Architect Archive
Thread: Greenmarine-I think making these harvester changes via hotfix is a very bad idea
The changes you are proposing for harvesters are too risky for a hotfix. Especially given the criteria Holocron has given for hotfixes several times over. Certainly the harvesters with absurdly high extraction rates needs to be hotfixed. But I feel the hotfix should be to revert all harvesters back to how they were before this patch.
Save all the sizeable changes for the next big patch. Give the architects time to see how it works on Test Center. Give the architects and resource gatherers time to discuss such sizable changes. Give these changes time on Test Center so we know they'll actually work. I certainly don't want to risk having to keep buying 2 or 3 new sets of heavy harvesters because they keep changing.
Making changes this severe via hotfix will only upset a great number of people. Architects who (on a day's notice) have a ton of already made components made irrelevant because they aren't good enough for people to want to buy harvesters made with them or because the schematics are changed overnight will be upset. Miners who have to buy new harvesters now, and again at the new big patch(when architects are getting 10 experimentation points) will be upset. Because beyond any doubt, people who mine resources will only want to have harvesters with the best extraction rate. As you said in your post when these changes were seen on Test Center (and which you cited as the reason that change wouldn't go to the live servers), any changes to the extraction rate are game-breakingly powerful. I don't want to see just how game-breakingly powerful by fiddling around with it on the live servers. That's what test center is for.
I think experimentation definitely does need to mean something for architects. Have it affect the output hopper size, and/or the maintenance/power needs. But I think it is a bad idea having it affect extraction rate. I think it is infinitely worse an idea to tinker with that setting on the live servers.
I am not opposed to experimentation in general on structures, but this isn't something that should be implemented overnight leaving everything in existance pre-patch obsolete. The experimentation stuff should be rolled out of the Live servers until it can be put through its paces on the Test Center.
I whole heartedly agree with you, Kinakuta.
There is a massive amount of capital equipment existing in the game right now that is just about to become obsolete.Changes like this should be performed in a cautious andconservative manner.
I am in favor of experimentation on structures and I'm pleased that GreenMarine is placing caps on the experimentation results. Nonetheless, these enhancements are best left for a regular patch after thorough testing on Test Center.
Further, I agree that all of the existing harvesters should be restored to a normal value, rather than the wildly varied mix that has come about since the patch. This way, the community will be able to provide feedback and suggest possible alternatives.
One such alternative would be to cap the experimentation results at +/- 25% on things such as maintenance, power consumption, hopper, and extraction. This would allow novice architects to be competitive while building thier character, rather than being completely outclassed by the more advanced players in their profession.
Maybe as a way for us to understand the rational behind these proposed changes, one of the Devs (nudge, nudge GreenMarine) could share with us their thoughts on why the changes are necessary and, more importantly, supply statistics about how these changes will affect game balance? That would be spectacular.
Thanks for listening!
H.
Houdani wrote:I whole heartedly agree with you, Kinakuta.
There is a massive amount of capital equipment existing in the game right now that is just about to become obsolete. Changes like this should be performed in a cautious and conservative manner.
I am in favor of experimentation on structures and I'm pleased that GreenMarine is placing caps on the experimentation results. Nonetheless, these enhancements are best left for a regular patch after thorough testing on Test Center.
Aside from the hopper size but that is being fixed, why is everyone assuming that the availability of better harvesters is going to make the old ones instantly obsolete? They're still doing what they did when you bought them and will continue to do so indefinetely. They may no longer be top-of-the-line, but they aren't obsolete.
I personally see them as a plus, because as it stands right now I have a hard time getting bulk ore shipments more than once a week. When you're buying 200k of ore a pop a few master archs can clean out a few million units of ore in hours.
Will it cause some economic disruption? Of course. But it'll pass. And in the long run we'll be better for it, because finally my Master title gives me a way to make my product better than the part-time arch selling his harvesters dirt cheap. I'll take the economic hit now rather than later, thank you.
I've been a bit back and forth on whether experimentation is a good thing... I still don't think it is, but i'll put that aside. If its going to be in.. then I think there should be the potential for a large difference from novice to master. if the difference is insignificant, you've done virtually nothing to provide an incentive to become master that aren't already. By making a significant difference you take people out of the business that have gone in halfway to do one line of it.
