Artisan Archive

Top issues:

1. Bugs remain a top complaint on the Artisan forum. The current bug list thread is http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=artisan&message.id=17873

2. Artisans, and related elites, continue to have questions about experimentation. Experimentation does not feel right. Successes will often reduce attributes. Tools and Crafting stations appear to have little if any effect in the experimentation process. Optional subcomponents do not make a noticeable effect on many items (such as repair tools). The general feeling seems to be that quality should matter more - but not to the extent that novices are producing worthless items.

3. Artisans feel the need for artisan specific items that will have a market. Currently we are making items that are upgraded at the first opportunity, subcomponents, and powerups. Unique items have little appeal to our customers, the Nemoidian birdcage is the best example. If there were birds for the cages, it might have some appeal as a decoration - currently it's most famous use is as a torch stand.

4. Surveying needs a lot of work. It is not at all interactive, even with the new pop-ups. A discussion thread on this issue has been started, so that I can report more concrete feelings/ideas for improvement in next week's update.

5. Many artisans would like to be more involved in the GCW/PvP. Since the whole system is combat related at this time, it is difficult for many artisans to take the jump. Last week we discussed the artisan role in the GCW. The thread is located here: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=artisan&message.id=17350

6. The bazaar filter still needs a lot of work. It would be nice to see weapons and resource containers seperated into more detailed categories (steels, coppers, polymers, pistols) and to have deeds sort to their appropriate categories. Any improvement to the filter will be appreciated.

7. Crafting missions are still paying based onweapon skills, this is unacceptable.

8. Resource shifting is a difficulty for 'casual gamers' who are not able to log on and record shifts on a daily basis. There are suggestions that an in-game method of tracking resources becomes available (although there is also a vocal group of 'miners' who like the difficulty the system currently has). There should be some middle ground here. Additionally, some resources (LG Ores and Wind for example) never seem to spawn in high percentages - feature or bug?

9. Harvester placement needs to have a better dialogue as to why the harvester can or cannot be placed in a certain location. It is very difficult to locate buildable areas at times. The UI on energy remaining time and rates needs to be more intuitive.

10. Artisans would like to see some perks such as additional droids, or lots. Especally at the master level. Many artisansfeel the benefits of MAare trivial - other than the electronics components.

Please feel free to continue the discussion on this thread, with your issues - comments - suggestions or just your general impression of the Artisan profession. This thread has been copied to the Correspondent board with a link to your comments, and will be updated weekly.

Bianca Minola

Here is the bug list, for convience.

1. Harvestorswill often incorrectly report that you need to empty the hopper before redeeding.*this is fixed on test with a new empty hopper buttonon the harvester interface.
   
2. Unabe to sample resource for a period of time after it's appearance in a resource shift. Resource density reported as too low to sample regardless of the percentage.
   
3. Waypoints 'stick' while surveying,requiring a relog. Additional information available in Artisan #1 Issue report.
   
4. While not specifically an artisan issue, I experience this mostly when checking my harvestors. Mobs tend to not appear in the game until you are within 40 m or less. This isn't so bad with the non-aggressives and the creatures we can hide from, but when you're running along and suddenly 10 aggressive swoopers jump you, it pretty much ruins my fun, enjoyment and suspension of disbelief - this is especially dangerous to the artisan with little combat effectiveness.
   
5. Crafting tool experimentation appears to have zeroto little effect in the quality of the tool produced. There is much debate as to whether a +10 tool is actually any better than a-10 tool.
   
6. Artisan missions are paying based on skill with equipped weapon, instead of relevant survey/artisan skills.
   
7. Pressing enter during a crafting session progress meter may cause your next crafting stage to behave nondeterministically. You may lose all of your items if you press the enter key one time too many too quickly.
   
8. I have a annoying bug that appears when I use the surveyor or crafting tools.
   When I'm done using the tool and want to use my map (ctrl+M) or inventory (ctrl+I) or any other control-command it wont work. To get by this I have to open any of the tool-windows again and close it. THEN it work to use the control-stuff. Not sure if this bug is just for surveying and crafting tools or if it has something to do with the task-bar since it may be combined with the shift-pressing issue. I haven't changed any keys in my settings. They're all set to standard. *we need to get this one nailed down.
   
