Architect Archive
Thread: Advantages, Disadvantages, and Suggestions (long)
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Elminnster
Thu Jul 24, 2003 1:14 pm
#1
Very nice post. I'm planning to be an architect, and I like that idea with the modules.
What could make the architect live in the long term is, if the devs are putting in a timer like you talked about, and then after it ran out, the installationsbreaks down. If players won't loose their installation, they have to talk with an architect and make him repair it (Make it only Master Architect, or high end architects that can repair, so their efforts are worth it, and people just don't use 6 skill points if they have Engineering 4, to make sure that the architects still have something to do). Might be an bad idea, it might be good. I like it, because it makes the game more real, and I don't have to sacrifice my architect profession when there is nothing more to make...
Braan
Thu Jul 24, 2003 1:27 pm
#2
I think most of your ideas have merit. I like your module ideas. Sure would be nice to be able to monitor my harvesters from my living room. The idea of not being able to move your home after a period of time would also make the market move better.
If your home gets to the point where it cannot be moved any more though, then the owner should be able to sell it to some one else who in turn can declare it for his/her self. May be a great way for people who want that starter home cheap. 
In the mean time we can continue to fill a regular need.
TyrimMant
Fri Jul 25, 2003 12:51 am
#3
You know, before I go into this, let me outline some things I love about the architect profession. Lots of complaints float around about the pricing problems and the long-term issues, but no one points out some great advantages of the architect trade.
Advantages:
* We don't need to grind (get resources, make a product, destroy it because the market is flooded/the item is useless) to skill up as an architect. Pump out wall modules, generator turbines, structural modules, whatever - everything will get used, we just need to wait for an order or a reason. And with experimentation seeming to matter for nothing but harvesters (if those) what we make as a novice will be useful to a master.
* Not only are those items long-term useful, but they take huge amounts of resources, resulting in that much more experience (and better, less weariness from combining things over and over.) And if that gets to us, we can make our own factories to carry out the grunt-work for us.
* We are the most self-reliant of the artisan classes in comparison. Everyone, as far as I know, eventually will need the factories we can make - heck, we even suppliers for people outside of the artisan tree (I've been approached by multiple medics interested in factories for their goods.) At worst, some of our furniture requires hides, some of our combines require master artisan parts, and craft stations can optionally use DE parts.
* Because we can produce medium and heavy harvesters, we have another alternate job path available to us in the game: Resource providers. It would be feasible, even smart, to be a successful master architect who never produces finished goods - we can get into the commodities market, like Superman versions of scouts who supply hide, bone, and meat. We can just focus on everything else in the game, from water to plumbum iron. With the nerf to sampling, the ability to produce harvesters becomes that much more powerful.
* Our resource needs, while heavy, are general. Architects need 'iron' and 'steel' and 'copper.' Not 'plumbum iron' and 'link-steel aluminum' and 'chromium copper.' It's hard for a resource flip on a server to slow our production, much less shut it down altogether. Further, resource quality equally means jack for the moment, except for those rare cases where it seems to matter with installations.
------
With all that said, let's take a look at some disadvantages our class has. And believe me, they're pretty strong.
------
* The bulk of what we provide are vanity items. Yes, they're necessary for artisans who wish to get into serious business with vendors, or who want to have private crafting stations of their very own rather than bumming off a friend or just using the now-appearing 'public' private crafting houses. But if you check out house after house that is built, the majority are just people who 'thought it would be cool' to have a home. With medium and large houses, the lack of need is even moreso - what's the point other than just to impress, maybe roleplay? The need simply isn't there.
* Related to the first disadvantage, the logical extension is that (from the posts I've seen on other servers) our pricing scheme is off. Way off. When a small house goes for 8-10k, what's the point? 2500ish materials into a finished product for that amount is pointless - you could have sold the materials on bazaar and made more money. The same goes for the larger houses. Factories get hit with it in a roundabout way, because people (and face it, even architects) can't figure out why a factory would cost more than a not-in-demand medium house when they both need roughly the same materials anyway. A single line - installations - in our skill tree is used for products that are actually worthwhile and game-affecting to make. Even experimentation means next to nothing when it comes to the marketplace, because the buyers would have to take our word for it, as far as I know; it doesn't show up on the deed, certainly.
