Architect Archive

Ya know, when I was looking at some of our schematics today, I noticed that if an armorsmith or weaponsmith made something with the same resource cost and effort as one of our houses, harvesters, or factories, they'd charge far more. I'd say about 50k for a small house, 300k for a medium, and 600k for a large. So, why is the going rate for these buildings about a fifth of that? Here's my oppinion--

SWG's trade economy revolves around two polar extremes.

On one hand, you've got the low-ballers that harvest whatever they find in highest concentrations, do no serious expirimentation, end up with fairly inferior weapons, and sell for cheap.

On the other, you've got the premo guys that move their harvesters regularly to always be on top of the best resources on the server, expirement like crazy to make insane schematics, upgrade their products in every possible way, end up with a fairly superior product, and sell for prices that reflect that.

Both make adecent living, as there is a market for both types of products. It's a little different with us architects though-- building quality simply does not matter.

That leads to a pretty serious impact on the balance between low-baller and premo. Obviously, nobody making high durability buildings for twice as much is going to make any sales whatsoever. Therefor, they are forced to lower their prices to the low-baller level and start looking for quantity instead of quality.

This, in turn, leads to another huge impact on the architect community. The low-ballers suddenly don't have someone else to make theirprices look good. Their business slows down, their method stops working so well, they naturally undercut to get back on top of the game. This, of course, leads to more undercutting. Essentially, without someone selling for spendy, they don't know when to stop. Finally, they reach the smallest amount of money they can pay the bills with.They sell small houses for 8k or less, factories for 20k, etc. The going rate drops to just slightly above that. Finally,where weapon and armorsmiths can move their wares extremely easily for 10c/resource, and non-artisans can put up harvesters and sell resources on theopen marketfor 6c/resource with absolutely no trouble, we're doing good to sell our buildings foraround 3.

Bottom line-- Until there is some incentive to expirement andfinding better resources, the architecture economy is and will remain broken.

And before I get"Ohh I'm doing so good yer just a noob" replies, seriously, how many of you architects, especially those from newer servers or servers that had the Daily total resource shiftglitch, have more than a million credits? I guarantee, without any doubt, that the ratio in weapon and armorsmiths will be many, many times higher. Also, how many of you can honestly say you don't degrade the value of the materials you are working with every time you assemble something?

Xukan Fallenhorse

Scylla

Furniture IV, Building IV, Installations IV. Completely bankrupt. Retired as a commercial architect.

No PA

The idea has merit. Maybe it's not the one definitive answer that will fix the economy (and imo, the architect market does need fixing) .. but it's a start.

I was also pondering with the idea of making a PA hall require the efforts of multiple architects at multiple levels. Therefore perhaps reducing the incentive for some architects to power through the early stages and sell houses for cost.

Who knows. I still enjoy the profession even if I am barely scraping through. I wont say no to higher profit margins though

Sha'mad Conde.

..sometimesI think I shoulda stopped at weaponsmith..

Just as a note. Using something with 200 toughness/decay has a quite a higher chance to critical fail than something with 800 toughness/decay!! Even a success affects the durability which in turn could cause a critical fail on what the component is used on. A large house cost around 40k resources and i would hate to critical fail one because i chose a 90% spot instead of a 75-80%. I use good steel as my metal and usually copper instead of aluminum for non-ferrous. Definately fiberplast over any other chemical!!

Once you make your way up thefurniture tree, the odds of crit failing are extremely low anyway. This is a small incentive to get higher quality materials, but not nearly substantial enough to affect the market.

My thoughts on fixing the houses market is once you master take on and apprentic and have them make structural modules and other work they can do for you ...You dont have to make the structure modules ,they gain skill (that you dont need anymore), and they dont have to sell cheap houses and grind them for skill gain..

This is what im going to do and I hope others do this too because it has a good shot at bumping the houses prices up..(pllus i hate making structural modules lol)

Well I slightly disagree. I don't want to see materials effect the quality of the products. We're not talking about 100 unit items. We're talking 10K unit items. Furtheremore how much 'play' do allow? Say a personal harvester has a base maintence of 500 instead of 720, how low a precentage would make it 720? If it's 100% efficiency does that mean it gets to be the 500? What if it's 0% efficiency, 1000 then? The point is there are too many variables that would be more frustrating then fun. Say you do make a personal harvester with all the best materials, expirement on it, and get it to be 100% efficient. How much do you sell it for? You sure not going to get much more for it then one that costs 1000 creds a day. Now let's go to medium harvesters. You make the best and it costs 1000 creds/day to run instead of the theoritical worse 2000 creds/day. Mediums go for 20K. What would you sell it for now? Nobody is going to pay even double the price for 1000 creds a day. Weaponsmiths/Armorsmiths will always be able to charge the double digits/unit resource because people want to kill. People don't need homes.

The backlash we're seeing now is from a lot of peoplegoing into architecture at the same time. The market is over-saturated right now. However, I do think that when vehicles are released you're going to see a lot of people go that route instead of dealing with homes. Vehicles are going to make a lot more money because people want vehicles. In 6 months we won't have the same issues as we have now. Small homes will probably sell for 25K and that pricing scheme will follow through to the top.

The life of an architect right now is just collect resources in a day and use them up in 1-2 hours. There is no thought at all for an architect. At least a weaponsmith can choose to be a little more into the game. A person can strive to be the best weaponsmith out there. But you can't be the best Architect, because they are all the same.

Rath, these variables you are talking about making the game to complicating is exactly what I think needs to be in the game. If someone wants to just do the lowest possibly work, they can still not care a bit about the resource values. But for someone like me, I would like to be able to at least be a better architect than the average person. If a medium house is the same from me as other people there is no reason to have customer loyalty(or at least no incentive for it) except for price, which is the main reason why this thread was started.

I have noticed the same thing. The selling price is around 2.67Cr per resource unit for completed items, but raw resources run 3Cr per unit (and that's not taking quality into account).

One attribute I would like to see Architects be able to affect through resources and experimenting is the maintainence cost. If the PA Hall I make costs 80% to maintain compared to Joe Architect's, then that will influence the market, as either people will seek me out and pay premiuim or give me market leverage over Joe.

Rath--

Messing with the near-insignificant figures in the status window isn't quite whatI had in mind. It might help, but that wouldn't get us where we need to be.

A couple ideas--

Increased resource harvesting rates

Altered/customized house floorplans (if this is technically infeasible, perhaps some high-end floorplans that require better resources)

Altered/customized harvester graphics

A set of special abilities that a home bestows on it's occupants that are based on the quality of the home (regen, wound regen, crafting bonus, etc.)

Add-ons for houses,automatically attachedevery x% of quality

I could go on. There's about 1000 ways you could make expirementation and those Construction skill boxes at least slightly worthwhile. As of right now, we might as well remove the construction line and add about 300k structure exp to the cost of Master Architect.

Best way to help fix this problem, woudl be to make a few grinding items, so you would have less items flooding the market. somethiung like powerupos, not too many resources, but a good exp ratio

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xukan wrote:

A set of special abilities that a home bestows on it's occupants that are based on the quality of the home (regen, wound regen, crafting bonus, etc.)

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That's a good idea.

The other big problem is an architech cant even charge the cost of materials. Say that the material cost is 5c/resource. There is no what you can multiply the total number of resources time the 5 and sell it for that price, though you should be able to.

That is one of the oddest things now. For the most part as a crafter I could make much more cash just selling my resources than I could actually making the items and selling them. I have tried to talk starting architects into not undercutting themselves and others by this much as they are only shooting themselves in the foot but they want the fat UXP and they don't care.

Kaid