Architect Archive
Thread: Architect Issues Designer responses
i apoligize if the previouspost seemed out of order, i had to respond to an early postI missed saying "some ppl are getting architecture to get what they need then dropping it."
I think the current system does not favor architectures. In real life, you dont always get an order for a house, so when u make one, you make alot of money off it. Here, we set the prices and guess what? All the people competing sell deeds for less than it cost to sell the raw resources themselves. I hate to say it, but we created this mess. We as architects had to restrain ourselves but I know you need to stay competitive. PPL selling medium houses for 25k in Bestine irked me so much. Now they are gone. Now prices are going back up but the damage is done. Most have houses and only look to upgrade.
What we need is new skills. I hope when player cities come out, architects will be used to its fullest. I know urban planners will make alot of it, but come on! If that happens, most will go urban planning and leave the ones that only have architecture to die off.
Perhaps architects can make decay power ups, repair turrets, city walls. Honestly we need to keep busy. I did not join architecture to spend time doing mission terminals becauseI make more money that way.
Here is the brightest idea I can think of to repair Architects and Droid Engineers. Make Mission Terminal jobs for us. We go to an area (similar to a battlefield) and build the structure we were hired to build by a certain time frame. Some jobs will require you to fly to other planets, or dangerous areas. Perhaps We'll need to bring some friends or hire a bodyguard just to get there. We fullfill our mission and get paid.
I think this is fair. Mission terminals offers a repetitive form of Credit revenue mostly for combat skilled class. Some can make 100k in an hour. The higher your skill the betterresult in higher missions and more payout for the job. Architects suffer from lack of things to build for people, so creating some will fill that need. Supply and demand, that's the heart of this problem.
The mission terminal for architect sparked an indea to merge it with another ideaposted here previously ...
Maintanence fees on structures would still be required however when someone pays the fees on their structures it puts the job into the architect mission terminal system under "repairs" ... any architects out there looking for work could select those jobs to go and repair those structures...of course getting a waypoint to the structure. When the architect repairs the structure (either by just doing something available on the radial menu or using a structure repair kit) the condition/maintanence time on the structure goes up to what ever the owner paid for... a small% of the money the player payed goes into a money sink and the rest is the paid to the architect for the job. To solve the problem of the job getting ignored and peoples houses crumbling on top ofthem ... make it so the job getsdone automaticly when the maintanence pool hits zero (if no architect took the job) and the entire amount of maintanence goes into the money sink. House fixed (owner happy) ..money sink (devs happy) ... ability for archs to take jobs to make money (archs happy)... no additional decay (everyone happy)
Provides architects who want stuff to do with things to do and make money .... keeps the devs from havingto add additional decay to the structures ...keeps the maintanence fees on all structures as it exists now... the only con is it lessons the money sink of maintanence as it is now an d spreads it out a little bit to the architects. Of course to make it worth while they we need to allow like 4 arch missions vs the normal 2 to make it worth while with all the shuttle fees and such.
Just an idea that poped into my head while combining ideas that were previously posted... what do you guys think?
Ask yourself the following question..
Good home ownership in the beginnin phases - and all phases - of the liife of a house will keep its value and quality in good condition. I do not mean droping boatsloads of money into houses to make them run every 2 years. I mean every day, spending a few moments to making sure everything is in good order.
To simulte this i propose the following, and it includes many of the ideas ive seen and heard while reading this thread.
1) Architects get repair kits to sell, at which point the owner of adminstrator of a house can use a repair kit on a house (once weekly since i know alot of players are not active during the weekdays). This will go up and beyond credit maintinence, that maintence is designed to keep the house in working order, not neccesarily in good condition fit enough to live in.
2) Maintinence rates of a HOUSE (note, this is not a structure) should be based upon the quality of the deed flat out. I would suggest a good formula that most everyone can figure out easily. (this would have to be designed by the devs, i dare not tell them how there game runs). If step one is not done once weekly, then the quality of the house and original deed goes down by 1, doubleing for every week after the original. (1 for week one, 2 for week two, 4 for week three etc for a total of 7% over 3 weeks if left unattended). So hence a perfectly made house with the best resouces will have a very low upkeep rate if the owner cares for his house. A crap house can be kept in good order aswell, and not cost the owner a fortune if he pays attention to it.
If the quality of houses really does start to matter then architects will need to go in search for better resouces and start having to shell out 4 and 5 credits a unit for higher qualit stuff. This will drive the resouces field even heavier, as that i know alot of them already do not do there own harvesting. I myself have not done my own harvesting since my first week before master. I have paid 2.5 credits a unit for resouces and below since.
