Architect Archive

breeze

Its just a money sink like maintenance. The reason I am suggesting it be renamed is to accomodate the location tax variation ... it makes more sense than variable maintenance .... If you build in a choice location your rates are higher. If you build in a remote or poor location your rates will be lower. same as in rl where choice land costs more than swamp.

This is out there, but food for thought. How about we just get a cut of the maintenance (very small, maybe 1 cr/hour) on buildings we build? Granted, this would require the building actually keep the information from the deed, rather than converting to a generic type house. This would also be good for us, as people could examine the house to find out who built it, thus giving us a small (very?) amount of advertisement. In any case, with the maint sharing idea, it would provide those of us who build lots of harvs and such a bit of steady income based on the items we create, especially since we only get uxp the time the building is placed. Also would give Archs a perk for building their own buildings (we wouldn't get any income from our own buildings obviously, thus seeming like a lower maint rate.) If they want to keep the drain the same size as currently, they could bump maint rates by 1-2 to accomodate for the Architect's commision on the building. Just a thought from another galaxy.

On the other hand, furniture should decay, and based on it's quality should have visual changes from a perfectly experimented full decay piece of furniture.

As both a novice architect and someone who has been using structures for the past couple months, I will give my thoughts. Yes, I know this is going to piss off architects, but I am currently pissed off myself that you would even suggest this.

I think this entire idea is terrible. I have been working hard and spending a fortuneto obtain the structures I need. With resources shifting, I need the ability to redeed a harvester every single time its resource dissapears. Decay? Thats why I pay maintainance, so that it does not decay. I had to paya lot of money to obtain my structures, and I continue to pay a lot of money just to keep them alive, and to redeed them.

If a structure can only be redeeded a set number of times, then I would have toexpect a HUGE price drop from architects for these deedsand a complete removal of maintainance and redeedcosts. Ishould not need to completely buy a whole new set of heavy harvesters every couple weeks, that would be freaking murderon everyone other then architects who would not only be able to craft their harvesters themselves, but would also be rolling in the cash from all these sales.

It is not my fault that there are so many of you. There will always be continued market for structures, as new people join the server, old players change to crafting classes, or careless people forget to pay the maintainance on their harvesters. But if your market is starting to dry up, its because in a player run economy, there just can not be 2000 successful architects on one server. If there were less of you, there would be much more market for you. Just because there are too many of you out there does not mean that SOE should change the game to destroy my structures and force me to buy new ones. And what happens when I can not find two heavy mineral harvesters to replace the ones I just lost in the last resource shift? Those cost a lot of materials, what guarentee can you give me that all of you architects will have vendors setup and *well stocked* every single day with these harvesters? Humph, I dont see good business, I see a future of price gouging architects. People will find that they suddenly desperately NEED to obtain anew heavy harvester and the only architects around will be asking obscene prices for them. I can see it now, Watto says:"If you want a heavy harvester, you will paymy price of 400k. You will not find anyone else with heavy chemical harvesters in stock, I promise you that. And I do not take republican credits!"

I am not much of an architect yet, but reguardless of what profession I am, this change would have extreme impact upon everyone who utilizes harvesters and other structures. I feel that harvesters are one of the few aspects of SWG that function nearly perfectly. For the love of god, do not fix something that is not broken. You are proposing a change that would have catastrophic impact upon all the crafters in the game. I think most of you are only thinking of your bank accounts, and not of what will really come of this change.

It would be far less productive, but Ibet thatit would be far more sensible for any crafter to just construct their own small harvesters over and over then to continually buy medium and heavy harvesters from architects.

Okay my views are thus.. Housing and other Structures really have decay already in the way of maintenance.. we can occasionally sell homes via the Ooops I didnt put maintenance in it effect.. We need Furniture decay in a big way.. Furniture should decay in 2 months max. This will give us our biggest sources of income next to upgrades on houses. I also agree that we need newer structures occasionally and we also need more furniture as well as WORKING furniture..Lights need to Light.. we need to be able to use chests, armoire, and such as storage, we need to be able to lay on beds..

Ok, i'm an architect and I'll be honest, if you tell me that in 2 months I'll have to replace all my furniture, I'd laugh and say no thanks or at the least drastically reduce the amount of items i'd buy. Right now you can easily accomodate 100 items of furniture in a medium home. Lets just use a low estimate and say I buy everything very cheap at 500 cr each. Are you really going to tell me that my house cost me 60k, that my furniture is costing me 50k and in 2 months I'll have to spend another 50k to have any furniture in my house?

Short term decay appears to me to not be an option on anything we make. Long term decay, say over 6 months, or a year maybe, but anything under 3 months shouldn't even be discussed, if this is going to be discussed at all.

Ropock lets see you forgot something... you may have paid 60K for the house but you forgota rate of 17 which costs about 5000 for 9 days? so thats about 20000 a month or 40000 for the 2 months.. anyways we have all agreed it shouldn't go down to zero.. but most of us haveagreed it should decay.. maybe furniture repair tools crafted by artisans could be applied... and well Dudez wouldn't buy it.. people who aren't dudez would invest in it..

And Cyberthugg your right.. for that matter Architects shouldn't be BUILDING houses, harvesters or any structures.. we SHOULD be designing them and having Construction Engineers and GC's and Furniture makers make them.. but we don't have those professions.. so we are stuck with Architects making furniture...

