Bio Engineer Archive

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The devs like to ensure that some items are hard to make and are especially valuable, sadly in the case of some of our items they are hard to make but not all that valuable at all. Items which need meats are not designed to be mass produced since they are supposed to be limited in availability, this isn't a problem as it means the costs are higher. That pretty much sums up everything about bio-engineers since nothing we make can actually be mass produced with ease, even petstims can't be churned out with ease in thousands because of the fact taluisan fungus isn't all that common and isn't always that great.

But anyway, this isn't my choice.. it's what the devs have said on the website if you look:

"There are more eggs too. When "Searching Lair", players will now find more eggs that can be used in recipes (though it is not intended to be enough for manufacturing)."

So it seems that in terms of organic resources some are meant to be limited.

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angelonfire wrote:

tell me tal, why not? you say that we're not supposed to be able to manufacture things easily. why not? why just our profession and most of the items in it are unmanufacturable? and that's 90,000 of meat to make one schematic of meat.. it's no typo. if it takes 90 to make one, it takes 90,000 to make a schem of 1000.

*snip*

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Umm, no - it still only takes 90 units of meat to make the schematic, whether its a schematic for one item or for 1000 items. You have either never actually done a factory run on anything or are deliberately misrepresenting the situation.

Yeah, it'll take you 90k meat to actually make 1000 units but what the heck do you expect? The whole point of BE is that what we make is special, not the bog-standard, run of the mill usual stuff turned out by the regular crafters. You say that makes us worse, I say that makes us better. You don't use BE enhanced food for just grinding out experience, you use it when it matters and you pay accordingly.

Btw, if you have a problem getting 10s of thousands of meat I would have to say you need to be a lot smarter with your chief customer, the CH Get a few of those collecting for you and getting meat is trivial.

Not enough meat>Why do you think I have Tracking 3 and working on 4 in Ranger? *grin* Better harvesting is a very good thing. Then again I have TKA paired with my BE.

Astu (Valcyn)

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angelonfire wrote:
a dime a dozen? at this rate they're not going to touch a crate of food for under 1mil once all the products and time are counted in. and again, this is not exagerated or a typo. 90k of meat going at a low rate of 10cpu would be 900,000 for the meat alone. that's completely uncalled for. why bother having additives if they're untouchable by the public? something needs to be said and done about it. this game is a job enough without the added bs of trying to get meat for nearly every **edit** thing we make and STILL can't harvest from dna killed animals. might as well change our profession to Butchers, cause that's what I feel we are.. give us the meat, we're you're best processors for it.

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You're underestimating how good these additives are. As a Chef, I can tell you I'd happily pay 1 million credits for a run of 1,000 heavy BE additives. Of course, that really understates the problem. 10 cpu? HA! On my server at least good meats sell for 40-50... and if you want scouts out there harvesting for you, you'll have to be paying a price competitive with that of their other clients. This ignores the of flora as well, and while cheaper, harvesters don't run for free. By the time you figure in a profit for yourself, you're likely looking at charging 8+ million for a single run of heavy additives. They're good, but I'm not sure how many customers would pay the king of end-user prices I'd have to charge to make this work (10,000 credits for a single drink!)

You guys need to simply forget most of these additives even exist and change your expectations. The patch notes may say 12 additives exist, but the simple truth is you guys will only be selling those that require the least meat and milk (sound familiar?) in relation to thier effect, namely heavy nutritional supplements (20 creature food, just 5 more than a light) and *maybe* light flavor supplements (20 milk). All those other recipes simply don't exist.

PLEASE point out to the BE dev that it will require 2000 milk to make enough Heavy Flavor additive for a crate of chef stuff. Ask them to change this to a resource that is accessible, even if it has to be a specific kind of meat (e.g. Dathomir Carnivore Meat).

No one ever wants single items, they want crates of the stuff.

This whole, "well its special use only and we're not supposed to make it in bulk" theory is crap when compared to actual game experience.