This fixes the one problem that seems to be plaguing the sceene. That being that ultimatly we devalue the house. Well not really, 1) the houses will be needed at much better quality, at the buyers discretion, and the architects guts to experiment on houses with really high quality resouces in them (can u say crit fail? YUCK). All of a sudden the architect field now comes one of upgrading, and replenishment for errors made by not so attentive house owners.
Make houses easy to upkeep with no decay IF the ownner pays attention to it. Well what about thos pour guys using other facilities, like factories, harvesters etc? You want to up the cost of resouces? Well heres how.. this allows the architect to make money well into the future, and have good competition for the good minerals, and the good business partners.
1) make the facilites have decay rate comparable to 1% quality per 2 weeks. Once the facilty drops below 10% quality the owner must start paying for the very costly repairs (just like any piece of machienry the older it gets the more costly it gets to repair). (the devs would need to figure out a formula here, but say for every percentage below 0, the upkeep would be multiplied by 10/9'ths, Meaing if you pay 30 credits per hour for a harvester (say)... u would start paying 33 credits per hour (round to the nearest whole). Continueing onto a later date where the harvester would cost multitudes of credits it would not be worth keeping it anymore. (even if this means going below 0 quality, if the harvester is redeeded at 0 quality it is destroyed no matter of the upkeep in it).
2) The business classes already make a fair bit of money as it is, and this would mean busines is more competative and only the ones who are rooted and well equiped will servive. Meanwhile there will be many who will be challenged at trying to stay afloat in a challenging socity, crafting is great, but honeslty people, where is the challenge? Wanna play business? lets play hardball. They would have to incorporate several things into there prices 1) replacement of equipment 2) GOOD forthought as to there business plan, 3) the increasing price of resouces as that resouce harvesters will also be feeling the punch.
Possible affects of this system.. nothing terribly sevear that i see myself, however i do see the following..
1) Inflation like SWG has never seen. Everything goes up two or three fold... well in the long run i dont think this is to much of a problem, we always have complained about there being to much money in the game to begin with. It will be harder for newbies to start up, however it will be a fairly large challenge for them, perhaps the devs can work somthing out there? Im not sure myself.
2) the home owners who where not to be terribly affected by building prices are in the run aroung going be affected. Well so be it, they are not hit anywhere near as hard as they could be though, they are cussioned if they are just simply a home owner.
This is just the idea forming in my mind. Be critical on it, as that i think its possibly an answer that works for everyone, including the architect, which the SWG galaxy would be sourly lacking without the field. Aswell like another post mentioned and is sticked on this board would be to have them a greater part in the galactic cival war.
Well thats my two cents.. hopefully it makes sence..
Jimbobway' - Master Architect Flurry Galaxy.
I also believe that decay would only make fewer people want to buy our goods.
It is my belief that the easiest fix for the problem of no future income for an Architect would be to replace the maintenance that is paid on Houses and Harvester with warranty cards. This would be a card that only Architects could build using a reasonable about of resources that would do the same thing as the credits that we put in to houses and harvesters now. As the Architect raises in levels they could build a card that would last longer then lower level Architects. Not only would this help us by giving us future income it would also allow us to have items that do not require 10K+ of minerals to make and maybe even give us a barging chip with miners to get better prices on LG Ore and such.
I also like the idea of Architect being able to build some of the faction structures like turrets and etc….
Just a passing thought, not to get too far away from the gripes and concerns. I would like to see art on the walls but if there is an interest in cross profession work then have an image designer make the painting, an artisan make the frame, and the architect make the final picture. You could have a small, med and large size similar to tables and then varry some of the images.
Fixing experimentation could solve this, at least for a little while, as it would give people the ability to "upgrade" later. Better houses could get you reduced maintenace, better harvesters would extract at a better rate, etc. I agree experimentation and crit failure issues are TOP priority right now, because fixing these is (1) probably fairly simple and (2) would produce at least a temporary spurt in demand as people upgrade to better items.
As for the long term, how about something like this?
1. Structures decay if maintenance is not paid (just like now) but repair requires a kit from an architect. In other words, give US the "xxx credits to repair" money instead of taking it back out of the game.
2. Houses either aren't redeedable or cost a HUGE amount to do so. It should be like real life; yes you can move a house, but it costs a LOT. As architects we would craft a tool that allows us to essentially move a house to a new location, totally intact including items inside. There would be some skill limitations involved (so for example a novice architect can't get the tool and move a PA Hall), possibly earned as part of the Buildings line. The tool would charge the architect an amount based on what's being moved and how good the tool is, and it would not grant XP, so there would be no incentive to sell the service below cost like happens with deeds. While the house is being moved the old site and the new site would be red-taped for some period of time indicative of the difficulty in moving that structure (PA Halls for example should take a lot longer than a small house.) I see this service being popular with people who have aquariums built in their houses since you can't just pick one up and move it to a new house.
