Architect Archive

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Dvnce wrote:

the main problem I see is that SOE is confusing what is the Cause of the true problem... The problem and one of the Few TRUE problems with SOE crafting game is It is Just as easy for me to Make 1000 of the best Versions of a Item as it is for me to make 1000 of the Worst Versions of an Item. Thus there is no reason or market for anything but the best. This is not true in ANY OTHER game.. ANY other game has a market for starter gear and each stepping stone up to the final achievment of the best.

As a result Unless you make the best you dont last long as a crafter. and that is wrong and that makes for a dull bland very Un dynamic market. There is No Niches for people to find their way. This is why we only see really very few crafters of each type. For a new crafter (though it can be done ) it is not easy to enter the market because of (as Cafa Points out) rare spawns that someone has always got a few million units of horded. So there is no way to compete period Unless you are rich and can afford the rares.

As for Our profession there should be a market for BER 7 8 9 and 10 Medium harvesters. Max BER should be an Extreme Challenge to make. This is not the case .. The cause is two fold.. 1) I think the experimentation is too easy. 2) many architects have Millions of units of the Uber resources required to build Max BER for a very long time... I personally bought almost all my resources from hired miners. I recently made 4k medium and heavy harvesters houses and factories.. I can do this probably 2 more time without buying more resourses.. Now imagine if I had a fleet of 100 lot swapped harvesters behind me.... I keep my prices High but if my true cost to product is a fraction of a credit per unit think of what I could do to the market.... I could Price Heavies at 1 cpu and still make a profit. How fun would it be to compete against me if you only had 10 lots and didnt swap at all... That is the problem..

SOE has done good in presenting the ground work for a true Player Run Economy something that is new to the Gaming Industry. Since its new I think the experience in Gaming programing is lacking the experience of truly understanding Economic principles. What needs to happen to make Crafting game in SOE truly Great is introduce a true dynamic Market. Where If you build a crapy gun or a Crappy harvester it doesnt get deleted because there is still someone that is starting out and can use it. When SOE says their is a Hoarding Problem what they are truely saying is there is NO DIVERSITY in the market. You can go from vendor to vendor and really see the EXACT SAME ITEM for sale except for the way the crafter named it. To combat this problem you have to make the quality of the final products fluctuate as much as the quality of the spawn of resources. If all that is available is crap resources then all that should be able to be produced is Crap items. Until a better resource spawns. To make this happen we must drastically reduce how much resources are pulled into the game.. We can Nerf BER or we can NERF the amount of harvesters 1 person can control....

I personally want a market that is Diverse. I want to see crafters not having to Mad Grind to master just so they can make something they can sell.. They should be able to level by playing and support their leveling with the products they can make as they climb the ladder. If it was Extremely difficult to mass produce the BEST then the market would have ROOM for everything else....

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Message Edited by Anthemion on 06-09-2005 12:52 AM

Not to be a buzzkill, but I think if the DEVs created more non-experimental component parts for each of the master schematics then potentially we could see people making quite a bit of money selling them. I'd seriously buy generators and power cores in bulk if someone sold them at a reasonable price.

Diversity should not be gained by a nerf to the Architect profession. Make MORE to do, not less. More armors meant Armorsmiths had to specialize. Weaponsmiths were already specializing between regular, heavy and personalized services Weaponsmiths on Tempest for more than two years.

Give me a reason to walk a path, devs. Take the RIS quest and use it as a template to discover hundreds of quests and specialties for every crafting profession, BUT ESPECIALLY ARCHITECTS!!!

Fivo Asia

Message Edited by Cafa on 06-09-2005 08:09 AM

Thanks for getting this started, Anthemion.

I have to admit I wish this thread were in the Core Systems forum, since although it certainly does affect Architects (who need so many resources), it really affects all crafters. In fact, it's something that affects all players since it's a fundamental question of how an entire player economy should be structured. Still, no harm done in getting the ball rolling here.

(Note: In what follows, be aware that we're talking about crafted products -- that is, we're only talking about the stuff that crafters have permanent schematics for and can make at will if they have the resources. Sales of loot, quest, and one-off schematic items do participate in the SWG economy but don't determine its form.)

