Architect Archive

Maybe increasing maintenance rates are?

If maintenance rates increased very slightly over time, a structure would eventually reach a point where it was simply too costly to maintain?

Just thinking out loud

that would have to go up on an exponential curve, say after 3 months RL time a house would cost 6k a day, after 6 months 18k

Once again, this would discourage potential buyers..

I still think the solution would be to lower maint fees, call it a "power bill" or something, then have a structure durability that decreases over time just like armor and weapons. Then add a simple, somewhat inexpensive repair kit that only architects can make. One repair kit could use 250 resources to make, sell for 1k, and repair about 2-4 weeks worth of usage on the average small house. More than one repair kit would be needed for larger houses.. That way, the maintenance does not really go up, just shifts some of the maintenance costs to the architect, without causing an exploit for the architect. This also solves the dead end we will reach in a month or 2 when everyone has what they want..

There is one other thing this addresses as well, and does it in simple terms. The construction tree, and experimentation. Experimentation would of course increase the durability of the house, and the architect using better resources and more experimentation would sell a better house. On top of that, add a re-deed overhead of a small amount of max durability so that after a few re-deeds, the house would be low on durability and cost more to keep up.

Simple solution to a complex problem.. How hard is it for the devs to put something like this in when other items already have it?

I am starting to think all durable goods (things that are not consumed like food and meds)should deacay.

Without decayarchitect, driod and clothing sales will drop over time.

I have4 house deeds,a medical droid, a wookiee hood with buffs, and 6 or 7 backpacks. I will never need to buy new ones.

well you can kinda look at this as a sort of trade off.

our stuff lasts for ever, weaponsmiths and droids and armorers stuff doesnt. (droids can be destroyed now right but ch pets never die?)

SO they are guarenteed a job for ever, we can guarentee stability where as they cannot.

Granted, my personaly take is...

Houses should absolutely not in any way shape or form decay.
Harvesters should by all means break down overtime after several moves.

The amount of moves that a harvester can endure should be directly attributed to experimenatation.

Droid pets can't be death-blown yet. They're still working on a viable solution for CH and Droid pets.

Structures will always have a maint fee, it's one the largest way for the Devs to pull money out of the economy. Even if we did have Structural Decay, we'd still have maint fees. Increasing the fees may be a possible solution.

Your suggestion is interesting. It could also be a viable solution.

An increasing maintenance rate, could provide the incentive for people to discard their old harvesters/houses and buy new ones from architects.

I'm afraid I've got to disagree with this variation on the solution to keeping Architects from running out of things to sell. If you change the overall cost of structureownership much, you are going to alienate a whole lot of players who have structures. I can hear it now: "Those whining Architects finally got their way, and now *we've* got to pay for it!"

Right now, players pay the gameserver both to maintain structures and to move them. Paying the gameserver seems useless. Let the players pay us instead.Allow us to make Repair Kits andStructure Move Kits. We'll make them fora littleless than the current maintenance and move fees that players pay the server. Their costs will go down slightly, we'll have an ongoing supplyof things to make, and the onlyloser in this scenario is the gameserver's bankaccount, which is irrelevant.

--Kyer Amon, Lowca

TGPO and DannoZ's solution are similar.

TGPO is advocating a maintenance increase which would rise slowly over the period of a harvester's existence on the server. The monetary difference in maintenance increase and the original maintenance increase, just goes to the server in the form of a money sink. In the end, TGPO hopes that the increase in harvester maintenance drives the consumer to buy another house/harvester from us. Thereby eliminating the situation where everyone has architectural goods and if they loyally maintain it, they will very rarely ever need to buy another one from an architect.

In short: No money for architects in maintenance increase. Big money when the customers come back to us to get a "new" harvester/house.

DannoZ's solution involves creating structure moving/repairkits that can be bought from architectsso structures can be repaired/moved for a price that is less then the maintenance fee. I can only assume he means the redeeding fee. While this is also interesting, it is similar to the spirit of TGPO's solution in that other players are paying something extra to move around their harvesters/houses. Furthermore, players would just have to buy structure move/repair kits by the crates in order to supplement themselves in the future. However you don't ever have that need by other players to actually buy a new one, when afterall they could just buy a repair kit. So this in effect pushes the end game of master architect to someone who builds the occasional structure and mostly sells kits. Maybe this might solve the issue of architects getting houses now, since the kits might not need many resources, and thus architects can afford to cut back on harvesters. (But how will the architect be able to have the resources for the occassional structure order?) But then, the end game architect pretty much doesn't make as much money as the architect in TGPO's scenario.

In short: Short money now. Not alot of big money later.

These are all good ideas, and I have my own pet ideas as well, which I have stated before and will state again. One idea is moderate, the other is extreme.

(moderate) When two PAs declare war on each other, their buildings / harvesters become attackable and destroyable by members of the opposing PA.

(extreme) Declared overt faction members can attack all structures owned by declared overt members of the opposing faction. I know buildings inherit their owners' faction tags, I constantly see buildings with the little rebel or imperial icon next to their names.

Now, most structures ought to be very difficult to take down, either requiring massive numbers of people (over 20?) or Commando-level weaponry. But if this were implemented, we would see the architecture market pick up again, as people sought to replace their destroyed structures. And I don't think people would complain as much as thety would about an across-the-board maintenance increase, since this also empowers them to destroy their rivals' buildings.

-Z40K

PS: And if we want to get really wacky, we could say that destroying a harvester that is full of some volatile element could be a risky proposition. (Say? What's that mushroom cloud off of the horizon? Oh, some fool took out a Heavy Mineral Harvester that was mining radioactives....)

anz_jedi brings up an interesting point: it's not sufficient to make sure that Architects have something to sell down the road, we need something to sell that is interesting to make. While I support Repair Kits and Relocation Kits as an alternative to paying the gameserver structure maitenance and re-deeding fees, I can imagine that producing nothing but kits would be really, really boring.

Given that fact, I think I'd rather just see houses deteriorate over time according to their Overall Quality. At some point, the owner would simply have to come get another. At least under this system, we'd get to build something somewhat more interesting than a repair kit. Quality of materials and construction would finally matter, and decay rates could be balanced to find some acceptable balance between the needs of architects and those of general players.

how about houses decay completely every 6 months to 1 year,based on how well it was built and the size of the house.furniture decay also is a possiblity.

Im not an architect but I was thinking about what happens when everyone has a house.

I was one of the DE's pushing for destroyable droids cause I foresaw the day when eveyone had 3 or 4 droids and the DE class would not be needed anymore.

I love your Idea Zephyr, I suggested something similar a ways back but sure it is long lost to the mountain of posts. I also feel that not only does this help out the architect class, but will also enhance the GCW so that the galaxy truly does feel as if its torn apart by war