Architect Archive
Thread: Renewable Revenue
AwaitingWoW wrote:
Could we ask those opposed to decay to please explain what they suggest be done when everyone has all the structures they need and will buy no more. They seem to be adamant in their beliefs yet i dont think ive seen one propose an alternate solution to this problem.
I'm only opposed to Decay on Houses. I do think, Decay on Factories, Harvesters, Furniture, and Gens should happen. That should easily help Architects gain the needed renewable income. For one, more players use Harvestre and Gens in far greater quanities than Houses. The general impression I have seen from players is that Houses are worthless, unless you are setting up a vendor. Even then, most crafters seem to live out of their vendor house. Granted their are some exceptions.
Secondly, houses need to have more encouragement to them. With recent item cap limit change, the need for large houses is next to nothing. Only players, who realy like those houses are wiling to give up the 6 lots for the measely 250 cap. Yes, I am one of those people, who does use a large house, even though 3 mediums would result in a greater storage cap overall.
Lastly, how would you like to be forced to gather 5 or more friends every month or so, just so you can move all of your stuff and re-place a new house. I wouldn't, I would get rid of my houses and not buy another one.
Problems
No decay means eventually low demand
Solutions
1) Introduce decay for harvesters since everyone will still use harvesters no matter if there is decay or not.
a. Each time you move your harvester it decays x amount and becomes less efficient (this being the major way of decay)
b.It decays overtime at a slow rate
2)Houses and Furniture should not have decay, since the demand is low for them anyhow. If they could give them some larger advantages then I would be all for decay.
Hidden problems
1) Decay on harvesters means people will buy personal harvesters and just destroy them. I would lower the efficiency of personal harvesters and give larger advantages to med and hvy harvesters.
On experimentation
1) I would hope that all previous items had a base level since most building/harvesters were made with little or no experimentation.
2) I would also hope that experimentation is not to heavy on the type of resource, since architects need a ton of resources. The reason being is if you need 60k resources to make a PA hall, you don't want to have to wait a couple weeks until an ore that has high toughness is available. A weaponsmith can do that since there items take only a few hundred resources and not thousands.
I can tottaly understand why poeple want decay, but really, if you had to spend 400k on a house to know your going to loose it, people wont buy it.
decay for housing and harvesters is a bad bad idea. its not so bad when your thinking 2k for a personal harvester. but 100k is a bit too much of a loss.
Architects need a consumable item, not breaking whats already out there.
we all agree the construction branch is useless, lets find something worth adding to it.
Decay on any items we can curently build will hurt us much worse than it will ever help.
furntiture is a decoration for storage places. if it decays i would just now have any and free up the space for more storage.
house/ harvesters have maintance fees which is why they dont decay you are paying to keep them running fine and fixing any thing that may arise.
The solution is new items.
Some one already mentioned turrets. this would be a great item. People would need a new one any time a old one is killed. This could serve to solve yet another problem. Require the customer to give the builder of said turret faction points. Then architects could actually choose a side with out having to get combat skills.
Some other items could be walls,towers, home security items in the furniture line.these could take the place of the useless construction line.
There are plenty of items that could be made and used use your imagination. Give each of the other crafters a new item that requires structure module walls or any subcoponent we make. A bot that takes 4 subcoponents only a architect can build a weapon smith needing a new subcoponent only we build. so on and so on.
Bottom line is there are much better ways to help the class then to continue down the path of decay which would ruin us. Continue on the new item avenue and we shall get better
They should change maintanence to property tax of some sort. This would solve the idea that your paying maintanence to keep the harvesters in top shop.
If they put decay on harvesters and lower the efficiency of personal harvesters there would be demand forever in making harvesters. This would be very similar to weapons, which seems to be working now.
There will always be demand for harvesters even if there is decay.
maybe a second lot count for shrubery.
or a 2 lot count all the way around your house.
How about this:
Give us a means to remotely manage harvesters requiring disposable technology. Make the system such that you have acquire andplug in a "remote management module" to your harvesters to remotely manage them. The module is permanent until you pick up the harvester so each time you move the harvesters you have to plug in new management modules if you want to maintain them remotely.
Harvesters with this plug incan be accessed remotely from homeusing a"Harvester Management Console" (made by architects of course and is a placed asset like a crafting station). The console lets you view the status for each harvester, pay maintenance, deposit power and maybe even change resources and toggle power on and off.
So everyone gets the benefit of a more casual means of running harvesters but we Architects get a means of churning income from players buying new management modules for each time they move their harvesters.
Even if the harvester still has to be visited to pull goodies from the hopper this would still sell well as there's plenty of harvester owners that would prefer to hop on and go hunt or do something other than spend their first hour (or three) online every night checking their harvesters.
Whatcha think?
To the person who said prices would have to go lower if they put in decay.
It is supply and demand.
If they put in decay that increases demand.If they decrease the effectiveness of personal harvesters that would also increase demand. If they put in expermentation to make a better harvester, this would also increase demand. Supply is decreasing since there are less and less architects everyday.
So prices should go up if anything.
To the person who said prices would have to go lower if they put in decay.
I have said that introducing decay will decrease the VALUE of our structures. If someone knows that when they buy a house, it will only last for 30 days, the house will have less VALUE to them. Decay decreases the quality of our product.
Let's say car manufacturers started designing cars that only lasted 1 year. What would happen to demand of automobiles? Would prices go up, because of increased demand? Not neccesarily. Instead, many people would decide that owning a car would not be worth it anymore, and would move to alternate ways of doing things. For example, droids now have perma death. Does that mean people are buying more probots now, to replace the ones that die? Or instead, are they simply deciding that probots aren't worth using anymore? As a result, DE's have to lower their prices in order to move them.
The same would happen in SWG. Already, houses have very little inheirant value. They're good for storage, and are required for a vendor. A small works as well as a medium for that, and mass quantities of small houses only keeps a couple archs busy. Harvesters have much more value, because they produce credits basically. Guns produce credits, armor helps you produce credits.
If you want to mass produce houses & sell them for 2 cred / resource, by all means, be my guest. Decay is not the answer.
Rather we should be looking at additions to the profession such as consumables, military installations (destroyable) and additional subcomponents for other professions and upcoming elite-elite professions.
I also like Adune's idea for giving us military installations in the construction line. The precedence is there in the Tailor profession and even Armorcrafter profession for creating different things and for different uses.
Allow us to build turrets and small walls with Construction 1 and maybe small bases and improved turrets (like those you see for NPC rebels/imperials) in Construction 2 and move up to large bases in Construction4.
All of these would be able to be destroyed and would actually give us a means to support more than 2 or 3 arch's per server.
Couple that with the player city implementations going in and I think Architects would be a more viable profession.
I would love to have more military structures also, but we need decay on harvesters now or there will be no demand by the time they implement military structures .
Please explain how demand could possibly be lower if there was decay on harvesters?
1. Most harvesters are personal harvesters, I would hope they would make these way way less attractive. Doing this would increase demand for medium and heavy.
2. Do you think crafters are going to say I don't need resources anymore, so I refuse to buy a harvester when theres decays? They may increase their prices. I just don't see Mr. Weaponsmith say man now it is going to cost me 400 credits to make this weapon that I sell for 12k it just isn't worth it anymore. (funny thing is they would complain like that)