Artisan Archive

• Powerup Crafting

Issue: Powerup crafting needs a complete overhaul.
Rank: 1
Fix: Proposed Powerup Revamp

• Factory Crate Size

Issue: Factory crate size is does not make sense on a number of items. Does not comport with resource requirements of the item, etc.
Rank: 2
Fix: There are two possible fixes for this. The first one is the best and probably easiest to code. Create an option on the factory's radial menu that allows the factory to override the default crate size for the item being crafted. Thus, if you select a create size of 25, it will override the default crate size, whether it's 10 or 25 or 50. The second fix is to revamp the size of factory crates on a per-item basis to comport with resource requirements (would take a lot of work). What I mean is that items which take far more resources and components to create (e.g. armor) would have smaller crate sizes (you're stuffing bigger things into that crate so you should be able to stuff less of them in there) than things which take smaller amounts of resources (e.g. powerups). I think option 1 is the best fix.

• Artisan Component Quality

Issue: The quality of master artisan components used by other professions does not matter at all. The only profession I can think of where it does matter is for architects making crafting stations.
Rank: 3
Fix: I would like to see component quality taken into account when they are used in other items. For example, if a weaponsmith makes a weapon that uses a power conditioner, he can request one where the quality of the PC is maxed out if he wants to increase the speed/dmg of the weapon, or he can request one where the durability is maxed out to create a weapon with a higher condition. Please make component quality mean something.

• Vehicle Crafting

Issue: Vehicle Crafting is TOO simple.
Rank: 4
Fix: Create more than one experimentation line. Let experimentation affect acceleration, breaking (how fast vehicle stops after you let off the gas), hit points, turn rate, water speed, top speed, terrain negotiation, etc. There can be three experimentation lines (or more) which allow the artisan to affect these characteristics. Also, add in artisan components as a requirement. Two hunks of metal is a little too easy.

• Vendor Restocking (affects all crafting profs)

Issue: It takes FOREVER to relist items and to sell items out of your inventory. It shouldn't take 20 minutes to load 100 crates of powerups onto your vendor.
Rank: 5
Fix: Create an interface that allows the merchant to select multiple items and set the same sale price for all selected items. This interface should work whether you are selling items out of the stock room or out of your inventory. This "almost" works already for the stockroom. I can select multiple items in the stockroom by holding down my shift key. Then I can hit the "sell item" button and put in a purchase price. Unfortunately, even though all the items are selected for sale, only the first item in the list will be put back up for sale.

I've got more, but I'll stop there.

Message Edited by Animi on 10-20-2004 11:38 AM

Issue: Crafting bug.
Rank: 2
Fix: When crafting "crafting tools" and thereafterstarting a second crafting tool, both tools finish when the initial tools close resulting in loss of ingredients in the second tool if you don't get the tool 'finished' and on the crafting countdown in time

Message Edited by Beladan on 10-20-2004 05:21 PM

Ok, Guru said we could submit more than 5...

Issue: Extractors stop producing silently.
Rank: 1
Fix: Extractors should communicate any time they stop, whether for a resource shift, low power, or maintenance. Notifying when the hopper is full would be nice as well, but I'd consider that a bonus compared to knowing when it has shut down. Most of my time every session is checking on my harvestors to make sure they're still running and generating income for the maintenance I am paying. Telling us why they stopped would be a bonus, but as long as I know it stopped then I know I have to go visit it.

Issue: Swoops and speeders are only displayable as a deed
Rank: 4
Fix: Allow a speeder deed to be dropped as a display unit actually showing the speeder. I like to display items I am selling near my vendors. Think of a car lot - users get to browse the selection.

Issue: Swoop and speeder deeds display no details about the vehicle. A junk speeder looks exactly the same as a speeder experimented to 98% to the buyer.
Rank: 2
Fix: Display more detail about the vehicle in the deed.


Issue: My Nemoidian Bird cage has no bird in it.
Rank: 5
Fix: Allow CH tamed birds to be 'installed' in the cage.


Issue: Currenlty a master artisan almost requires using another player's build slots. By the time you have a house to live in, a house (or two)for storage, and a factory you hardly have anything left for putting up harvestors.
Rank: 2
Fix: Allow additional build slots as players advance through the Surveying line. Even just one build slot at Master would help, but I think one every 2 boxes plus one at master would certainly take a lot of the pressure off.


