Armorsmith Archive

One facet that all of the past weeks' discussion was getting away from is that the only goods being bought on the servers are master produced goods. It seems to me that upon entering a crafting class there should be a few components that a master and a lucky novice produce at the SAME level.

If a master had an advantage at producing say "butter knives" it certainly wouldn't come in the ability of said knife to spread butter. Assuming heavily decorated knives cut the same as a well-crafted plain-looking knife so, arguably master knives would be produced quicker, and his quality would be more consistent (the in-game result would be less critical failures to produce the same high-level knife over and over). There's always the apprentice with real talent that could, by chance, produce the most heavenly of knives on his first try because he's got the gift. So, what am I babbling about?

Why not give a novice a chance at producing a very high quality good, perhaps as good as a "since-beta" master? Make critical failures MUCH MUCH MUCH more common as a newbie, but a person with time and resources should be able to roll the dice over and over again until they get a schematic that competes with a master schematic. In this new system I'm suggesting, most noob crafters do not have the piles of good resources laid up to out-sell the master crafters. Certainly there is a problem with crafters that can dabble and make their own goods, but I think we achieve one of the original goals of making master crafters more consistent through the reduction of critical failures.

This opens certain markets to low-level crafters with the creation of niche markets for the guy who has a stock-piled a couple hundred K of something and got lucky with a schematic one night. To prevent dabbler-abuse you could tie the number of items in a schematic to crafter level so that Master Crafters still create the products in bulk. Regardless of number of schematics produced, all of them are going to require resources that are finite. Hence, Joe-bob's butter knife of spreading is going to be around for a while and then no more will be made unless Joe-bob spends a large amount of time "rolling the dice" to get another amazing success. If a novice schematic could only produce 100 or 10 of these uber knives all of sudden the value to the crafter increases a lot, and therefore the price now competes with the master crafter's.

To tie this to the butter knife, you may have seen the multitude of late night info-mercials for Wonder-uber-super knives. Is the market already flooded with wonderful 200$ kitchen knives that will last until your grandkids need to give them away? Yes. Are their fewer and fewer ads from small start-ups selling knives that may, for a time, work as well as a 200$ knife? No. The path to selling a knife in a buyers' market is in specialization in the vertical market of people who need one knife to do it all and don't care if it's name brand or has matching steak knives. (of course throwing in 6 junk steak knives will sway some buyers) They guy hawking it on late night television is the newbie crafter, the company with 200$ knives in 5 different chains of kitchen stores is the Master Crafter. The customer shopping at the kitchen store is a Master Chef shopping at well-stocked vendor, while the customer purchasing from the infomercial is the one buying from the noob spamming the starport who carries much of his stock in his backpack. Allowing for a _chance_ (5%? 1%?) that new crafters craft the few things they can craft at the same level as a master, with decreased crit fails and increased schematic numbers for the master increases cash flow to new crafters while still providing incentive to climb the tree.

This also attempts to combat the resource hoarding mindset as current cruddy resources have a chance of competing with people who've mined/hoarded ultra-rare spawns of high quality resources. I'm sure it's not going to stop it, but if anything we need to open the door to new crafters entering the market and get away from the feeling that one needs to cross-server trade for 10 of each harvester type on each planet just to cover their rear ends when something good spawns.




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RocketM wrote:
You can't give a novice the chance to make items as good as a master because its possible for a person to be a novice architect, weaponsmith, armorsmith, droid engineer, doctor, combat medic, chef, tailor, and bio engineer all at the same time. It takes 237 skill points to do so.

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Given my implementation, you wouldn't have to worry about that very much as most of the things take advanced boxes to even gain the schematics. Certainly a redistribution of schematics could follow to increase the incentive to get to master. It actually makes more sense. Novice crafters can make serviceable butter knives, while Master crafters can make 47 piece knife sets with matching leather caring cases! I'd love to see novice crafters cornering the market of sub-compenents so I don't have to make them anymore as a master.

As I mentioned above, the number of items per schematic would be drastically reduced for novice as well so the situation you fear, a novice creating thousand of master-level items would be an oddity. To get to that under what I'm thinking about you'd have to spend weeks with hundreds of thousands of resources just to get a handful of schematics that would produce the number of goods to actually knock a Master out of business. If you are going to put that kind of time into it, why not get master whatever for a few days, produce the schematics at the high level and drop it? There's nothing to prevent that happening now.

For example, I can think of very few Architects that love to make wall modules. This is just dividing the labor so that Masters produce all things at a high level, and Novices produce a few specific things at a high level.

The are a fewproblems I see with crafting in general and proposing this type ofsolution.

1. The schematic for the "knife" is already hard-coded.Any knife made by one "master artisan" willnever be better than any other "master artisans", savefor a few variations in the experimentation.

2. Basically "noviceartisans" will make not so sharp knives and"master artisans" will make super-sharp knives.

3. There is nothing in the gamecost,-wise, need-wise, or impulse-buy-wise tocause players to pass on the super-sharp knives and buy the not-so-sharp knives. There is too much money in circulation and money is too easy to obtain.

