Architect Archive
Thread: Ok now what.
If you picked architect because you wanted to make money, you are in the wrong profession. If you picked it because you absolutely want to, then take your lumps with a smile. I don't know what every one else is charging for furniture or homes or factories, but I do know people sell resources for an absolute minimum of 3 credits per unit. Many are even higher. Some are outrageous. I sell my small homes for 20k, not a credit less. If someone doesn't want to pay that much then I don't care. If you are on the Flurry server and sell for 10k credits, send me a tell. That's what I sell smalls for to my guildees now.
So let's take a look at your staple item...the small house. A small Naboo, for example, takes just under 3400 units of resources to make. You can sell a house for 10k, and that's if you go running around towns like an idiot looking for a buyer...a waste of time. And what do you get for your trouble? You get LESS than 3 credits per unit PLUS if you are just a novice with limited means you do not have a factory so you have certainly flubbed a few items along the way, further reducing your profit margin. And perhaps you have also burned up a few entire houses along the way...I know I still do even at master, with regular occurrance.
So I ask you, why in the world would you sell something for LESS than the going rate of resources? My advice to you...forget all the people saying to sell furniture...forget the people saying you should suck it up and sell your structures for the pitance that cheapskates will pay. Go for the real money...go for selling resources. There is no risk AND you get at least the same profit you are currently getting on houses or even furniture.
At the same time, stockpile what ore you can...don't get rid of ore unless you absolutely have to. Find the schematics for a structure factory...print it out...memorize it. As you go, make only what you need to make your factory. Once you have crafted all the items you can for your factory, look at your next goal and start crafting the bits for that. You will soon have enough to be able to get your factory. The only piece you can't make for your factory is a structure storage module. Don't waste even a bit of your experience going for this in the small houses column. Spend 400c or whatever to buy one or two from another architect. When you have your factory, you will be able to mass produce items and never ever have a critical failure with your components...this removes a decent amount of risk, but not the biggest.
Once you have a factory, your next goal should be medium extractors to replace your personal ones. They will allow you to get even more of your raw resources to sell to the market as well as those you will continue to stockpile for your own uses.
I also agree with the idea you should work on your combat skills. If you do, you will get even more money faster. The more money you have, the more of your resources you can put to your own uses, and the faster you will be able to set up even more harvesters.
One thing though. Only build solar gens and mining installations until you get to heavy harvesters...the medium ones for chemicals and gas at least require 3 wall units instead of 3 strucucture modules, and you can't build a harvesting mechanism for flora harvesters anyway, so those are out.
Take it or leave it...it's my opinion. Hope it helps.
My suggestion to the solo architect would be to pick up their favorite weapon and take some missions while they are waiting for those harvesters are cranking out the minerals. Concequence: you make money to afford them. Also, if you cant sell small houses, DONT MAKE THEM. Put those resources to better use like making wall units. Wall units are AWESOME exp and you can use them to make things that people will actually buy like factories and medium houses. I figure the market is shot on the small houses because they are so cheap to make... the other better structures out there you'll start to pull a profit easily because no one is gonna sell 13k of resources for 10k.
Ikit,
What they're referring to wasn't a nerf in the slightest....it was just a fix that required people to use harvesters as they were intended in the first place. Before the fix, harvesters would still run if you didn't keep the maintenance pool fed properly, until finally the condition dwindled to 0% and it would just disappear (crumble to pieces). So people en masse would take advantage of that and place hundreds of cheap personal harvesters and let them run into the ground and continue to empty the hoppers until they died, and then a simple quick crafting session produces another cheap personal and so on and so forth. Now finally they work as intended and if either the maintenance pool or the power pool drop to 0, the harvester stops functioning.
Ok now what?
If you are having difficulty selling that small house, find a market. One of the first days that I could make a small house I built one with some cute newbie furniture and gave it to a popular entertainer. Yes, I gave it away. For xp? no. For marketing!
So the entertainer sees lots and lots of people coming in and out of that cantina. And he is singing about how great his house is. Everyone asks and he tells them to contact Xolanne.
You have new mail x 30.
Also, don't just build a house deed for someone and say bye. I love building HOMES. I like building the deed and throwing in some cute furniture. Then I like to stop by and visit and throw in a few houseplants and such. Soon, they are visiting my shop on a regular basis and buying up furniture. And they come to me for home upgrades. Another thing I did was refund or rebuild for those who got the perma construct bug on their homes. Yes, I was dead poor as a novice I couldn't afford to maintain harvesters without doing missions. But now I have a regular clientel who love their homes and tell others about it. And I can walk through player towns and proudly say "I built everything you see here. Inside and out!"
I still don't make money hand over foot, even with building PAs, in fact I cannot afford a large home for myself, but I still love what I do. And I would rather cut someone a break and take a bit of a loss on a PA than have that guild Architect mule spam my market with free housing just to get usage xp.
Are you a guild mule architect? Sick of doing combines for xp to build your friends a guild hall? Let Xolanne do the building for you! Go out kick some bad guy butt and Xolie will get that hall for ya. Send me an ingame email and we will work something out.
