Architect Archive

I am hoping someone in game development is noticing that Architects are by far the most unbalanced crafting profession in the game. You may call it my opinion or respond to disagree, but hear me out first and you'll see:

1) Architects are literally always, and yet the only players who must maintain scores of their own extractors to keep up with below fair market value and demand.

2) Bugs - They are a pain in the butt for other crafting professions, but they are literally 10x more painful for Architects, simply because Architects burn 10-20x more resource unitsthan any other crafting profession.

3) Purchasing Resources - An Architect is the only profession that cannot purchase resources like other professions, because they need too much, in quantities resource suppliers cannot supply, for a price that they cannot find, because half the competing Architects in their galaxy undercut each other to make only 2-3x profit, just like resource suppliers make. Meanwhile, every other profession makes 10-50x what the resources cost them, giving them literally a 100x fold of profit margin based on the resources they consume to sell theircrafts.

4) Critical Failure - Guild Halls.. I have crafted three Guild Halls.

Guild Hall #1 - Critical Failure, Guild Hall #2 - Poofed on my customer's end. Guild Hall #3 - Replacement for the 2nd that had poofed... Bria was lagging horribly on saturday, and when including the factory crate item removal bug, i had to relog over 15-20 times while crafting and operating a factory for all the GH components. I stayed up 9 hours until 8am while my clients waited for their Guild Hall. One again - CRITICAL FAILURE.

This marks the disappearance of over 220k resource units. This officially put me out of operation for a while since I made no money off the loss of these resource. However any other profession is not susceptible to losing this many resources at one time.

Mind you, a weaponsmith such as Origins on Bria, can also make 15k-50k per weapon he sells. He brings in an average of 200-300k per hour. I'm lucky if I can hold onto that many credits in a matter of 2-3 days, with the amount of extractors I put into (maintenance bug still happening that removes and moves maintenance into negative, and destroys hopper contents).

As an Architect I have lost the following to in-game bugs:

1 Guild Hall to a bug. 2 Guild Halls to critical failures (hence a 66.66% crit failure chance for me on guild halls).

1 Large house with over 50k+ resources (resources disappeared, house poofed upon reclaiming deed).

1 Medium Naboo House (my armorsmith friend lost my house while reclaiming the deed I lent her)

2 Wearables & 1 Equipment Factory, 6 Small Houses (Lost in vendor bug)

300k Units of Solar Energy - After the corpse loot bug supposedly being fixed. I collected all the items back off of my corpse, only to find that everything in my backpack and cargo pack had been spilled into my main inventory window, making the counter 96+/60 or something. When I looked everywhere for it and I had collected everything off of my corpse, I saw that all three (3) 100k packs of solar energy I stockpiled to run the insane amount of extractors I have to to stay afloat in my profession, had disappeared.

*** Customer Service ***

I have sent you three open tickets in the past 6 days. I have received one reply from a CSR stating an interest in chatting with me to resolve my problems. That was 3 days ago. However, I added comments about my time of play and when we could meet to the CSR's ticket response, although I saw my comments on it that day. The following day all comments including the CSR's had been removed from my ticket. Now another 2 days later, I have yet to hear from any CSR. I am told I will be lucky if I hear from one within 2 weeks.

*** Guild Hall CRITICAL FAILURES

Yes, critical failures are meant to be a "part of the game". But the frequency of critical failures on guild halls and most structures has made me completely boycott selling structures. Now I am a resource supplier. Other Master Architects I know are now purely resource suppliers, they refuse to craft structures. Two other Master Architects have simply left the profession, as I was going to do. They could not handle all the bugs and frustrating issues with the profession.

Armorsmiths, Weaponsmiths, Droid Engineers, Tailors, Chefs even...

You all have professions that can be rewarding provided you simply craft. I wish my profession was that simple. Having to worry about 5-6 different patches of a 10-15 extractors each, making sure they are all maintained and powered, and then to run into bugs, let alone having time to sell or talk to people socially and enjoy the game casually, makes it so that.. Anyone who wants to play this game more than just casually and for an hour or two a day (which is simply not possible as a crafter), is going to run into the most unrewarding bugs and misfortunes of their craftings poofing, that they will reconsider why they are playing the game at all.

