Architect Archive
Thread: Top 5 Candidate : Renewable Source of Income.
). How about a "Harvester Farm" where lets say 5 - 10 harvesters could be placed into a deed or device, would only take x number of lots ( 5 harvester = 3 lots, 10 harvesters = 5 lots), would show as just 1 harvesting unit in the world, (new Harvester design) and have just one menu to run the whole works. Maintainance and energy would still be the same rate but you could take care of all needs through just one menu.
Now this "Farm" would only be good until the unit is re-deeded - or better yet lets say maybe as soon as the resources runs out, then the farm stops working forcing the player to pick it up, buy another "Farm", and setup on a new spot.
Yes, you can pay to keep your house/harvester in pristine condition. However, over time this fee should increase. How much time is the key.
The analogy here is that people say, well housing from the 20s are still around. Ya, but it cost a lot more money to keep them houses up and running, unless you completely renovate.
How you implement the new deed w/o loosing contents is the key. Maybe the house terminal could take a replacement deed as a "renovation" type gizmo.
The big thing is houses, as noone (understandably) wants to loose contents or furniture settings. Harvesters, well eventually it should be mroe cost efficient for you to buy one that to keep paying high mx fees for you current old one.
It is really simple IMO, it is just a matter of implementation on the housing.
I think that the architect community is too torn on the issue of adding decay to structures and I don't think its likely SOE would even seriously consider it.
Other renewable sources of income might include:
Someone had suggested making a way to "buff" a harvester. Like a "Generator Turbo Bushing" addon part that we can make and add to an existing harvester which will increase BER output for a certain length of time.
GCW structures or devices would be something we can make that would have renewable income because they would be stuff that would get destroyed.
Another new idea from one of my guildmates, De'wana. He suggested that we could make optional basement components that would be added on to a house. It could maybe increase storage a bit and be added to an existing house or just as an optional component during deed creation.
By that I mean as armor wears down or someone qualifies for a new weapon, they go to the crafter do one of the following: just buy a replacement, buy a repair kit and repair it themselves, or ask the crafter to repair it.
The architect products are: "real estate" - houses (and other structures like Halls, Cantinas, etc) and factories, harvesters, and "furniture" (furniture, crafting stations). I think that we might want to look at *different* models for each of these product areas.
I don't believe that we should have - for any of these - an "ask the crafter to repair it" type of model. None of our products are like armor or weapons in the sense that people carry them around with them as a matter of course. It's not reasonable to have someone bring their house in, and I sure don't want to be in the service business of visiting their house and fixing it. ("Damnit Jim, I'm an architect, not a handyman!")
The "buy a replacement" model isn't very appealing to players for any of the "real estate" products. They have their house decorated. They have stuff in their factory. They have staked out a plot of land someplace.
A "real estate repair kit" feels like a natural way to deal with the delivery of this. Perhaps have the kit use up "charges" based on how broken down the home is, or how many lots it occupies. So maybe a small house takes 2 charges from the kit whereas a PA Hall takes 9.
So how to motivate the use of a "repair kit" in the first place? The best suggestions that I've seen have to do with driving the maintenance cost. Obviously there is a lot of work to be done to figure out the right rate for this. But if you do something gross like say a brand new house has "duribility" ("maintenability"?) of 1000, and each day drops it by one, and there are some step functions that start kicking up the maintenance rate at each step, then you provide a clear motivation to get a repair kit. If at 950 the daily maintenance doubles, then you can just pay that and everything is fine - but it costs you more, or you can use a repair kit to bring it back to 1000. Perhaps a redeed operation drops the durability by 10 or something - there is a cost to picking up the house and moving it in terms of wear and tear. This means that a "used" house buyer will be motivated to get a repair kit sooner.
This kind of model also lays the foundation for experimentation on houses, thus differinciating products by novices from masters. So maybe the "max durability" of a house can run from 900-1100, depending on experimentation. I'm not saying that we have to do that - I'm just saying that the "degradration over time gives you higher maintenance bills" model provides a natural way to introduce the notion of a "high quality" house if we want.