3. Harvesters and factories function until decay reaches a certain point (say, 50%). Before that the current structure state simply affects performance...ie 75% status means you harvest 75% as much or produce items at 75% rate.
4. Harvesters and factories gain the chance of having a non-repairable critical failure. Best leave this one until they get a handle on making critical failures actually be rare. ;-)
It seems to me like this is a reasonable comprimise. Comments?
Prices are determined by supply and demand and not by "class" or "titles". If there are too many architechs competing with each other for limited business and undercutting each other's prices's, then the problem is that there is simply too many architects, too many supplies relative demand. IRL what happens is that most architect will go out of business and move into another profession. Now lawers and doctors have boards or governing bodiesthat grants "memberships" to applicants to precisely control the "supplie" of services which then drives up prices. If in SWG artisans out numbers other class then naturally artisans is going to end up being the "poor" class. You can't compare "weapons" to "houses" as weapons earn's a living for a figher while "houses" does nothing. IRL I need a house over a gun but in this game I need a gun over a house. Therefore it pays to be a weapon master. Since most of us don't need houses in this game I believe you can't solve the problem by adding decay because I just simply don't need it. I'd rather carry a droid around with crafting stations rather than having my personal one in my house. The fighting class is the source basis ofALL income in SWG and therefore to generate income for architect you have to somehow make the fighting class "need" some form of services from the architects. Forcing decay on structures won't generate more income for the architects. Make something that can in term help fighing class generate more income is the way to go for architect.
P.S. Survey and Dancing also generate income for the game but then, they don't need architech to generate money, do they?
I'm so glad I'm not the only person that feels this way.. I don't want outright decay.. but architects should be involved in the maintance of structures. Allow us to be the ones to provide the maintence stuff for structures.
Basically,
Most people are saying architects should be somehow responsible for house mainteance. So the maintenance fee you pay now will no longer go to a mysterious void, but get paid to an architect to fix your house.
Should this "repair house skill" be given to novice? or saved for Master architects =)
Here's a solution, Architects can make Housethat will replace the maintenance fees.For lack of better term so everyone can comprehend, we will call these House stims. You can also call them a power supply/ time cards/whatever you want, as long as you get the point.
For example:
HouseStim A willlast one week. At high skill levels they will make higher quality cards icrease the amount of time required for the next maintenace cycle.
House Stim B's Last 2 weeks
House Stim C's is 3 Weeks
House Stim D's is 4 weeks (a full month)
So If you buy a House stim D, your house is safe for a month, Of course it would be very expensive, but then if you were going on vacation why not?
Otherwise if you are giong to be gone for an extended amount of time, you better redeed.
If this gets implemented, I vote we rid ourselves of house maintenance fees since it's purpose is to maintain the house.
i'm thinking that we are quickly working toward a functioning solution, and i frankly expect them to fix architect before they implement urban planner with the player city expansion. i'm not really worried that things will crash into the ground. there are simply TOO many people working in this game.
just be careful knocking that mysterious void. i think it's one of the largest sinks for credits in the game, and frankly, i'm thinking that decreasing the net amount of sinks too much would be a very bad idea. i personally think that the game needs more sinks, hence i wasn't entirely against decay in addition to maintenance, but i believe now that that would put too much strain in one spot on one group of people.
more sinks, but elsewhere. and having architects involved with structures through the life of the structure seems a good idea to me, instead of just making it and throwing it to the wind. these seem like good ideas to me. all we need is a little attention from the developers. we havn't heard from one in a while on this thread. do they still love us anymore? 
MAN I agree with you I'm at a low lv and struggle to get resources what I don't harvest I buy at 3000 creds per 1000 units...OUCH...(Mind you I am not crying about cost) but it is real hard to make cash. Back to the issue I have had way to many critical failures making generator turbines and I'm using my best crafter at 14.XX.
Hmmm I don't know but it makes it hard to stay with Architect...may the force be at my command
It would be SOOOOO convenient to have some sort of harvester/factory status monitor available without running around to every one of them -- I'm starting to have enough money to feed my harvesters 2-3 days worth of maintenance, and plenty of power, so I don't have to make an hour-long daily supply run. However, sometimes I find out that a resource was depleted, or resources shifted, or some other issue has arisen so that a harvester stopped functioning 2 hours after I last visited, and instead of finding 12k of a resource waiting for me, there's 200.
Just to see how they are all doing (anything I'm an ADMIN for, not just my own lots) would be a huge help.
Beyond that, being able to pay maintenance from this inteface would be cool.
I know depositing power and collecting resources requiresa site visit, but just a visual on the rest -- pretty pretty please??
--Freiyia Scola , Naritus