Architect Archive
Thread: Proposed Solutions for Architect Decay
'Consumable' items, like the powerups (neat ideas there), are really the key. I agree that structures should be long life but decay. I don't think that's really the enough.
A guy buys a set of golf once every 10 years, but he buys a dozen golf balls every season. You buy a lamp that last forever, but it needs a new light bulb every few months. I work at a pump company; we sell the pumps for near cost just because we know we'll get a lucritive spares/service contract in a couple years.
We apply this to harvesters... they all (except personal harvesters) have a crucial replaceable subcomponent.
Mineral: Boring Auger
Chemical: Suction Screen
Flora: Harvesting Tine
Moisture: Particle Filter
Gas: Containment Seal
Solar: Solaplexis (sorry had to steal that from James Bond: Man with the Golden Gun)
Fusion: Radiation Shield
Perhaps these would effect harvester performance (with some of the ideas for powerups) and of course they wear out.
A novice architect could make basic versions of these (allowing them to have a viable product to craft and sell), while maybe in the experimentation line you gain schematics for more advance versions, carbide tipped boring auger vs duranium-coated bit, polymer containment seal vs silvered o-ring containment seal. Throw some wildly exotic materials into the advanced components.
It's all about the pieces... Harley Davidson makes money on their motorcycles, but they make alot more on the hundred dollar grip with their logo.
Keh' Icoh
My idea for market turn over is some what similar to some of the ideas here.
No redeed on houses, halls or factories. Decay bases in days would be great. 30 days for a small, 60 days for medium, 90 days for a large and 120 days for a hall. The number of days can be experimented on. I high quality small house could last up to 40 days. This needs to be clearly seen in the deed. Now moving into a new house once a month would be a nightmare. There needs to be a function where you can just add a deed to the structure terminal. Also the structure terminal needs to say exactly what the deed is needed or take any deed of that size. People don't always remember what house they bought and some houses are too much alike to even know the difference. When a house does decay, it shouldn't poof. That is too much like the disappearing house bug and will just grief people. Have the house container, as it were, lock. Nothing can be picked up or put down until the house is fixed.
Factories should have a limited number of runs, say 1000. Once they are out of runs, they stop working and need to be replaced. They do not go poof as people need to take out any resources and finished products before destroying the structure. This is based on usuage not any time decay. Heavy crafters are making more money and therefore should be able to afford more factories. The number of runs could even be experimented on to get more runs for a more durable factory. Again this needs to be clearly stated on the deed.
Harvesters should have a redeed limit that is dependant on experimentation. The number of redeeds is based on the size of the harvester, so the larger harvesters can be redeed more. Personals can go from 1 to 3 redeeds, mediums 3 to 6 and larges 7 to 10. Doesn't have to be those numbers, maybe allow for a wider range so experimentation has more of an effect. Redeeding will still cost money as this is one of the ways money is removed from the game that currently lacks money sinks.
There are a few guidelines I would add. No structures should disappear because of decay, simply become unusable. People use our structures for storage and need to know their items will be there at the end of the day. Experimentation needs to be tied to decay so that two birds can be killed with one stone.
Jyss wrote:
Have house placement work like vendor placement.. You have to initialize the house then It cannot be moved. You cant put anyhting in the house or do anything else but redeed it until it is initalized. I mean afaik people cannot turn droids they buy back into deeds.. houses shouldnt be able to either.
That is an excellent idea! Makes perfect sense.
As far as experimentation goes, I'm fully assuming that this indead is (or at least was) the intended plan to have structures differ more than they currently do. Whether it be through maintenance rates, extraction rates (for harvesters), or whatever. They simply need to implement it or replace it with something else. I have a gut feeling that we will see something regarding this in the next big update. We'll see soon I suppose. 
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Houses, Factories, PA Halls - no redeed - Normal maintenance
This allows the housing market to refresh itself on a semi regular basis. I've moved around several times myself, and I would have put down the money for the house(s).
Harvesters - 10 redeeds - No redeed cost
Since the ressource shift takes place about every week, this sounds like a reasonable number of redeeds. There are alot of complaints about having to pay for a redeed after a ressource shift, and this would solve that problem as well as create a market for new harvesters every so long.
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Wow.......... Angel I agree 
I don't mind the no redeed for houses and factorys part. Only drawback to that is instances like the infamous factory bug where you had to redeed every 100 items. That bug took, what, 3 weeks for them to fix?
As an independent architect (2 accounts, no PA) having to remake my 18 heavyharvesters every 10 weeks would be a killer in terms of resources. I could afford the cost of doing it, but coming up with the resources would be tough, especially if my past customers are allneeding new harvesters as well at the same time.
I already know some miners have taken limited architect skills to make their own harvesters. Wouldn't harvester decay lead to more of that?
I still don't think decay is the answer to our renewable income problems 
My vote is for GCW involvement. For some reason I have more faith in the devs getting the pvp system working well enough that people want to be involved, than I do in them getting any decay solution done correctly.
My opinion on replaceable parts is this:
Mass producing two crates of Mineral Boring Augers (or replaceable part X) adds a "grind" factor (maybe it wont be so bad with factories?). Also, unless the cost of those things are like 10% of the value of the harvester, than it might not even be worth it:
Example:
If someone needs a "Mineral Boring Auger" and it requires. About 3000 ore and 1000 steel (among others) to reactivate 8 Heavy Mineral Extractors. That would be say 100k. Not such a bad deal if you think about it. If those things burn out after 744 hours of usage, that guarantess 12k income per harvester. Not such a bad deal
Pros:
- Time decay (structures last for a fixed amount of time before needing to be fixed by an architect only)
- Any person can stock up on these "rechargers" so that while Architects still get some income, but the miners don't get stuck with too much downtime
- Easy to mass produce with factories
Cons:
- A bit of a grind
- Difficult to implement (?)
