Architect Archive
Thread: Current Problems with Architecture (Consolidated)
However, I'm sick of parsing through pages of whining about things non-architectural to find discussions about the things that are pissing me off.
So, here it is.... I've ripepd a few posts from other places about stuff that's buggin me, and I hope other people will add to it, or comment. Maybe our semi-absent representative can use this thread as a good jumping off point for things to talk to Holo about.
====================================================
On factory exp:
What a bloody insult.
Who's idiotic idea was this?
Spending no less than 6 hours a day maintaining my harvesters, and at least 18 hours every week simply surveying after all my crap moves, spending hundreds of thousands of credits per week just keeping the harvesters going... and NOW I'm supposed to sit and plunk away at every tiny little item if I want the exp?
Here we go! Architects getting bent over again. Having to make 10 or 15 small items for a weapon or a droid or something is one thing... but LARGE HOUSES NEED 100 STRUCTURAL MODULES ALONE, PLUS OTHER THINGS... and now I need to craft them ALL by hand, or get 10% of the exp on 25,000 units of resources? ARE YOU CERTIFIABLE OR WHAT?
Have you even LOOKED at the component requirements for things? I need identical Generator Turbines to make heavy harvesters. So umm.. if I want just two, I get to blow 1450 resources on the schematic.... and if I want to make a decent sized run to waste fewer materials, I'm going to get jack all for exp?
If you're going to screw factory exp, you NEED to remove ALL identicality requirements from ALL crafted items.
This is just freaking rediculous... I try very hard not to be one of those people who say, "Fix it or I'm cancelling." but crafting is already next to NO fun, and I was holding out for it to get better, and it doesn't look like it's going to. Your brand new In Dev crap includes NOTHING about making the Architectural path more supportable as a craft, or making the indivudal architect somehow different from the others through experimentation.
=======================================================
Architecture is already the least-profitable of all the elite crafting professions... why do stingy customers seek to make it even less supportable?
When you commission a weapon... let's say, a Laser Rifle. A laser rifle that's going to cost you ~8000cr costs the crafter 299 resource units. That's just over 30cr per unit, and if he fails and has to try again... in the immortal words of Dr Evil, "Boo-frikkity-hoo." The weaponsmith loses a few minutes worth of harvester production and still makes 15cr/unit on the weapon.
My main is an architect, but I play on other servers a lot while I wait for my daily harvest. I sell my small homes for 12k.... and from what I understand, on other servers, 12k is really high. So, even I'm making under 4cr/unit of material. 3388 resources for a small house. As a solo player I need to sell nearly everything JUST to keep my harvesters running.
Two things really destroy the Architect's profitability, as far as I can see.
One, is the Architectural community. Instead of working together to maintain a sense of price stability, we all seem to be working against eachother. Continual undercutting has dropped the prices of buildings to abysmal levels.. so badly that non-Architect players assume these rates are the norm and should stay that way. As far as I know, there is not a SINLGE ARCHITECTURAL PRODUCT on any server that consistantly sells for MORE as an assembled product than the raw materials would sell for at the bazaar? As an architect you're better off simply selling all your resources than you are building things with them. Your time and experience in architecture are completely worthless to the buyer, which leads to the second reason.
The second reason is total uniformity of product. Architectural experimentation is 100 percent useless. Every Small Tatooine House is exactly the same as one any other architect can build, no matter if they use materials with 100s across the board, or 900s. There is no architectural recognition.. there's no reason to be a "better architect"... and therefore no inflation based on quality. Not all weaponsmiths are the same.. .we know this. Not all armorsmiths are the same... we know this. But Architects? It doesn't matter who you buy from, it's all the same.
I don't personally charge a down-payment, but I'm certainly not against the practice. I crit-failed a Large House last night, which is 2 or 3 full days of resources for me as a solo player. So now I'm 2 or 3 days behind, I've lost about 200k in other business, and I'm doing missions for 6-8 hours a day to break even on harvester maintainance. One click and all the money I had MADE since becoming an Architect disappeared.
