Artisan Archive
Thread: Artisans: Doomed to Failure?
There are certain in-game requirements that should be required so that a career of crafting or making thing will be sucessful that don't seem to be being tackled in SWG:
1) The need for goods
If I am going to build a character based on making goods, there needs to be a need for those goods. Even the most simple (and badly made) articles need a market. But where is the demand? I have tried auctioning low-level items on the Bazaar, bids starting a 1 credit.... but no buyers!?! I'm losing money on the auction fees. Am I missing something here? Please advise. Surely there should be an in-built NPC market where items are bought from you?
2) A stable economy
Money (Credits) need to have value for a seller-buyer market to work and balance. How can this ever work when you can purchase 1,000,000 credits on Ebay for $9.99? I'm doomed... I have my hands tied in making reasonable profit for my goods.
3) A hard-earned skill
The crafting skills (indeed all skills) seem a little too easy to obtain. And in addition, the possible mixing of skills seems ridiculous. If I'm a chef, I need a market where there are people who cannot, and never will be able to cook. Similarly, if I'm a tailor.Crafters (Artisans) need people like Bounty Hunters and Marksmen who cannot cook bonus-giving food and clothing. It's rare enough in the real world to find a Tailor who can also prepare a first-calss meal; never mind a Brawler who's able to tailor a set of first-class garments! Darth Maul, darning his own socks!?! I mean, really, come on.
With all these in mind (and probably more) I can't see how one of the most ingenious and real character types ever created will ever survive.
A good try, but a failure I believe. Like the rest of the players, you are reducing us to the level of having to get out a weapon and hit things on the head all day.
You're raising valid points, which (unfortunately) plague most if not all of the MMORPGs out there.
1) The need for a market is a key point... but in my opinion SWG made a good stab at this.My tailorsuccesfully sells both low and high level clothing items. Since low-level soldiers can only use the low-level guns, there is a market for them as well, asmy gunsmith-in-training found. Even the more badly-made items sell, albeit at a lower price. I found that I still can make a decent profit on most things.
Where pricing fails miserably is in grinding items. Artisans grind out personal harvesters for XP, and dump them on the bazaar... you'll find these being sold below cost. But this is generally just a few items in any skill box.
One point of advice: don't put things on auction. If I look through the bazaar for an item, I want that item now, not wait 5 days until the auction ends. Look for the sale price on similar items, and how long those items have been sitting on the bazaar. Base your price on that and sell your goods asan instant sale.
2) No MMORPG to date has fixed the problem of inflation. The only way to stabilise prices in an economy into which money constantly flows (missions, etc), is to take that money out at the other end. What you need is a money sink, but one that does not penalise casual players. Upping harvester maintenance rates or house maintenance will penalise the casual player (like me) who does not care much for money and never seems to have a lot of it. Introducing running costs in any form is either not enough to syphon off money effectively, or will make costs too high for casual players.
Another way (which the rich players will hate) is a progressive wealth and/or income tax. Yet another way is simply limiting the amount of money that you can possibly own. Both of these have their problems.
3) My view on skills has always been that it should not be too hard to gain skills, but it should take a long time. Ultima Online has a good approach with their Guaranteed Gain System. In UO, you do not necessarily get XP for everyaction performed, but the first action in one day, 6 hoursor whatever (depending on your level) will result in XP, guaranteed. It basicallyguarantees that even casual players will eventually be a grandmaster, after a sufficiently long time but without a lot of effort. Powergamers can grind away and reach grandmaster status faster, if they want. It will be very hard, but they'll get there faster.
This system in principle strikes a good balance... powergamers will have a sufficiently hard time to master a skill quickly, but the mechanism that makes it hard for powergamers does not make it impossible for casual players. Casual players can master the skill with decidedly less effort, but it will take that much longer.
