Architect Archive

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Pawlin wrote:

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Arturun wrote:

How about making large amounts of harvesters near each other break down faster?...

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Problem with that I think is that they would have no way of knowing if the harvesters are lot trades or just owned by different people that don't even know each other or shared by guildmates.

Usually a good resource spawn is going to attact a lot of different people who don't know each other. I mean I have often found then when I finally find a good % of a material that other people already have a bunch of harvesters there.

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Ahem, turn on CSR mode for me and I'll know every single one in less than 4 days, on all servers.

That's what's so silly about this. Have you seen how little the devs appear to know about anything going on in the game under Fanfest questioning? Either they're really good actors or someone is literally hiding stuff from them.

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VWBugKing wrote:

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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.

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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.

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I promise I don't know him, Pawlin! Refreshing to hear an echo, though, I must say.

Here's your smalltime player that plays crafters on two servers. Almost every option presented would directly affect his gameplay. Why is his playstyle wrong? Why do we need to sacrifice his gameplay in order to promote someone else's?

Fivo Asia

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Cafa wrote:

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Ahem, turn on CSR mode for me and I'll know every single one in less than 4 days, on all servers.

Yes but you are not one of our CSRs. Would you trust teh SOE CSRs to do that?

The CSRs we have are either overworked, mismanaged, incompetent or some combination of all.

That's what's so silly about this. Have you seen how little the devs appear to know about anything going on in the game under Fanfest questioning? Either they're really good actors or someone is literally hiding stuff from them.

The devs are software programmers who spend most of their time doing actual programming. They are given tasks to do. They don't have much time to go fishing around the forums or keep abreast of all the top issues for 30+ individual professions. Instead they are working on their current TO DO list. Those are some of the people who were at Fanfest, the actual programmer types.

The community relations people like Tiggs and Thunderheart that we see posting here in the forums are (I assume / hope ) supposed to compile all the issues and prioritize. But theres always something more important than the Architect profession. Jedi. Smugglers, every combat profession, Jedi again.. more important crafters, etc.. So we get lost in the shuffle. Weshouldn't but we do. I only *hope* that Tiggs or Thunderheart are aware of our issues or at least have our issues written down somewhere.

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Pawlin wrote:

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I look at it this way. There is limited demand in the galaxy. If you artifically increase supply then the supply and demand balance gets out of whack. This lowers prices. Lower prices make it harder for people to make a living.

For example lets just say that there is demand for 3M of grind ore on a server in any given day. This demand is from architects who are feeding the demand for structures.

With alllot trades: A single person setup with a 75 harvester lot trade farm can produce about 300k of ore in a day using BER10's on 30% average. Their cost is about 200k for maintenance and power.So if they sell for 1 cpu then they can make 100k a day. It doesn't take much time to maintaina static lot farm. 1-2 minutes a day to check and make sure the resource is still there. Then maybe 1-2 hour a week to collect out of hoppers, change the resource and put the ore on your vendor. So with lot trades, 10 guys can produce all the grind ore needed and they can make 100k a day for maybe 20 minutes of work. So only 10 guys need be involved. Theres no real benefit to renting lots over doing a cross server trade really. That could be 10 miners or 10 architects or a combination. End result: With 100% utilization of lot trades only 10 people are involved.

Without lot trades: If you are limited to 10 lots the most one person can produce with BER10's is 100k if you are looking for good density and moving your harvesters. Your cost is around 30k / day. So if you sell for 1 cpu the most you can make is 70k / day. To make 100k / day you'd have to sell for 1.5 cpu. It would take 30 people to supply the whole grind ore market. This means either 30 miners or 30 architects harvesting for their own or a combination of miners and architects. Or an individual miner can rent lots from other people. Or guilds can work together to form mining collectives. End result:There are 30 people involved in some way.

Lot trades literally cut active players out of the equation. Thats the problem as I see it.

We are somewhere inbetween these 2 extremes. I think we are probably closer to 50/50. There are big producers with lot farms. But that doesnt' mean small guys can't exist as well.

You bring up Walmart and say its good. Walmart comes to a small town and all the little shops close up cause they cant' compete. Do we want 1 Walmart or 10 little shops? THe choice there is between 1 guy running the Walmart having fun as crafter or miner verus 10 people enjoyin an ex perience running their small shops or mining operations either invidiually or collectively?

Did I 'prove' anything? Probably not. But thats my argument / viewpoint on it. Prove I'm wrong.

