Artisan Archive
Thread: Why Harvester Cert's can never happen...
The thing is... I don't want armor prices to go up. They're high enough already. I feel guilty charging as much as I do. Cripple the resource harvesting market and good quality armor gets even harder to make, and more expensive.
Do we want a game where only the rich can afford armor?
As an armorsmith I depend on my combat alt, and my buddies lots for my harvesting, and the harvester cert idea aims to take that ability away from me. For no reason. If you want to go after cross server lot trades well then don't nerf me in the bargain.
Other crafters who only have one account would be hit even worse.
And what is there to boil your blood about artisan being a novice proffession and vehicles not being elite goods? It's basic fact. Vehicels take unnamed resources, the materials needed for vehicles are easy to get. And it's a novice proff. a master brawler isn't some combat machine, and a master artisan isn't some crafting machine.
StGabriel wrote:
No, its a sympton large number of idiot and stupid Artisans who are so utterly clueless they can't grasp the simple concept that they can sell the raw resources from vehicles for more money that what they are selling the vehicles for. Certs will not miraculously increase their IQ.
If resources were not so incredibly common this wouldn't be an issue. These "idiots" would burn their resources out before they dented the market.
StGabe.
You missed my point there. The issue is NOT availability of resources considering its Master Artisans who would have the certs in your scenario and would be harvesting the resources.
Bah, why am I keeping this alive sheesh. This issue is dead. You're yelling at the wind.
Clearly there is a lot of balancing to be done between crafting professions that have widely varying restrictions. However the fact that ONE crafting profession isn't completely broken isn't reason to call off balancing the whole system. Furthermore armorsmith still has problems. The thing that keeps it a viable profession is largely the factory time. The resource hoarding continues unabated however. I myself have enough resources for thousands of triple layer composite suits and I'm not that big of a lot-swapper.
Do we want a game where only the rich can afford armor?
Of course not but you're just being dramatic. What we have right now is that your 280k ubese can be purchased after half an hour to an hour of missions and will last a few days or weeks. With repairs, upwards of a month.
. . . the harvester cert idea aims to take that ability away from me. For no reason.
Obviously it's not for "no reason". Clearly the intent is balancing resource gluts. As I said above, the primary goal of balancing is to remove gross imbalances. That you in particular do not take full advantage of the current imbalances (or that one craft can make a semi-decent living) does not mean that they do not exist or that they aren't damaging server-wide economies and removing a lot of the intended economic challenge and fun.
And what is there to boil your blood about artisan being a novice proffession and vehicles not being elite goods? It's basic fact. Vehicels take unnamed resources, the materials needed for vehicles are easy to get. And it's a novice proff. a master brawler isn't some combat machine, and a master artisan isn't some crafting machine.
It's not a basic fact that artisans are second class citizens (and similarly for other novice professions). The title "novice" does not imply any particular limitations it only really says that you start out as an artisan. Master artisan is indeed a "mastery" and it takes skill points just like any other profession. Vehicles take easy resources BUT that doesn't mean that it's fine if the market for them is non-existent and that entry requires the willingness to lose money by selling under resource cost/value.
And it's not like it's really that much better for weapons or other crafts. Weapons take much less resources and mastering weaponsmith takes only 15 points more than master artisan. Thus the resource gluts affect the weapons market at least as much. Try making as much money per hour as a weaponsmith as you could doing missions as an elite combatant (500k+).
StGabe.
You seem to have missed the line at the top of my first post where I said I wasn't particularly a proponent of harvester certs. This conversation right now is about the ability to harvest massively which drives resource prices down and floods the market. There are MANY possible harvester certification ideas as well as other ideas that would reduce the massive harvesting that is currently hitting our server economies and flooding the market with resources.
I am arguing against the point that reducing overall resources in the system will be a nerf for crafters by pointing out that with greater scarcity, crafters will be economically empowered and there will be more opportunities in the crafting market. I am further arguing that SOME change may be necessary to curb the current economic imbalances. I am pointedly trying not to assume that this change needs to be any specific idea.
StGabe.
Message Edited by StGabriel on 06-04-2004 05:26 PM
meh, show me the proof of a resource glut. Show me the proof of the monoplies. Show me the proof that allowing anyone to use harvesters is causing problems.
Until SOE gives out numbers it's all conjecture. And I say I don't want to be nerfed because of a handfull of people who're dissatisfied with how things run now.
The poll thread shows the vast majority of crafters disagree with this nerf. And a very small minority seem to favor it.
