Architect Archive

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Daynn wrote:
Something else.

Okay, take a breath, now.

I get far better results at my droid station than I do at my maxed furniture crating station. In fact, using a REALLY good station seem to be exactly inverse of what you would expect. I failed so much at my GOOD crafting station, I gave it up entirely. It has been deleted.

Someone in this or the WS forum did a test using very good and very bad stations and found that the Bad station was much better. I have found the same.

So, I suggest you try doing your combines at a very bad station and see if that works better. My guess is that there is a (-) in an equasion somewhere where there should be a (+).

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Out of all the speculation I have heard, this one seems to ring true.

The usual advice given by veteran MAs like Daynn is that critical failures are caused by using low-quality components. I've been skeptical because it doesn't match my experience. For example, the time I was critical-failing on making bricks with steel and ore having a Toughness of 850. A master architect, top-quality tools and stations (12 and 39) and 850-grade materials, should not be seeing failures making a brick.

It seems to me that we all noticed an epidemic of critical failures that started a few weeks ago. There was a good long while when, basically, crit-fails were very rare for me. Then, a few weeks ago something changed: Quality of crafting stations became visible.

Now that I think about it... I looked at the quality of the station I had built for myself. It was a 6. Ugh! I pulled some 950-conductivity copper out of storage, experimented, and got a 12 - not very good, but I didn't use the optional components, so its not surprising.

I started getting critical failures. So I looked around, and contacted Mox (on Gorath). He built me a 39-quality crafting station. It was after that that critical failures stated to get really devastating, and no matter what I did, I was failing about 10% of the time.

So here's what I think happened: For a long time, we were mostly using stations with an effectiveness near 0 or even slightly negative. The bug inferred by Daynn was lurking, but there were very few high-quality stations out there. Then, they made effectiveness visible. People started getting uber stations. All of a sudden - the reversal of the + and - manifested, and the epidemic of criticals started.

Does this ring true for other crafters?

I still think that the current system of critical failures is a bad idea, but if fixing this bug brought it down from 10% to 1% it would cease to be of practical concern.

Of all the theories out there, I think this one has more potential.

It's so easy for a programmer to accidently reverse the application of a bonus.

FYI: I sent a PM to one of the devs (Blair, selected at random). Don't know if it will be seen... but its worth a shot.