I'll give you a quick example. A friend of mine is a novice architect who got just enough so he could create harvesters. His only business is selling harvesters... he's also a Master CH and a master Pistoleer. Now, tell me why it is that he should have the same results on his harvesters (or an insignificant difference) than I should when i invested the rest of the way to being a master and gave up the option of getting a master in these other areas that i've dabbled in as well...? by comparison using one of those... i should be able to go up just one line of the CH box and be able to do everything he can with a pet that I can with a harvester.
On the original topic, I do agree with that thought... to be honest, with all the confusion on what had happened, and what was going to happen, reverting to prepatch and thoroughly testing it, then re-releasing to an informed populace would make a lot of sense.
...why is everyone assuming that the availability of better harvesters is going to make the old ones instantly obsolete?...
When a brand new medium harvester has a better extraction rate than the heavy which I owned pre-patch -- but the medium costs half as much to maintain -- that's when I would consider my old heavy obsolete. It's slower and costs twice as much maintenance/power. I would be a flawed consumer to continue using it.
H.
I have to disagree. These new effects on experimentation are very valuable to the overall health of the Architect profession- At a time when prices and demand were dropping, this gave a breath of new life into a dying market. Granted the market wasnt completely bad, work is available, but I think there the rate of architects is increasing more than the amount of players coming in to increase demand. I think that having a extraction rate of 10 on my heavy is nice, and I deserve it. I sold all of my prepatch harvestors to people for no gripe or misfortune, and they left happy. People still want old harvs, they are cheaper. I am not going to sell a heavy with extraction rate of 10 for the same price. The mediums well.. GreenMarine said he would accept that a great medium is the same as a bad heavy. I would say mediums should maybe be capped at 6, but I am not complaining yet
hehe. Well to conclude I think that its not a bad thing at all- Our profession was, and is, handicapped by low experiementation pts (fixed soon i hear?), low structure assembly pts, and before this patch a useless feature of experimentation. Ropock added about comparing Master to Novice- He is right, when I was a novice I could make the same harv as good as a Master. And I also probably have the same amount of crit fails as I did when I was a Novice too. If anything I agree with GreenMarine by stating that Harvestors that are experiemented on should get BETTER extraction rates, but should require MORE HQ resources to get there. Right now its a little goes a long way, if alot more of HQ resource was required to boost the extraction fine- but be ready for VERY expensive harvestors.
-Fitzhume -Kettemore- Master Architect
As far as a hotfix, well as far as I can tell most of the code is in so hotfix will likely be fine if it goes on TC for a day or two, just to check for gotchas.
My Master Title finally means something. I can finally distinguish myself from a novice grinder and have people seeking me out because of it. For once being an architech is enjoyable. Please do not take this away.
Drew
First, they've let experimentation out the door, and its probably too late to call it back - doing so would introduce extreme economic distortions, causing the value of existing experimented harvesters to skyrocket to fairly unreal levels. And nerfing all the experimented harvesters would be unfair to the people who had build and bought them.
But, the existing values don't make sense. Mediums are now in the range 5-8 (its probably not possible to make a 4 any more), and heavies are in the range 8-11. This is a tad high, and the range of values you end up with is too compressed - a novice can make +2, a master can make +3, and someone with a good skill tape can make +4.
So they have to fix it so that the range might be -1 to +3. Given the current game mechanics, I'd hope for something like:
00-34 -1
35-44 0
45-54 +1
55-64 +2
65+ +3
The basis for this is that, with stuff in the low 900s and near-40 crafting station, I can break 55 fairly often, but barely reach 60 on rare occasions. I think that it would just barely be possible to break 65 with 975+ materials and the best possible success. Adjusting 5 down from that would be OK, too.
But, GreenMarine has already written the code and the above is fruitless speculation.
Houdani wrote:
...why is everyone assuming that the availability of better harvesters is going to make the old ones instantly obsolete?...
When a brand new medium harvester has a better extraction rate than the heavy which I owned pre-patch -- but the medium costs half as much to maintain -- that's when I would consider my old heavy obsolete. It's slower and costs twice as much maintenance/power. I would be a flawed consumer to continue using it.H.
