Artisan Archive

I vote for three changes:

1) Abolish maintenance fees.

2) Have buildings, harvesters and generators of all kinds degrade in performance over time -- eventually failing.

3) Have abuilding maintenance skill or device that can be used on other people's buildings.

Here are the reasons...

If this is a player driven economy let the value of maintenance float on the market. By allowing players to contract maintenance they can make the choice of letting their holdings die off or keeping them in tip-top shape. If the skill / equipment is on the artisan engineering tree then people can choose to maintain their own buildings or let someone else do it.

Many of the issues go away under this scheme. No required "filling up" of maintenance pools, no reseting, and no carping about prices.

Somewhat off topic...

In a world with interstellar travel having a harvester that sends you email when it's broke, full or running out of resources doesn't seem to be too much to ask. If you want to make it more complicated the notification capability could be an add-on or a for-cost option. But that doesn't seem to add much to the game experience.

Off-topic two...

I wasn't around for the beta but I understand there was a miner occupation. I don't think, with a good range of increasingly capable harvesters and generators that needs to be a separate occupation. Especially with the changes I suggest above an artisan could choose to be a miner without the need for the formal occupation.

Harvester maintenance is irrellevent I think. Its probably fine as is. Power consumption is more of an issue since that dictates how many lots are wasted making energy.

Any cost I incur (or a crafter incurs aquiring resources) will be passed on to the customer. Now that i have some experience with the system, and am making good money selling resources, I just dont see this as a big issue.

The bigger issue is extraction rates. We dont need to increase costs, we need to reduce production.

I think we need to drive a commodity market that is supplied by dedicated miners as well as crafters. It would be very nice if one or two miners were needed to supplement the needs of each crafter. Or.. to look at it another way.. if it took 28 lots worth of resources to keep a crafter going full time rather then 8.

My fear is that as time goes on, and more and more crafters "finish" their profession, demand will go down. Right now demand is inflated by people grinding. They go through far more resources then customer demand warrants. I would like to see that there is demand for resources drawn by independent miners in the future, not just after the initial "crafting rush".

Regards,

Artuk

yes increase the wind and solar power the highest I can ever find is 55%. I also think that these should not shift or at most once a month as they don't really shift in real life wind does alittle morethen solar. this is out of proportion with fussion where you can find up to 95% and it draws more an hour then the others to start with

"If this is a player driven economy let the value of maintenance float on the market. By allowing players to contract maintenance they can make the choice of letting their holdings die off or keeping them in tip-top shape. "

Bad idea, let me explain why I think that maintenece fees are fine (or should even be increased).

What you are suggesting is that players pay other players, thereby stimulating the economy. The problem with this is that paying maintenence to harvestors take money out of the economy, and paying players to fix it just shuffles money around the economy. If there were no maintenence fees, where would all the money leave the economy? Insurance, cloning, etc etc. However, Harvestors are the MAIN way money leaves the economy right now, so taking that away destroys the economy. Imagine playing in a game where all the artisans made money by selling goods, and the money just sat in their bank accounts instead of going to harvestor costs. With an infinite amount of money floating around, think about how expensive ANYTHING would cost.

I agree with Dexnil. If both of those two policies are implemented, the world will be a happier place. As long as credits stay in the harvester through server reboots. Ooops...I promised myself I wouldn't bring that up anymore!

It's not the cost in power and maitenence that bothers me. A lot of people have mentioned time. That is a factor. I'd like to be able to put 4 days of stuff in there and not have to worry that the resources would go away. Running around everyday worrying about harvesters is not what I want to do.

1) Either a timer on resources so we can do some planning.
2) Email when the harvester turns off.
3) No power and mainentence costs when the harvester is off.
4) Power and maintence stay in the deed when you move it.


Any or all of these would help a lot in running harvesters.

Some interesting thoughts here. I rarely post on this board, but I have recently tried to make my lot with harvesters.

A few things:

This is coming from the perspecitve of a Droid Engineer who had no combat skills because he didn't want them. He wanted to be a straight builder, this turned out to be a folly of an idea.

The harvester idea is awesome. I love what it theoretically is supposed to do. However, there are a few flaws in the system:

First you need money and power. Ok, this makes sense. Lets run 15 minutes outside the city, spend 15 minutes dodging monsters and finding a good spot, then drop it. No problem. Set up your harvester and hope you don't die on the way back. Not a problem. I desposit 2000 credits in the hopper and let it do its thing.

2000 credits is a lot for me. I try running delivery missions this takes a LOT of time, so much in fact I did not have enough time for my crafting. This amount only lasts a day and a half. Then I made the mistake of trying to do the inter-planetary missions to earn money. Again, a joke. I got a mission to coronet. Great! I bought my ticket, I'm thinking I will get two missions to come home again and come out with around a 200 credit profit. This would have been nice for me.

Did this happen? No. The only delivery missions were either inside the city, or to various locations on the planet. Often out in the middle of the wilderness. I was out about 1000 credits after plane fair and my earnings from the mission. I was thoroughly dissapointed.

I began selling droids on the bazaar, the ones I could make. These sell off erratically at best, so they're not going to help me much in keeping my harvesters afloat. Server crashed, no big deal. I come back on, a friend has me run 2 kill missions with them. I get 5000 credits and I'm a happy little clam. I run back out to my harvester to dump my earnings into it.

I found out that the server crash has somehow drained my maintence time so I now owe 2750 in repairs to the harvester. I stood there blinking until a large turtle looking thing had its way with me. Quick way back to city, at least.

