Architect Archive
Thread: It is not about greed
Decay is not about greed, it is about making the game viable.
My character does not need more money, I could not agree more that there is too much money flowing into the game and not enough flowing out. The inflow on raw materials and cash far outweighs the outflow, this is a verybad thing in the long run.
There are several solutions but they really boil down to two.
Decrease the ammont of cash( including resources ) comming into the game and/or Increase the ammout that flows outof the game.
Personally I would like to see both,but more on the outflow side then theinflow side.
Initate decay on all craftable items to one degree or another!
Put item Insurance back!
Fix the Vendor bug where it cost only 1 cr a day ( or nothing if you skills are high enough ) Buit dont go crazy, the terminals and droids are out of whack the other way.
Raise the price of selling something on the Bazzar, should be a percentage of the cost of the item. ( call itsales feethat the seller pays )
Make a trip to the cloning station put your experience levels back to the point where you were whencloned.
Make cloning more expensive the more skills you have.
But of all of these, decay would do the most good, even if it is very slow.
What can i say....
WOW
Preach it brother Dayln 
There are a couple of items there I think they need to be careful with, but overall absolutely the right direction.
While I definately agree about decay, I firmly disagree about the economy of this game.
The reason this game has a "worthless" economic structure is becuase just like every other game we have the street corner credit printing press in every town you go to, I swear no developer ever managed to stay awake during those Econ classes in college.
To avoid inflation and deflation, you MUST control the amount of currency (or it's equivalents) in existance. In this game, there is no such thing, the amount of currency in the game, is totally controlled by the productivity of the players. Since everyone in the game, can walk up to the nearest mission terminal, and quite litterally print "new money" at will, there is no way for this economy to be a valid working example. The other side of this coin is the same. Limitless raw materials pour into the economy on a daily basis. While the currency influx, has kept raw material sales prices somewhat stable, think of exactly what is going to happen, when everyone on the server really has nothing else to buy? Eventually, production of resources will drop off, since the price on these will eventually get too low for it's production cost to be worth doing, but even that will not stop the limitless ability to "print money" whenever people want to, so SOE will start adding more and more money sink's in an attempt to get rid of it.
Unlike RL, no charector in this game actually "needs" anything. There is nothing that FORCES you to spend credits, unless you wish too. This is the last problem with this economy, money only "circulates" at each individual players discression.
I hope I pointed out at least a few of the basic problems in how this economy was set up, and why, it basically "won't work right".
Vorgus on Bria
I dont disagree with you in an economic sense, but I am not sure I would want to play in the game you are talking about.
A game where the ammount of resrouces found would depend on the ammount avaliable elsewhere in the game in stock or finished products.
Where the ammount a mission pays would depend on how much money is in circulation.
You are not totally wrong, but I am not sure I would want to play in that game.
The thing is, it is about greed, but it the customers greed we are talking about
case in point.
my second account is a Bounty hunter, last patch we got a tweak to the Light Lightning Cannon, it went from 20-200 to 500-900 damage.
pre patch I paid 15k for a gun.
Then the patch hits, and I am told I have to buy all new gun's since they dont patch existing Stuff. I am OK what ever.
just ticks me off , oh its ok to make me rebuy one thing, but god forbit they touch our houses, harvesters ...
Unless they automatically start deducting credits from your account (so that you are FORCED) to pay overdue maintenance there will HAVE to come a time when a given item goes *Poof*.
Otherwise there is no requirement to replace said item.
I know that locking people out of their house would work short term... but unless the maintenance bill continues to accumulate they could jusy pay 5 creds whenever they need access.
At what point would we remove a structure with un-paid maintenance?
I actually agree Posi, but I would make it 7 days or 2 weeks of no pay mantnenace to do that.
I would also make it so that the control panel of a house was accessed from outside the house and no one could enter if the pay mantenance was not paid up.
ThorsAnvil wrote:The thing is, it is about greed, but it the customers greed we are talking about
As one of your customers, I have to disagree. My problem with decay is not at all about how much I would have to pay for a new structure. Even if you wanted me to pay 150k for a small house, I could still just spend a few days and get that money. That's not the problem here at all.
The reason that I, and a lot of other people, don't want our houses to decay to the point where they'll poof and make us buy a new one is that we don't want to rearrange the stuff inide it. I keep a lot of things in my house, more than I could move by myself. I also have it arranged nicely after having spent a lot of time using the, pretty terrible, placement controls in this game. If my house was going to disappear tomorrow, I'd have to find an Architect to build me a new one, pay him, find a friend (or three) to help me carry things from one structure to the next and then spend a few hours putting things in the way I wanted them.
And that's just for a house. The system is even worse when you're talking about PA Halls and eventually even Town Halls. I don't see greed as part of this, nor as part of the Architect's desire to work. I understand that you need to be able to supply things for the game to be enjoyable to you.
Now, if you were to get a Dev to say that they'd put in a system where I could swap an old structure with a new one without having to move my items, without having to recreate a PA or without having to lose my town for a while, I'd be fine with paying to replace these things. Of course, at that point, you're really nothing more than repairmen who sell repair kits that just happen to say Deed on them, which I understand you also aren't in favor of. But understand that if you make managing my structure more of a pain for me than it is worth, I will simply choose not to own one.
There is a lot of greed on this issue, but it isn't coming from architects. The number of responses to our poll on this in a forum that only sees a few regular posters is a testiment to that.
Architects are the ones mostresponsible for takingmoney out of the game with all the resources we need by harvester cost. We are also responsible for putting so many resources into the game via the harvesters we make and sell. Harvester decay will not only remove cash from the system, but it will also remove resources from the system.
I wonder what will happen to all these miners crying no decay when the servers become deed saturated and the architects, the best miners in this game, turn to selling resources as their means of income. The demand for resources will drop through the floor as the supply gets higher. No decay basically kills two professions, the Architect and the Miners.
There is no question that decay is extremely important for the economy for everyone involved, however much of a pain it would be.
I don't think too many people want house decay, most don't in fact. The one thing I see most people wanting is no redeed on houses and no decay. No one whats to move their stuff every few months, that would be a pain. However decay and harvesters and factories is very acceptable and needed.
The issue of having to re-arange furniture IS a huge one.
Luckily I think there is a very simple solution.
When you want to replace a house (small/mediujm/large/PA) with the SAME type... simply use a new deed on the control panel of the existing house. The existing house is restored to "Like-New' condition, and the deed is destroyed.
Presto.. architect deeds can now be used either to a) place a new structure, or b) replace and existingstructure without having to manage any of the structures contents.
What do you think? Would this remove alot of the negative feelilng about the process?
I totally disagree. I think structure decay is a VERY bad idea and will do nothing but piss off the entire player population.
I wouldn't want to play in that game you describe Dalyn and there are many many more that feel the same way.
It IS about greed.
It's just another way for Architects to bring more money into their pockets.
There are other FAR better ways than decay. Decay is just a cheap, easy, can't think of anything else way of doing what you want done. It's the way a lot of Dev Team members think. They fix a problem by not using their brains and taking the easy way out. Decay is the easy way out without having to use your brain to come up with USEFUL solutions to a problem that will do what you want AND HELP the players, not hurt them.
Decay is an intent to HURT the players so someone can have more money.
I DARE you to come up with intelligent ways of adding a renewable income that will also help the players.
What is so wrong with structure repair kits? What, poor little thing don't wanna make repair kits like the other professions?
I can't believe you all are still so intent on creating ways to HURT the playerbase to satisfy your own profit.
Don't even pretend this is for the economies sake. There are FAR better ways and more intelligent ways of doing things to adjust the economy other than trying ot HURT the playerbase.