Architect Archive

I have been reading thisthread but have kept quiet because I only understand about 10% of what you folks are talking about. However, I am finally speaking up because of a comment made that implied (to me) that starting out as an Architect in today's game is very difficult.

I started my Architect around late October / early November. On January 8 we moved to another city in another state, and I didn't play at all for a couple of months. She is an Architect 4111 and a Master Artisan.

I have had no trouble being an Architect or breaking into the market. In fact, my Architect now supports 3 other players and I'm still able to donate credits to the city I live in and my Guildmates for various projects. Of course, I'm perfectly happy with 10 million credits and have no desire to have 40, 50, 60 million credits.

I hand-craft about 90% of everything I sell. I don't mind that I can't make the white Master Architect furniture items - my hubby's Master Architect/Master Droid Engineer makes those. I also choose not to make the low-end furniture items. Everything else that my Architect can make she makes & my hubby makes the other stuff (for example, the high-BER harvesters). If the item can be experimented, I'll make 5 test items to see if, to me, the effort is worth the end result - sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.

I think there are 2 reasons why I am so successful - I keep my vendor stocked & I label everything with their specifics. For example, instead of saying "Swoopbike by XYZ" I say "swoopbike - 99% - 2485 hit points" or "table - end - square - wood" - this way the customer knows exactly what they are getting by simply looking at the listing - he/she doesn't need to look at the "details," an extra step.

None of my vendors bark. I don't advertise in any of the chat channels. I don't stand in any city and spam. The only advertising I do is about onceevery 3 months I'll put 5 powerups, for example, on the Theed bazaar and in the "description" area I'll put something like "For more furniture, go to the XYZ Store, 1200 m. east of Keren at -1234 -5678. Thank you for your business!"

And my prices are probably lower than most - again, I'm not in it for the money, so I don't gouge.

Word gets around, and people come.

It's actually very easy.

Dvnce, sorry for trying to preach to the choir!

And Dazzydoodle, I don't know if you were serious or not, but I'll just say that I enjoyreading (and writing) too much.

Finally, Pawlin, again I'm not trying to suggest that it's absolutely easy to break into any crafting market in SWG. It's harder in some than in others, definitely.

But 1)the necessary condition isn't that a playercan go toe-to-toe with the big dogs right away --it's just that a new player can compete effectively in a market in a reasonably short time. It's not necessary to dominate; if you can make more money than you spend and it doesn't take long to accomplish that, then it's fair to describe that market as "easy to enter." (Note that being able to exit a market easily is another part of the condition, but that seems obviously true for SWG.)

And 2) it's useful when trying to decide whether it's "easy" to get into a market or not to think about it in terms of "barriers to entry." In other words, do there tend to be a lot of artificial constraints placed on newcomers before they're allowed to advance? (Examplesincludelegal regulations, union rules, guild requirements, corruption, and so on.)Or is success based almost directly on the amount of time and effort personally invested?

I think if you consider items 1) and 2) it's reasonable to conclude that it's"easy" to become a productive crafter in SWG. Not perfectly easy, where you can sit on your backside and the credits just roll in, but easy enough with some work that it fits the requirement of being easy to enter and exit the market. And that's all that'snecessary (along with the other conditions) to define an economic system as being one of "pure competition."

(Incidentally, for those who think I've been runningoff at the keyboard in this thread, my apologies... but this isn't my worst offense. If you're feeling masochistic and have plenty of free time, you might enjoy -- or be disturbed by -- examples of real prolixity such as Player Contracts: A Design Document and Space Expansion: The Commercial Game. Don't say you weren't given fair warning....)

