Architect Archive

Would you play a combat class that only had Gnorts to kill?

Thats is the equivalent of what you are asking for us to do.. only build a structure repair kit to fix structures that are never purchased any more.

No. That is my point. You are forcing me to take more missions to kill gnorts to pay for your proposed decay. You are asking me to kill twice as many gnorts so I can afford to buy a brand new house every couple of months, new furniture every couple of months, or pay more for guns and armor because you get to charge morefor harvesters to the armorsmiths and weaponsmiths that make my guns and armor.

Remember, mobs drop ALMOST NO credits or loot. The ONLY way combat professions make money is by doing missions.The ONLY credits that enter andfeedthe player driven economy, come from combat players spending that money. You all seem to be opposed to the thought of actually having to run architect missions, but you want to charge me more for things, so that I have to run more missions? Get real!

Again my point: This problem SHOULD NOT be fixed in ANY way that make me grind credits to pay you any more. I have to grind too much to upkeep structures as it is, and in that regard we already have the same problem. Keep your monkey off of my back, and come up with solutions that do not make other players grind more.

Personally I like the ideahaving the customers buydaily, weekly, bi-weeklyor monthlyrepair kits in replace of maintenance costs for both harvestors and houses. It can be in the currently useless construction line (well maybe useful just for crafting stations - but even that is questionable) construction 1 daily kits, construction 2 weekly, construction 3 bi-weekly and construction 4 monthly repair kits. This will reinforce the idea of a player based economy and make it so we actually earn the money,

The idea of getting 10% of mainteance is not such a good idea.That would make people charge even less for the harvestors, sell a ton off cheap and live off the 10% maintenance and never have to lift a finger while pulling in thousands of credits a day.

Daker i got to thank youi never really thought about the replacing furniture thing when envisoining house decay. I tend to keep ageneral empty and messy house. But i could see the huge hassle it would cause. I really appreciated Reeka's post i think you really hit the head on the nail. Most of my business these days deals with heavies and mediums. If i saw a decent return from my customers for those i would be more than happy. A slow decay of those would be great. I dont want to see my repeat customers every week or every month per say, but to know that if i give good customer service ill see them later for that return buy. Heck i could even start a frequent buyers program. I really dont think this is too much to ask from the community. The people running the harvestors are making decent money so for them to have to replace them occasionally should be acceptable.

On another note in another thread someone flamed about decay saying archs are greedy for wanting this. I say for shame i'm greedy period. I like playing a merchant king in these games. i want to make lots of money. but i dont price gouge. I try to be extremely courteous and helpful to my customers and potential customers. I even sold a PA hall with 150k on credit, and had only seen the person around never actually talked to him. I want to be rich but that is not why i want decay. I want decay so i want to play this profession in 6 months. I dont want to have to learn how to be a weaponsmith to make money.

thats the end of my rant

Quarzi

Master Architect of Moenia

Kettermoor

I really appreciated Reeka's post i think you really hit the head on the nail.

I started by praising Reeka's post and kinda went off on a tangent. Reeka, I really liked your post as well.

Thanks, I have been following because I really want to see this resolved and in a constructive manner that everyone will (well the majority of people, you can't please everyone) will be happy with.

I thing I do want to point out. We are coming from 2 different sides of the fence here. You are a combat class, I am a crafter. Yes combatants main source of income is through missions, a crafters income is through running your business. This is what it appears the devs had in mind.

You hate grinding missions for credits, i can appreciate that. Thats how I started. Thats how every crafter that wasn't spoon fed resources started. It sucks I agree. But the problem I have with your statment that harvesters bring you no wealth I just can't understand. Please look at the following example.

My current prices are 14K for a Solar Harvester, and 90k for a Heavy Mineral. You purchase those you have spent 104K.

You place those for 1 day on a 50% spot on each. You spend 3600 maintenace for the day. You recieve 3960 power and 5040 mineral. Your total power cost for the day is 1800. So now you are left with 3960 power.

Take that 3960 power and sell it at 1.5cpu and 5040 mineral and sell it for 2 cpu. These are both below the current resource value on my server. You have just made 16020 credits minus your maintenance your net profit is 12420 for the day.

Now you are on very avg viens, and undercutting resources. You will make back your initial investment in just over 8 days. Now say you had a 60% power spot and 70% mineral spot you would make your investment back in just under 6 days. And you can still do better than this.

