Architect Archive

How would experimented durability tie into this?

Maybe each redeed know 100 off the durability? So suppose the base durability on a harvester is 1000, if I experiment it up to 50% then it's durability starts off at 1500 instead allowing a few more redeeds...

Although it is better than no decay at all, I still think I would prefer to see a use based decay system. I can think of a lot of downsides to this type of system that ause based one wouldn't have.

Say you buy a new large house and place it thinking that, like small houses, it has a rather large "front yard" associated with the footprint of the house. When it is constructed, you realize that this isn't the case, and now it doesn't line up properly with the rest of the houses in the area. So now what? Just live with it I guess? Kinda stinks though.

Also, with concerns to harvesters- By only allowing a set number of redeeds, many people will settle with leaving their harvester where it is, and then pulling up whatever the "flavor of the day" is.So that means that large harvester directly in front of your houseis never going to move. Again, not a huge problem, but something that could be avoided by using a time based, or use based, decay.

Personally I think a structure repair tool combined with usage based decay would be perfect. I think it would be just as easy, if not easier to implement as it's exactly what weapons and armor currently use.

We have to take into consideration programming.. There are all kinds of "dream" ideas but would require a ton of programming. The devs will ignore ideas like that..

I have given it much thought and there is the only way I think it will work

Housing does not decay. 24 hours after placing a house you can not redeed it.
People do move, When they do they will have to destroy their home and buy a new one.
This will curb the "What do I pay maintenance fees for" question. Houses in real life can last
for hundreds of years if maintained but how many do you see being moved?
(possibly add the ability to "transfer" ownership to someone else making players able to sell
the house instead of destroying it?)

Factories and Harvesters. Do decay over a period of time
Just like any piece of machinery, no matter how much you maintain it, it will eventually fall apart.
There are 2 possibilities here.
1) Whenever a factory or harvester is on, a decay number counts down. Just like weapons with use.
2) The older the structure, the more it costs to maintain. (this would be a pain to keep track of I think)

I'm going to stick with #1

Harvesters going 24x7
Small lasts 1 month
Medium lasts 2 months
Large lasts 4 months

A factory going 24x7 would last 2 months
(not many run at 24x7)

Furniture. No decay just add variety
People won't appreciate furniture disappearing from their house at varied rates.
They will not want to keep up with that. I think the only way to deal with this is
by having the devs make new furniture available over time. There are scads
of models already out there that are used for NPC structures only. People will
want to remodel with the "new fad"

We need to all agree on something that is going to make us money again and push it to the devs. Something like this is feasible programming wise and would have a chance of getting implemented.

While I like the idea of structure decay to promote new purchases and relieve saturation, I hate thefact that we're raising our overhead by increasing the cost of resources. I guess that's going to be a necessary evil.

Decay has three problems:

1. It doesn't help us with the problem of experimentation being useless
2. It doesn't help us with the problem of resource quality being useless
3. This nerfs everyone else and is likely to draw the ire of the rest of the community.

Issues #1 and #2 are, from my point of view, as important as the problem we have with there being no recurring revenue. Without any notion of quality, a master has no competitive advantage over a novice. In addition, architecture becomes VERY dull after you've built your 30th identical heavy mineral harvester, which is identical to every other heavy mineral harvester that has ever been made.

Harvester powerups would be much more helpful. See:

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=architect&message.id=24215

Powerups would provide recurring revenue, benefit from experimentation and resource quality, and buff our customers instead of nerfing them. Can we sell the devs on doing this piece of work? Perhaps; I don't know. Limited redeeding perhaps has the advantage of being simpler to code and test, but powerups will cure ALL of our major problems rather than just one of them.

Powerups would limit us to only making powerups for a living, That might sound all peachy to you but I dont like that. I want to be an architect to make deeds, not powerups all the time. Your solution is a nice one but it isnt simply the one that will solve all our problems.

Good suggestions. I would like to suggest the following

1. Allow transfer of houses. Require the maintance to be of a certainamount (like 3000 credits)before transfer (money sink, that also keeps people from transfering everyday) Once a house has been placed it is there until it is destroyed. (maybe give a inital 24 hour peroid to redeed just incase the placement is wrong)

2. Make maintaince cost of house relate to the durability of house. If the house is made out of low quality materials it should require more maintaince. Or, new houses should have a lower maintance rate than old houses. The maintance ratecould be measured by a Durability stat. Allow Architects to build items that increase the durability of a house that can be added at anytime. (drag onto structure maintance term)

3. Furniture should change. Every couple months add a new peice of furniture. Take old ones out if you have too.

4. Harvestors currently sell for less that 1k credits. This means it is better to buy a new one than re-deed. Allow harvestors to be crafted with avariable number of re-deeds. While crafting the amount of a given componet used will allow the hArvestor to be re-deeded that number of times. This gives playersthe freedom to purchase high priced harvs for long term use, and low price harvs for short term use.