So I'm done arguing. The harvester nerf is a bad idea that got shot down. Live with it.
This makes my blood boil as a correspondent that used to fight for brawler rights. "Novice" is just a name. Master artisan still costs 77 points or almost a third of one's available skill points (and only 15 points less than mastering weaponsmith, armorsmith or droid engineer). Vehicles are their main products for that investment.
StGabe.
Message Edited by StGabriel on 06-04-2004 03:19 PM
The poll thread shows the vast majority of crafters disagree with this nerf. And a very small minority seem to favor it.
GrafvonSoden wrote:
The poll thread shows the vast majority of crafters disagree with this nerf. And a very small minority seem to favor it.
No, the poll only show shows that the majority of people who said they were crafters dissagree. It doesnt show how many of them have 30+ harvesters sucking in resources. It doesnt show how many of the actual people "In The Game" are against it. As you said, without the numbers from SOE, this poll is USELESS ! And just because you interpret TH's answer as no harvester certs, doesnt make it gosple. Thats' just your opinion. So deal with it.
Wait let me get this straight. All 25 of the artisans supporting the issue are a majority? and the 220 who opposed dont count? You can not honestly believe that out of those 220 less than 25 were artisans or elite crafters? ROFL that is the biggest crok of sh1t I have ever heard. While I agree that all 220 were probably not elite crafters or artisans, but I would be more than willing to bet that atleast half were. Leaving the aginst side with 110 and you with your 25 which is still only 22%. My god you guys really dont like to lose do you?
hoenixIts nice to come back in to check the forums and see a discussion take off like this...
To answer a few of StGabriels concerns...
There is inflation, and then there is Inflation. I was not discussing the economic factors that devalue currency, but the inflation of prices for goods in limited supply. Oil is a prime example, especially since the supply of it can and is artificially controlled. OPEC decides if they will produce 500k barrels a day or 1.5 million barrels a day. This control allows them to influence the price of oil on the world markets, but not SET the price. The end users of the oil (i.e. Oil Companies) set the price based on their supply vs. the demand placed upon them and how much the basic resource cost them. Please note that the manner in which they do this is a major bone of contention amongst the public-in-the-know since the price of end-products such as gasoline always go up as soon as the price of crude goes up (no matter that the oil they are currently using was purchased at a low price) but does not go down as soon as the price of crude goes down. This is my example of Human Nature/ Greed at work...
As to the effect of putting resource collection into a small groups hands...Any given profession has "X" number of people playing it. "X" is a finite number. Currently, everyone playing the game can harvest. If that number is reduced to "X", it means less resources being harvested. If you want to give "X" a number, try throwing in the number of people who have at least the Engineering I box. If Certifications were to be implemented, then the only Certs gained through Master Artisan would be, at most, those available for crafting in the Artisan profession. Mediums and Heavys would be gained through the Advanced professions, much in the same way that Combat types gain their best weapon certs in the professions beyond Marksman....you could make an argument for giving Medium Mineral and Chemical to Master Artisans, but that could go either way. If at any time you reduce the availability of a resources, with the demand unchanged, you will see prices for the same resource go up. The basic principle of Supply and Demand.
Now, I hate Lot Sharing. I think of it as an exploit that single character servers were designed to prevent. But the simple truth is, these Mega Mining Operations aren't really a threat. Oh, every now and then they may get lucky and find themselves on top of a high percentage spawn of a good, named resource, but for the most part, they simply grab whatever resource has spawned at the highest percentage without regard to type or quality. They will tend to mine low quality resources in bulk. When Profession grinding for Jedi ceases, so will their need to pull millions of units of garbage fiberplast from the ground. From that point, the only profession that would benefit would be Architect, with their insane requirements for LGO, among other resources. And Architects aren't going to pay 10 cpu for LGO.
A decrease in supply is never good for crafters. I never seem to have enough resources now, especially of the High Quality, Named resources required by the higher end schematics. I can only harvest so much, and while I pull up that good Polysteel Copper I could very well be missing that good Corellian Fiberplast. I have to hope thatone of thefew people that harvest quality resources for profit has hit that spawn for me, for which I pay them for...Certs would reduce the number of people who provide this service, meaning that I, as a crafter, would have to harvest all of the resources that I need for my profession myself. Quality of goods and quantity of goods would both come down, and the price would go up as I would definately charge more because more of my time was taken up by Harvesting. So, reduction in resources would NOT be good for crafters...
