Architect Archive
Thread: Is Maintenance bugged, or is it a stealth nerf?
It happens so often that I cannot believe that the Devs don't see it. What I mean, of course, is that harvesters (almost exclusively chem and mineral, coincidence?) use up far too much maintenance, often causing them to shut down and so bring fewer resources into the world. This generally makes resource more costly, as well.
It happened to me again today. After posting on this and /bugging it several times, I again sign on to find that 1440/day harvesters that I had 3k in last night had either 500 in today, or even were owed maintenance, almost exactly 24 hours later (in some cases a few hours less). A friend's personal chems had 1k in last night and this morning were all >2k debt! And these use up 720/day. I am angry at these persistent problems, and I pay inordinate attention to the maitenance pools.
How long does this have to continue before we can conclude that the Devs have decided to nerf maintenance and will later give us some, err, bad explanation like "it adds challenge to mining" or "we implemented changes to reflect quality" or even "in the last six months we were unable to duplicate this issue in-house."?
Has there been any Dev admission that this is a problem? I check the tracker frequently but I miss some posts (e.g. when there's ten in a thread).
To be fair to the devs . . . it's probably "just a bug". Why haven't they said anything about it? Or done anything about it? Go back through all those dev posts you said you read, and you'll see that they have "bigger fish to fry". Yeah, losing thousands of credits per night IS a big problem, but it really does pale in comparison to everything else they're working on right now.
It's certainly true that the game has much bigger bugs than this <cough><rushed-out-the-door><cough>, but no comment on it, a persistent and difficult to miss bug for anyone who has run many harvesters at once.
In beta you didn't even need to pay maintenance til the very end, but by now they have to have seen this.
Fairness to the devs extends as far as them being thankful they still have jobs, because so far their performance and communication are scoring a big fat goose egg.
The big problems I have with this are these:
1 - zero mention of this that I have seen, coupled with
2 - this is a bug they'd like, since it bumps up costs.
At some point not fixing a bug makes it a feature, and this feature would clearly be a stealth nerf.
Even though, like I said . . . this isn't the biggest issue . . . it IS quite a problem. I don't want to underplay that. I know they need to do a million other things first, and I don't think they're intentionally nerfing this . . . but it does need fixing. I, for one, don't really MIND losing money left and right. I can afford it. What I can't afford is to NOT have those resources. I have customers who I've promised goods to, with the knowledge that I'd be ABLE to make their stuff!
Devs, you got other things going, I know . . . but . . . could you put this somewhere . . . near the top?
O.k I can so relate to the poster , this has been a peeve of mine for so long now . I have 15 harvs on a sweet spot of ore (yeah a friend is helping me) . I put the same amount of power and maintence in each of them in order to get there the same time (before work)
I do my run today 13 of them are shut down , with some having maybe 300 ore in it 
Now these are not my harvs , and my friend is doing me a favor .
SO i plunk down the extra money , lol some harvs where at 1 % with me oweing them over 1k . This should be fixed .
I understand why the Devs work hard at what they do and do not fault them one bit . I would on the other hand like to hear that its in the "plans" to work on this problem .
If I pay for tyhe harvs to be working (always 3-4 xtra hrs just in case) then we should get the amount of resources that the Harv should pull
Is that too much to ask?>
I don't think your magic number is correct. I have had it happen several times when the maintenance was about 1k. I used to just put 24hours into it, and have had to replace 8+ harvesters. I now put 2-3 days in them, and replace harvesters that get bugged and damaged. I find that ifa harvester has the issue once, it is more likely to have it again.
Just my experiences.
LG's name is at least consistent with his attitude. It is precisely this Fanboiresponse that allows Devs and suits to release badly unfinished products.
I had the same thing happen again tonight. Stuff I bumped up to 3k maintenance poollast night were at -2100 (!) today, and they are supposed to use up 1440/day.
If some of the players don't mind stealth nerfs that work their way into the game, good for them. However, I think that the Devs should not ignore serious flaws in the game on the basis that there is so much wrong with the game that these are small in comparison.
The extent to which they screwed up should not be a defense.
>However, I think that the Devs should not ignore serious flaws in the game on the basis that there is so much wrong with the game that these are small in comparison.
Yeah, but reality dictates that there is only so much that can be done at a time.Since the game had apremature release - there are a ton of serious gameplay bugs. There really is not much we can do but wait for the devs to work their way through the list. Give it a year - it should be fairly stable by than. ;-)
Hmm well you know if they would switch from the silly cost over time model to a cost per usage model we wouldn't have this problem now would we?
Devs are you listening?