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I have to agree, we are around 50/50 on the situation we are at right now. There are a few players on the larger servers that have the 75+ harvestors always mining something, and then there are the other "little" guys that are still doing ok for their small operation. But I don't think that the Lot Trades cut active players out of the equation. Yes, with Lot Trades few people can supply the whole demand of Ore for that day very quickly, and probably on more then one day this is true, but they can not supply the entire demand for the entire resource market, even for one day. Thats what makes SWG nice, the fact that any given time, there is literally hundreds of resources spawned between all of the planets. According to SWGCraft (which I know is not always accurate) there are 626 Resources on Eclipse, and 608 on Wanderhome right now. Lowest was Tarquinas with 198, highest was Kettemoor with 712. Now probably the average demand is about 30% of those resources for grind materials, and about 5-10% of those resources are in demand for high quality merchandise. So out of an average (198+712/2) 455 resources available to any galaxy on a daily basis, we are talking 136 resources for grind, and 23 resources available for high quality materials. I find it hard to believe that even if 10% of all players on the server did cross-server lot trades, the 10% could handle supplying the demand for the 159 resources (unless for some reason they all decided to work together and make sure they weren't duplicating their efforts). This gives room for the other 90% of the players that even want to do resource business to get into it. They can do Flora resources, or Gas Resources, something that there is still a demand for, but not as many "miners" go for because it actually takes time for them to think about who they can sell it to. With minerals its easy, every profession needs minerals.

I probably did not prove anything here either. And I just pulled numbers out, no real fact, just estimates, but it is still my opinion that Lot Trades are not something that the Architect Profession should be looking at. My honest opinion is that we should remove this from our list of problems, focus on other things that are actually hurting the Architect profession (like broken experiementation on Fusion Generators), and move this issue to KStarfire in the Core Systems Profession.

Pawlin, I would just like to say I respect your opinions, more then I respect Dvnce's opinions. You have helped me in more ways then anyone else has helped me (at least in the ways of Architect), and there is no way I, or any Architect, could repay you for all of the work you have done for our profession. And I know you are working hard on finding a solution that doesn't just help/hurt one playing style, but a solution that will help all of the Architects in all Galaxies.

Bah, stupid double posting

Message Edited by VWBugKing on 06-07-200503:18 PM

Message Edited by VWBugKing on 06-07-2005 03:18 PM

I don't know if this has been mention or not. I'm not going to read tons of pages....well, maybe later.

Anyway, here is a suggestion.

Many of the current house has sun decks, balconies,or roofs that you can walk on.

Could we please be "allowed" to drop items there.

You know have some "lawn furniture" out on the roof. Or a chair to sit in out on the balcony. Maybe create some new furniture for it?

I dunno. just a thought of something I has wanted to do from day one.

VWBugKing,

I don't want to go off on a tangent on GWVS. I was really just pointing to that to say "prove it" cause you pointed at lot trades and said "prove it".I don't think either can be proven. Occasionaly I like to debate just for the sake of debate.

I can honestly say my chef character is doing a lot better since GWVS was introduced and my architect isn't doing all taht bad either and I sell for 100k and have seen people selling for 55k on my server (ore goes for 1cpu now). /shrug. But we could have a 5 page discussion on that topic so I won't go into that much further cause we're already got enough heavy discussion on our hands in this thread over lot trades.

Far as lot trades go, I guess another way I look at it is that for every lot trader in the market that is less room for legitimate miners. And they have a natural competitive advantage due to economy of scale. I do think that lot trades hurt architects more than other professions since we use grind material most. Other professions use high quality stuff mostly and lot trades arent' very good at producing that so lot trades don't synch well with most other professions. I run static mining and you hardly ever get anything 'good' and its just a random draw if you do.

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Pawlin wrote:
But it still would incomvenience some people and cost them more. ... So it would cost such people more inconvience and additional redeed costs.

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Elyssa, thanks for taking the time to put together an alternative.

I wish I could support it, but in its current formI can't. I think there are some assumptions being made that don't stand up to scrutiny.

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Elyssa wrote:

Simple solution to cross-server lot swaps: Forced re-deeding of harvesters to change the resource being extracted.

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I agree that this is simple, but I don't agree that it's a solution becauseI don't think itaddresses the real problem.

The real problem is not that some players (typically in PAs) are able to do better than individuals. That's not a problem -- it's a Good Thing. Achievement should be rewarded.

The real problem is that a few players are able to do HUGELY better than individuals -- we're talking two to three orders of magnitude better. Because they have access to hundreds of lots, they can afford to crank out vast amounts of any item at basically rock-bottom prices, to the point that there's no way a small crafter can even survive economically, much less compete effectively.

And that's a problem because SWG is a game. In RL, I'd say "work harder!" because it's possible to create capital in RL. But you can't do that in SWG; there's no way to add to the sum total of capital in SWG. Which means that it's a zero-sum game -- I can only win if you lose. For me to make money on sales, I have to take sales away from you (and vice versa).