A possible implementation in SWG might be to make the XP payout for any action much lower than it currently is, but give players a fixed 'free' amount of XP for every skill executed on a particular day. You could even reduce the XP payout with each subsequent action. An example:
Crafting a ribbed shirt currently gives you 150 XP (I think). You need to grind out 333 of these shirts to gain 50000 points for a particular skill box. Suppose you change that to the following schedule:
- 1000 skill points given for any tailoring action, every day
- 150 skill points given for your first ribbed shirt, but3 skill points less for each subsequent shirt, with a minimum of 10 points left over.
The casual player who crafts and sells just a few items every day will eventually have the 50.000 points, after 50 days. This player chooses to avoid the tedium of grinding, with the drawback that he'll take a long time to gain his XP.
The powergamer will still grind ribbed shirts, but after 50 shirts on any given day, the XP payout is reduced to 30... the more he grinds, the slower he will go, but never will he stop gaining XP.
The powergamer who wants to go faster can still do so, but his effort is greatly increased compared to the current system in SWG, but without penalising the casual gamer. Simply increasing the XP requirements or lowering the XP payouts will slow down the powergamers, but it will be impossible for casual players to master anything.
As far as creating a demand for low level items, the developers were going to try this, the the outcry from players was so loud that they finally had to give in.
In the original plan, your data pad was going to be able to hold just a limited number of schematics. When you learned new more advanced ones, you would have to erase your lower level ones. So a Weaponsmith would no longer be able to crafte CDEF weapons. This would have left the market for low level weapons to the artisans. Also included in the plan was the idea that artisans would be making some of the components that the high level crafters would need. Example artisans would be making the cloth that tailors used. There would have been a permanent market for artisans, selling components. But, no one seemed to like this system. So now, except for the upcoming vehicles, artisan is pretty much just an apprentice profession to earn your way to the REAL crafting professions.
Some thoughts on these:
1) You should concentrate on goods that have high repurchase rates. At novice Artisan, I found that Ranged Powerups were by far the items I was selling the most of, mostly because they only last 100 shots. A well maintained Harvester lasts forever. Also items that are not destroyed, but are made obsolete by rapid new-character advancement work in this regard as well; newbie wepaons, and armour for example.
Also, experiement like crazy on anything you intend to sell. Grinders do not experiement at all; it slows them down and gains no extra XP. To compete with output dumping from these people, your items need to be much better, stat-wise. Yes there are thousands of Personal Wind Generator deeds on the bazaar, but most of them are Base Extraction Rate 4. With fair minerals and good experimentation, Base Extract 8 is not too hard to regularly achieve. Twice the power for the same maintenance. Any reasonably well-informed shopper will not touch a BER 4 Wind Turbine with a bargepole, and the grind items will just rot there.
Be sure to educate your customers on the benefits of experiemented items; it takes longer to do, but you will be far more likely to make a sale.
Also, yes as pointed out above, very few people have the patience to track an auction in one particular city for a whole week, purely to save 200cr. Set price instant-sales are definitely the way to go on items under 3k, which is everything on the bazaar.
Having no NPC demand is a brave step and it doesn't seem to have gone nearly as badly as I thought it would. Having played EVE Online, if the NPC Demand there were removed, the entire economy would collapse utterly, but even so, there isn't any real way to remove money from the system, aside from minor PVP ship destruction. The net result is everyone except real newbies flying around in uber-battleships, and using them purely to mine asteroids. I digress...
Bearing in mind that *anyone* can place 10 Heavy Mineral Extractors on any old bit of steel and pull out about 360,000 units of resource *per day*, power and maintenance not withstanding, the only thing preventing a nightmare collapse is their inability to sell these resources at a set price, infinitely, whenever they like. Infinite Demand would effectively mean near-infinite cash in circulation after a while. I'm no economist, but that would probably bea Bad Thing.
