Architect Archive
Thread: State of the Architect End of October
Surefoot-SOK wrote:
Keep the faith.
Please do 
I know that its been a long road and that results wont be immediate, but there really is a big internal push to address issues. This program is not even something I have been told to do - - its something that I volunteered to do and its a huge task. I think its important and so does the dev team so here we are.
I really appreciate the support of you guys and I know we'll be able to make a big difference 
Well, as the saying goes:
Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it
As i was saying... we wished to be brought more in line wiht the other crafting professions..... and guess what? we're getting exactly that! BUT! (& i cannot stress this enough!) we arent getting it by merely being given the additional 45 experimentation/assembly points almost all other crafters have... we are, to be sure, getting those; yet the real crux of the matter is that SOE has decided that some jackass of a dev somewhere way back when borkede the code, so now ALL crafters are to suffer.... and since this is coming out right along side the archi fix.... it has also become the archi curse. imagine it.... not only can we not make decent structures, and are now in direct compettition with the other major materials consumers, but we will now be the most universally detested professions out there.
all this, due to the devs doin their little bit of powertrippin' godmode bovine excrementation!
bite me, I say to you, SOE.... mebbe you can find some other way to rescue the cash bleedout you will have begun with this little escapade.... but you arent going to be getting any more of my hard earned dollars!
I'm happy with the 3 stat use for our harvester resources. If someone wants to be a Quanity not quality miner they can control the housing market instead of harvesters. I think the Decimal idea for extraction rates is also a good idea, it seems like an easy way to differentiate through experimenation. How ever i think it would be nice if there was more then one thing to experiment on.
Just my 2 cents.
Fuss Bango (Chilastra)
Master Arch/Artisan/Merchant
My take on Holocrons:
It's a horse that's been beaten up and down already, but if Jedi is truly an end-goal that is meant to be achievable by any character class in the game, there has to be an outlet for every type of player to reasonably achieve them. Placing drops only on force sensitive npc's covers players drawn to the combat professions. Limiting holocrons only to that end has unfairly given the heavy combat types the advantage, and pumped excess credits into them. Unfortunately, I really do like the way that the dispersion of Holocrons has been handled on a thematic, and difficulty level. While it's unfairly advantagous to the combat types, having to crawl around the ruins of Jedi influence, and making things fairly difficult is definately the right way to go about things.
To balance things out, I would love to see some new missions tailored to those with Elite Crafter professions, and other non-combat professions like Dancer, through which Holocrons could be dispersed. Say a crafter has been grinding out items for a lengthy period of time, I would love to see NPC's that would spawn nearby, and specifically come to the crafter and ask them for assistance in some mediocre way. The NPC would be completely unresponsive to anyone besides the crafter it was spawned for, maybe have them spawn inside a town the player is near and have a private message sent to the crafter requesting their help and including coordinates where they may be found. The crafter could then make up their mind whether or not to help. After a certain amount of time the NPC would go away if the player has not responded. Possible tasks could be along the lines of needing a certain custom piece of furniture capable of being created by the crafter as a gift for a friends wedding, or an officer is looking for entertainment for their troops, something along those lines. Upon completion of the task, the majority of the time the NPC would reward the player, walk out of site and disappear. Rarely, the NPC could be more than they appear, and upon completion of their task, suggest that the player visit an out of the way location where a Holocron may be obtained.
The basic idea is to create a way for Holocrons to be obtained without combat in a way that would be about as rare as Holocrons currently are off drops, and replaces the combat element with an excessive amount of jumping through hoops, hopefully using those hoops to maintain some thematic elements that would lead to the player to Dantooine, or other Jedi/Sith ruins.
This is the Architect forum, not Jedi though, so getting back on subject..
First off I want to thank ArchAngel for the awesome job. Please keep up the good work! =)
I'm excited that Player Cities are going live and that the schematics were kept inside Architect where it should be as opposed to getting goofy with Elite-Elite Professions. Creating Cantina's and other specialized venues was how I viewed Architects early on, not the restrictions to a basic set of harvesters, homes, and furniture. Also while Experimentation will always be a loaded issue, I truly feel that until Experimentation is fully implemented, Architect is an unfinished profession. Architect was the first profession I Mastered, and while I truly loved working as one, it quickly became tedious, besides hunting down new resources to improve my Crafting Stations. It wasn't until I went into Weaponsmithing that I realized how much the Architect profession is missing. The lack of Experimentation does allow us to be lazy, which is a HUGE plus sometimes, hehe. But, in the end, what a lack of Experimentation really does is take a huge amount of depth away from the Architect profession. Experimentation needs to be fleshed out.
Before we go any farther down the path of Architect additions, what's the deal with many of the little problems with the profession? I echo frustration with many of the little issues that just don't seem to go away. How much time does it take to ensure critical Architecture components in factory crates flow through a Factory? Or adjust Armoire 3 to the correct image? Could we borrow a dev for just one day to clean up little issues? =)
And while we're talking about little issues.. Crafting Stations. They are probably by far one of my favorite items to create. I love how every optional component has a visible affect on the final outcome. What drives me nuts, is how for all the hard work and time I spend tracking down the PERFECT resources on my server for my crafting stations, the actual Crafting Station benefit of a high-end station is next to nil. I would love to see the whole critical failure rate adjusted so that they happen about 50% of the time when using the worst possible Crafting Tool / Crafting Station combination, but are reduced to .05% of the time with a perfect Crafting Tool / Crafting Station. Could we get a +1 bonus to various Experimentation types for every 3 Function Ratings above 0 on Crafting Stations? (Perfect 45.0 Clothing/Armor Crafting Station would add +15 Clothing/Armor Experimentation for all items crafted with it, resulting in 3 extra points to experiment with.)