Please. Someone in game development or customer service. Respond to this please. I have heard 'Sorry' and 'Sorry' and 'Sorry' over a hundred times now. It doesn't help me.

Please. Tell me what the developers are going to do about it. If you aren't going to change critical failure on guild halls, and you can't reimburse me for the resources/deeds I lost to these imbalances, then I know I can stop playing this game and wasting my time waging a war against bugs that make it impossible for me to operate as an Architect at all.

SUGGESTIONS:

1) Architects make structures that require maintenance to run. Housing, factories, etc. If the game developers provided a % margin of that maintenance that would get deposited into an Architects' account, it would make sense. If you even designed it so that Architects had to drop by to 'FIX' or 'REPAIR' housing, it would ensure we have return business. However, once houses fill up the galaxy, we are next to useless. Any other profession creates perishable items - we make the biggest, and people are less likely to let their house decay than their blaster weapons.

2) Remove or significantly reduce the chances of critical failure on guild halls. I don't have to state why. It should be obvious. A game should be rewarding to play after you put a lot of play-time into it. And thus far I have seen all 3 of the 3 guild halls I have created poof to critical failure and to a game bug when reclaiming deeds.

3) Provide Architects with a lot bonus (+10 to lot limit) to allow them to plant double what they normally can themselves. It takes so much time to have the various people I know run out with me and plant extractors on their lots to lend to me.

*** I'm not saying do all of these things.. Or even these specifically. But please.. do something.

Here's my own rant on the subject from the main forum, it was a part of a thread about giving Arch's extra lots:

The funny thing about this thread is that everybody says, "WOW if you're an Architect and you need help, join a PA!"

Well.. Weaponsmiths, Tailors, Armorsmiths, Chefs, and DEs, can all subsist on their OWN with a respectable amount of success just using their own lots.

Let's say a Tailor has a Small House, a Factory, 1 Solar Generator, and 7 Medium Harvesters.

7 Medium Harvesters on 75% spots will produce roughly 4000 units of material each in 24 hours. 75% is not hard to get, nor is it the max, but it's a good number.

Let's throw in some examples of clothing from each tier:
Military Pack: Takes 45 Resources, sells for 500
Swoop Helmet: Takes 60 resources, sells for 1000
Belted Jacket: Takes 65 resources, sells for 1000
Gunman's Duster: Takes 120 resources, sells for 5000
Tactical Skinsuit: Takes 360 resources, sells for 9000

Prices will vary per server, per tailor, but these prices are the prices of a friend of mine.. and his are among the lowest I've seen.

The average profit per unit of resources on the above items at listed price is 23.8. Now, if you take those 24000 daily resources and make clothing at that rate, the Tailor comes up at a profit of 609,203cr. Not that one will sell EVERYTHING they have every day, but I'm talking potential here.

Now, let's look at the architect:
Small House: Takes 3388 resources, sells for 15k.
Factory: Takes 13550 resources, sells for 40k.
Medium House: Takes 20600, sells for sells for 70k.
Heavy Mineral Harv: Takes 27700 resources, sells for 100k.
PA Hall: Takes 55768 resources, sells for 500k.

Again, prices will vary per server. AND I GUARANTEE that most architects will tell you the prices I've listed for buildings are absolute maximum. On a lot of servers, Mediums are going for 50k, smalls for under 10k.

Calculated the SAME WAY, that's 5.99cr per unit of resource profit for the Architect. With 24,000 units of resources a day that's 143794 cr per day. That is LESS than ONE QUARTER of a TAILOR's potential take. Don't EVEN get me started on Weaponsmiths and Armorsmiths. This result is skewed horribly by the PA hall. A PA hall would take 3 days of havest to make, and it's the only item whose price is over 4cr/unit. It throws the average way off. I personally haul in enough resources to make only one Medium House a day, and that's 70k. Costs me 30k/day to maintain harvesters. I barely keep half.

Every one of the other Elite Crafting Classes(ECC's) can subsit very handsomely on their own, the Architect can not. On top of it all, one WHOLE TREE of our profession is totally, utterly, completely, and in all ways useless. +1 Plot per level of Construction is NOT so much to ask for considering that Architects use up resources in greater quantity for less profit.

Here's a repost of a note I made on a different thread which applies to this topic...