To begin with, let's be aware of the fundamentals. SWG's economy is a near-textbook example of what economists call "perfect competition." By definition, this is a market structure in which:

• Products are relatively undifferentiated (i.e., they lack "diversity").


• Price and quality information is readily available for all products.


• There are many buyers and sellers.


• New sellers can easily enter the industry.

Every one of these is true for SWG. This means that SWG's economy should show many of the effects -- both good and bad -- that models of perfect competition tell us to expect.

In a perfect competition economy there are numerous producers of a few similar (undifferentiated) goods, and many buyers who do not coordinate on what prices they will pay. This should generate intense competition on price, since -- because there are numerous producers, and few other ways to differentiate goods except on price -- we should expect that no one producer or consumer should be able to leverage their size to set prices. Supply and demand will dictate the average price of every item.

And that's exactly what we find in SWG: lots of similar items at similar prices. (With a few oddballs from people who aren't serious sellers.) In a monopoly or oligopoly, one or a few sellers can set prices and everyone else has to follow; in the perfect competition of SWG, if one seller doubles his price, he loses sales because nothing prevents other sellers from offering the same item at a lower price.

This situation isn't entirely a bad thing... if you're a consumer. Perfect competition such as SWG's is good for consumers in at least three ways: 1) it tends over time to depress prices to their lowest possible level; 2) it allows new players to compete in an established market, which insures a constant supply of price-competitive goods, and 3) it encourages producers to try to make the highest quality items (in order to try to compete on something other than price). If you're a buyer, you have to love perfect competition.

But along with the good, SWG also shares the negative effects of perfect competition. In particular, it makes life hard for producers, and in the exact opposite ways in which it's good for consumers: 1) it limits profits (because you can only chase sales by lowering your prices); 2) it discourages success through innovation (because experienced players can't leverage that experience to create new kinds of goods); and 3) it raises costs (by limiting the resources that can be used and requiring that lots of time be spent in finding and harvesting the "best" resources).

The result is that SWG's economy is extremely customer-driven: If nobody wants it, there's no point in making it. This is great for you if you're a combat player, as there'll always be weapons and armor for you at some price, but it takes a lot of the fun out of being a crafter because it basically makes us indentured servants. (Which may be exactly the balance of power that SWG's designers want... but that's another thread.)

So, all this said, it seems to me that the real question is whether it's possible to make the crafting game more fun for crafters without significantly affecting the perfect competition model that makes SWG's economy so consumer-friendly, and if so, how that could/should be done.

Ultimately it comes down to allowing crafters to differentiate their products. The tricky thing about allowing differentiation us that it can move an economy away from perfect competition toward what's called "monopolistic competition": those who are able to make a unique product are able to set the price for that product, so that price may not be a good reflection of actual value. An example of this in SWG would be if I somehow figured out a way to make T21 rifles that did both heat and electrical elemental damage -- as the only producer of such items in a market of many buyers, I could effectively set whatever price I wanted and people would still buy as many as I could make, even though it wouldn't be that much better than a regular T21. (To be more precise, this would actually be a monopoly situation. If I taught a few other people on my server how to make such rifles, then we'd have monopolistic competition. The effect is roughly the same.)

So obviously that's a dangerous road to travel, no matter how much fun it might be for crafters-as-sellers to be able to differentiate their products on something other than price.

But I think there may be a solution. It's twofold:

First, enhance the crafting process to allow crafters some way to differentiate their products on features... but design this new process so that every advantageous new feature comes at the price of a disadvantage. For every benefit, let there be a corresponding and equivalent cost. (Note that you could also allow features that have no benefit -- things like colors and shapes that don't affect utility. These would also help differentiate products, but as they're purely aesthetic they would not need to be countered with a "cost" feature.) I described such a concept in myCrafting: A Blueprint for the Future thread, but there are certainly other approaches possible.