* Two things offset the advantages we gain as far as being a self-reliant artisan class, and one which doesn't make 'chaff' for experience. The first is that our critical failures are the most vicious and nasty in the game. If an armorsmith crit failures, he at worst loses, what, 1k of components? An architect can lose tens of thousands of resources in a blink. Second, our end-tree items result in us losing a horde in schematic creation. Identical ore-mining units, generator turbines, wall structures, etc make for a pretty impressive 'added cost' to what we make, which only becomes more cost efficient if we have massive, massive resources on-hand to create a lot of the things in a single run.
* Our products do not degrade. This is going to kill us in the long-term, which is a shame when you realize that most architects are screwing themselves over in the short term thanks to the way pricing is being handled.
------
So that's where we stand right now. We can exp off items that are incredibly useful for our end products, but the bulk of our end-products are useless except for vanity - we're tailors who use a helluva lot more components to make our goods. It makes next to no sense for us to use our resources to sell most of our products compared to selling the resources themselves, which is fine because it makes next to no sense for people to buy most of our products for any reason aside from show. So what can we ask for? What can be improved with our skills and system? Hey, I have some ideas.
------
* Give houses modules, and give those modules capabilities. Confusing? Here's an example of how house breakdown should go.
Small (1-2 Module Max)
Medium (2-4 Modules Max)
Large (3-6 Modules Max)
Guildhall (8-12 Modules Max)
What would 'modules' be? Many things:
*** Garages/stables for the upcoming vehicles and mounts that are going to be added to the game. Make these requirements for their ownership and use.
*** Storage areas for organized, bank-like containment of items. Why bother buying one of these when safe deposits work just as well, you may ask? Good question: Get rid of bank safe deposits, or link them home storage. Add on more storage modules for a larger 'bank' if so chosen.
*** Remote installation interfacing. Curious about how your harvesters are doing? Install this module and get remote-checked updates on maintenance, power supplies, and resource-harvest options. Perhaps even advanced modules that allow remote maintenance and power payments, even hopper delivery (I could see this requiring DE components to work as a limiting factor.)
*** Make crafting stations use module slots. They're important devices, but at the moment, they're nothing but glorified furniture. Maybe even grant a minor (5-10%) experimentation bonus in exchange for the change, in addition to whatever are introduced with experimented crafting stations.
*** Bazaar modules. Basic module for viewing-only, advanced modules for purchase and on-the-spot delivery with a surcharge linked to purchase location distance, highly advanced modules that allow for placing an item up for bid in a remote market for a very big surcharge.
*** Guild Bank Modules. Reserve these for guildhalls with certain permissions so guild leaders can organize and distribute equipment and supplies, while house banks would be private/single individual use.
Obviously these module ideas can be edited and expanded upon in many ways. Link them heavily to experimentation - a crappy bank module with bad resources and no experimentation would store 25 items, while a 100% experimented one would do 50. A low-quality installation module may only be able to return information on harvesters within a certain distance, while something above 50% could be planetwide, and 75% would be galaxywide. A low-quality small house could only have 1 module, while a heavily experimented one could have 2. And so on.
* Architects are in desperate need of having what they create somehow, over a long period of time, need replacement. It doesn't seem like an issue now, with the game being now. But down the line when there will be galaxies filled with what architects have made, from houses to factories to harvesters, there's going to be a resell market that may **edit** well kill us. While weapons and armor (which, by the way, cost far more than most of our houses at the high end - how sad) degrade in quality over time and break, our products simply require constant maintenance. A possible solution? A placement timer. It can be a long one - maybe three RL months, slightly longer with experimentantion, but the time would tick off slowly from the creation of the deed, and at the end of the time the house or factory could no longer be re-deeded. It can stay wherever it is forever, but there would be no way to get it back as a deed. Maybe even have this apply to harvesters, though that seems rather nasty all around.
