Architect Archive
Thread: PA hall critical fail: An Open Letter to the Developers of SWG
I am a self made Master Architect. I worked through the game nearly totally solo, and acheived the status of Master Architect playing by the rules. I did not rely on a factory to gain all my experience, although I did use it to save some time with structural modules. I did not have a team of players harvesting minerals and bringing me money to level with. I did not use macro programs to harvest on my off time. I put power in the harvesters when it really wasnt required, and I have done my share to keep the economy thriving by not giving my crafted wares, or my skills away. I have had the good fortune of having 2 friends that have allowed me to make use of their lots so that I may increase my production and sales, although I share 10 of these with another crafter, so effectively, I have my factory, my house, and 6 personal lots, and 10 more from another player. I did not scam this player into giving me the lots, nor did I give free structures as incentive to allow me to use them.
I played this game for many hours every evening and weekend to make sure I was running at an optimal level. I have worked around bugs that range from frustrating to critical, and have provided feedback on the forums regarding issues that need to be addressed since early beta 3. I have had a higher level of frustration lately when seeing the latest changes to the game not include the architect profession, even though some simple fixes would be more than appropriate. There is one issue however, that is a gamebreaker for me. Critical Failure.
Now I realize that our new correspondent is addressing this issue, but I do not believe that much is intended to get fixed on this, and the issue would not be as large if some basic bug fixes were implemented.
Allow me to examine my Saturday of game time. I started the day by finding out the resources I was harvesting had shifted about 15 minutes after I logged out the night before. So basically, I had no power, and no steel to speak of. I spent the first 6 hours of the day moving harvesters. From there, I spent some time trying to buy some low grade ore from some players who specialize in it. I had a person offer up quite a substantial amount, and after some haggling over price, we settled on 4 credits per unit. I could afford it just because I had completed a PA hall the night before. I had 3 more to build, and had received orders for 3 more large houses, many large harvesters, and a few medium houses as well. I needed the ore. After about 3 more hours of travelling and buying resources, I began to run some structural blocks through the factory. I also hired an aspiring new architect to make some more structural modules since I dont get any experience for it, and a person is faster than a factory anyway. I went on a planet hop to pick up some resources, deliver some furniture for a customer, and to meet up with a customer to make 4 medium mineral harvesters for him.
During construction of the 4 medium minerals, I had a critical fail on a turbine. That hurts as it uses quite a few resources. The previous night, I had critical failures on 3 wall modules, and about 12 structural blocks. That came to around 11,000 resources I lost building a PA hall. Now for a PA hall, this is a little steep but acceptable. The total resource deficit for that hall was around 70,000, and I sold it for 500,000 credits. I got a little better than 5 credits each for my product. Back to the mineral harvesters. I made a 5th turbine, to replace the failed one, and proceeded to assemble the final deeds. On the 3rd deed, I got a critical fail. This is only a medium mineral harvester. But it is still quite a blow to my sale. I was selling the 4 harvesters for a discounted price of 80k total. I had already shaved 20k off the sale, now I just lost another harvester that I could have sold for 20-25k. The resources I was using were mostly purchased at a price of 2-4 credits each. Basically, the 5 harvesters I had to put resources into netted me about a negative 10,000 credit sale. I chalked it up to customer service as this customer will buy some large equipment from me in the near future.
So I made it home to Rori, and had decided that a customer that wanted to pay a little extra to get a rush on a PA hall would be the next in line. He was very happy, and his guild mates were anxious. It took me a couple hours to get back to my house, and get set up for the hall assembly. The novice architect I had working with me completed several structural modules, and I gave him more ore and steel to do more. Now the modules he was building were made with materials that had 900+ for toughness, which was resulting in a 24-28% module. The walls I assembled from those I was hitting 26-28% on. I figured the good minerals would just give me a better chance to make a decent PA hall. I had the power cores done already, and I ran the storage modules. The storage modules were successes around 54%. I finished the walls, and went to do final assembly. I picked an extrusive ore with a 968 decay resistance as that was the fator in the stats for the hall, and a steel with a 900+ decay resistance as well. I was exptecting to see a final product with around a 30-40% success. Instead, for all the materials I used, this master architect got a critical failure.
