Architect Archive
Thread: Architect Issues Designer responses
One reason architects are so touchy to 'balance' is our resource costs are completely off the charts compared to other professions. Next closest would be, what? Droid engineers at around 1-2k per top-tier combine? Actually, that'd be a pretty fair solution to all of our problems. For one, pull those schematics for personal harvesters right out of the engineering tree - what the heck are they doing there, if you want to skill up as the junk dealer known as artisan, use your sampling tree for crying out loud. Then, scale the harvester costs more reasonably - have medium harvesters be 3-4x the resource cost of a personal. Have heavies be 6-9x the cost. Make experimentation matter greatly on them.. hell, maybe even make optional parts for improved harvesting of specific resource types, etc. 'This heavy harvester has a +10% efficiency for harvesting steel!' Maybe even throw some nasty curveballs. "No harvesting link-steel aluminum without this trusty optional part!" Have them be created with 1000-2000 maint on them prepaid. Oh, and, make them burn out in a week, and don't allow for redeeding. Right there, a lot of problems are solved. Architects have an enduring market for harvesters. People would pick up mediums/heavies primarily for the rares, or for stockpiling. Everybody wins!
And yeah, there's huge downsides to this, starting with massive screamfests by all the people who invested hundreds of thousands in their sets of heavy or medium harvesters. Second would be the mad, mad rush and hogging of good resource spots - already some areas on Naritus are just ugly expanses of harvesters all over the place, with everyone hitting the same spots. If everyone could get those big, ugly, space-taking heavies? A nightmare. But hey, that's the nature of competition, right? I'll be honest with you: I don't even know if -I- buy this idea, but right now, it seems like a good one.
Solving housing would be trickier. I mean, part of that is, houses don't do much other than act as a messy storage area and a vanity collection. Frankly, I don't think we should even bother thinking about dealing with house decay for now - sometime down the road, but making houses useful would give us more reason to do so. Heck, furniture too. I think every item should decay in some way, just like every other item in the game seems to decay/get used up, but every other item in the game also offers some actual gameplay use. Gotta be fair about that.
God you devs are way dumb or just way lazy to read!!!
I can't believe that after all our weekly reports, all our bugs, all our complaints, all of our simple solutions to HUGE problems, that this is what you give us back. Currently we can't make 1/3 of the harvestors, we have 1/4 of a skill tree completly pointles, we have 1/2 the crafting points than any other profession, due to components on top of components on top of a deed we have a 33% chance of failing on a part of the deed, on top of that it always seems we fail on the deed and on the big items so we lose enough resource to last any other profession a month rather than a day.
Thx for all your help devs, your lucky the game is to adicting, otherwise I gurantee almost everyone would have quit by now. You got a long way to go.
LMAO after I see my post right below the other big text. lol, I am important **edit** it. It just has a better chance of being read by the blind devs.
just makes you look 10
Deoka wrote:I completely fail to understand why there are people posting on the architect board that they want large harvesters to either decay or be unredeedable.
This is the architect forum people. You know, architects...the single class that needs the most resources in the game.
It is difficult enough for an architect to accumulate enough material to upgrade all their harvesters to large while running a business. And some of you want this to happen every resource cycle??? You would drive every independant architect out of business if this change was to go in.
Think before you post, people.
A voice of reason in a sea of insanity. Thank you Deoka.
The problem with large installations decaying is that they are too **edit** hard to make. An E11 carbine is a couple hundred resources, a heavy harvester is 27,000. I very much doubt that anyone who has ever used a heavy mineral would ask that they decay or be gone every week. Build new ones? To replace 5 heavy minerals would cost you 150,000 resources.
It blows my mind that one the one hand you have people complaining about critical fails and on the other they want the products they make to essentially critical fail after creation? The first and heaviest users of heavy installations are architects. I have 13 mineral alone, most weaponsmiths I know have 2 or 3. Decaying these structures would be a crushing nerf to architects.
Also arguments that because everyone else has a lot of items that decay that architect items should decay are ignoring that simple fact that our stuff costs 10-100 times the resources to build.
If they are gonna decay my heavies then those heavies better pull 5 times what they do now and I better quit my job so I can make them full time as I wait for my 3 factories to complete the components.
The best ideas I have seen for helping the architect are
1) Allowing us to make destroyable military installations
2) Increasing the variety of our craft like more models and adding colorization to furniture
3) Introducing experimentation effects to all structures
4) Having some items, such as crafting stations decay. However big items stay in their current state.
5) Give us more items that other crafters use and that they consume. Currently I think powercores are the only items.
All of these things together plus player cities would make constant work for architects without placing undue hardship by requiring extremely expensive structures to be constantly remade.
Q says "Critical failures should be better".
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Better?? I hit master architect this week, and in the last three days, I've gotten more crit fails than I have since release. I don't know if this is due to some "fix" or just because, as people have been complaining for a month, that master architects are screwed up and failures actually increase as you go up the tree. I saved the construction tree for last, and as I trained up it, I watched my crit failures climb.
I am seriously giving up architect until this is addressed. Just today, out of crafting about 40 items (motly furniture), I failed on probably 1 in 6 items, including a FUSION REACTOR. So that's 110,000 lost credits, plus 4 hours work, right there. And I'm using high-level tools and stations (all 93%) and good quality resources.