Architects need a little development love. It needs to be impossible to crit fail the final products. Structural modules? Wall Modules? Generator Turbines? Fine. But not final combines. A wall module, or Generator Turbine contain more resources than almost anything in the other elite professions as it is... Why're we forced to pay more in maintainance, sell our stuff for cheaper, and risk losing days of work in one click? It's kinda silly.
Also, The "Construction" tree has to be something other than totally worthless. How about Experimental Durability reducing the daily maintainance of a building? How about being able to choose from a few different indoor and/or ourdoor color schemes for houses? How about being able to increase the speed of a harvester? Product uniformity is crippling the Architectural economy and it needs to be fixed.
Maybe give Architects +1 plot per level of Construction instead of the above, or as well as? Nobody consumes resources like an architect, and we're effectively punished for it.. from the cost of gathering materials, to the risk involved in combining those materials, to the phenomenally low cr/unit profit we make. Where is the reward for our risk?
==============================================
Marduke's Post on the Factory Xp Nerf:
My thoughts, relocated since the other post went poof before I submitted. Sorry if it's redundant... In 20+ pages, it's hard to not be...
Someone (in the previous thread) mentioned that Architects are the only ones not hurt by this. I'd say you're dead arse wrong.
A Fusion Generator requires 6 identicle Wall Modules. Each wall module requries 3000 units of resources (6000xp). You don't get XP for making a schematic, so there's 3K units (6K XP) in the toilet right off the bat. So now you have 21000 units of resources used and it nets you a whopping 3600xp.
But wait! It's even better! Since those Wall Modules are a sub-combine, you don't get UXP for them! Lets look at a small house. Total units to make? 3388. Total units that are not a sub-combine? 500. Architects get a 150% UXP on their items, so that's a whopping 750 UXP for a 3K+ unit item. On top of that, UXP has always seemed to be proximity based. If I go near (1km?) a house I've made for someone else, I think get UXP. If they buy a house from me on Talus and set it up on Rori, I wouldn't get jack unless I go to Rori and walk by it.
Nope. That doesn't hurt Architects at all. Architects already have the highest XP requirements of any of the Elite Artisan classes. They have a much higher financial risk on every final combine and require the largest amount of time gathering materials per combine (with the exception of furniture). They also have the greatest number of resource units wrapped up in subcombines (thus giving no UXP). Now you're nerfing away thousands of XP per factory combine. No other Elite Artisan can claim that.
If factories are going to be nerfed to the point of uslessness, remove required identicle components from the game. Make factory use an option to speed production.
That way, you're screwed only if you choose to screw yourself. Or, you're already a master and XP is a moot point.
I use my factory so I don't have to sit and make the asinine numbers of sub combines required for structures. I don't use it to grind XP. I don't make 1000 unit runs of Cafe Tables just for the XP and then destroy the crates. I make 40 Structural Modules in my factory so I can make 4 houses by hand. Factory crates are also much easier to store in my house. I don't think I could actually fit 40 structural modules in my house. While my factory is making the Structural Modules, I can go hunt near by with my friends or chat, or do what ever. It lets me play the game and not be stuck in those **edit** lockout screens during crafting.
(By the way, you wanna nerf something? Nerf those lockout screens. Lag/latency can double or triple the time needed to craft something.)
My suggestion (like that of many here) would be to:
Limit factories to 1 in place per person at a time (Architects already get screwed on this deal because a structure factory takes 2 lots)
reducing the XP range of a factory to 64m (like combat XP)
Only awarding XP while online
I think that is a decent middle ground. It provieds the use of the factory while limiting posibilities for exploiting.
And Holo, honestly, your credibility takes a huge hit when you come in here and spout off about how things are supposed work, when you don't have a clue that they arn't. I realize that you can't know everything about everything, but you've been so left field here that it really appears you have no clue how crafting works and why people do what they do. Realize that most, if not all, of us don't know how we're suppose to play the game. You can look at spreadsheets and database quaries and can see the "path of least resistance", we can't. You know what the "intentioned use" of something is, we can only guess. The fact that there must have been a noticable (and therefore trackable) increase in skill levels and items on the market once Arcitects hit factories should have clued you off, and you missed it.