2) Bugs, exploits, duping and Ebay are all Bad Things, and yes, SOE should be doing everything they can to stop them, but this excess cash will distribute to all of us in time; the duper buys a silly amount of holocrons, for example; the holocron folk put their prices up, and then in turn buy more 'Stuff' then usual, those people put their prices up and so on. I suspect that compared to the general stare of the economy, these cheats are having less of an impact than people would think, in the grand scheme of it all.
3) Broadly agree with this; it is apparently possible to 'grind' Architect to Master in under 24 hours. Why anyone would actually do this varies; 'want to win', 'need to build our PA a hall', 'want to provde all the furniture choices I canfor my customers', 'the holocron told me to; Arch sux, I wannabe a jedi!'.
Personally, I think Holocrons are a stupid idea; they force people to do professions they have no interest in, and hate them as a result; they make 'true' professionals resent them as casual tourists, 'leet', etc; they play havoc with market prices on bulk grind items vs. well experiemented ones; and all manner of other problems.Best way would be to remove the Holocron system and just give them a straight xp-to-Jedi formula, allowing those who want to be Jedi to get on with it, and help stop bulk price-dumping to 'get some of the costs of Jedi back'
Also, I can't believe that third-party macro programs are against the EULA, yet they actually *provide* a complex macro system within the game itself. Mastery of professions is essentially devalued by macroing. I'm not calling it 'wrong' or 'cheating'...how can it be? SOE provide the mechanism to do it as part of the game, but it's little wonder that most professions are Masterable within two-three weeks at most, and that there are so many Masters about; powergamers or otherwise. It's almost become commonly accepted that you can't really start making and selling products *properly* until you've reached Master in it.
Any game where it is more interesting to let an automated script play for you, than play it yourself, has essentially failed as a 'game'. That people call it the 'grind' speaks volumes.
One solution to this would be to remove the '/ui toolbarbutton' command from the macro set. This would prevent endless macros being possible, and command the attention of the player, to the game. And if the player then decides that 'doing it by hand' is really dull, then perhaps he/she/it should try a different profession, or indeed, different game even? This would cut down the number of Masters drastically, I think, leaving only those who are really dedicated.
Of course this cannot possibly happen while the current holocron system exists.
Anyway, chin up Fur-qu...in answer to your first question; no, Artisans aren't doomed to failure, although things could be a bit better maybe 
Well, you have two types of holocroneers; the rich ones who earn vast money camping whatever-the-hell drops holocrons, and chain-ATST missioning. (I saw one such actually shoutspamming outside the starport for extra people to group with him; 'u don't have 2 b any gud'. He was paying for newbies to simply get 2 missions each, and follow him while he did the work, purely to up his 'take' per excursion.)
These people will Practice, as they have no problems blowing the however-many million cr needed for a big enough stack of resources to blow through an enitre Elite profession asap.
The other sort of holocroneer is someone who, by whatever means, has just about earnt enough money to buy the holocron, let alone enough for 300k of Steel, etc, etc on top, but is still determined to get Jedi as soon as possible. (Nothing wrong with that in itself...this is star wars afterall.) It's these people who aren't necessarily concenred with quality items at realistic prices, but are worried about recovering what they see as their 'losses'. These are the ones who tend to cause market problems for everyone else.
It's not their fault really; it's just that they probaby didn't sign up to be a (insert random profession here) in the first place.
But yes, I went off topic a bit, as this is more of a problem for Elite, ratherthan Novice Professions really. Holocron or not, many people regard Artisan as merely a necessary first step toward what they *really* want to be, be it Jedi, or Elite Crafter.
i have an idea.. REMOVE most crafting exp, make all artison/elites be based on Use exp. and fixt to make it practical.
Kalano,
The problem with that is, we would still all be using CDEF weapons and living in the open. If you don't get full exp for the grinding stuff, no one would be at the level to make any of the good stuff, yet.
Repost, first posted.... almost 5 years ago.