PS. Why can't I post large font messages? I still get the error about not being authorized for HTML.
Critical failures still need to be addressed. Do you have any clue how catastrophic a critical failure is to a casual player? I crit failed on a medium house last night... that cost me about half a week's resources and will probably leave me running missions to feed my harvesters.
If components weren't lost, and only raw resources, I would still be out a few thousand but not roughly 20,000! We risked the resources that went into the components once already.
For know, I would be overjoyed with a structure factory that did not eat materials and components and not produce anything.
My plea to the developers. Please halt any more "new content" and fix the plethora of bugs that plague this game. This is Beta 4 I am paying for and I was STUPID enough to buy a year subscription.
I am going to have to stop buying Sony products and bad mouth their brand to make up for the money I am loosing on this product.
You architects need to realize that every attempt to make your services indispensable will fail and actually set back the architect profession. I mean everything which involves getting architects to fix this, repair that, have houses/furniture/harvesters decay.
The reason is, architecture is simply too easy to level up and too easy to do (as in the quality of the resources and the "skill" of the architect do not affect the outcome at all. Too easy also leads to too many architects, which seems to be one of the core problems connected with a low price structure market. If everybody needed an architect every few days, way more people would skill up one.
I know I will get flamed for this "too easy" statement but I think I have a right to say it. I took up architecture after becoming Master Weaponsmith. Now to be a successfull Weaponsmith you have to handle resource harvesting in a way larger style than as an architect, trust me in that. I just asked my friends to get me a lot of ore and I soon I was able to make medium harvesters for them. Making all kind of harvesters and houses for everybody in our small PA, leveling in architecture was a blast. Just took me a few minutes a day to get a level. Now I can see it seems kind of hard for a solo player and or casual player to get the huge amount of resources involved (I am still needing/getting 3 times more for weaponsmithing tho). Now I have read crafter boards before the game started and it's not rocket science that it would be hard for a solo player to get the amounts needed for the schematics. On the other hand it's a child's game for an organized group of players. I have many friends from my last 2 online games who don't mind helping me harvest stuff (which does not make us 1337 powergamers or 11 year olds btw heh). It was obvious to me after the 3 days I was able to play beta that crafting could not be done casually on the side, no matter what the devs said. Trust me again, weaponsmithing IS worse and probably most other crafts too.
The only solution I can think of is making architecture more difficult and give architects improved results for using better materials or experimenting. Make it so not every Weaponsmith etc can do it on the side using his crappiest resources and some ore he finds on his doorstep. Give larger bonuses to advanced (heavy structures) because they are quite a bit harder too make (not really something to scare a Weaponsmith off but putting up a factory is definitely an inconvinience I can avoid by just making medium structures). It takes skill to make weapons (not only the master title but a brain behind the screen). Give architects the same chance to prove their skills and give them ways to excel, ways to create unique items. Architecture does not provide any satisfaction for the creative mind - beyond getting past the crit failure chance on a large structure.
It was easy for me to get to the point where I could make medium harvesters. But if a novice could only build harvesters with a harvesting rate of 4 and a master could push it up to 6, I would probably not bother making any myself. I wouldn't mind paying good cash for one of these super harvesters. As it is any novice can make the same quality as a master and everybody with engineering IV and 100 k or so resources (estimated) and a few hours time can make them too.
Bugs need to be fixed first tho. Can't be hard to make harvesting mechanisms work. Factories are definitely bugged. What all the others said.
About critical failures: at 2-0-4-3 the only major crit failure I ever had was one wearables factory, so personally I have no reason to complain, it's totally in line with my experience in weaponcrafting (if not less) and no big deal considering how many times I have succeeded. Maybe the failure rate increases with points in the experimentation tree instead of decreasing? This definitely needs to be looked into - actually the whole line should be revamped since experimentation is pretty much pointless as of now.
-Decay on items:
I personally think individual components should break over time on harvesters. This makes architects middle pieces a viable means of making money. Not just our final products. This of course is complicated as all , but it could work something like when an architect examines the deed he can see each of the individual componets JUST like it appears in the crafting window (the blueprints for a machine if you will). He can then replace the broken peice with a new one.
Houses dont need to decay unless its the larger home and only under extreme lengths of time. I think the matience window should perhaps work a little more along the lines of harvesters, but would be a lot longer process. Perhaps a month before a house dissapates or something.
-Harvester Mechanism
This is plain silly that this one component cannot be made. I'll give you credit for fixing other things and having more important issues, but....
-Reclaming money/power from harvesters
Who doesnt want this. It only makes sense to have it.
-Critical Failures
If this pointless timesink/moneywaste is to ensue please, pretty please give us a definition of HOW this works. What kind of diceroll is involved? Is it pure random? I dont care to hear player speculations just like everyone else does. We would pretty please like a defintion of what we can do to somewhat avoid this and narrow it down. We are architects. we want to know the workings of EVERYTHING
If its not already it should be based on total experience you have in structure building on whole. Its only common sense that if someone has built 600000 houses that he will have 99.999999% chance to build the 600001st one.
Before the patch:
1 PA Success
After the patch:
2 PA failures
I do not like the changes.