Issue: Power must be delivered tostructures manually, but a droid can perform regular maintenance.
Rank: 2
Fix: Either allow a structure maintenance droid to deliver power, or enable a Power Droid to perform power runs simular to how a structure maintenance droid performs maintenance. The code is there, and the interface would be identical but instead of credits, you tell the droid how much power to deposit.

Issue: Structures only notify when they are heavily damaged.
Rank: 2
Fix: Structures should send an e-mail as soon as they run out of maintenance, in addition to the other notifications.

Issue: Details about structures are only available at the structure (with information available from a maintenance droid if you have one)
Rank: 5
Fix: Put a control device on our datapad for every extractor we drop that allows us to check the status of the extractor. Alternately, we could send an e-mail to the extractor and recieve a response.Informationprovided would bepower levels, maintenance levels, resource being extracted, and room remaining in the hopper.

Issue: Artisans need to visit every harvester to perform pickup duty - i.e. pick up the output of the harvestor.
Rank: 3
Fix: Allow Droid Engineers to construct resource transport modules in Binary Load Lifters so that the BLLcould visit extractors and extract an (experimentable quality determined)amount of the resources the extractor holds and return to the Artisan (possibly a pre-determined location) to deliver them. If the resources are not delivered for some reason, they stay in the droid and continue to use part of it's capacity. This would allow the menial task of retrieving resources to be done by a droid, freeing the artisan to spend time working on their business. it would also provide a purpose to the BLL droids beyond ad barking.


Issue: Survey Droid only lists what resources are available, but provides no clue as to the quality. A resource you're looking for comes up in the scan, and you travel to Dathomir (or wherever) and survey to find a sample only to find out it is junk.
Rank: 5
Fix: Allow the survey droid to return general information about different (possibly selectable) attributes. Low, medium and high. DE's (or the quality of the survey tool) could determin how many attributes you can get ratings on. This will tell the Artisan if they need to bother going to Dathomir and risk their life finding a resource only to find out it is junk.

Issue: You buy some resources off the bazaar. Now you have to travel to the city of Armpit way out beyond the Dune Seato pick up those resources. Conversely, you have made something for someone and they either have to traipse to your vendor or you have to hunt them down and make a delivery in person.
Rank: 5
Fix: Allow DE's to build a module they could mount in a Binary Load Lifterthat can pick up purchased items for you (or possibly make deliveries). This is a menial task that is well suited to the kind of things a droid should be doing. This gives the BLL a purpose beyond add barking, and frees up the Aritisan to work on their business.

[Edited for typos]

Message Edited by Chaosium_451 on 10-20-2004 05:38 PM

Message Edited by Chaosium_451 on 10-20-2004 05:46 PM

Message Edited by Chaosium_451 on 10-21-2004 12:31 AM

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Guruweaver wrote:
Actually, Animi, if you have more, post 'em. The issues list I will submit will be longer than five.

I need to know what the top five are, but issues 6-N are welcome as well.


Guru

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Cordar wrote:

ISSUE: Merchant Restocking RANK: 5

FIX: This interface needs to be reworked so you can work with the stockroom easier. Being able to restock and price multiple items at a time.

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Going along these lines, I would like to add an issue or three. While this may be more of a Merchant issue, as Artisans with the Business line, it affects us as well. All 3 of these go hand-in-hand with each other, though could easily be implemented seperately:

1) ISSUE: Vendor Turn-around RANK4 (almost highest) : Specifically, there is no way to permanently display an item on a vendor

FIX: Make it possible for 1 item to be made permanent on a vendor (sale time never expires -gets destroyed with the vendor) so that Merchants can put in those long "Special Order Instructions", "Buffing Instructions", "Suppliers List", "Please Read" etc without having to copy/paste (or worse retype) everything in the Sellers Item Description. I say only 1 item to prevent it becoming a "storage exploit" as that was not what is intended for vendors.

ALTERNATE FIX: Give a vendor a text box where these types instructions could be entered and displayed. This could be generated upon vendor creation, and modifyable from the radial menu. This solves this issue and the 1 below, and makes the 3rd less of an impact.

2) ISSUE:Vendor Stickies RANK 4 (almost highest): Specifically the way the vendor displays items in a seemingly random order.

FIX: Make it possible to "sticky" an item, such as the permanent item mentioned above, to the top of the list (first item displayed always when vendor is first opened). This will allow those items mentioned above to get seen far easier, as opposed to them getting lost as the last vendor item and rarely seen.

ALTERNATE FIX: See Issue 1

FIX: Add a button to modify the Sellers Item Description in the Vendor interface screen.