Title:I want to bake Bread [a letter to game developers]
Author:Sie Ming
I'm an under served part of the Massively Multi-player Online Game (MMOG) player-base. I'm not a large part, and you'd be a fool to base your whole game around me. But I think I'd make a welcome addition to your bottom line. Evidence suggests that I don't cost a lot to support and that I tend to stick around when I find a game that I like. I also add to your game in other, less tangible, ways. But you'll have to decide what those intangibles are worth.
I'm also a fairly untapped market. It's been a few years since a game has come out that even attempted to attract me. Many of my members have never played a MMOG. We like simulations that deal with people: SimCity, Railroad Tycoon, Capitalist Pig, The Sims. The type of game where we're "making a name for ourselves" without a lot of violence. Most of us don't even know there are games like that with other real people playing. When many of these potential players of your game hear "multi-player" they think Quake. Show us that there's more available.
Some game developers have even told me that I'm not welcome in their game:
Shadowbane: "We don't play games to bake bread, we play them to crush!"
Legends of Kesmai: "Tired of making furniture? Want some real monsters to fight?"
That's fine. In fact, I appreciate knowing ahead of time that there won't really be much in your game of interest to me. It's certainly better than being lead to believe that there will be something and then being disappointed. It's better for these developers as well, because it keeps me from spreading disparaging reviews of their game.
Because of Shadowbane's ad we rally around "baking" as our catchphrase. I've also called myself by the more generic --and more accurate-- term: "crafter". You see, it's not just bread I want to bake.I also want to bake armor and dresses, phasers and chairs, scrolls and steam engines, swords and plow-shears, blasters and potion. I want to bake bread and anything else that is a relevant item for me to bake in your game.
There are a few other things that you'll need to keep in mind to keep me as part of your player base. They are pretty obvious, and if you've thought about attracting me as a customer, then you've probably thought of most of these already. I'm just listing them in case you missed one or two:
- The things I make have to be desirable to at least some of the other players of your game. They should not be necessary for all other players (I know some of your other players have little or no use for me) but they should be useful to all of your players. Note that useful might also mean pretty, interesting looking, and so forth in this context.
- It should be possible for me to reach the same status --fame, loot, rank, level, gold...(whatever you use)-- as other segments of your player-base (Monster Hunters, Explorers, Player Killers, Role Players...). But it is certainly reasonable to take into account the amount of risk involved in the reward. Standing next to a forge is certainly much safer than killing a Klingon. Mining may or may not be.
- I want to be able to enjoy the other parts of your game too. I know that I won't be as effective as a sergeant or wizard at fighting, but I want to be able to develop some of those abilities. At least let me develop them enough to explore the game that you created and occasionally adventure with my less mundane friends.
By the same token, I have no problem with other players who want to bake a little bread, but they should not be as good as someone who devotes more time and effort to it.
- As much as I like the idea of the items I make having a permanent place in your world, it's more important to me in the long run that your economy works. With that in mind, don't forget to include mechanisms for the items I create to: age / break / be consumed / need repairs / need recharging / decay / wear out / or whatever seems appropriate in your game.
- It should be easy enough to buy goods from me that other players do not feel that they need to create mules to ensure that they have an adequate supply of the bread I bake.
It should also be expensive enough to become a good baker that it is not cost effective to make a mule to produce bread for just one player. This cost does not have to be just in terms of shekels. I also consider the time that I have invested as part of that cost.
- Baking bread need not be a complected "sub game" that takes a lot of time for you to program. In fact, most of my members are at least as interested in using and/or selling what they make as they are in the process of making it.
But they don't want the baking to be tedious either. If someone wants 100 apple pies then there should be a way for them to make the pies without getting Carpel Tunnel Syndrom. They understand that this has to be "balanced" (perhaps with higher failure, less ability gain or lower quality pies) that's okay with them.
- If you are interested in making a more involved "subgame" for baking then many of us would find it enjoyable. But --in deference to those of us who would not-- it should probably be optional. If recipes are needed to make sweet rolls, let us sell those recipes to players who do not enjoy the "research subgame". Those of us who are not interested in a particular "subgame" understand that this too needs to be balanced in some way.
