Artisan Archive

/Disagree

Sorry, but we can't get SOE to fix simple bugs, you want them to devote time/energy/money to set up a "trademark" system.

The BEST thing SOE can do for us is cut back on the sub-component crafting for a major part:

Example: If a Master Artisan is also a Master Architect, then the player should not have to create the sub-components needed to make the final product if s/he has all the materials and schematics to make them all.

At the same time, I'd rather have more choices in COLOR or APPEARENCE of items, but adding what could amount to be thousands of items? No.

On the Tailor front, I think that we should be able to put BE Enhancements into anything but shoes, belts, and gloves!

This will give players a better choice in the clothing they wear and provide a more diverse look.

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TailorEbau wrote:

Example: If a Master Artisan is also a Master Architect, then the player should not have to create the sub-components needed to make the final product if s/he has all the materials and schematics to make them all.

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NOOOOOOOOOOOOO I love my subcomponents. back back i say, leave my droid brains alone.

The one thing i like about being a MDE is all the different components needed to make one droid. In fact i wish all the crafting proffesions were more like like DE. If it was there would be a lot less fly by night crafters and more dedicated crafters that know what they are doing.

The Devs have already stated the Revamp Schedule.

Smugglers -------> Bounty Hunters -------> Rangers

revamp? crafting revamp?

After the Combat Upgrade, calling it a revamp isnt gonna make me feel better.

Mommy? Im scared........

A crafter eh? hand over your usefullness!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoo

Artisan Revamp -- scary.

That said, I've sort of been pushing for one for well over a year now. If you've got a little time, check out myCrafting: A Blueprint for the Future proposal.

Meanwhile, I had some additional thoughts on the "crafted vs. looted/quested" issue over on the Shipwright board, butsince these concepts areprobably equally applicable to Artisans (if not more so), I hope no one will mind if I mention them here.

1. Player Choice

Sid Meier (the guy behind the original Civilization among other things) once noted that his definition of what makes a game fun is "interesting choices." With that in mind, maybe there's a way to serve both quest recipients and crafters here.

Crafters have a choicewhen they have fantastic success filling in and experimenting on a schematic:we can either go ahead and make agreat prototypeitem, orwe can create a manufacturing schematic. What if the folks who earn quest items had a similar choice?

Option 1:Take the reward as anitem, which would giveyou a very powerful itemthat decayed rapidly.

Option 2: Take thereward as a schematic, which a crafter can turn into a usable item that has slightly less burly stats but which decays much less rapidly.

Or should it be the other way around to increase the volume of business that crafters can do?

2. Cost/Benefit Balancing

Getting here is really a two-step process.

First, youdesigneachusable itemin the gameto have bothadvantages and disadvantages. For everycool, desirable characteristic, there's some other undesirablecharacteristic that goes along with the good stuff -- for every benefit, there's an unavoidablecost. This insures that there's not just one item that everyone takes (*coughcompositecough*).

As long as you're careful to insure that the alternatives are balanced -- that one class of objects is never always clearly better than another class -- then you're creating a world of "interesting choices."

Let's say you've won SOE's "DeveloperFor A Day" contest, and you've decided youwant to offer anew class of crafting tools that have more effects on crafting.

The first step (from a functional point of view)is to think about what effects the object will have. Just for the sake of discussion, let's say you decide that the new crafting tools will have the following characteristics:

• Assembly Effectiveness -- influences assembly result


• Experimentation Effectiveness -- influences experimentation results


• Manufacturing Output -- influences the number of items manufacturable in1 run


• Construction Speed -- influences speed of producing prototypes or manf. items

Eachof thesecharacteristicswould bea 0-100 result that modifies the baseline result.That is, if a tool has an Assembly Effectiveness of 50, it doesn't do anything to the basic assembly calculation; if it had an AE of 100, it would add some nice amount to your chances of getting a great assembly result; if it had an AE of less than 50, it would actually reduce your chances of getting a desirable assembly result. (Note that you could use some other scale if you wanted; "0-100" isn't the thing to focus on here.) (Also note that you don't actually have to make "undesirable" mean "worse effects" -- just preventing you from getting the best effects could seem like enough of a disadvantage.)

Soif 50 is the "no effect" point, that allows you to assign "desirable" (above 50) and "undesirable" (below 50) valuesto each characteristic.

Next, you decide how you want to group benefits and costs. In this example, for crafted toolsI'd suggest giving Assembly Effectiveness and Experimentation Effectiveness an inverse relationship, increasing ManufacturingOutput should significantly reduce ConstructionSpeed,and increasing Construction Speed should decrease the typical values ofall three of the other characteristics.

By setting up these inverse relationships, you create a kind ofitem for which there is no "best" form -- each player will decide which is best for his or her personal needs.

And it doesn't stop there. Now you can also allow for a new kind of crafting tool that is dropped as loot or as a quest reward. All the characteristics still apply; what changes are the benefit/cost relationships. Maybe for a looted crafting tool, you can get a great Experimentation Effectiveness but it always comes with a very slow Construction Speed. Maybea crafting tool presented as a quest reward lets you crank out many more units than usual in Manufacturing Output (and at an acceptable rate), butcrafting itemswith that tool will suffer significant penalties toAssembly Effectiveness and Experimentation Effectiveness.

By specifying that usable items will have multiple characteristics that have meaningful in-game effects, and by further specifying that high values of one characteristic will always be balanced by low values in some other characteristic(s), you can balance the perceived value of items no matter how they're provided.

These ideasseem likethey might help to address the "crafted vs. looted/quested" item qualityconcern in a way that doesn't undercut anyone. Is there a problem withany of thisthat I'm not seeing?

--Flatfingers