You come here and say that factories are much more efficent then players or that they can produce items far far far (ad nauseum) faster the players. When that statement was pointed out as BS, you said, "Not in an hour, but in a week." Nice try at a spin, but quary your mystical database next time it's working and find the longest factory run since June 26th. I'm betting it's no where near a week. You nerfed the hell out of the input hopper during Beta, remember? Just a bit of help, there's 168 hours in 7 days. I challange you to find even one factory game wide that has ran for even half that in any seven day period. You're quoting statistics that are not based in reality but in "perfect world" scenerios that have yet to occur. Has any server even been up for 7 days uninterupted?
I'd like to suggest that both you, Holo, and Q-3PO take a month's paid vacation and play the frickin game. Then come here and tell us how everything is working as intended. I really am starting to agree that there has been a huge shift from "informative" Dev posts to "damage control" Dev posts. You're starting to double-talk and dodge questions. I really expect to see the boards shut down due to the negitive nature of the majority of the posts. The sad thing is, the negitive posts arn't totally baseless.
I really tried to be positive and patient during Beta. That's gone, and apparently so is the willingness to admit you have totally buggered a lot of things up. Big time beta bugs have reappeared (corpse poofing, bad /cons, rollbacks, etc), server stability sucks, classes are still not finished/fleshed out, admin rights on houses and factories still doesn't work, and the list goes on and on and on and on. Being spoon fed sunshine and happy thoughts is getting real old. There were huge leaps in gameplay and bug fixes during Beta on a weekly basis. Now, because it's live, it takes a month? Please share, how could you screw things up more then they are? This already feels like Beta. Why not use the oppurtunity to fix the game like you should?
You guys have missed the chance to put this as intended, its been ingame for a month already and there are many Master Elite Artisans because of it. You're only punishing those that didn't exploit it and awarding those who did the entire market until anyone else can get there. It wouldn't have happened if you hadn't rolled so far back in to beta and started over. It seems like all the work that was done in the closing weeks of Beta was lost within days, if not hours, of Live.
Marduke Akkad
Architect
South Beach, Talus
===============================
Sorry, that was kinda long.. and some of it wasn't formatted right, lol.
Excellent post
/cheer
Personally, im making myself a large house (which would be cheaper to just buy from someone else) and them i'm quitting Arch for something more exciting instead. Its not like I need the profession to make credits as my harvesters do that for me when I sell the materials.
Goodbye Architecture, let me know when you get an unnerf
lol kinda the same thing I was talking about in my thread with the entire failure things. Great post, hope the dev's read this one, our architecture correspondant should email them this. It's right on.
The first two posts are my own, the last one (the one that the formatted messed up) is Marduke's. I don't have a sig, and I didn't mean for it to appear as though I was MArduke hehe.
However, just because xp is low on the factory.. well.. I dont see this as an issue. I am working my way through to Master Architect right now and I get plenty of xp just selling stuff as I go. I can usually get one skill a night. Now maybe, at the tail end of being a master archetect this might help, but thats minor at best.
Now for the UBER PA grinder trying to get to master archetect in a week to build his guild hall, armed with tons of resources and credits, hoping to get an easy way out of leveling by loading up the factory and hitting the GREEN BUTTON, well.. I hope this kind of player has to do at least something..
Heavy Harvesters are tough to make? GOOD. THANK GOD. MAYBE SOMEONE WILL ACTUALLY CHARGE MORE FOR IT. We need more stuff like that so we can stop the under-cutting idiots out there. If there is something that actually makes it take a little more time than to just click and buy a bunch of resources and level as fast as you can.. I am all for it.
Really, I get plenty of xp just making my medium harvestesrs.. homes.. and I haven't even made furniture last night.
I just got 27k last night from one customer from Yavin who was prospecting a rare Iron resource .. all I sold him were 13 personal harvesters.
Anyway.. just my 2cents..