Everything left after your first 6-8 days is 100% profit for you. If you are a crafter you then take the resources you gathered and craft an item that will sell for more than the raw resources and make this investment back even faster as quick as hours (i.e. weaponsmiths)

If you use the reources for your self and not profit that really isn't our desicion it is your and in that case yes you will be operating at a loss. But to say that harvesters bring no profit just isn't correct, next to missions it is the #1 money maker in the game, either by mining or by crafting.

Now with my above decay proposal you would have to lay that investment out again every 30-90 days. I do not think that this will be such a burden to other crafters, namley you name weapon and armorsmiths raising prices that it will affect prices all that much.

I would really like to get Archangel's opinion on this and possibly modify our decay proposal.

OK I am going to stray a bit from my constructive posts but I have to post this cause I am laughing to hard.

For all you non-architects that feel we are exagerating or greedy I just logged on. Within 5 minutes of being on this was my conversation.

ximitru tells you: Hello

You reply to ximitru: Hello

ximitru tells you: Can you make me a solar power gen?

You reply to ximitru: Yes I have them for sale on my vendor actually.

ximitru: For how much?

You reply to ximitru: Would you like me to send you a waypoint? They are 14K

ximitru tells you: Oh... I can get one tomorrow for 3K, Sorry.

At which point i just laughed at my keyboard and came here to post this. You see a Solar Generator costs us 4430 resources to make. This guy is going to by one for 3k. That works out to .67cpu. You might as well give it to him because that isn't worth much more than the cost of your resources if you mine it yourself.

Greedy? ha!

It is the lack of economic stability that architects have that fuels our push for decay. It doesn't mean we are going about it the right way but i see too many flames towards Architects latley. Tells like these are becoming more common by the day and needs to be addressed. So for those non-architects that do read this post and are itching to flame us, stop read the above conversation and ask yourself... " If I where an architect and had to deal with it, would I? If I could fix it what would I do?" Instead of posting your typical architects are greedy and why i should i have to pay for them to play and have fun posts.

hrmmm...how about something like this.

Droids require batteries. How about making it so that harvesters run off of batteries which have been created instead of power supplied by the user similar to what droids require?

This would would free up a harvester slot or two for most users who use all of their building slots. This would also allow architects to builda reusable resource that people must buy from them on a periodic basis. Give each battery a chunk of time that it's good for, or even better yet, make it variable depending on the quality of power used to create it, the architect's skill and experimentation done.

This would give architects something similar to medics in that it would be a crafted object that would be always in demand. Noob architects build low quality ones that don't last very long, but work well in personal harvesters, while master architects could build nice ones which would work well in heavy and would power a personal for a loooong time.

This would satisfy what architects have been asking for in two areas...experimentation and continued business from customers. This would also change the way that people manage harvesters and energy.

What do you guys and gals think?

-Szordin

So you want to reduse every class in the game to a power-up salesman.

I disagree, I think all craftable items should decay in some way.

I really decided to play this game on the promise and potential of a player and crafting run economy. For, being an artisan and more an elite artisan it is not about money, it is about crafting, experimenting and doing that by interacting with other players (selling, bargaining, taking orders, being asked for custom made items).

Of coursewhen your house, furniture and harvesters decay you will feel annoyed, as annoyed as Ifeel when I crit fail on a huge structure maybe or even more! However, dont you feel the same annoyance when your 100k worth weapon or armor decay? yes or no! Neverthenless most players are happy to pay much more than they pay for structures for decaying items.

If people dont feel the need for a house or furniture after decay (there certainly will still be need for harvesters), so be it! Maybe the Devs should think or ask the comunity (that has already come with great ideas) on how to make furniture and houses more usefull. Or scrap the architectural profession altogether. After all they can implement missions to buy you structures and furniture, and we all get to be miners or armor/weaponsmiths.

On your points:

1) As I stated above, I am not interested in interacting with NPC as the main way playing my crafter. If I wanted that I would continue playing Capitalism or similar non massively multiplayer games. Its a good idea though if it would be implemented for the novice crafters as a complementary way tocrafting experience, but not for the end play to my opinion.

2) I dont think you are right.Thereis the saturation of the market for structures and there is the saturation of the profession.Certainly there will be some new people comming but will enough come to feed all the architects? I dont agree with the idea ofhaving to change profession aftertheir reached master... all that efford. Neither I agree with the concept of one of the profession beiing closed to newcommers because of saturation.