B_austen

Outside of adding new floorplans, or new buildings Architects will end up making the same think over and over. Therefore Architects should be allowed to add variable elments to anything they build. Allow any structure to have up to 3 variables added, but make 10 or more varibles possible. These variables would be like powerups that could only be added while crafting. This will create a very wide range of strucutres an architect can build. The art doesn't necessarily need to be different for these strucutres. THe variables would just add features to the structures. I think the crafting stations are already like this to a certain degree.

Otherwise architects will need to have powerups of some type to add to exististing structures to generate stready income. Or decay to structures.

Bram

I'm only a lowly CM, butI think what is in this thread is all tolerable; you guys need decay.

I don't get a vote...but use based makes more sense. Duration should be experimental for you, and if you want to sell repair modules great but the max health should decay too (you can't patch structure forever).

I also think for harvesters the decay should be tolerable, but not too long. A large harvester should not have economies of scale relative toa medium in terms of decay. People are paying for efficiency in gathering resources on constrained lot count. There should not be a decay incentive to move towards larges. There should be a relative decay penalty (money sink) towards farming with larges on a routine basis, relative to mediums.

Jacore

There should simply be a decay measure, similar to condition on weapons, that is time-based and experimentation based. It should be relatively long, the base durability, because its a building and buildings should last a while. Harvesters would have the lowest base durability because of the moving parts and stress etc. It should not be tied to re-deeding at all. There are many factors that may cause someone to want to redeed and making them lose a "charge" of redeeding because the screwed up a placement is unfair. Give things base durability, allow it to improve from experimentation (hell, give us 100 experimentation and assembly first you gimps before ANY of this happens), and make the durability reasonable but not so painful that people will forego even purchasing the item. Remember, we use these too and it'll suck away our own resources to constantly replace our harvesters. It *has* to be reasonable and not geared towards power-gamers. Have to find a comfortable in-between. I would suggest 2 week durability on harvesters, all other things 1 month.

Hmmm, perhaps a 24 hour grace period would do it, and I totally agree that people will mess up placing their house on the first try. Been there done that.

I have a feeling however that despite all our ideas, it will probably come down to something like this:

Us: We want harvester decay like this-this-this-this

Devs: I can do it like this or like this because of DBase constraints

And then we pick one.

I'll keep bringing this up on our forum as we go along, I posted it before I got the correspondant spot, but I know it's been a hard point with alot of us.

I believe I read somewhere in this forum that the devs had time-based decay and houses went "poof" when they decayed completely, so they did away with decay.

What if, after re-implementing time-based decay and the house decayed completely, the house didn't go "poof", but instead the owner (and everyone else) was locked out by the "Naboo Housing Safety Committee" (for example)? It would require the services of an architect to bring it back up to specs. This way, the owner doesn't lose anything valuable, another money sink is created, and the architect gets a source of repeat business. In essence, it becomes another "quest" for the owner of the house!

Also, how about time-based decay being fixable by new parts from an architect? What if the house needed a structure module after a week, a generator module every couple of weeks, a wall once a month, etc. This would also be a great source of continual income for the architects and the money drain could be slow enough on the house / structure owner that it wouldn't be too much of a pain.

Have house placement work like vendor placement.. You have to initialize the house then It cannot be moved. You cant put anyhting in the house or do anything else but redeed it until it is initalized. I mean afaik people cannot turn droids they buy back into deeds.. houses shouldnt be able to either.

Experimentation would be nice, being able to create a better harvester from better materials that extracts more or takes less power..

Removing redeeding costs would be silly as this is a money sink in the game. It helps get money out of the economy and into the void. I think more of how long a harvester is used over time is a better decay measure than how many times I redeed it.. I had my fleet of heavies sitting on the same spot for 3 weeks because ore kept spawning underneath them, like a gift from the heavens so i never needed to move.

COLOR options for furniture please............ Let us customize more of the furniture with different colors...

And ofc, why cant we craft the architect things that faction vendors sell? Like the furniture or installations... Just have them require the right amount of faction points to craft.. perhaps the customer could give us some faction points in some sort of deed or holocron or smth..... then we can make the furniture/structures using it. Seems silly to have vendors selling stuff that we shoud be able to craft.