ALTERNATE PSEUDO-FIX: See Issue 1

Bitgolem, I respectfully disagree with a couple of your points.

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Bitgolem wrote:

2) Get rid of item decay altogether, it doesn't add anything to the game.

Item Decay means repeat business, and plenty of other things as well. I have no problem with it, and like the system as-is. Without decay, after a while the only market you'll have for items are newbies. When you've sold a swoop to everyone on your server, there is no one else left to sell to.

3) Set the resources and leave them. Having to spend 80% of my time finding resources and babysitting extractors is not why I became an artisan. If you're gonna leave the resource situation the way it is, make a new profession of Miner and make it an advanced Scout profession and leave the Artisans to crafting.

There is a great rush at being the first at a new spawn. If they never shifted, then the veteran players would own all the big resource spawns. Someone new to the game would have to drop their harvestors 2000m from the waypoint because the entire area around the spawn to that radius would be filled with heavies. If you're spending 80% of your time babysitting harvestors (something I was doing until recently), I suggest getting a structure maintenance droid. That purchase has freed up a huge amount of time for me that I can now spend crafting.

5) At survey 4, you should be able to survey the entire map.

Not with you here. I agree that something should be done to make the survey tree more valuable. As it stands right now, any plug with Survey I and a harvester is just as effective at getting resources as a master artisan (or someone with Survey IV). It just takes them a *little* longer to find the sweet spot. But to survey the entire map would be way too much.

Message Edited by Chaosium_451 on 10-21-2004 12:37 PM

I have some serious issues with some of these suggestions:

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Bitgolem wrote:

1) When you get to Architect, you should get additional lots.

If you have one house and 3 power generators, it doesn't leave you enough extractor lots to gather enough resources to build anything.

Additional lots is not something I am generally in favor of. Especially if all it took was Novice Architect. Every resource miner in the game would simply adjust their "template" to include Engineering 4, and NA. More lots = more resources / glutted and degraded economy / less space for everyone. Currently, people need to do 2 things to increase their lot count: Make alot-swap agreement with someone on a different server, or get an additional account. Harv farms from a lot swap aren't quite so bad, as they are usually static and never move. Second accounts give SOE increased cash flow, which they will never do away with.

2) Get rid of item decay altogether, it doesn't add anything to the game.

Lack of item decay is something that Droid Engineers have been very upset about for a long time. Because all deeded droids have no decay, they last forever. Repeat business is relatively rare. With an entierly player-driven economy, a lack of decay spells economic death. If no items ever decayed, the people that have what they need right now would never need to buy anything new, ever. That screws the crafting professions unbelievably. As they lower their prices in price wars to 1/100 of what they had before trying to get a single customer, most of them will likely change professions as there will no longer be a point. What exactly is the point of crafting, if nobody buys anything ever? There's only so much you can do for personal use. Once crafters are extremely rare, the prices will shoot through the roof 100x original prices because of the rarity of the items. In general, people are too lazy to grind through Armorsmith and do all the resource gathering necessary just to make their alt a set of armor. They would rather pay cash, and they would be paying through the nose.

Lack of item decay..... BAD idea.

3) Set the resources and leave them. Having to spend 80% of my time finding resources and babysitting extractors is not why I became an artisan. If you're gonna leave the resource situation the way it is, make a new profession of Miner and make it an advanced Scout profession and leave the Artisans to crafting.

As explained before, having all resources be static would be an extremely bad idea. Those who get their harvs down first will forever have a monopoly.

I am strongly in favor of a Geologist/ Miner profession with distinct surveying / resource gathering advantages however.

4) Give an onscreen prompt like you get when you leave a city zone for when you can place deeds. "Zoning now authorized" or something to that effect.

This would be something very useful. I am in favor of this.

5) At survey 4, you should be able to survey the entire map.

The entire map is going a bit too far. To place this as a real world example, how is somebody inMinneapolis, MNsupposed to be able to detect the mineral levels in Bejing, China? This IS an accurate portrayal as while we do have a "zone" map, the map is supposed to represent the entire planet. It's programming / server limitations that resulted in there being a hard wall at the edges instead of being able to "wrap around". You may argue that SW is far more techinically advanced, but the principles of physics remain intact. You can't survey the other side of a planet the way energy waves work.

But to state again, I am strongly in favor of a Geologist/ Miner profession with distinct surveying / resource gathering advantages, including increased range.

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