4. There is no innovation in crafting.It's currently not possible for artisans to create new schematicsor change the resources used in a schematic to create a better or unique product.The schematics are fixed and so are the stats for the items being crafted.

Since there is already an artificially set ceiling on what the best knifemade can be, unless the knives were set to some insanely high price (likeyou currently see with high-end armors and weapons), theneveryone one will buy the super sharp knife. Also, since the "consumer base" (i.e. players) dictates what is an acceptable high end item, all high-end items will be made to these specs (hi def/low enc or hi dam/hi rof) regardless of anything else that's brought to market.

Allowing a "novice artisan" to create a super-sharp knife (equal to that of an "master artisan") might allow them to briefly "compete" at the same level as a master, but this is double-edged. The novice artisan begins selling high quality knivesand makes a name for himself, but then, because this is temporary, is returned to only making mediocre knives (which are better than poor, but nowhere near the level of a master), and so loses business since he can no longer create knives that can compete in the market place.

Adding wear and tear to items (decay) helps to rotate the items in use, forcing players to re-purchase goods. But they will simply buy the super-sharp knife, since they know it is the best that can be boughtand easily attainable.

Please make your sig a little shorter...just the lines you put in. Not the words, they'll wrap properly.

Many of us don't have 21" mointors.

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MrBumpy wrote:

The are a few problems I see with crafting in general and proposing this type of solution.

1. The schematic for the "knife" is already hard-coded. Any knife made by one "master artisan" will never be better than any other "master artisans", save for a few variations in the experimentation.

The current situation is worse than that as the schematic for butter knife is ultimately more dependent on the resources used than on the level of the crafter, though masters can offset some of that. This is a keystone of the arguement against the changes to resource stats when used in schems that the devs pulled this week.

2. Basically "novice artisans" will make not so sharp knives and "master artisans" will make super-sharp knives.

That's why I chose to talk about butter knives which don't function very well as cutting knives. What I'm suggesting here is that for a few items a novice crafter should be able to make near-equal product to the master.

3. There is nothing in the game cost,-wise, need-wise, or impulse-buy-wise to cause players to pass on the super-sharp knives and buy the not-so-sharp knives. There is too much money in circulation and money is too easy to obtain.

As you pointed out, decay is currently the only thing to take out a butter knife. Maybe this is related to why novice crafters have no incentive to produce goods for sale, but I think it actually does help the lack of money sinks problem as you aren't putting all that cash into a few master's accounts. I'm not addressing that issue, I'm addressing the problem that there's no reason to spend any time as a crafter and not be a master. Certainly, dabbler templates can cause problems as we've seen in CH, rifleman..., but we need more non-master crafters to increase the number of goods in the game and hopefully bring down prices and increase the number of places to shop and as an end result increase the number of players.

4. There is no innovation in crafting. It's currently not possible for artisans to create new schematics or change the resources used in a schematic to create a better or unique product. The schematics are fixed and so are the stats for the items being crafted.

So all the more reason it's important not to make the key to the system hoarding of rare resources over months at a time and becoming a master crafter.

Since there is already an artificially set ceiling on what the best knife made can be, unless the knives were set to some insanely high price (like you currently see with high-end armors and weapons), then everyone one will buy the super sharp knife. Also, since the "consumer base" (i.e. players) dictates what is an acceptable high end item, all high-end items will be made to these specs (hi def/low enc or hi dam/hi rof) regardless of anything else that's brought to market.

This isn't a problem with novice artisans crafting high quality goods, it's an issue with not enough distinct choices of items to craft and use in the game.

Allowing a "novice artisan" to create a super-sharp knife (equal to that of an "master artisan") might
allow them to briefly "compete" at the same level as a master, but this is double-edged.
The novice artisan begins selling high quality knives and makes a name for himself,

STOP RIGHT THERE! This is what the goal of my system is, to propel players more naturally towards master levels. If a crafter sells some of the really sweet butter knives to make a little knot of credits and can stop living hand to mouth for a minute, there's REAL INCENTIVE to climb the crafting tree that's been chosen, not just, "You'll have a chance at selling something if you are a master that hordes resources in the millions of units when a rare spawn happens." Besides, Masters would have all sorts of high credit items that can be sold so the number of masters building butter knives decreases as more and more novices try to make a name for themselves. Does the master have a little worse chance of getting all the business on a server? Yes. Can the game only go to better places if that's the case? Yes.

but then, because this is temporary, is returned to only making mediocre knives (which are better than poor, but nowhere near the level of a master)

Why is that the case? They see that their knives are selling and they're getting XP from crafting all the butter knives so they are in a perfect position to gain more skill boxes, in turn, increasing the number of items per schematic, the chance of an Amazing Success, and adding more schematics to their data pad. How is this not better than the current system of, well let me grind, holo-style, before making 1 product cuz nobody will ever buy it.