* Same with furniture. After x amount of time, it cannot leave the house it was placed in. It can only be moved inside that place, or destroyed altogether.
And there we go! Long post, but, I hope this sparks some interesting ideas among the other architects. I love the class so far, and have high hopes for the future of it. I wouldn't mind seeing our capabilities and our long-term viability expanded on, even in exchange for us having to be cross-class reliant more (at least for modules as I've tossed the idea out) and dependent on rarer resources for the new items.
Advantages:
* We don't need to grind (get resources, make a product, destroy it because the market is flooded/the item is useless) to skill up as an architect. Pump out wall modules, generator turbines, structural modules, whatever - everything will get used, we just need to wait for an order or a reason. And with experimentation seeming to matter for nothing but harvesters (if those) what we make as a novice will be useful to a master.
* Not only are those items long-term useful, but they take huge amounts of resources, resulting in that much more experience (and better, less weariness from combining things over and over.) And if that gets to us, we can make our own factories to carry out the grunt-work for us.
* We are the most self-reliant of the artisan classes in comparison. Everyone, as far as I know, eventually will need the factories we can make - heck, we even suppliers for people outside of the artisan tree (I've been approached by multiple medics interested in factories for their goods.) At worst, some of our furniture requires hides, some of our combines require master artisan parts, and craft stations can optionally use DE parts.
* Because we can produce medium and heavy harvesters, we have another alternate job path available to us in the game: Resource providers. It would be feasible, even smart, to be a successful master architect who never produces finished goods - we can get into the commodities market, like Superman versions of scouts who supply hide, bone, and meat. We can just focus on everything else in the game, from water to plumbum iron. With the nerf to sampling, the ability to produce harvesters becomes that much more powerful.
* Our resource needs, while heavy, are general. Architects need 'iron' and 'steel' and 'copper.' Not 'plumbum iron' and 'link-steel aluminum' and 'chromium copper.' It's hard for a resource flip on a server to slow our production, much less shut it down altogether. Further, resource quality equally means jack for the moment, except for those rare cases where it seems to matter with installations.
------
With all that said, let's take a look at some disadvantages our class has. And believe me, they're pretty strong.
------
* The bulk of what we provide are vanity items. Yes, they're necessary for artisans who wish to get into serious business with vendors, or who want to have private crafting stations of their very own rather than bumming off a friend or just using the now-appearing 'public' private crafting houses. But if you check out house after house that is built, the majority are just people who 'thought it would be cool' to have a home. With medium and large houses, the lack of need is even moreso - what's the point other than just to impress, maybe roleplay? The need simply isn't there.
* Related to the first disadvantage, the logical extension is that (from the posts I've seen on other servers) our pricing scheme is off. Way off. When a small house goes for 8-10k, what's the point? 2500ish materials into a finished product for that amount is pointless - you could have sold the materials on bazaar and made more money. The same goes for the larger houses. Factories get hit with it in a roundabout way, because people (and face it, even architects) can't figure out why a factory would cost more than a not-in-demand medium house when they both need roughly the same materials anyway. A single line - installations - in our skill tree is used for products that are actually worthwhile and game-affecting to make. Even experimentation means next to nothing when it comes to the marketplace, because the buyers would have to take our word for it, as far as I know; it doesn't show up on the deed, certainly.
* Two things offset the advantages we gain as far as being a self-reliant artisan class, and one which doesn't make 'chaff' for experience. The first is that our critical failures are the most vicious and nasty in the game. If an armorsmith crit failures, he at worst loses, what, 1k of components? An architect can lose tens of thousands of resources in a blink. Second, our end-tree items result in us losing a horde in schematic creation. Identical ore-mining units, generator turbines, wall structures, etc make for a pretty impressive 'added cost' to what we make, which only becomes more cost efficient if we have massive, massive resources on-hand to create a lot of the things in a single run.