Fair enough on the maintenance fees, I dont' disagree with you there. I missed it where most people agreed it shouldn't go to zero. If its in there, I do apologize. I still don't see short term decay as an overall good idea. I actually thought it was good when I first started reading here, but the more I think about it, the more I ask myself whether I would spend the money on as many things knowing it would have to be repairedor replaced in a very short period of time.

I think adding things in that are renewable is a far better fix than making things go away. Just think about this. When they took away the extra storage space in houses, everyone screamed and yelled and you'd have thought the world was going to end. I'm not just talking about here, on all crafting forums. As soon as they added some of it back, people relaxed. In any patch that adds something people are generally happy, as soon as you take something away, most are very upset. By including something that is going to remove or deteriorate an item that people don't need to survive you automatically reduce the demand and people are then forced to make an additional choice on whether its worth it to spend the money on something that you either won't have or will look bad in a short period of time. We are already struggling to sell furniture as it is with the reduced limits on housing, how does this drive up the demand for the product?

I'm still undecided on whether or not decay should be implemeted, but if it is, here's how I would envision it. (I haven't seen this scheme mentioned before, but with the intertwining of threads, it may have been and I just haven't seen it.) I'll use harvesters as an example where appropriate:

• All structures start with a certain maximum durability rating based on its quality (materials and Architect's skill) and experimentation.


• Durability decays at a set rate based on building type (all harvesters should be the same, houses should be slower, PA halls *much* slower, etc).


• Once the durability has decayed past a certain point, say half of the structure's maximum, then the harvester's maximum output starts dropping at a constant rate, until at 0 durability, it stops functioning. The structure should *not* be destroyed when durability runs out... just stop functioning.


• Players can purchase a repair deed from Architects (or, perhaps, Droid Engineers). It shouldn't be exorbitantly expensive. This deed can be applied by the player to his structure. It will lower the maximum durability of the structure a little, and then return the current durability to the new maximum.


• Rinse and repeat.

This way, a player can repair his structure fairly cheaply for a while, but as it ages, the repairs will need to be more and more frequent. Evetually, the player can decide when the repairs are happening too often, and it's time for a new structure.

Housing is trickier, as there really isn't much you can do to make it "stop functioning", besides perhaps not let anyone in but the owner.

Whatever the case, I think decay should be a slow process. I think serviceable life should be in the 2-3 month range.

And as an aside, I don't think furniture should decay. Seems it would be more of a nuisance than it's worth to *anyone*, Architects included.

Would it make sence to have house decay, but not to auctually destroy the house? Mabeysomething along the lines of the longer your house goes without repairs, the more expensive your maint cost becomes. We could then have our totally usless experimental line be changed to a "House Repair" line. After the architect repairs the house, the maint drops back to normal. This would insure we would have income after sales slow down and also relieve all the headaches that moving a house contents would involve. If a house totally destroys, especially for buisnessmen, then you would need to send a new waypoint to all your loyal customers after you changed local. Also, if you have large house, would this mean that you would infact need to buy two houses so you could move all your items before one decayed? Would you loose your perfect spot in an area outside of town because of these moves? It just dosnt' make sence to put players though this kind of hassle. A repair line would also up the architects need to be more socialble when dealing with customers. Right now, we dont NEED to be nicebecause we know at most were going to have House, harvester, factory sales to a customer and thats it. Something so being a good buisnessman in our field would pay off with repeat buisness would be a boon. Thoughts? opinions??

I dont think decay is a good thing for structures that already have maintainence.. IE all of them now I guess. I'm not going to buy a gun if I have to pay daily to keep it up, and it still decays to nothing while I use it. The whole idea of maintainence is that you stop the item from decaying.

I like the idea of maintainence rate increasing over time. Basicly true for anything in real life.. older something becomes, more likely it will degrade or fail in some way. Eventually structures will degrade far enough that they cost more to upkeep than a buying a new one will cost. This still won't solve architects having to recurring income tho. If structures dont last long even while paying for them, no on will buy them at all. Maybe make maintaince so high after say, 2 months (real time), that you should just buy a new one.

My thoughts for recurring income: Furniture. The other profession with this problem that comes to mind is the Tailor. Clothes are very similar to furniture.. no one needs them, but most people like to buy some for style purposes. Yet tailors can customize at least colors on clothes... so people come back for new things.
We should be able to customize furniture.

I have to go to work now, so.. have fun ranting! I did,
~ Dorigen

They should rename Maintenance Fee to Structure Tax. You pay taxes when you have a house or building in RL.

Then have the building decay. If you want to fix it, you need to buy a Mainteance Kit from an architect or have a architect fix it.

And in - order to keep us alive, add it to the Contrcutction Tree at level 3and 4, since its a useless tree.

just an Idea.

I would like to see maintenance rates increase with the owner's time ingame.

Perhaps every 90 hours (for example)the owner is logged on the maintenace rates will double.

This would be fair to casual players:

Play 45 hours a week = 2 weeks before you are encouraged to get a new house

Play10 hours a week = 9 weeks

This would also prevent houses from "poofing" due to bugs, server outages, player vactions / personal emrgencies ect.

Furnature (and all durable goods like droids and clothes) should decay IMO. Again it should be based on a "it decays more if you play more" system.

I had a long post but I guess it got eaten so I will just say this quick.

If people don't like the idea of decay on top of the maintenance, make the maintenance the decay. Just have the maintenance of a house steading increase over time to the point where it is more cost effective for people to get a new house than to keep maintaining the old one. The rate of increase on the maintenance would be tied to the skill of the architect and the quality of the materials used. Maintenance on harvesters would increase based on how many times you redeed it. This really is the simplest solution.