But as I said your old harvesters are still doing exactly what they did when you bought them. And it's really not that big of a deal. Do the math:
Let's say your heavy is on a 75% spot and you're pulling up about 7500 resources a day. Let's assume you put your own power in so your cost to run for a day is, oh, maybe 3500 credits. So you pay 0.47 cpu for what you pull up. A medium with the same extraction rate costs you maybe 1750 credits per day to maintain including power so 0.24 cpu. Even if this drops the average resource cost in HALF to 1.5cpu you're still raking in nearly 70% per unit sold as profit. If you use eight of your lots for resources you'll be pulling in 63k a day in pure profit assuming you sell all that you mine. In a week you'll have 440k which ought to be enough for at LEAST two new experimented harvesters (plus you can sell your old ones to offset some of that cost.) Then the week after that you'll have even more profit because your average cpu goes down as you upgrade your harvester fleet.
In reality the numbers will probably be better than this, because I doubt resource costs will drop signifigantly for at LEAST a month (why drop price when you can just eat the extra profit until the last minute?) and I'm not even counting the money for selling higher quality resources that currently go for more than 3cpu.
I know it seems bad, but if you really do plan it out as a real business it's not all that bad. The key is to just not immediately assume that you have to shell out for all new harvesters right away. Go slow, upgrade as you need to, and you'll shoot past your competition because while they're out blowing all their capital right away you're letting yours grow and just upgrading your fleet as needed.
Also I can't stress enough that they key to success is teamwork. Sounds cliche I know, but my success as an MA on Ahazi is largely due to me teaming up with people. For example I have resource vendor that I deal with, and I'm upgrading his fleet to heavies for him. I basically hand him a heavy, take the cost I would've sold that at, and he pays me back by selling me resources for 1cpu less than his normal cost until the debt is paid. So if I give him a 100k harvester, and he normally sells to me for 2.5cpu, then he'll sell me 100k units at 1.5cpu. He's still making profit and I'm making profit so everybody's happy. And I made a friend out of the deal.
(btw this deal works out better and better as time goes on...doing the math is left as an exercise for the reader.
)
I agree, Kinakuta brings up a good point with having it go to TC first, but to be honest, there will be no way to effectively evaluate the impact from TC. TC has a way different economic model, and ressource availability is scaled down because the lack of centralized population. Most population is centered around PAs which exist as pretty much a free trade environment (and incidentally this leaves many bazaars empty, and it's extremely rare to have people in a town barking that they are selling ressources, or anything else for that matter). Furthermore, because of this lack of ressource availability, it is difficult to test the impact on harvesters simply because we don't have the ressources to manufacture 10 or 20 of each harvester.
To everyone that thinks this will save the arch profession I think you are mistaken. You can set prices at whatever lvls you want, but they will always come down over time to a lvl that usually only the resources are taken into account.
Harvestors are still very easy to make compared with the price. 10-15 minutes and you have something that goes for 100-125k credits. Whether that is worth it to you, is only up to you. There will always be PA's that have huge amounts of lots available to mine ore and steel. You need very little of "good" materials to make a good harvestor.
If someone sells for 250k, someone else can go to 225k and then 200k and so on down to the old rate. Why? because both were used to the 100k price before. Virtually nothing has changed. Instead of 30k crap materials, they need 29k crap materials and 1k good materials. Sooner or later people will come down to the old price. People will then again have all the harvestors they need. Actually more than they need because they are now pulling 50-60% more resources and crafters are using the same amounts. The price might actually go down quite a bit. Now instead of being able to make 5 heavys in a day, someone can make 7-8 of them.
All this change did was basically reset the server harvestors. All current harvestors just became obsolete. To the person that said they are still useful, you are correct, they are. They are still obsolete. I can still use a 150 dmg rifle even though a 200 dmg rifle is out. But the 150 dmg one is still obsolete. So in 3 months from now, everyone will have their 11kg harvestors or whatever the final number is and archs will be back to the beginning. Then maybe some miracle will happen and people have to buy them all over again. Maybe this will keep happening for the next few years. There you go, a renewable source of income.
All I'm trying to say, is this change doesn't do anything long term to help architects. This is a short term boost to archs, and a longterm boost to resource harvesting.