What about some experience sinks for once we've hit Master Architect? I would love to spend some of my capped out experience to "discover" new furniture schematics, alternate housing styles, advanced structure components, etc. Could we strip skill tapes from dropping off of NPC's, and add difficult missions to the game with items to increase Architect Experimentation and other skills in some way?
I would love to see all Galactic Civil War structures taken away from being items that can be rewarded at insane FP prices, and changed to Architect schematics that are obtained through FP instead, while requiring a player to be of a certain rank before they may deploy certain GCW structure deeds. One of the things I've been dying to see is increased cooperation between many crafter professions on various constructs. Offering an Imperial Base as a FP perk to Imperial Architects, who could then create a basic base that could be deployed by a player of a certain Imperial rank or higher, and could then be retrofitted with multiple Gun Turrets and other weaponry by a Weaponsmith who purchased various Imperial FP schematics, or enhanced with increased defenses from an Armorsmith, would really raise my interest in SWG and increase my emersion in the game.
I needed to unload some of my thoughts somewhere. Thanks to all who made it through this post. =)
Btw the above mention of the wrong graphic for Amoire 3 is not just a nice idea, this is the graphic for the Master level White Series Amoire which uses an ultrarare metal to make. IMHO, the Amoire is the second most beautiful piece in the series (next to the exquisite coffee table), but no one can have one due to this silly flaw, not even a bug! Someone just messed up the crafting database and put the same resultant graphic in both Amoire 2 and 3 slots. If you want to see what it REALLY should look like, check out just inside the Spaceport in Theed, really lovely work.
Also, their is a persistent bug with the ballot box- once you place it, you can not move it! Dropped one in my shop as part of a staging of a customer's order month ago, and it is still there. CSR has not even responded to several requests to zap it out of there.
A final note, the only reason I became a Master Architect was to become an Urban Planner. Now that has totally been dissolved into our Construction tree which they never took the time to ever implement anyway, a double win for the devs at our expense! It really saddens me to see the bare bones Citizen Cities release that is planned, it is about 20% of the grand vision originally expounded on by the devs that so excited many of us. And you know that any further enhancements of the bones that they are throwing at us to get us off their backs will be a minimum of a year away as total SWG effort turns into development of Space travel and combat. So what we get is what we got for a long time.
Hawkwind Val'Inares: Master Architect, Sr. Partner VR Designs, Minister of Commerce Citizen City of Vagabond's Rest, Naboo, Starsider.
Xader_Vartec wrote:
I'LL TELL YOU WHY!!!! BECAUSE NONE OF THE OTHER CRAFTING PROFESSIONS NEED 1BILLION TRILLION RESOURCES!!!!!
sorry.....
Although it is nice that expermentation actually DOES something it is hard enough (without an army of miners) to get resources in quantities needed WITHOUT experimentation. Add expermentation to the mix with resource attributes being part of it and it's REALLY hard.
Most of the time by the time I even FIND a decent place to harvest I can't even place harvesters there because it's full. This is due to the (needed) mining armies out there.
This argument doesn't hold water. Sure we need tons of resources of the basic kind- but the items we need that are the focus of experimentation to get it to a higher quality isn't a high-resource demanding item. Our fluidic pumps, ore units and the like (even the two new ones coming in).
While a structure may take 5, 10, 15 walls to build - big deal - those can be the massive junk resources. The sub-assemblies that are the key to high crafted items, those don't require gobs of resources, so you can afford to go high-quality hunt for those.
Gather up crap resources for 95% of our builds, and then the "good stuff" for the key sub-assemblies that actually make a difference.
Sorry, the argument does hold water, unless you have more than one account or PA lots, you dont have enough to mine the stuff needed to for the pumping units and to mine the crap stuff for walls. And if you want to pay, get ready for 4 to 5 cru for quality inert petro/aluminum, least on Flurry that is the prices of the stuff. So, the more stats you have to worry about, the less chances the little guy can compete with the ubber PA backed architects, the multi account architects or the day one architects.
When a weaponsmiths mines irolunun gas for a week ( a very rare spawn) he has enough gas for months of production. When I mine 100k of **edit** good carb ore, I only have enough for two weeks of making drilling components or generator turbines.
Buh? Still your argument is flawed. Currently what you need is only good quality metal. Good in the Unit Toughness rating. THAT IS ALL.
And not very much of it either, in the way of crafting up the ore/mining units. So, plop one harv down for a week on a good resource, and you're set for a long time. Stop crafting for a week, plop a handful of them down, and you're set for a very long time.
Do you do this? Apparently not. Do I? You bet. I laid down six harvs on a 940 unit toughness steel and picked up over 300k of it. Do you know how many ore mining units that can make? Quite a freakin' few.
For all of the other stuff (turbines, walls, structure storage modules) it currently makes no difference. Use crap on those.
You said it, Currently doesnt look like that is what is going to happen in the future.
In the future, we get a couple new items (turbo fluidic and heavy harvesting mech). The same rules will apply, though. The sub assemblies are the key, and they don't require the large amounts of resources. The huge resources go into the walls and such, and they don't matter. Dump your quality resources on the specific sub assemblies. You don't need great quantities of them. I'm still correct on this.
So, you dont experiment on final assembly?
Just asking, I mean am I wasting my time?
I do, but it really doesn't matter terribly - in all honesty. Final assembly only affects storage capacity, and by very little (amazing gets you from 100k storage to around 129k storage - big whoo).
99% of the players out there don't run their harvs to 100% capacity anyhow, so storage has zero impact on my sales. Not a single person has come up to me and said, "Can you make me a 150k storage heavy harvester?" -- while I get constant barrages for +3 BER harvs.
Ok, I concede the point...............................for now .