To keep things simple, we could have exactly the same model for harvesters (with perhaps different constants). That is, usage over time would slowly wear the machinery down and cause the operating costs to go up. Again, perhaps redeeding takes a few points off the total also. Match the repair kit charges to the sizes of the harvesters and/or the BER of them. You *can* buy a harvester and it *will* work forever - but if you don't repair / replace it by about your third month in operation without repair it becomes fairly uneconomic to operate.
The nice thing about this model is that nothing ever goes "poof". And in a way it resembles what happens with a pistol - as you shoot, the durability goes down. At some point it starts to do less damage, such that it drives your costs up. You can either buy a repair kit or just replace it - your choice.
I don't know what to say about repeat business on furniture - frankly the reason most people go buy new clothes is NOT because of decay, but rather that they just want a change and the item is cheap enough that they can just go buy a new outfit. If we get some more furniture options I think that the same could be true here.
So that's what I'd advocate for real estate and harvesters - a "degradation over time" model that slowly increases the amount of maintenance required and one or more types of "repair kits" with variable charges in the kit and variable charges needed to repair things.
My way of looking at things:
1 - I don't believe that the playerbase would accept current harvesters and housesbeing subject to real decay;
2 - We need something we can sell and resell.
3 - Variations on existing items could be made to work, whereby our buyers get something which is both better than other things we can make, but also disposable. IT has to be better to make disposability worthwhile.
Therefore, IMHO we should get some disposable items. Not a new version of every item there is, but some versions of many items, some of each class. We need to try to avoid requiring new artwork, unless the Devs have new artwork they can attach to these things.
Example - a fusion reactor that costs 40% of the resources for current reactors (about 10k vs 25k), but which only lasts 100 days (every "tick" that it is running deducts from an irrevocable timer. If need be, the BER can be a bit higher for these new, temporary fusions. When they hit zero they 1) stop working (but are not destroyed), 2) vanish after a period of time (hey, we get to use the cool 'damaged' graphics that right now are virutally never seen), and 3) cannot be redeeded, when destroyed they are gone.
The same can be done with houses, and possibly even furniture.
IMHO we need to revamp the harvester scheme so that new, non-permanent, harvesters are worthwhile for buyers. 40% might be too low, the BER might need to be boosted, I'm not sure.However, we need to make disposable harvesters attractive enough to make them worth buying vs the current set.
These could be made even more disposable, lasting only 30 days but producing double the BER and costing half the resources, or even more. In any event, I think the key is to make disposable items available and attractive. Just adding repair kits won't produce much of an income stream.
Of course, a whole new slew of products (which are also disposable) would work as well, new Harv types, new House types, whatever. Then we'd all gravitate to selling the new classes of items as the demand for current ones slowed to a trickle.
Notice that it may help to think of these things as "powerups". You buy them, you drop one of them on an existing piece of equipment, and it gives a very real but limited duration advantage to that piece of equipment. Players are already familiar with this model, and there is clearly already the user interface necessary to implement this notion built in.
1. "harvester productivity boost" - gives a 5-30% (maybe less - obviously you need to think about game balance issues here) boost in effeciency to a harvester for some number (5?) days and/or next redeed. Again, apply architect experimentation to this such that there is some low-to-high spread on the quality of these.
2. "harvester placement kits" - right now the rules for placing houses are more forgiving of terrain features (e.g., slope) than the rules for harvesters, and as the person who brought this up pointed out, the rules for camps are pretty lax - you can pitch a camp on a shear rock face.
So, you follow a vein and end up in hilly terrain. Maybe there are clear spots for 1 or 2 of your heavies but not a lot. So, after trying and trying to place it, you drop one of these placement kits on the deed. It's effectively a "powerup" with a 1 shot lifetime. The next time you use the deed it eats the kit, but lets you place that harvester on terrain that you would otherwise not have been able to place it on.Additionally, if we follow the model of the new "vehicle color kits" that are coming, where a master artisan (I think) can make a kit that will allow anyone to color their bike, then a "furniture color kit" would be an absolutely wonderful thing to have. Again, the number of charges and/or the richness of the color palette could be dependent on Architect level to create a spread between Novice and Master produced kits.
with the amount of structureand harvesters in the world I think this would be enough for an architect to live on.