No big deal, I run back out to do more missions, on my own this time. I have built myself a full set of bone armor and a really nice set of CDEF guns. I go back out to do my little paralope, difficulty 5 missions and get mercilously slaughtered, after killing them off one by one, and trying to kill the nest. I get it down halfway and they all jump me. I don't get my mission to my dismay. I have two levels in Rifle and one in pistol by now. I continue to try until my armor breaks apart, again, completely dismayed. I won about 3 missions out of 12 tries. I'm not meant for fighting, obviously.

By the time I have the money, another server crash to my horror, I find my harvester is simply gone. Great.

I at least was able to obtain about 3000 fuel from it before it fell apart.

Now, while trying to work on crafting and surveying, I'm trying to level up my combat abilities, which I never wanted to play in the first place.

I think three things would aid this game significantly:

1) Remote access to your harvesters, whether it be by droid with a data module or a data terminal in a house. This would be awesome to be able to access your harvesters, obtain the ore and pay off the maintence.

2) Fix delivery missions. Adding missions to other worlds on the planets like Corellia, Naboo, ect. Talus has missions to other worlds and not arbitrary places on the map. Why can't Corellia? Also being able to turn a profit would be a major bonus to this one. Maybe being able to see the city or location on the planet that it is taking you to before you choose the mission? This will give us non-combat types a way to obtain money without fighting.

3) Finally, I would love to see a warning system in your e-mail regarding maintenance running out, ran out, ect.

Maybe I'm completely missing something, but I don't see a way for a non-combative person to have a reliable way to earn money. As a DE, I won't make money until I hit the Probots. Explaining to a person why they should pay for an R2 who doesn't do anything is insanely hard, understandably. My point for bringing this here is that the Artisan, someone who just wants to build, will have a hard time amassing his fortune unless he goes out and fights often.

Thanks for listening!

Iphis

Remote monitoring and paying maintenance would be a good thing.

It would not cause everyone to put down a harvester like some claim. Why?

You still have to survey the spot, spend the cash to maintain it, and power the harvester. You still have to run out to it to collect the resource and deposit power. Resourses will still rotate also. The only change would be you could check it's status and get some quick cash in it if needed. The "barrier" to running a harvester wouldn't be significantly lowered.

Not "realistic"? First off this is Star Wars. But even my RL standards cash can be wired anywhere I want today. I can also have my bills payed automatically without ever lifting a finger (it's called direct withdraw). So automatic maintenance isn't that far out there.

I'd like to see the devscreate droids/droid modules that can do functions like these. Then everyone would not automatically have the ability to do anything remotely. You would need to invest in the droid.

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Jedi_Titus wrote:

I'd like to see the devscreate droids/droid modules that can do functions like these. Then everyone would not automatically have the ability to do anything remotely. You would need to invest in the droid.

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Thats a great idea!!!

The droid idea is a great one, both solves the remote issue, and creates a useful item for others to make.

If we could pay maintenance fees say through the bank or another terminal on the planet you have the harvester, that would be the best option IMO. Just add the option :Bills: or something like that to the banking terminal. Sorry if this was already posted I just posted without reading.

You all seem to want to make harvesting easier. Why?

Most people will answer "I want to be able to get a lot of minerals easy so that I can make cash to support my grinding."

I feel that running a lot of harvestors should cost more time than anything. A battle type character with a lot of money could just throw down 10 harvestors and pay everything through his datapad, sell it all off on the bazaar and clean up. An artisan, who many agree are already struggling to make money, would be forced to compete against these classes with MORE money than them, thus spending them into debt.

Harvestor droids, while cool in concept, does just the same thing: allows for those people with money to make lots of minerals without needing to spend any more time.

As it stands now, the only thing that keeps warrior classes from running mining operations IS the time factor. They are too busy leveling up and making money to take an hour or so every day to operate their harvestors. This is the way it SHOULD be. For us artisan classes, who need these minerals, we have to either mine them ourselves or buy them anyway, so a few expand and try to make a profit off of it. Not EVERYONE should be making a profit off of mining, only those who want to dedicate themselves to it. This is just like weaponscrafting, not everyone should be making a profit off of it, just those who are dedicated to it.

This is just how I look at the situation, anything which makes getting money EASIER in this game is not going to be good for it.

What DOES need to be fixed about harvestors:

1) Accurate depletion of resources/maintenence fees
2) Fix the time system to display hours:minutes instead of 60hours:hours, so it's more obvious to people how much time they have.
3) A sub-option to deposit power/pay maintenence, that is withdraw power/withdraw maintenence at a 10-25% fee.
4) E-mail notification when a mineral is no longer able to be mined, or runs out of power, or runs out of credits
5) Turning a harvestor OFF should cause NO maintenence or power to be lost. Hence if we need to stop playing for a few days, we should be able to turn them off and not have to worry about losing them.
6) With the old system (as in harvestors mining less as they went down), it made sense to have enormous fixing costs when it dropped below 100%. Now that the machine shuts off if it drops below 100%, these HUGE costs need to be lowered to reasonable levels. Nobody is going to spend 2k to repair the harvestor when they can re-build one for much cheaper. It should be cheaper to fix than to buy a new one, otherwise why fix it?

I dont think its too bad, but running to and from your installations is like running a gauntlet anymore. If your new artisan just starting out I would recommend a few marksmen skills and scout skills for terrain negotiation.