Now, the factories, medium houses, small houses, wall modules, and turbines I have failed on in the past were difficult to deal with, but at least you can say that I only lost a days worth of work, or a days worth of profit. But the PA hall is the most expensive single thing in the entire game. This is not a weapon that used 1000 resources, nor a piece of armor that used 2000 resources. It used in excess of 60,000 resources that I paid over 3 credits per for earlier in the day. This was a devastating blow. Because of this, I lost a 500,000 credit sale, but I also lost the potential to make 2 medium houses for waiting customers (at 60,000 each).
The customer had traveled all the way to Rori to pick it up, and him, and his entire PA was disappointed.
This is not where it ended however. I still had a factory to build for a customer that I had promised. So I took what I had left, and built the components. But, guess what? The final assembly was a critical failure as well. Once again, the determining factors for the quality were all above 900, but it failed nonetheless..
Then I started making a new one. I failed on the next 8 structural modules in a row. These were using 900+ resources in the unit toughness field.
Now here is the problem. A master architect has a total of 55 structure assembly. Every class outside of architect is being fixed in the next patch to bring this to 100 except the one class that can crit fail on more resources than any other class uses to get an entire level. Not only this, but experimentation on the components has no effect of the outcome or success of the final product. Ifassembly were something difficult to adjust, that would be one thing, but this is not that hard to take care of, and the devs are already doing it for the other classes.
Bottom line, I am experiencing a 5-40% failure rate averaging around 20% that varies from day to day. If I were working with resources quantities of 100 or even 1000, this failure rate would be difficult but acceptable. The developers have let it be known that the failure is to be a part of the game up to the highest levels, including the single most expensive thing to build or sell in the game, even if it can completely break an architect in one shot.
A reasonable alternative to the critical failure resulting in the loss of 100% of the resources used including components would be a simple change.. A critical failure could result in the loss of the resources, but not the components. If I can critical fail on a structural module, then critical fail on a wall assembly, then critical fail on the final deed, I am being hit 3 times in one item. That is like being taxed 3 times by the government for the same dollar. If I have a 5% chance to critical fail on a component, then a 5% chance to critical fail on a subassembly, then a 5% chance to fail on a final assembly, I have an extremely high chance of losing the original component during crafting. Lets put some numbers to it: If I make 10 large houses, and lets pretend that the failure rate is 10% when I experience double that rate, then lets start at the beginning. I make 1000 structural modules. I lost 100 of them to failure. so I make 111 more to get my 100 (make 100, fail 10, make 10, fail 1, make 1 more). Now I have lost 111 blocks to get 1000. I make 100 walls with these blocks. I lose 10 walls in the process. That is another 100 blocks. I make 111 more blocks to make up for it, and lose 11 more, but fail on one more wall, for 10 more blocks, lose 1 block making the 10 more, and hopefully make the last wall. Now I have lost 233 blocks. Now I make the 10 houses with the 100 walls. I lose one house and consequently, 10 walls, resulting again in 100 blocks, and then 11 again to make it up. In the end, my failure rate went from 10 percent which should have been 100 blocks of 1000, to 34% or 344 blocks because I can fail 3 times in the process.
So a 10 percent failure which we can all see regularly, has turned into a 34% failure rate. If we eliminated the loss of the components, we would lose the resources for each assembly stage, but not the components, which we have already taken the risk to build. A critical fail on a PA hall would be painful, but not a killer..
My statement in all this is simple: If final assemblies on structures are to remain a 100 percent loss of resources, I would like the developers to at least tell us now. This way I can cancel my subscription as I will not play a game as terribly unbalanced as this. I have worked too hard to earn my title, and as a master, I should not be failing 1/3rd of the time. It is enough to have to pay to still be in a beta stage of the game, but to have to put up with ridiculous odds of succeeding financially in a player based economy, is too much. This is a gamebreaker for me, as well as other architects. The recent nerfs to other fields is stirring up a hornets nest of unhappy players, and combined with poor or non-existent customer support, nearly all functions of the game bugged to some extent, and a near complete lack of honest feedback from the developers is creating an environment that many people are already jumping ship. As much as I support this game and would love to see it live up to its potential, I feel that this is one issue that will finally break me, and keep me from renewing for another month.
