Architect Archive

I'm not particularly happy about the whole of your message sent. Your top 5 issues seem to be a good idea. I like what was included. What I really do NOT like is being bunched in with "All the architect community" I absolutely abhor the idea of adding decay to architect items. This is the worst possible idea imaginable and it will only have negative consequences on our profession. You falsely claimed this was something the whole of the community wanted to see happen regardless of the 25% of us that are crying out that this is the worst idea you could possibly think up!

If you want to make a claim on "the whole community" be accurate about it. "A large portion" and "The whole" are completely different. Make your claims properly or they could be misunderstood. Another thing... as our liason you need to make sure to keep your biases out of your letters to the devs. I respect you having an opinion, every one should have an opinion, but as a person that is the "middle man" so to speak from one entity to another, you need to be void of your own biases when reporting.

Strucuture decay, with maintenence pools right now, will only worsen our market. People will not want a house if they have to find an architect AND pay an hourly maintenence.

THink of it this way... would you want to pay (for a small house) 16 creds per hour to keep your home from decaying... and then have it decay anyway? And have to spend MORE money to get a repair kit to pay to repair it?

Using weapons and armor and the fact that they have repair kits isn't justified. These items do NOT have maintenence pools to keep them in working order. They are used/abused continually, houses and structures are not. The ONLY place I could even see decay from use even feasible would be harvesters and factories because of moving parts... BUT... again... this is paid through a maintenence pool which is MUCH higher than houses. The whole idea is a bad one. You will alienate any customer base you have accumulated and they won't want to buy. Heck... I wouldn't want to own a house if I had to repair it myself AND pay a maintenence. It's foolish!

I'd condone and support the idea of buildings decaying if and ONLY if they took out maintenence pools. This will not happen, it's how the game was built. And I agree with and support the idea 100%. If the rest of you want to whine and cry that your market will become overly saturated and you will run out of new business... you're not looking very far ahead. Go ahead and do your theoretical math, but expansions will come out, new items will be introduced, new players WILL come on board. There will ALWAYS be a market for us and we will ALWAYS have our customers. Making it necessary to come back to us to fix the items a player own just doesn't sound like a good idea... a very bad idea. Anywho... I am done ranting and raving... it seems the posting community is against me for the most part... and that's OK... my side will win out in the end because they won't make such a drastic change as you described, at least not for 3-4 years down the line when the new game will be out and I"ll be playing that.

For those that agree with me... send your support... Email or /tell Danvar on Chilastra. If you want to have an in game debate when I'm not AFK... feel free to send me a /tell then too. Please keep your debates intelligent though. Name calling and harrassment will only earn you a /report and /ignore.

Thanks for those that have read this patiently and I think the community is doing great as a whole. You've all got great ideas (with this one being the only exception that I've seen). Keep them coming.

Danvar the Wookiee

Chilastra, Mos Espa, Tatooine.

Very good report, perfect balance of present and future needs.

Bravo!!

Good stuff, well written. FWIW maintenance is clearly bugged. I might skip a harvester now and then, no one is perfect, but I'd have to be Alec Baldwin to get the results I am seeing.

On decay of houses, my suggestion was something like this - new Decay meter. 5% loss when you re-deed a property, .01% loss per RL hour.

This would mean that a house which was never moved would decay roughly .25% per day, and last 400 days. Harvesters would last around 120 150 days on average, depending on how often they were re-deeded.

My 0.02 credits worth. Very nice post, BTW.

Power Core and Harvesting Mechanism - Yes! Please fix this and make PA Halls worth the time to attempt again.

Maintenance Status - I have not personally had this happen to me, and I am running about 35 harvesters. So squash it fast before it DOES happen to me

Reclaiming Maintenance and Power - I think reclaiming power is a good idea. I am not so sure about maintenance. I think about it this way: if you maintain your house you are adding things onto it that prevent it from decaying, thus keeping it at 100%. The money you spend on maintenance is therefore lost when you place it. Implications of reclaiming maintenance is that every harvester becomes an instant bank. Currently the only building that has this as an option is the PA Hall, and that is because it is supposed to act as a guild account, so adding this to all structures would devalue that (tho I'm not sure if that matters much). Power, on the other hand, should be fully recoverable.