When a few players are able to take away the majority of sales, the economic game in SWG -- the thing that makes many of us willing to pay a $15/month subscription fee -- is destroyed.

And the cause of this problem is that there is no limit on the number lots a person can be admin'ed to and operate.

So let's be clear: I'm not talking aboutcapping harvester lots at 20 or 30. Doing thatreally would hurt the typical PA, and I don't want that.I'm talking about limiting -- noteliminating, but limiting -- the ability of theorder-of-magnitude players to utterly dominate a server.I'm thinkingmore like 50 or even80 harvester lots as a limit-- anything beyond that is simply unfair to the other people who pay to play SWG.

Somebody is going to have to explain to me how merely limiting an individual character'sharvester lots to such a large number would "kill" PAs. I'm open to such an explanation, but I haven't heard it yet.

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Potential outcomes:
- A single account may continue to access all lots to which they are entitled.

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Elyssa, I'm really trying hard to understand your insistence that there are things in SWG to which you're "entitled" (such as 10 lots per character, and 8 characters per account), but I'm just not seeing it.

Is it your feeling that these numbers establish some kind of contract with players, which SOE is not permitted to alter?

Under what circumstances would you feel it was acceptable/allowable to reduce any number?

If it's acceptable under any circumstances at all to reduce some number, why is it not at least discussable to consider reducing the maximumnumber of lots to which one player may be admin'ed?

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What must change: Re-deed costMUST be removed.

Potential impact:
- Owner would simply have to pick it up and put it back down at no cost in order to change resources.

- Cross-server trades become too cumbersome to deal with.
- Same-server rental requires more work.

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I don't believe this would make cross-server trades more cumbersome than they are now.

If I understand you correctly, you're talking about adding astep (free redeeding) that would be a new requirement before an admin'ed user would be allowed to change a harvester to a new resource. Is this a correct interpretation of your suggestion?

If so,how is also having to redeed that harvester (especially if it's mademerely a matter of picking it up and putting it back down) any more of a real imposition on a harvester tender? How does adding astep-- whichyou are explicitly making very simple --impose any kind of cumbersomeness on admin'ed players, who already have to visit each harvester after a resource shift?

Here's an alternative suggestion: Instead of percentages being a straight line, make it an exponential curve -- if a 100% resource spotyields 100 units/time, then instead of 50% being 50 units/time, it's more like 30; 25% would be 8; 15% would be about 3. In this model, even if you're using a BER 13 heavy, if it's on a 12% spot because you can't move it, you're not going to get enough resources out of it to pay for maintenance and power on it.

Yes, this would mean more work to really keep harvesters tended... but isn't that what this proposal is trying to accomplish? Howwould the approach I'm suggesting here be anyworse? Wouldn't it actually be better because it would directly reward active players who move their harvesters to the best current locations?

Awaiting the incoming fire....

--Flatfingers

I should add that I agree with Cafa and the others who've suggested that any question of cross-server lots isn't really an Architect-specific question, and shouldn't be taking up a valuable "Top Five Architect Issues" slot.

Given its impact on a server's economy, I believe this issue is a Core Systems issue. Dvnce, if you feel like it, you might suggest to KStarfire that he be the one to include it in his list of concerns. That way you can focus on something else of more specific interest to Architects.

What that new thing might be, I wouldn't presume to suggest.

--Flatfingers

I agree that forced re-deeds might well be a good compromise. Since it looks like we are stuck with the stupid perma-structure rule now, maybe even make it so that there is no need to "pay maint" on harvs (only), and they pull money from the OWNERSbank automatically. Another layer of PITA discouraging server swaps. But I will admit this might be too much of a pain for same-server cooperation.

I will also readily admit that I look forward to seeing the supply of crafted goods drop drastically as the flow of resources tapers off to a more sensible level. I would love to start finding emails in my inbox asking to make this or that. There is no need now, as everything craftedin the game is easily and cheaply available inside of 5 minutes (thanks to the GVS). As a crafter, I am "expected" to service the population. People dont feel the gratitude they might if what I can make was more uncommon, or if my goods were a reflection of my dedication to the craft. But with everyone turning out thousands of cookie-cutter goods (all made with the best resources since its so easy to get massive amounts of those best resources) every week, it devalues the crafting playstyle.

Re-deed per resource shift, or the requirement to selec the resource to mine as part of the placement process, very well could be the best alternative. And I also agree this means the re-deed cost should be eliminated, or (/gasp) be a reflection of the investment in your crafting prof (cheaper re-deed the more SP invested as a crafter).