- The economy in your game has to work. Your players have to have enough money that the most expensive things we can make are within reach of and useful to-- at least some of them. By the same token, your players cannot have so much money that our lesser goods --those made by new bakers-- sit on the shelves and prevent new bakers from enjoying your game.
- Our cost to produce things has to scale well. It doesn't work for our cheapest goods to cost 10 shekels to make and for our most expensive goods to cost 40 shekels to make. Everyone will buy the 40 shekel variety and those that cannot yet make the 40 shekel variety will not sell anything. The necessary cost difference will depend on how scarce shekels are in your game. Keep in mind that the scarcity of shekels will change over time, and adjustments may be needed.
- Help us diversify. If every baker in your game is exactly the same we'll be bored, and the things we make will be viewed as commodities. Those things will cause us to quit playing your game sooner. We would rather be able to strive to be one of a few who are the best at baking a particular cuisine than to be among hundreds who are all equally "the best" at baking everything. We're okay with having limits on what we can make, or the quality of what we make based on our choices in the game. We don't necessarily like it, but we'll put up with it, because the alternative is worse.
- We don't like competition from your game servers. If you don't spawn computer controlled characters to go out and kill monsters, then you should not spawn computer controlled characters to go out and sell things that are substantially the same as the stuff we make.
However, we do understand that you will want to have computer controlled characters sell some items that are craftable --that's no problem-- but please do so in a way that does not make it impossible for new bakers to get started in their profession. This can be done by differentiating the items made by players and servers in terms of price, availability and/or quality.
- We don't like selling things to computer controlled characters. Those people who bake bread and sell it to computer controlled characters for money are not us. They are just looking for easy shekels without risk and without interacting with your other players. But you have to understand that if you want this to work then our lesser skilled members have to be able to make something that is useful and desirable to the other lesser skilled members of your player-base (see 9 above).
- We hope you can devise some way that we can advance our skill without requiring us to make 10,000 widgets. It's not that we dislike making (and selling) widgets, it's just that we tend to flood the market if that's the only way for us to advance. We really can't help ourselves; we like to gain skill like anyone else. But we do know that flooding the market isn't good for anyone. Please give us a way to avoid that.
- It's probably not a good idea for us to become increasingly more efficient at producing relatively low level items. It is certainly nice for the egos (and purses) of crafters with high ability, but it tends to lower the price of items to the point where crafters of lesser ability are forced to sell their products at a loss if they want to sell them at all. This then urges everyone to strive solely for the quickest advancement to the highest (ie profitable) abilities instead of enjoying your game at each stage as they come to it.
- The amount of time it takes us to bake a few cakes should not depend on how quickly we can click our mouse button; it should not depend on how fast our connection to your game is; it should not depend on how advanced our macro program we use is. Characters with the same traits, abilities, equipment and raw materials should take the same amount of time to whip up some cakes. Please don't make us into "twitch bakers".
- When you're writing your game, give some though to expanding crafting in the future; then don't forget us entirely. We tend not to be as vocal as some of your player- base, and the additions need not be large. But they will encourage us to keep playing, and let us know you're listening. We generally think it's more important to tweak things to make them both balanced and useful than it is to add new things.
- Find some way to let us know about your game. There's a chance we'll stumble across it on our own, but you can increase that greatly by letting us know you've done these things. No one is marketing their game to us now. In fact, some games clearly don't want us baking bread anywhere near their players. We don't expect a major marketing campaign, but if you do some of the things listed above let us know so we can try them out.
The next game to really try to support our "style of play" will not only gain many loyal players, but will also be enhancing the quality of their player-base. Not many kewl doodz bake bread.
Thanks, and we look forward to playing your game.
Sie Ming
[self appointed speaker for bread bakers of all varieties]
P.S. If you know a game designer personally, feel free to send this to him or her.