Xolanne
Mistress Architect - Corbaintis
"if your in this profession to make money, your in the wrong profession"
Am I missing something here? The game is supposed to be touting the most advanced player run economic structure out there where the majority of professions are designed to make items to sell. The other classes are designed to pump money into those professions.
I didn't choose architect because I thought it would make me the most money. I chose it because Out of the exisiting professions, Architect seemed the most appealing to me. I don't expect to be rich all the time but I can't see a silly suit of armor selling for more than even the smallest house.
As for the maintenance nerf... IT WAS A NERF.
The original design was harvestors required maintenance but what would happen was as the harvestor decayed production became less efficient. So you could let a harvestor decay it would just not produce as well. The problem was it was much cheaper to let harvestors rot away instead of paying the upkeep. that plus the various bugs allowed grinders to run masses of harvestors for free. The devs sought to fix this.
Thereare tworoutes they could have taken.
1.Reducethe reclaim cost. Reduce the maintenance rate but increase the performance degredation so that it was more worthwhile to maintain the harvestors than to let them rot. Increase the length of time between resource shifts or at least cause resource shifts to be more gradual. They could have added in breakdown failures chances to severly decayed harvestors that would provide for a complete breakdown that would have to be repaired before the harvestor would work again. Increase the complexity of the harvestors to make it more desirable to reclaim your current deeds than to make new ones.
2. Force everybody to keep all harvestors at 100% ignoring the maintenance bugs that seem to eat cash at random all while moving resources around every 8 days causing players to either destroy and make new harvestors or pay into the system every 8 days when the resources shift.. also bear in mind that due to system resets and such resource are actually shifting more thanonce every 8 days.
Obviously the second one is easier to add and so swang the nerf bat.
The only problem I have with them as it stands is that if you move one it's power and perhaps it's maintenance should stay intact. I might understand setting up maintenance on a relocated unit, (if it was at a cost that made it more cost effective to move it instead of replacing it) but the power should be there at least.
You're still just telling them to sell their goods for less than the resources are worth selling them on the market...that's just not good business sence. If you are a master now, you had people feeding you or you have multiple accounts. Everyone does not have that luxury. This guy, and many like him are having to do all the work by themselves, then have people badmouth him because he want a fair price for his goods.
Mine what you can, sell what you need to keep the harvs fed, build with whatever is left over. You aren't going to power level like many of us did, but you will keep yourself sane and your business afloat.
Most of the problem I have with Architect is that there is no turnover. Once soembody has a house as long as they pay the upkeep they are golden. That means when the powergamers flooded the market they basically shutout us solo architects. The other problem is that the professions are not seperated enough. There needs to be a mining professions. As an architect I should be ordering supplies not digging them out of the ground myself. and since when can one person take raw materials right out of the ground refine them to steel/copper/iron etc.... make the actual item.... then be a merchant and sell them. these should all be seperate functions.
Mining/Harvesting
Processing/Refining
Crafting/Manufacturing
Marketing/Selling
I posted in another thread an idea involving losing the entire cash up front idea for large scale items and going to a payment plan. Structures cost maintenance Have part of the maintenance costs go to the architects like a mortgage payment. The architect charges a small upfront fee for the item say a 1 to 1 ratio then recieves daily payments from thier maintenance pool. I'm not askign to increae maintenance costs but since the money isnt going to anybody some if not all of it should really be going to the person who built the structure. the reason i say some and not all is so that those who make structures for themselves are still having to put money into the system. Also add a decay system where after a specific amount of time the house begins to break down and costs increasingly more and more to maintain. eventually the costs outweigh the benefits and the person buys a newer home. Now Im talking long term for this like say a period of a RL year.
This seems more realistic than the current system and it will allow even solo architects such as myself to stay in the game.
Cyber...you may not be an architect to make money, but some people do become one because they think they will make it big and we all know that's not the case. Certainly not compared to weaponsmiths. It seems you chose it for the second reason I gave. Nothing wrong with that, it's why I'm in it. There's not another profession (yet) that can leave such a significant mark in the game world than an architect.
The fact remains though that if you can not make ends meet, you will not last long in the business. I've always been a crafter in games and always gave my wares away free to my friends. In this game, and in this profession, that's not possible. You can't fuel your harvesters with generosity, unless that generosity is in the form of cold hard cash and energy.
Architects can't afford to go solo, that's all there is to it.
Maybe in some crazy long-run kind of scheme you could achieve Master by yourself, but otherwise architects need help from both surveyors and customers to find success.
It isn't the profession that needs to change, I say that as constructively as I can.
-Pogo
As a Mistress Architect who does not have a PA backing her up, I can fairly say you are wrong. You do not need a group of people backing you up. I do agree that it would be much easier. And I do agree that customers need to help.
Customers help by paying reasonable prices. So, if you have a sound marketing plan and clever harvester placement and work some deals with miners. If you can keep your production queue full and spend less than 1 hour a day working on collecting resources you are in business.
One of the fun parts of being an architect is that you have to network. I must spend the majority of my time dancing or chatting in busy cantinas with my title turned on. People always start asking what I can make and soon enough I have my queue full of orders again.
The only whine I have about Architecture is that there are toooooooo many architects!
Xolanne
Mistress Architect - Corbantis