Tradeskills are hard enough to figure out as is, so why is acquiring the parts you need made even harder? While it's great that adding a tradeskill section to shops was introduced, why is it so hard to find parts when I need to make a certain QL item. I'll give two examples:
1) Shopping for nanoclusters for implants. While trying to purchase clusters for QL 200 implants there is a cutoff for what clusters will conceviably go into each QL implant. The cutoff for QL 200 is a QL 175 or higher cluster. Several times I went to different superior shops (4 to be precise) and would find clusters at QL 174, one QL too low for my imps. My suggestion is to put clusters in the shops that are at 174 and 175 for each cluster. Also do the same thing for every QL of store bought implant, one over and under the cutoff range for those empty implants.
2) Tower construction. I'm trying to build towers for land control areas. I have polychromic nanobots and want to make a QL 40 tower for an area that supports max QL 40 towers. Been to the tower shop in Rome and Borealis and found a QL 46 and 43 Guardian Conductor Building Kits. These kits will make QL 46 and 43 towers, not the QL 40 that I need. With the recycle rate of the tower shops it could take weeks to find a QL 40.
My suggestion for a fix: This is supposed to be the 24th or whatever century. If Fixers can summon an exact QL item from thin air everytime (don't start about how random the item is), why is it so hard to find what you need in a shop? While as I said it's great that tradeskill sections have been added I think shops need to be a bit more versatile. Money sinks have been added to the game (10M for Yalmaha spray paint cans, 500k for sunglasses that give +1 intelligence [that seems ironic, eh?]) I think a much better money sink would be if you could pick the QL of item you need from a shop, or at least have some way of picking the QL of the finished item depending on your skills. If someone has gone thru the trouble of raising their tradeskills to 500-1000 to make items it seems pretty silly to me that whenever they put something together they have no idea what the final QL of said item will be until after they do it.