Permissions - I would love SOE to state their position on this. Is this a 'bug' or a 'feature?' Why has this not been fixed already? Is it intentional? Is there some game ballance here? The silence on this issue from SOE has been deafening since I started beta back in April. My opinion is simple: admin should have all the rights the owner has, save maybe destruction. That includes drop rights, pick-up rights andrenaming rights. Factories should be allowed to be shared. It is silly that each person has to own a factory to use it.

Critical Failures - Critical failures are fine the way they are. Don't change them at all. The risk is fine, is in-line with other MMORPGs, and adds a level of uncertainty to the creation process that is necessary. The huge combines, especially, should have a risk of failure. It should be based on the complexity, so a PA Hall with 45 complexity is going to fail occasionally, no matter how good you are. Keep it the way it is and force us to grow up and adapt. I DO like the salvage idea, however.

Personal Issue (building decay) - I am ambivolent on this one. I would support it if it was a long decay time. If you buy a RL home, you can expect it to be around, if maintained, at least 50 years. Harvesters, things with big moving parts, may decay significantly faster. I still don't buy the idea that architects are doomed to uselessness, tho. Player cities are coming out soon, and I doubt demand will die completely for houses even 6 mo into the game.

I guess I am afraid of what huge changes to the system will do. Over a period of 3 years I watched Everquest slowly castrated to the point where everyone could be uber and much of the cool challenges in the game were removed because too many people whined. It was done in small steps, but always it seemdto make the game easier. My gut feeling is that we really don't know what is good for us yet, so take our opinions with a grain of salt before you go making major changes.

As always, just my opinions.

You need to send another report and include a paragraph about how Holo's INSANE factory nerf has really screwed the architects.

You make no mention of this heinous act.

It is the gravest thing facing architects.

dude.. you are only suposed to get 10% XP because you arn't doing any work. we don't need fast advancement, we need people building because it's fun.

please plea with the devs to cut ore if they can't implement decay.

Though I dont think they are going to give us reclaiming of power and maintenace. It was mentioned in a dev post at one point that the fact that when you move a harvester you loose all your maint is a bug. Your supposed to keep it on the deed and then when you place it its there again.

What I dont know is if you 'loose' the minimal to move fee. Like is it 3k to move a harvester every time. Or is it just literally what the message says, you must have 3k on it to move it.

That would be nice and make sense to me. You could hand out prepaid harvesters to your guild mates. Or always keep a week's worth of time on your harvester without having to worry about loosing it to move.

clicking is not fun,,,,,,what planet are you people from.....all crafting here is clicking ...mindless clicking...

i can tell i am just abandoning this forum....

'we have an SOE too for corresspondent and the cabal of crafters are back...

it is only a matter of time before you guys stroke Raphs ego ebnough taht he has sucked what little fun there is left out of this game...

FACTORIES WHERE NOT AN EXPOIT.........

but i guess it doesnt matter since all Raphls buds are master now....

Just wanted to confirm the Power Core issue mentioned at the top. Spent many hours today struggling with this (the gang of would-be guildmates panting over my should didn't help much). I wound up giving up (after some /bug and CSR emissions) and taking my kid to a lame new 3D flick... but it was quite refreshing compared to the shear hell I had been going through on Intrepid today.

Also confirming the Harvesting Mechinism schematic failure. 3 days now I've been unable to produce this item (hadn't tried before that).

Weji

The devs know most if not all of the issues already, that is true. The point of the corrspondent or whatever you call them is not to point out new issues, those get pointed out through bug reports and csr tickets, its to let them know what the community consideres the worst issues.

The devs cannot fix everything all at once, they have to prioritize.

No, I am not happy that some of these bugs are still here, but compare this profession to say, Droid Engineer, or Chef, and anything an architect gets too upset about is just plain whining. (Btw, I am all three of these professions and the other two thirds of my character is practically unplayable, architect is right now the only profession that actually functions like a profession. Where if you dont want to grind to hell and back you can create actual items and sell them for reasonable prices.)

So atleast our helper dude is listening to us and making the connection to the devs. Now, the real test is, whats the answer. Do we get an official post saying "The dev's respond.." or does it just end up being as effective as farts in the wind? If we turn around and two weeks from now or the next major patch or whatever and half or more of these things are taken care of, then I will say job well done to both the rep and the devs.

But give em a chance atleast.