Architect Archive
Thread: Whats Next?? Getting our Voices Ready...
Pawlin wrote:
Anthemion wrote:
Pawlin,
...
Suggestions:
- Make good resource spawns not occur under harv farms. (advantage to the active miners)
- Reduce lifetime of admin rights on Dvnce's "commercial" structures. (requires logging to mule toon regularly)
- Limit the number of admin rights a player can have. (ex. I can only have admin on a total of 20 structures)
- Formalize the valid forms of lot "renting" between active players similar to the secure trade feature. (formalize the definition of abusive lot swapping)
- Prohibit cross server lot swapping posts in the forums. (unfortunately, adds to the forum moderator's duties)
Some good ideas there and a combination of them might help drastically cut cross server lot trades.
The one about limiting the number of admin rights per player is something that Cafa and others would object to since they have bigger guilds with a lot of cooperation. e.g. sharing factories, or a cooperating on harvesting. So if we're trying to find a solution that wouldn't hurt anyone then I would not want to add that to the list. For example my own guild mines and sells fusion power. Our guild leader does the maintenance work. So we put them on admin. If you nerfed the # of harvesters someone can have on admin then that would inconvenience my guild. And of course see all of Cafa's posts above too on that topic.
Its hard to know if SOE will want to delcare cross server lot trades as against the rules and enforce that. I haven't seen them do so yet, if they have then I missed it. Sometimes they allow things that just seem crazy like Jedi fight clubs. And other times they 'fix' something that wasn't intended like the solo group nerf.
There isn't always a lot of obvious rational behind those choices and I think there might be reasons were' unaware of or debate within SOE on that stuff.
Ultimately, my biggest fear is that they will look at Dvnce's submissions, skim through 1 thru 4 and see #5. #5 consist of variable changes more than anything. Simple in comparison to any other request. #5 is all we'll get done for the next year and when the outcries ensue they'll say exactly what they told the DE's:
"It's what you asked for!"
Fivo Asia
Cafa wrote:
Ultimately, my biggest fear is that they will look at Dvnce's submissions, skim through 1 thru 4 and see #5. #5 consist of variable changes more than anything. Simple in comparison to any other request. #5 is all we'll get done for the next year and when the outcries ensue they'll say exactly what they told the DE's:"It's what you asked for!"
Fivo Asia
I agree whole heartedly. This is a somewhat complicated issue that in not architect specific and we need to avoid another slap-dash fix that makes me/players not want to keep playing the game. This issue needs to be separated from our immediate requests and explored more thoroughly considering all the valid play-styles.
This cannot be treated like the development of a new game. There are existing players, guilds, and play-styles that need to be considered.
Anthemion wrote:
...This issue needs to be separated from our immediate requests and explored more thoroughly considering all the valid play-styles....
Dvnce, please add the missing Schematics to the list of things to be addressed for our profession. Possibly to be mixed in with the furniture colorization section. This should be easy since the art is already in the game.
Cafa wrote:
...and they took away the cool armoires from us and gave them to the faction recruiter. ...
Pawlin wrote:
Cafa wrote:
...and they took away the cool armoires from us and gave them to the faction recruiter. ...
The 'cool' armoire was always the faction armoire. THis is how I recall the blundering going down: First the master armoire was bugged and had the same artwork as the middle level brown one. It was like that for a while. Then they finally 'fixed' it by changing the artwork for teh middle level armoire to the faction armoire. Then they finally fixed it for real by changing the master armoire to the proper white artwork and changing the middle armoire back from the faction armoire to the brown one.
Yeah I know, and I can get plenty now. But they don't say "by Fivo" on them.
You mean you didn't run off 22000 of them and stockpile 5 storage houses full? I coulda sworn that SOE said we players do that with everything in order to monopolize the economy.
How about making large amounts of harvesters near each other break down faster? Or make them require more maintenance (mineral harvesters kick up sand and dirt that gets lodged in other harvesters), or cause some to suddenly stop working/ be destroyed (a gas pocket explodes, or a mineral/water deposit collapses). That idea is similar to the idea of having resource deposits be lower under large mining fields.
Also, an idea that would be more harmful to guild operations like those of Cafa and the Estate, if x harvesters are in an area of a certain size, make the good resources with high stats spawn less often near there, and more often or in higher concentration near independent harvester fields.
Completely eradicating cross-lot trades would hurt far more people than it would help. From what I have read, and from what I have seen in-game, many of the large-scale operations are run by a group of people, not the single crafter that, from what I understood, are talking about Dvnce. And even if you are talking about the large groups, they most likely contain a large portion of crafters, and so it actually helps their portion of the game.