* Our products do not degrade. This is going to kill us in the long-term, which is a shame when you realize that most architects are screwing themselves over in the short term thanks to the way pricing is being handled.
------
So that's where we stand right now. We can exp off items that are incredibly useful for our end products, but the bulk of our end-products are useless except for vanity - we're tailors who use a helluva lot more components to make our goods. It makes next to no sense for us to use our resources to sell most of our products compared to selling the resources themselves, which is fine because it makes next to no sense for people to buy most of our products for any reason aside from show. So what can we ask for? What can be improved with our skills and system? Hey, I have some ideas.
------
* Give houses modules, and give those modules capabilities. Confusing? Here's an example of how house breakdown should go.
Small (1-2 Module Max)
Medium (2-4 Modules Max)
Large (3-6 Modules Max)
Guildhall (8-12 Modules Max)
What would 'modules' be? Many things:
*** Garages/stables for the upcoming vehicles and mounts that are going to be added to the game. Make these requirements for their ownership and use.
*** Storage areas for organized, bank-like containment of items. Why bother buying one of these when safe deposits work just as well, you may ask? Good question: Get rid of bank safe deposits, or link them home storage. Add on more storage modules for a larger 'bank' if so chosen.
*** Remote installation interfacing. Curious about how your harvesters are doing? Install this module and get remote-checked updates on maintenance, power supplies, and resource-harvest options. Perhaps even advanced modules that allow remote maintenance and power payments, even hopper delivery (I could see this requiring DE components to work as a limiting factor.)
*** Make crafting stations use module slots. They're important devices, but at the moment, they're nothing but glorified furniture. Maybe even grant a minor (5-10%) experimentation bonus in exchange for the change, in addition to whatever are introduced with experimented crafting stations.
*** Bazaar modules. Basic module for viewing-only, advanced modules for purchase and on-the-spot delivery with a surcharge linked to purchase location distance, highly advanced modules that allow for placing an item up for bid in a remote market for a very big surcharge.
*** Guild Bank Modules. Reserve these for guildhalls with certain permissions so guild leaders can organize and distribute equipment and supplies, while house banks would be private/single individual use.
Obviously these module ideas can be edited and expanded upon in many ways. Link them heavily to experimentation - a crappy bank module with bad resources and no experimentation would store 25 items, while a 100% experimented one would do 50. A low-quality installation module may only be able to return information on harvesters within a certain distance, while something above 50% could be planetwide, and 75% would be galaxywide. A low-quality small house could only have 1 module, while a heavily experimented one could have 2. And so on.
* Architects are in desperate need of having what they create somehow, over a long period of time, need replacement. It doesn't seem like an issue now, with the game being now. But down the line when there will be galaxies filled with what architects have made, from houses to factories to harvesters, there's going to be a resell market that may **edit** well kill us. While weapons and armor (which, by the way, cost far more than most of our houses at the high end - how sad) degrade in quality over time and break, our products simply require constant maintenance. A possible solution? A placement timer. It can be a long one - maybe three RL months, slightly longer with experimentantion, but the time would tick off slowly from the creation of the deed, and at the end of the time the house or factory could no longer be re-deeded. It can stay wherever it is forever, but there would be no way to get it back as a deed. Maybe even have this apply to harvesters, though that seems rather nasty all around.
* Same with furniture. After x amount of time, it cannot leave the house it was placed in. It can only be moved inside that place, or destroyed altogether.
And there we go! Long post, but, I hope this sparks some interesting ideas among the other architects. I love the class so far, and have high hopes for the future of it. I wouldn't mind seeing our capabilities and our long-term viability expanded on, even in exchange for us having to be cross-class reliant more (at least for modules as I've tossed the idea out) and dependent on rarer resources for the new items.
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