To make a comment on the house poster. If you only play every once in a while, then a house isn't for you. I aggree that houses should never go poof, but only become unusable until serviced.
I can draw 300 to 400k in materials with 10 heavy minerals per shift. So I could replace all 10 with the resources gained from one shifts worth of resources. If the redeed limit was 10, that gives me 9 whole shifts to make structures for sell. This seems very reasonable to me. I would perfer this over any power up or replacement parts. First it is easier to understand, you get 10 redeeds, simple. There is a counter on the deed that says how many is left. Your harvester never stops because it needs a new part. People already hate having to check harvesters everyday. This won't make people too happy adding one more thing that can go wrong. It also would require more work on the development side of things. Redeed limits is just another database field and shouldn't be that hard to code. No extra art work or new UI.
Replaceable parts that could be experimented on would be cool.
You've seen my thoughts on experimenting an entire structure. I don't think that's what we want.
Someone posted in the past (forgive me for stealing the idea but I thought it was a good one. Sorry I don't remember the original poster.) that we make parts for, say, harvesters, that are replaceable but not necessary for the harvester to run. For instance, an Auger ofMineral Extraction, that would add maybe 2 kg/hr toa mineralharvester and last about a week.
These items could be relatively low in resource cost (100-500ish) IF they could be experimented on, because then we could sell them for more than the traditional 3-5cr a unit. We also would be able to stock up on whatever high stat resources we need to make them, andturn the best experiments into schematics.
I don't see any disadvantages to this. One thing I've always liked about the architect skill is the ability to level without having to grind. Novice architects would still be able to sell their goods, even though it would take a master to make the best "powerups".
I love this idea
Replaceable parts
looks well thought out too Kerico
"We apply this to harvesters... they all (except personal harvesters) have a crucial replaceable subcomponent.
Mineral: Boring Auger
Chemical: Suction Screen
Flora: Harvesting Tine
Moisture: Particle Filter
Gas: Containment Seal
Solar: Solaplexis (sorry had to steal that from James Bond: Man with the Golden Gun)
Fusion: Radiation Shield"
Just thought I would mentionthat there is already a command for transferring the ownership of structures from one person to another.
The command is /transferstructure.
It works like this, I target the harvestor/factory and type "/transferstructure <person's name>" and it will transfer ownership of the havestor/factory to the player I named. (The player MUST be close by for this to work) That player is now the owner/admin of the harvestor/factory and it is now using their LOTS (Have to be sure they have the LOTS free before /transfer'ing it) and I have been removed from the admin list.
The command also works for Houses/Halls, the only difference is, you must be inside the House/Hall to transfer it.
Now to my thoughts re the thread topic.
I'm not sold on the experimentation on our big resource sink items being a good thing, we all know the pain of crit failing a combine on one of those (i.e. a PA Hall, Heavy Harvestor) and we all know the relief we feel when the combine goes well. Adding Experimentation would mean that that relief could be short lived when you fail in your experimentation making the product worthless. It just increases the likelyhood of failing to make a finished product.
What would experimentation do for us? Do for our products? The only thing I can think of as a viable experimentable trait of our products would be their durability, which could tie in to the decay ideas people have put forward, and that's it. I doubt the Devs would let us experiment on Maint cost or Extraction/Efficiency rate, etc. They've stated already that money is flowing into the game much faster than they'd like and that they need more sinks not less. And we all know that resources are also flowing into the game at a high rate. Just look at the number of Miners out there selling multiple 100K's of resources on vendors.
Now I'm not dismissing experimentation completely, I'm just not sold on it yet.
I do like the idea of the no-redeed housing (given a 1 to 2 hour grace period for getting the placement right ), it could open a market for already placed and furnished homes in communities , and the idea of decay of harvestors and factories being based on the amount of time they are turned on for.
I think that the 'grind factor' can be reduced if there are a lot of different kinds of power ups, each of which requires different specific elements. For example, one could imagine drill bits specialized for each of the types of mineral - radioactives, gems, ore, etc. Add in experimentation and resource quality, and we have what other crafting professions have: product differentiation, and a constant challenge to produce high-quality goods.
If this is a grind, its no worse than what the other crafting professions have. With decay, we're still crafting the same harvesters and houses - no variety, no experimentation, nothing but logistics. That's what makes architecture the worst grind in the game right now.
I like the powerup/replacement parts idea I like it alot better than I like total decay. Right now the ease of using harvesters is a blessing and a curse to architects. Because everyone can own a harvester and because they are really easy to maintain many more people buy and own harvesters than they would if they decayed. The fighter that has a few harvesters to make extra cash isn't going to be as eager to do so if they have to totally replace that harvester every few weeks. By adding in replaceable parts it would lower some of the resource glut that is now seen but not make it so overwhelming as to drive all of the part time harvesters out of the market. And at the same time it adds in a renewable sales line for architects that is needed.
If experimentation came hand in hand with the replaceable parts I'd cheer loudly. Adding a highly experimentation powerup could decrease maintence, power usage or the decay of the part. Making the items would add a grind factor to architects but I don't think that's a bad thing as it stands there are alot of part time architects out there because it is a fairly easy profession to do part time.
I'm not sure how I feel about the no redeed on housing.There would need to be a secure trade system to be added for housing transfers otherwise the ability to sell a house would be an iffy prospect. Perhaps when a house is placed a tradable icon is added to the placers datapad that is used as a deed for secure transfers.