9. There was an interesting bug with factories... I'm not sure if it's fixed or not. (It wasn't last week). This is what happened: I have my shop and factory on Rori... a place not very travelled. Sometimes my house would disappear... it'd take anywhere from 1-5 minutes for it to load up again. This happened for all structures around my house. When my factory disappeared, I'd have to make it reload again before it would complete the items. *we need to get this one nailed down
   
10. Some how, some way, my resources are evaporating out of my hopper if I leave it sit for a length of time after a resource shift. *we need to get this one nailed down
    
11. Time remaining on harvester energy isvery non-intuitive - it needs to be in days and hours like the maintence is.
    
12. Experimentation feels very buggy. Successes that lower attributes, is the most visible of the bugs. This is difficult to pin down - it just 'feels' wrong.
    
13. Creature Habitats are not paying XP when crafted.
    
14. Optional components in tools appear to have no effect in the final product.

Bianca Minola

12 Experimentation feels very buggy. Successes that lower attributes, is the most visible of the bugs. This is difficult to pin down - it just 'feels' wrong.

Which exact item is this happenming with? I haven't ever seen this behaviour withitems I create. If this is true, the exact items and schematics this is happening with are needed by the DEVs to be able to look into it.

Goff McMerrii
Miner

I disagree very strongly with the repair tool comment. For testing on some weapons a few nights ago, I made one with and one without the components. Same materials, same crafting station/tool etc etc. Without the components, I could never get above 60% effectiveness. With them, it was always greater than 90%. A couple of test runs on junk weapons confirmed this with the 60% tool drastically reducing the lifespan of the weapon where the 90% tools barely touched them.

The one thing that is completely broken is the Droid repair tool. Wander over to the DE boards for some comments about that and some pretty pointed comments about the knowledge/capabilities of the Devs about their own code. (ie why do we have non-functional repair tool, a repair module that fits into a droid to repair other droids _and_ the devs saying that because we can't repair droids, they're making us a new schematic for it (why cna't they just fix the tool we already have?)).

I found an interesting feature of the useless droid repair tool. My medical droid was down to maybe 3 uses left. I decided to try a repair tool on him just to see if the devs had fixed the repair bugs (I don't follow the droid discussions much). No message popped up, but when I looked at my droid's characteristics, again, his life was restored to 20 uses. When I "repaired" him I was in my own house. Not sure if that has any affect onhow the bug works, but I thought I'd throw in all the factors.

12. happens to me with all CDEF weapons' qualities. Minimum damage is the most obvious.

BF - so you're saying the customisation number gets upped again? It's the only number that I know of that's in the 0-20 range for droids (vitality is 0-100). That's new. I've not seen that before. I'll check it out at lunch when I can in for 5min or so.

Yeah. It's the customization number. When I pulled the droid out and got some message about the droid's low life, I decided to see if the repair tool could increase the customization number and sure enough, it did.

Seems to me if the droid can have a repair module placed into it and repair other droids, the code already *exists* for making repair tools work. It is just a matter of copy and paste and spell check, plus add a few controls such as limits on how many times it will work, although that should already be listed in the number of items that are present in the stack. It really should not be as hard as it apparently is, unless they all lied about their talents to get the job, something that happens more often than we really want to know. Do you really want to know if the guy who programs your pacemaker got top of the class or a D-?

i

Where to begin...

1: Droid batterys have no power required component. What are we recharging droids with?

2: Schematics in general (all types) should list what resource attributes it is looking for. Decay resistance seems to be an unused statistic as nothing ingame decays right now.

3: All sub components for advanced professions should be buildable by Artisans. I do not see why an energy distributer is not needed in a power droid but is needed for the architect component which is needed.

4: I hear that a surveying tool can be used by anyone as long as they open the tool up. Does this mean that our ability to sample and survey is useless considering ANYONE can own a tool. We also are unable to select a resource to look for without using a tool anyway so basically the commands are so we don't have to click an onscreen button?

5: It is nearly impossible to tell when we are far enough from a town to build any structure. Can this be adjusted so that we get a message when we are allowed to build?

I'll leave this at that point now. Unless we can start building ammo clips for those guns.

A couple of issues I've seen in the past week

1. There are now 2 buttons for destroying resources from a harvestor and only 1 for retreiving them that is stuck in the middle of the other 2. It would be nice if the button was moved to the other side to avoid accidental hitting of the other buttons. Also, could there be an easier way(a button) to retrieve all of the resources from the harvestor into inventory rather than multiple steps we have to use now.

2. Sampling popups are have really been annoying when trying to sample to check stats on items. A number of times I've had the popup come up on my first try and then had to wait for timer to cycle again before I might be able to get the resource. Would it be possible to have the popups have a delay of a minute or so before they start happening or provide us with a way to check resource stats without haveing to physically pull it out of the ground.