--Flatfingers

Message Edited by Flatfingers on 06-10-2005 05:44 PM

I for one would LOVE to see ALL crafting become much more complicated. As for Architect, it woudl be a big change, but the "instant-build" bothers me. Maybe its just to unrealistic even for a game, but seeing a castle appear in 3 seconds is dumn, IMO. I would love to see large projects like civic structures and houses use a more interactive building process. Instead of crafting the house "in" a tool, you actually construct it on the site its meant to be on. As you add components and resources, the foundations appears, then framing, then rough exteriors, then a finished skin. The whole time, a small army of construction droids are running around "building" the structure. There are threads about this and many other great ways to spice up Architect crafting.

But regardless, I certainly agree there shoudl be a way for us to distinguish ourselves from each other. I would love to see 50 different floorplans/textures available. Each individual Architect can Quest to gain the blueprints for them individually. Same for Harvesters. They dont all HAVE to look exactly alike. And I would like to see Fountains and Statues and streetlightsreworked to be used on the footprint of private non-civic teritory. They would be placed in a way similar to how a Turrent appears when you donate it. You pick font/back/left/right, and the item is placed. TO remove it, it is destroyed, and you can put down something different. Of course it would add to the amint cost of the house.

I have mixed feelings reading this thread. I personally believe that more diversity in products will create a more interesting environment for both consumers and producers, so I'm all for that. New products or added features for existing products (e.g., furniture colors) would add to our fun. Just a couple of days ago some of us were commenting that two years ago if you told us we'd be spending hours and hours of game time decorating our houses or picking out colors for our armor, we would have laughed. And yet a lot of people (including me) enjoy doing j.ust that.

However, I disagree with Dvnce on some of the fundamental issues.

I believe that anyone who wants to be successful as a crafter in the game - no matter if they started two years ago or yesterday - can succeed. They need to be skillful as a crafter AND skillful as a business owner. There are LOTS of ways to differenciate yourself as a business owner. Besides "quality" (BER for architects) and price, there are: location, specialization, consultation, added services, market targeting, product availiltiy, etc. Time and time again someone swings by this forum and says "gosh - I'm not selling anything" and various people point out many things they could do to change that.

If we had more products and more features, would that increase people's ability to differenciate themselves? Absolutely! However, if someone doesn't think about the *business* today, and is unable or unwilling to pay attention to all of the facets of being in business, then they will fail no matter what level of diversity is available to them.

Building a successful business is work - in both the physical world and the virtual world. Nothing will change that, and we do ourselves a large disservice if we present these ideas in such a way that it will be "easy" to be successful as a crafter.

I also want to point out a flaw in applying "physical world" economic patterns to the virtual world. Obviously there are a lot of similarities, but there are some key differences also.

As a consumer in the physical world, I don't have a lot of "elasticity" in my disposible income. I have X dollars to spend at any point in time, and very little practical opportunity to change that on short notice. Most of us aren't in a position where we can just work another 2 hours today and have a bunch of extra cash to spend tomorrow on any major scale.

That means that I'll always make purchasing choices based on that X dollars and based on my spending priorities. Maybe I'd love to own a Ferrari, but that X dollars and the need to do things like pay my mortage and eat push me in a direction of driving a Yugo. So in that kind of environment of course we see a wide range of "quality" in products and why a business can make a lot of money in producing products that might be at the "50% quality" level in a particular category. I don't spend much on the car I drive but splurge on computer toys - and someone else will have exactly the opposite pattern.

But in the virtual world of SWG:

- I have very few, if any, fixed obligations - I don't *have* to spend credits on much at all just to play the game

- Although crafters have a fixed-size customer base to sell to, the combat characters have "captive customer" for their services with an absolutely unlimited budget - the mission terminals

- if an "ok" pistol is selling for 20K, and a "godly" one is selling for 500K, it isn't at all unreasonable for a combat character to say "ok, I'll run another 2,3, ... hours of missions and then I'll just buy the 'best' one"

- given both our human desires/dreams to drive that Ferrari or whatever, coupled with an ability to earn a lot more with fairly low time investment, I honestly don't think that we'll ever see a market for "just ok" products. I can't imagine what would have to happen such that people would be willing to buy BER7 medium harvesters.