I have 5 PA halls to build now, as I have taken orders for more as I wrote this post. I also have numerous orders for factories, large and medium houses, furniture, and harvesters of all sizes. I am afraid to attempt to assemble another thing. I even took down one of my own factories to sell to a customer I had promised a factory to. That happened after the critical failure on that factory. I ended the day at a 450,000 loss. I hope to recover it tomorrow, but another failure on the next PA hall will mean I will have to close up shop. I will not have the money to stay running and to pay the 50k+ per day maintenance.
The options I have suggested here are not unreasonable in the least, and are simple changes to the process, not involving new skills, or new equipment. Personally, I feel cheated by the game, and by the developers. If this issue had been resolved sooner, I would not have wasted 2 days of my life playing a game to end up further behind than where I started. I put my time in to aquire the highest skill level possible with this profession, and I managed my resources well enough to turn a profit, and now I watch it all go to hell because of one failure that did not have to happen. This is unacceptable. I played by the rules and made the best of my opportunities, and I get kicked down for my efforts. I cannot imagine what a newer player, especially a casual player, is feeling with the state of the game right now.
It is a little frustrating to see all the changes that are being made to almost every single profession, but the Architect one.
And I agree, if the other professions get their assembly modifiers set to 100 for Master, why not the Architects too?
That being said though, I don't really have a problem with the amount of crit failures, as it stands now.
If crit failures are ruining your bussiness then you haven't set up a very sound bussiness sollution. It's my one comfort when I see idiots running around selling small houses for 5k and medium ones for 30k that they'll find out soon enough why you do need a little more profit than that to make it. Their bussiness won't survive because of crit failures, and I don't want that changed.
I was flabbergasted today when I checked SWGCraft.com and found they had finally upped the blueprints for the Probots. My partner bought one a week or two ago, paid 40k for it. And it takes 586
(905 for the advanced) units to make! And then people have the audacity to run around accusing Architects as being 'rip offs' for charging 15k for a small house.
Apparently the justification from the droid makers for charging this much from people is that droids don't decay and can't be lost, but.. Isn't that more or less the same for houses?
I wish I could charge 80 credits per unit for something I made. 
And they're the ones getting the 100 assembly modifier, when they can crit fail on something taking 500 or 900 units to make...
You know what Perpetual_Dark, sitting here thinking about it, you're absolutely right: At the very least give us Masters 100 assembly modifier. Anything else would be a travesty.
Cheers,
Adlerson
I hear that if you make crafting stations with the optional components, you reduce your critical rate. Perhaps this will help you.
The extra price mark-upon weapons,droids, and armoris due to the quality of materials and experimentation needed to make a good item. A house is a house, but weapons and droids vary considerably.
I just made novice architect yesterday and still trying to gather enough resources to make the first little house
but i guess i already had a taste of what you mean .. first 6 items i tried to make 3 were critical failures (the power core and 2 structural modules) ..
anyway, pardon my ignorance, but .. why then selling the PA for 500k ? if this ends up being often a loss as you said (and i'm sure you are telling the truth ..) why not, uh just raise the price of them ?
Or it gets impossible to sell them for more than this ?
We have broken houses, broken furniture and broken factories.
You have not figured out by now that the Devs hate us?
The problem isn't with our business. I make enough money to survive. If I don't, I go to Endor and do missions.
The problem is that we can't turn out items and the frustration of spending hours and hours of work on absolutely nothing, despite having spent days and days working up the experience that should ensure a respectable success rate. I have just failed 2 Large Houses in a row. I have Furniture IV. I have a crafting station experimented to 90% with all optional components (including the non-working droid components). I had full HAM bars. I have fully experimented Crafting Tools in my inventory.