While you bring up some good points, StGabriel, I have to ask what crafting professions you have mastered. This isn't a dig, I just want to know what experience you have with the crafting system and the resource requirements of Advanced Profession High-end schematics. That you extremely knowledgable about economics is easily seen, but I think you miss the point when it comes to Certifications, Supply and Demand, and the Advanced Professions when seen as a whole.
StGabriel wrote:
No, its a sympton large number of idiot and stupid Artisans who are so utterly clueless they can't grasp the simple concept that they can sell the raw resources from vehicles for more money that what they are selling the vehicles for. Certs will not miraculously increase their IQ.
If resources were not so incredibly common this wouldn't be an issue. These "idiots" would burn their resources out before they dented the market.
StGabe.
To make a vehicle you have to be a master artisan, so introducing certs for harvesters wouldn't affect the "idiots" quite as much as you seem to be inclined to believe. With 7 lots (after house and factory has been adressed) you can easily pull upp somewhere between 500k-1mil resources per spawn. (I recently pulled 250k on a 71%-spot using only four BER 10 so I don't think those numbers are out of whack)
They will still be able to impact the market quite nicely.
I think I've already addressed this twice now. You are reading me as an advocate of a specific harvester certification plan which I am not. I am simply pointing out that increased scarcity of resources will shift economic power to artisan professions and not away and thusly is not a "nerf".
You've also the point that the resource gluts themselves stem from the fact that ANYONE can be harvesting and that those master artisans can put up 100 harvesters if they want to and have 9 friends willing to donate just a small amount of time.
StGabe.
People with 400+ harvesters is ample proof that abuses exist. I'm sure you can find these people on your very own server if you simply look. I've already said that I myself have put up 60+ harvesters on one account with little difficulty. I'm sure I could hit 100-200 just by tapping my own friends. After that I'd just start hitting cantinas and renting lots from entertainers, etc., that had no other use for them.
StGabe.
First of all this "greed" is an example of everyday economics at work. The central tenet of capitalism is that every party will do that which is best for their bottomline. That's the American Dream (tm) and it's basically a statement that greed is the primary means of creating a market. I think you are using OPEC not because it really furthers your claims but because you are playing up a natural propensity to dislike the people who control our oil consumption. OPEC is just doing what is good for OPEC (and really this proves my point that scarcity is actually powerful for those doing the selling).
There are several other fallacies in this example. First of all, resource gathers are not all part of one clique. We have independent resource gathers competing against each other thus creating a fair pricing structure. If there is any problem with OPEC it is that all of the resource is located in a spatially condensed area and no new resource generation can be accessed. However that is not at all the case with resource gathering in SWG. There is no centralization of harvesters, there are literally crafters everywhere with all sorts of backgrounds affiliations. Furthermore, ANYONE can take the skills they would need to harvest and can thus create new resource incomes. If a resource monopoly existed then that would drive up demand for resources and as such new resource gathers would show up to undercut and rebalance the market. If the US could simply decide, "hey, let's have oil" any time it wanted then OPEC would be a non-issue.
Second of all, you are overplaying the ingame analogy of credits as "money". There is NO REASON AT ALL to assume that credits act as money in a way analogous to real market economies. We could easily say that ore is the actual currency of SWG. Both ore and credits come from the "government" (in this case, the game physics). Each has their own uses. We could look at credits as simply a resource themselves. Credits are a special kind of resource that are used to maintain structures, repair vehicles, etc. That they are used a medium of trade is really just something that comes from their ease of transferrence, however in theory ore or other resources are just as plausibly seen as the "currency" of Star Wars Galaxies.
With money as a special kind of resource that crafters need, and ore as currency, we see that harvester certifications do not create this pseudo-inflation at all, in fact quite the opposite. Instead of reducing the value of currency, they increase it. Each unit of ore income now "buys" more credits that can be used to maintain structures, etc. Crafters can then afford to "pay" combatants go out and harvest credits though the credit harvesters known as mission terminals.
This is why there is no true inflation involved: the analogy mapping credits to real life currencies is flawed. Both resources and credits come from the same source albeit in different ways. All that we have is a relative increase in scarcity of one form of game currency . . . the result of which is more power for those who harvest resourcesand those who craft and less power for those who harvest credits. In order to argue that greater scarcity of resources is bad you have to argue that credit harvesters "deserve" their incomes more than resource harvesters and resource users.
Message Edited by StGabriel on 06-06-2004 11:42 PM
Message Edited by StGabriel on 06-07-2004 09:28 AM