In short, I support the notion of more diversity of products for all crafters, in order to make the game more enjoyable and offer greater flexibility to crafters in building their business model. OTOH I don't believe that will significantly lower the bar on what it will take to be a successful crafter, and I don't believe that it will create a significant market for "less than top-end" products.

I agree that breaking into the Architect market is not too hard. We can grind the prof quick, we're not dependent on 3 dozen different rare/high quality materials that spawned 9 months ago and 12 experimentpoints doesn't make a big deal.

For other professions though like WS, AS, or Chefit is I think more difficult to establish a successful business in an established economy. To make what is viewed as 'good' stuff they need to collect a wide range of high quality materials which takes time and money. And to make the 'best' stuff they need to be 12 pointers. Those are big barriers for people.

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Anthemion wrote:
Dvnce has stated the problem with the crafting game and the context in which our issues will be viewed. He did so here: Whats Next?? Getting our Voices Ready... as follows:

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Dvnce wrote:

the main problem I see is that SOE is confusing what is the Cause of the true problem... The problem and one of the Few TRUE problems with SOE crafting game is It is Just as easy for me to Make 1000 of the best Versions of a Item as it is for me to make 1000 of the Worst Versions of an Item. Thus there is no reason or market for anything but the best. This is not true in ANY OTHER game.. ANY other game has a market for starter gear and each stepping stone up to the final achievment of the best.

As a result Unless you make the best you dont last long as a crafter. and that is wrong and that makes for a dull bland very Un dynamic market. There is No Niches for people to find their way. This is why we only see really very few crafters of each type. For a new crafter (though it can be done ) it is not easy to enter the market because of (as Cafa Points out) rare spawns that someone has always got a few million units of horded. So there is no way to compete period Unless you are rich and can afford the rares.

As for Our profession there should be a market for BER 7 8 9 and 10 Medium harvesters. Max BER should be an Extreme Challenge to make. This is not the case .. The cause is two fold.. 1) I think the experimentation is too easy. 2) many architects have Millions of units of the Uber resources required to build Max BER for a very long time... I personally bought almost all my resources from hired miners. I recently made 4k medium and heavy harvesters houses and factories.. I can do this probably 2 more time without buying more resourses.. Now imagine if I had a fleet of 100 lot swapped harvesters behind me.... I keep my prices High but if my true cost to product is a fraction of a credit per unit think of what I could do to the market.... I could Price Heavies at 1 cpu and still make a profit. How fun would it be to compete against me if you only had 10 lots and didnt swap at all... That is the problem..

SOE has done good in presenting the ground work for a true Player Run Economy something that is new to the Gaming Industry. Since its new I think the experience in Gaming programing is lacking the experience of truly understanding Economic principles. What needs to happen to make Crafting game in SOE truly Great is introduce a true dynamic Market. Where If you build a crapy gun or a Crappy harvester it doesnt get deleted because there is still someone that is starting out and can use it. When SOE says their is a Hoarding Problem what they are truely saying is there is NO DIVERSITY in the market. You can go from vendor to vendor and really see the EXACT SAME ITEM for sale except for the way the crafter named it. To combat this problem you have to make the quality of the final products fluctuate as much as the quality of the spawn of resources. If all that is available is crap resources then all that should be able to be produced is Crap items. Until a better resource spawns. To make this happen we must drastically reduce how much resources are pulled into the game.. We can Nerf BER or we can NERF the amount of harvesters 1 person can control....

I personally want a market that is Diverse. I want to see crafters not having to Mad Grind to master just so they can make something they can sell.. They should be able to level by playing and support their leveling with the products they can make as they climb the ladder. If it was Extremely difficult to mass produce the BEST then the market would have ROOM for everything else....

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I suggest we discuss our views on this issue here.

How do we move toward a diverse economy when there are so many high stat resources in the game and the ease of manufacturing a large quantity of high quality items?

Message Edited by Anthemion on 06-09-2005 12:52 AM

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