I am doing nothing wrong, I'm working as hard as the next guy. But I cannot make an item commensurate with my assembly skill. I have reams of statistical proof that shows Furniture III is superior to Furniture IV. This cannot be intended!
On another note, how is it that we can pull tons of pure limestone out of the ground with a little tiny magical box, but cannot take the heaping wreck of a failed building to get a single resource back?
Agree agree agree. Arch specs r insane compared with every other profession. Selling the resources would earn us far more than we could ever charge for structures AND we wouldn't lose any to crit fails.
Making a crit fail cost "only" the materials adding in the final assembly is a great idea. It wouldn't make our profession commensurate with the losses other professions bear by a factor of quiteprobably 10 times more loss of resources for architects, but at least if would no longer be 1000s of more resourceslost for us than the other professions when we crit fail.
Yes, it's no fun to see so much go up in smoke for no apparent reason, and yes, they absolutely must fix it.
Now that we have that out of the way, you seem to be putting an awful lot of stress on yourself for a game. I've failed plenty, and because of that, I've jacked up my rates to the point I get about one order a day, and that's all I want. It seems both of us charge a price for a deed, not a chance at one like others do. I have 2 different pricing policies, but most people just want to pay cash, so that's fine, but they just pay more...a lot more. There's too much stress on building this way, so I'm going to squeeze as many credits out of my customers as I can.
Right now, I charge 5c or more per unit of resource. This is at this point in time and my prices will continue to rise until a point I feel comfortable with. If someone asks me why I charge so much, I tell them what resources are involved and ask them why I'd sell them a house for less if I could get the same amount of cash for no risk. I also tell them I may be more expensive than others, and they may want to shop around a bit before they decide...frankly I could care less. If they don't buy from me, my stock only increases and I can warehouse the extra parts. Right now, my main customers are those who want a building right now, and I provide it.
There's no way I'd be taking orders for so many guild halls if I was solo, and you were upset you crit'd a guild hall because you lost the sale of 2 medium houses for 60k each? Good god man...you pay 3c per unit to build a guild hall then you are going to charge 3cr per unit to someone for a finished product? Yikes! I'll admit...I started out doing the same thing, but I saw the light. I'm not selling myself short any more, and neither should any other architect.
RabidDawg wrote:
Now that we have that out of the way, you seem to be putting an awful lot of stress on yourself for a game. I've failed plenty, and because of that, I've jacked up my rates to the point I get about one order a day, and that's all I want. It seems both of us charge a price for a deed, not a chance at one like others do. I have 2 different pricing policies, but most people just want to pay cash, so that's fine, but they just pay more...a lot more. There's too much stress on building this way, so I'm going to squeeze as many credits out of my customers as I can.
Right now, I charge 5c or more per unit of resource. This is at this point in time and my prices will continue to rise until a point I feel comfortable with. If someone asks me why I charge so much, I tell them what resources are involved and ask them why I'd sell them a house for less if I could get the same amount of cash for no risk. I also tell them I may be more expensive than others, and they may want to shop around a bit before they decide...frankly I could care less. If they don't buy from me, my stock only increases and I can warehouse the extra parts. Right now, my main customers are those who want a building right now, and I provide it.
There's no way I'd be taking orders for so many guild halls if I was solo, and you were upset you crit'd a guild hall because you lost the sale of 2 medium houses for 60k each? Good god man...you pay 3c per unit to build a guild hall then you are going to charge 3cr per unit to someone for a finished product? Yikes! I'll admit...I started out doing the same thing, but I saw the light. I'm not selling myself short any more, and neither should any other architect.
First off, I decided to play this game because of the merchant/business aspect of it. This is the first MMO on the market that seriously addresses free enterprise, and frankly, that is my draw towards it. If I took your attidtude towards selling, I would not have a customer base. If you charge excessively over the competition without being able to provide a superior product, you will not gain any loyal customers. If you swing the other way and charge nothing for your services, you will have a whole lot of customers that want everything for free. In any business, the one with reasonable prices, who deals honestly with customers, and sticks to his/her deadlines is the one who will gain the respect of his/her customers and ultimately when the economy crashes after every player has everything they want, will be the one still thriving when there are few sales left to be had. In the architect forum alone, I see a few people that are gearing towards customer service, and I believe these people are going to be successful when the economy starts to swing.