Arturun wrote:
How about making large amounts of harvesters near each other break down faster?...
Arturun wrote:
Also, an idea that would be more harmful to guild operations like those of Cafa and the Estate, if x harvesters are in an area of a certain size, make the good resources with high stats spawn less often near there, and more often or in higher concentration near independent harvester fields.
The problem with the idea of having resources not spawn under large amounts of harvestors is two-fold.
First: When a really good resource spawns, and we find a nice place to put our harvestors, there will generally be a lot of non-cross-server lot trade harvestors there. So the resource shifts, and if this idea was implemented, then there would be no chance of there being a decent spawn of a resource under the current harvestors. Sometimes when there is really not anything uber to harvest, I just leave the harvestors where they are, and harvest the highest % resource under it for grind materials. So now under the new system, because my harvestor was part of an area that had a large amount of harvestors in it, there is not a decent % of resources for me to harvest. So you are penalizing the normal player that supposedly everyone is trying to protect, and not just the Cross-Server Lot Trades.
Second: The players that do Cross-Server Lot trades, will just combine together, and go find more people to expand their business. Knowing that SOE/SWG can't just say "dont spawn decent % under every harvestor field" and the servers automatically do it (without damaging the economy). They would simply double their efforts in finding more people willing to help them out with the cross-server lot trades. Find a group of 5-10 players that want to do a super resource business, and get them to each go to 7 other servers to get more lots. So they increase their business from 80 lots to 400 - 800 lots for them to pull resources. With 350 - 750 (counting some lots for all the Large Houses they would need to store all of the resources) harvestors down, there is no way that SOE/SWG could handle making sure each field they place. And if they tried, then the Cross-Server Lot Traders would get smarter. Instead of placing 80 harvestors together, they would do smal groups of 10-20 throught the planet, so instead of a couple huge harvestor fields, we now have 40 - 80 smaller harvestor fields that are disrupting more people trying to get a city started, more people trying to place a harvestor, and there is no way that SOE/SWG is going to be able to ensure that each field is found.
Now, I would like to kick in that I want proof that Cross-Server Lot Trades is damaging the economy we are in. I am a Master Weaponsmith on Wanderhome. I am only a 10 point Weaponsmith, my only Lot sharing is with my brother, and between us we have 30 lots. We have3 Large Houses, 1 EQ Factory, 1 Wearables Factory, 1 Structure Factory, and 2 Merchant Tents. For Harvestors, right now we only have 2 Mediums because really we are still trying to get everything organized like we want, and we want to get it all streamlined before we start focusing on resources. Even with that, I am making about 100k a week on the Bazaar selling weapons. When I flashed my M. Architect title in CNet for 20 mins, I received 5 special orders for Factories and Houses. Gave each a price I felt was reasonable, told them to give me a couple days to do some factory runs of Structure Mods, and made my sales. About 150k I would say was my total. I quickly turned off my M. Architect Title knowing that just those orders would completely deplete me of my Ore. I am doing very well as an Architect/Weaponsmith on Wanderhome, and my M. Architect/M. Chef is also doing very well on Eclipse. I am still making sales left and right (thankfully mostly due to the fact I have a nice guild that promotes my sales and I have a nice customer base). Right now, the thing that is hurting me more then anything in the game (including the non-crating of OMUs, and all of the issues that Dvnce posted on this) is the Galaxy Wide Vendor Search, but I have found some ways around it.
So, long story short. Those of you that believe that Cross-Server Lot Trades is damaging the economy, please show me proof. I want facts that show this. I want fact to prove that the upstart Armorsmith/Weaponsmith/Chef/etc. is not able to make a decent amount of money because of the Lot Trades. The only thing I see Lot Trades doing, is creating Wal-Marts of Resources. Wal-Marts are great, generally you can go to a Super Wal-Mart and get everything you need, from food, to a vacuum, to underwear, but a lot of people that shop at Super Wal-Mart still go to the grocery store, still buy things at Gas Stations, still buy things at Mom and Pop Hardware Stores. And the Mom and Pop Hardware Store still makes enough money to stay in business. The same applies here. I can still sell resources on the Bazaar or on a Vendor and compete with the "Super Wal-Mart" Lot Trade Business that has 400 Harvestors deployed, because the stats on the resource, and the economy set the price per cpu. And I will garuntee that the Lot Trade businesses are not undercutting the economy only making fractions of a cpu just to make sales, otherwise they wouldn't go through the long boring tasks of maintaining all of the harvestors. So the little 5 lot resource business can still make a decent profit, as he can still sell at what the economy is holding at.