3) Once again its not about money. Money in the game has no woth, having fun has.

How do you get that out of what I posted?I'm not talking about every class in the game, I'm talking about giving people a reason to return to architects after a sale while providing architects a reason to actually use experimentation besides increasing the hopper size on harvesters.

Medics are required to craft an object for each and every heal that they issue. I'm not talking about creating a huge time/money sink or anything like that. I'm talking about creating batteries usinga few metals and a bunch of power. It's simply an alternate way of what we're currently doing with stuffing power at harvesters, but requiring an architect to step in as the middleman between the raw power and the harvesters.

There is no way I want batteries to be in 15 minute power chunks or anything like that. I'd say 6-12 hoursish as a wild number from the sky. Better materials? Longer lasting. More experimentation points? Longer lasting.

Could a noob sell these to power a heavy? sure! but be prepared to stuff a lot in there. Would a master architect be needed for people with huge mining operations? yes.

This creates another transaction point which is good for the economy.

The best way to get people to return is NOT to make them a battery or power-up salesman.

The only way there can ever be a real player run economy is for all craftable itmes in the game to decay at some rate. Else there is no player economy at all.

So, I think the reason that people are viewing architects as greedy come from two things.

1) They see the high prices of large houses and other big structures, but having no idea how much work and resources go into them can only compare them to running gnort missions and think OMG! They want to make more money in one sale than I can make in 2 weeks!! This is a problem of perception.

2) The desire to add decay to structures is essentially enhancing architects at the expense of everyone else. Whether it should have been that way from the beginning, whether it's realistic... It doesn't change the point that if decay is added on top of the existing maintenance fees, the prices for everyone who plays the game increase. Combine that with the perception that becaues they sell single items for over 100k, architects must be wealthier than god and you get "The architects don't think they make enough money off of us already, so they want us to pay more money. Why don't they just ask the devs to give them 10% of every mission we run instead, and cut out the middle man."

Now, I can understand wanting your class bit sustainable, and I don't think that's just greed talking. After all, if you were only interested in money as you said, everything you do after the first 6-8 days of getting a heavy harvester is pure profit.Even more so for an architect who doesn't need to buy the harvester. But for a number of reasons, I think that forcing a tax on all the other players on the game to achieve that is the wrong idea. There has got to be a way to make the Architect class sustainable without shifting the burden for it on to the other players.

It's no more greedy for non-architects not to want yet another source of grinding in the game interfering with their fun than it is for architects to want to avoid market saturation.

It's why I think there should be other useful, but non-neccessary goods that wear out that are architect produced. I've gone into more detail about them in other threads though, so I'm not going to get into them now.

for curiosity sake, please really think hard about this before flaming....

why not make architects much harder to master? the reason prices are so low (in regards to Reeka's conversation post) is because architects are far too easy to master and thus there is an abundance of us. with fewer casual architects i'm sure we can see a gradual increase (and perhaps stability) in prices. along with the idea for harvester batteries (i love this idea), we should be quite capable of having a steady supply of customers. however, i believe that houses and furniture should remain as they are, without decay. if people do not fight in clothes, their clothes will also never decay, but even myself as a Master Artisan/Master Architect/Master Merchant owns at least 20 pieces of clothing and have purchased more to decorate my vendors. Equally unnecessary with replenishment, but yet, far higher in demand. with higher item caps in larger houses and the above changes(and furniture coloration), i believe then that we will have a somewhat stable demand for architectural goods.

so basically:

1) harder to level up - fewer PA grinders, higher prices

2) harvesters decay and replenishment batteries - steady demand

3) furniture coloration and higher item cap - desirability and fad

and not mentioned above:

4) working experimentation - demand for quality, market drive

5a) architect lot increase - balance in regards to our resource needs as compared to other crafters
or
5b) architect bonus to harvester efficiency - same deal, balance towards our needs

ps. with all due respect, our #1 needed resource is already "nerfed", having ore being capped at around 65% max as compared to metals @ 95%, radioactives @ 93%, chemicals @ 95%, reactive gas @77%, inert gas @ 97%, some flora @ 95%. if anyone have seen ore over ~70% please show me a screenshot of a harvester's list with proof(anyone can fake the sampling screen + spatial chat box)