The problem is that those of us who are solo are tight for resources as it is. Things like Turbine Generators are EXPENSIVE when you start having to blow 1400 resources on a schematic to make a couple identical ones.
I don't care as much that I have to make all my stuff by hand now, because it IS faster. I *am* irritated that as an Architect, which is already the least profitable profession, I'll be eating further costs in the form of hugely expensive schematics.
The solution as I see it, if they wish to nerf factory exp, is to remove the Item Identicalities from all craftinf recipes.
This nerf just hurts the soloer... because the big PA's supporting a craft can afford to take the resource hit for schematics and not blink about missing the experience. This is silly, because EXACTLY what they were trying to prevent was the people who have masses of resources from turning on factories and going afk...
Re selling resources:
Selling resources doesn't get me Architect exp.
Surprised this was not listed, but I think it is the single thing that will kill the architect class.
All buildings are permanant. As long as you pay your maintenance and redeed the unit if you move, that one large house/Med Min Harv or Solar Gen will always be yours, it will never decay or go away.
Every house sold is one hose less the world will ever need. The small house market is going to get glutted when people upgrade to med's a larges. Factories, Harvesters, and furniture will all be the same way.
In 12 months or less the architect class will be dead if this is not changed.
Caijal, I must have completely misread your post, because nothin youwrote shows me anything that helps a PA architect. You seem to be pointing out the schematics issue with loosing resources....What does that have to do with factory exp? We needed factory made items before(schematics too) and we still need them. I see this as helping the solo architect, because a solo architect is more likely to be waiting for there harvs to get the resources...spend that time grinding out structural modules and whatever else doesnt need the factory. A PA architect on the other hand usually has much more resources to use and it was in there best interest to throw them all into a factory and possibly also hand-crafting. This hurts there ability to use a factory for max exp moreso than a solo architect with less resources.
I believe you mentioned a problem with crit failures on final combines. The only thing taking that out is gonna do is reduce the price of the already low architect economy as noone would have to worry about the losses. Adjust your prices to expect a final combine crit failure every once in awhile. Thats how my prices are and I have 2 day backorders and won't take any past that or may have more. All my customers understand there is a chance of crit failure and have no problem with waitin an extra half-day or day for it(thus no orders beyond 2 days). They also don't care because I don't change my prices as the possibility of crit failure is already established.
You wanna sell for more than the average architect prices, you won't sell to everyone, but you'll sell a lot if your honest and help them out. I enjoy crit failures on final combines as it slightly slows the rate at which our items are sent out to the gaming world without the decaying factor and thus most won't purchase it again.
Zeck, those were my thoughts exactly...in fact I posted earlier today about it.....
Just a thought....
Harvestor Decay- Give harvestors a max amount of re-deeds(each re-deed decays it). It would probably need to be different for the different sizes(large have much more re-deeds than personal). Would also help push more people to buy large harvs(would also help solo arch's a little if you couldn't share admin rights on harvs). Maintenence would have nothing to do with this because harvs don't work unless fully maintained.
Factory Decay-Weapons and armor degrade for being used, why not factory's as well? As with harv's, maint shouldhave nothing to do with decay as with above reasons.
Furniture decay-Though it would be reasonable to have it decay on a per-use basis, that could be abused, plus most furniture isn't even usable(chests that don't hold things). Furniture decay should be slow and only happen while the furniture is placed.
House Decay-2 ideas come to mind. One is a slow gradual decay such as mentioned in furniture. The other, instead of buying a deed from an architect for an entire new house, hire an architect to fix/repair your house. Could have the architect use resources to make a house repair kit. Unlike Harv/fact, houses would degrade faster if not maintained.
As far as maintenence, give us a use for experimentation and finding better resources so I can charge 7-10cr/resource and have a reason to. Allow us to change the maintenece rates and re-deed/usage(if decay of somesort is added)rates of houses, harvs, factorys and furniture.
All of the above are just ideas off the top of my head. But all this could help Architects to remain a useful profession for all that are instead of knocking 90% of them out within the first 2 months of the game.