Second, expand the idea of crafting specializations. Currently, any crafter can experiment on whatever attributes are experimentable for any item, but some crafters have more experimentation points than others (humans, for example, which I personally find annoying since that's supposed to be a Mon Calamari species benefit, but never mind). What if this were expanded? Maybe a crafter who learns a particular ranged weapon skill from the Marksman profession gains an additional point of experimentation when crafting a ranged weapon. Maybe learning a Commando skill gives an additional point for experimenting on minimum/maximum damage, while learning a Ranger skill gives an additional point when experimenting on weapon speed. Maybe there's a crafting quest item you can install (permanently) in your datapad that gives a 10% bonus to weapon experimentation but that also imposes a 20% penalty on all Artisan experimentation. And so on.

Between these two changes, crafters would become able to create items that varied on both features and quality, but without allowing any one crafter to automatically become the "best" (and therefore able to dictate pricing). And this would happen because different crafters would make different choices, because these choices would not be better or worse but just different, and because not everyone could make everything.

There'd still be some overachievers who'd feel they had to provide hundreds of every possible combination... but if any individual item could have five or ten or twenty possible combinations, there's no way any one crafter could sell every possible kind of item -- no would merchants remain sane from all the restocking of their vendors they'd have to do. Big PAs that have multiple specialized crafters selling stuff in a mall could come close, but there's no real difference between that and what we have right now, is there?

As far as I can see, the bottom line of implementing these changes is that consumers would get more choice, crafters would have more fun (because the process of crafting would be more interesting), and prices would remain low due to supply and demand forces on different but equivalent goods. Everybody wins, and fiddling with resource amounts or types is not necessary.

Update: the I don't like vendor search from bazaars thread over on the Merchant board has a message from DocSavag (toward the end of the first page) saying (concisely) exactly what I was trying to say here. When there are so many options that no one can hope to be able to make everything, specialization becomes possible.

I would only add thatthiswill tend to raise prices, however, unless alternate products are basically each as good as the other so that no one crafter can monopolize the market for that product.

I expect I've committed some errors of vision or implementation in this proposal; any "grand design" concept is always imperfect. If so, please feel free to point out how you think this idea could be improved, or offer a different idea you think would be more effective.

Otherwise, I hope you weren't too bored. I really get into these Big Picture discussions.

--Flatfingers

Message Edited by Flatfingers on 06-09-2005 05:37 PM

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Flatfingers wrote:

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If the SWG crafting game was perfect there should be room in the market for a crafter to produce BER 7 Mega Storage Harvesters and capture an equal share of the market as someone that produces Max BER.. there should be a market for someone to specialize in the Cold Rifle ( cant remember the name but it was the one that My toon always packed until the curb.. ) but that doesnt happen either...

Dvnce, I should clarify: I wasn't trying to say that SWG is a "perfect" game, either in crafting or anything else. (Hoo, boy, would I ever not say that! ) I'm saying that the economic model that SWG most closely resembles is the one economists call"perfect competition." They also refer to it as "pure competition" or "price competition," so maybe I'd have done better to use one of those terms. They all mean the same thing, though -- an economy where supply and demand dictates price.

Which brings me to the second part of my response, which is that even in "pure competition" there's no guarantee that people will want everything you can make. That's the "demand" part of the equation -- ifbuyers don't want a BER 7 harvester when they can get a BER 10 harvester, then prices will reflect that demand, and sellers will provide a supply accordingly.

As for new crafters entering the market, I would argue that it is relatively easy. Is it easy in absolute terms? In other words, can I be competitive my first day or week as a new crafter? Doubtful. But within a month or three or six? Absolutely, which is far better than you could ever hope to do in RL (which is not a model of pure competition).

But in the end it sounds like you and I are in agreement that more differentiation in the things we can make would make crafting more enjoyable for crafters. And I have, can, and will argue that that's something we're long overdue for. The only question is what that enhanced differentiation looks like when it's implemented... which is one of the things this threadcould help usdiscuss.

--Flatfingers

Are we talking about JUST the Architect profession or crafting in general?

Architect is a bit unique in the products that we make.

Message Edited by TK42I on 06-09-2005 07:18 PM

Message Edited by TK42I on 06-09-2005 07:19 PM

An example would be you could have progressively more challenging requirements gate the various BER rates. I will use Med Harvs as an example.

• Ber 7 would only require good materials and experimentation
• Ber 8 would require a master artisan component
• Ber 9 you'd also need a master DE component
• Ber 10 a unique quest item (no factory runs).