If I told my customers my price was going up because I didnt want to be busy and turned away so many customers, my business would end when the big real estate rush was over. I am certain that rabiddawg will end up with customers afterwards, but will it be enough to keep things going? Archtiects have a high overhead, and having 500k in the bank only means you can go a week without a sale before you are broke. It does not matter if you have 400,000 resources at the end of that week, you will still have to take your harvesters down, and sit around until a customer comes along. If you think that large house sales and PA hall sales will be around forever, you are mistaken. Personally, I have a long term plan in mind as well as the short term. This is the fun of running a business in the virtual world. I can play with extreme ends of the economy and if everything goes to hell on me, I can shut off the computer and I am not out anything. I cannot afford to work with millions of dollars in the real world, so I do it in the virtual world. I am a crafter, not a fighter or scout or medic, and certainly not an entertainer. I dont want to go to endor to run missions if sales are slow. There is no reason I should be forced into spending my skill points on fighting skills. As it is, I will need to give up my 2 levels of pistol and my 2 levels of hunting soon to fill the merchant tree.
I offer a pricing schedule that at this point has not changed since I was scraping up 15k house sales 2 weeks ago. I charge 15k for small, 60k for medium, and 135k for large. I charge 500k for PA halls, and I go 1000, 25k-45k, and 180-220k for small, med, and large harvesters. On furniture, I do 5 cr per resource and round up to the nearest 100. I have orders that take me into next week, and every customer knows it before I even quote it. Anyone looking for something right now can go find another architect, but large houses and PA halls are at a premium now, and chances are if they want it right now, it will cost more. I will not put customers I have commited to aside to make an extra 100k.
I am not concerned about losing a couple medium house sales over this PA failure, I am concerned about losing customers. Almost every PA hall and large house I have lined up is from a customer that bought a small or medium house from me in the past. Plus, it is not just a couple medium houses, its now 5 large houses, 3 mediums, and 4 more PA halls.. plus some fusion plants, and large harvesters. We are talking about millions in sales here, and I am not happy to lose any of them over a bug in the game. Someone in the development team made a mistake in the math with the architect, and it is being ignored. There is not a player I have met in the game that doesnt agree that final assembly on any structure should be immune from critical failure. All I ask is to return assembled components in any critical failure. Take the 4000+ resources I dumped in but give me back the 15 walls, 2 or 3 power cores, and 8 storage modules. 4000 resources is a lot to lose, but I can live with it a heck of a lot better than losing over 60k resources.
I could have spent the time on this post talking about 100 different issues with architects or 1000 issues with crafting in general. Instead, I brought up a game-breaking issue for architects. This needs to be addressed soon, as I and many other players will not continue to pay 15 dollars per month to play a broken game.
Critical failures are a part of the game. I can live with a loss of resources, but losing a 500,000 credit building when using the finest materials available, a crafting tool crafted with the best experimentation (85%), and a crafting station experimented on to the maximum and containing all the optional components, is unacceptable. So far I have tried 5 pa halls and been successful on 4. If I go the next 20 without a failure, I will be happy to see that the failure rate is low, but I expect to fail on one of the next 4. I am convinced that there is a 20% failure rate for a master architect. If anything, I feel lucky that it is not higher for me. I will be mailing this thread to Sony in hopes that it amy help to get this addressed. If not, I am but one customer Sony will lose, which should not bother them as they are used to losing customers..
If one class uses 300 resources and crits only 5%, then a class using 20,000 resources should crit MUCH less... say 3/200 x 5%.
Weaponsmiths get to sell a simple gun for 20-25k. Armorsmiths sell armor for 30-50k -- and both use MUCH LESS resources to build AND will have a ZERO chance to crit? LMAO
BALANCE? Where exactly is this balance?
-Mbad
Master Architect
Wanderhome