Perhaps we could at least get an additional bonus to harvesting rates somewhere up the BE tree... maybe in the DNASampling line? I could see that at sampling 4 we also get +20 (or +30)to harvesting, thereby allowing us to nearly double the resources we get from harvesting as well as perhaps allowing us to harvest creatures we killed through sampling as a secondary bonus.

This way, we would be able to better acquire large quantities of the meats we need, without simplifying our work too much and belittling our efforts. It would still be very hard to get mass quantities for a factory run, but at least it would be a little easier than now, and that alone might be enough to assuage some of the dissenting masses.

This type of a change (that crosses classes from Scout to BE) would be very similar to one that Combat Medics got a while ago where they receive a Terrain Negotiation bonus (also from scout) as they progress up the CMtree.

"and that alone might be enough to assuage some of the dissenting masses."

Possibly, but who knows.

In SWG things people buy and how they buy them fall into 3 categories.

1) Permenant item - House deeds, harvesters, furniture etc... People will buy a single one of these items, since it lasts forever.

2) Long term use item - Armor, guns, BE tissues (in clothing) that take a few months to decay. Once again, you can sell a single one of these items.

3) Short term consumable - Food, spice, stim packs, slicing tools, repair kits etc... etc... all fall into this category. And people for the most part want CRATES of this stuff, enough to last a few weeks at least. When is the last time someone bought *ONE* stim pack to use for a special occasion? "Could you just make me 1 stimpack?" Sure it happens, but thats the vast vast minority of time.

Do you really think a chef is going to say, "Yeah, I just need5 of those food enhancers."??!?

When was the last time you bought just 1 muon gold or breathe of heaven or whatever mind buff? (If you even use mind buffs)

In theory the idea of not making many of these sounds all well and fine and even fun to some degree. But making this stuff practically unmakable in a factoryis basically going to relegate this stuff to the useless part of the skill tree.

- Pahbi

There are people on every server with hundreds of millions of credits in the bank. There are many, many people with 10s of milions of credits in the bank. Many many many peopel have a few million credits in the bank. People will buy anything. People will pay anythign to get miniscule advantages over other people.

High priced, premium products will be bought if they are marketed properly. You probably won't sell a ton of heavy-additive barrel-sized buff foods on a vendor in some player city mall that you only hope people wander past.

No, you invest the money or time in the meat to make a few crates. You take your time and you expereiment the hell out of it till you get the sweetest possible product you possibly can. It will be unique because no one else is crazy or stupid enough to make that much of it.

Then you take it to your server boards and market the hell out of it. You post to those idiotic PVP threads and point out that with +200% burst run duration or with -100% incap time you could have done such and such, You causally mention you have x crates of such and such.

You auction it on the boards. You will sell. People pay millions for stupid things. They pay millions for good things. Make friends with a chef. Invest together and split the board auction profits 50/50. Get creative.

Let the masses buy your prepacakged mass-produced run-of-the-mill supermarket foods. The few crates of gourmet, aged, prime, smuggled, imported, secret recipe. 11-herbs-n-spices delectables that you keep under the stairs in the cellar, can go to the highest wealthy bidder. Because they appreciate it and it amuses them. Because they lke to outbid each other. Because these same people will drop millions of credits on a weapon that is not even 30% better than somethign they can get for 50K. The same people that pay millions of credits for a tusken robe, or tip dancers 200k for a mind buff. It happens you know.

" It happens you know."

Anything can happen.

The vast vast majority of players 95%+, however, only buy rapidly consumed items (spice, food, drinks, camps etc...) by the crate.

- Pahbi

Then you missed my point. The system is not set u p such that you can amrket the very best of what you can conceivably make to 95% of the player base. it's too expensive and cumbersome for traditional fast food packaging. You *can* make a profit on the higest end stuff, by marketing it to the top 5% demographic. Sorry if my examples weren't clear. You can hate the system, and throw your hands up in disgust and lament that you will not be able to sell food 3 and 4 times better than the base as easily and cheaply as the base, or you can get creative and find a way to exploit the possiblities.