The sad fact is, often raw resources are selling for more than the price of items crafted from them.

This is a result of grinding. People are spending huge sums of money buying resources at 6 to 10 credits a unit in order to level faster. This is leaving the people who seek to play the game as craftspeople in the dust.

There are a number of changes which might have good effects on the economy -

1) Require survey skill to operate harvesters.

2) Disallow sharing of harvesters. While all of us do it, the sharing of lots is creating 2 classes of players... those to whome huge amounts of resources are plentiful and cheap, and those who are desparate for resources and willing to pay ridiculous prices for them.

3) Add a "suggested value" to every item in the game, based on it's resource requirements. That way any player can see on examining an object whether it is of value or not, and provides a guideling for pricing.

4) Create more craftable items, house types and in particular furniture types. These act as money sinks and also provide more potential areas in which players can concentrate their sales.

5) Create an actual "mining" skill tree which enables (and requires) players who wish to generate sums of resources to expend skill points to pull up the higher quality stuff.

6) REMOVE THE PRICE CAP ON THE BAZZARS - as long as resources can be sold on the bazzar craftspeople need to also be able to price and sell items made from them on the same venue... people are paying a high premium for convenience on resources and the prices are high as a result.

7) Create a NPC "inflation control" vendor. When items become too scarce, prices soar. When they become too common, prices drop. So create an automated vendor that sells items which are too hard to find, and buys items which are too common. Base this on item counts during server-up perhaps.

8) Another similar idea is to create a "banker" npc which converts between resources and money using exchange-rate formulas used in real-world banks. Right now resources are essentially currency, and the game currency and the resources need to be tied togehter at the front-end (since they are already tied at the back-end... ALL crafters, architects in particular, are essentially converting resources into money, and our problem comes down to exchange ratesbeingout of whack)

I cant stress this enough - Architects are a class of player in the business of converting resources into credits and buildings. Resources, Credits and Crafted items are all forms of currency and HAVE to be in balance, or the architect (and everyone else) will suffer from too much of one and not enough of the others.

Shall we also consider that our Construction skill branch is completely worthless, and half of our furniture is either non-functional or worthless?

This is the balance problem, and one the dev's probably did not see coming-

147 Unit FWG5 can be made several way, Quality matters, if your really pour your efforts and credits into doing the best job possible, you can get 20k for one, or136cpu.

Now, a large house, priced at 136cpu would cost - 5,077,424 credits.

If if we could get that price per credit for a large house (lol, hehe, haha, like not), there is no way we could match volume. And, there is no reason topay the top end price for a large house, cause any architect with the schematic makes the same exact house, no matter what, it means nothing.

I think we deserve a dev answer on what is in store for our class or that they even acknowledge our class has serious balance issues.

Caijal, that is an excellent post. You did a great job of identifying the major flaws in architecture. Best post I've seen on the forums here, period. Send this one to the devs, people!

Thanks MAtic, I've said the same things on a few posts, but sadly they never make it as far as someone who counts.

Maybe Zarcath can take a look and send it up the line.

Booo Hoooo

cry me a freaking river. Other professions don't get to produce things at the volume you guys do. So in turn most other professions do make better margins but have to invest more time in the actual crafting procedure.

: thinks about how rich he is

hum... yes we need more money, the only way to acheave that is less ore.

:thinks about how that will make his deposits worth ever so much more.

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GordonGecko wrote:

Booo Hoooo

cry me a freaking river. Other professions don't get to produce things at the volume you guys do. So in turn most other professions do make better margins but have to invest more time in the actual crafting procedure.

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VOLUME?!?!?!?

**edit** are you smoking?

2 days to build one PA Hall

1 day for a Large house

1 day for 2 Medium houses

Is that the VOLUME you are speaking about?

Ya I am sure Weaponsmiths and Armorsmiths have to use 15k ore to build ubese and carbine weapons, the same way Architects use the 15k ore to build one heavy extractor.

Oh and everyone knows that architects make alot of money, afterall Weaponsmiths sell for 17k a weapon that took 250 resources, while a architect sells for..err 10k for a house that took 3k resources?

Well I guess it's just obvious Gordon is not an architect and is once again talking out of his a-hole.

Lol