Bio Engineer Archive
Thread: Top 5 Official Dev Response
Drogon,
The problem we have is not that we don't have containers. we have tons of containers. I can put them in backpacks, houses, factories, banks, droids etc. etc. The problem is stacking, and there is simply no way to expect two completely dissimilar dna samples to stack. Dna samples are very unlike any material an artisan uses. They don't simply have numerical values and that's it like say a unit of steel and a unit of copper. There is a lot of other stuff like armor, special attacks, ranged attacks, and so forth. So even if somebody thought it would be a good idea to "average" the numerical portions of dna samples into a stack, the other non-numerical ones you just can't treat that way. What is the average between one having armor and the other not? what is the average between strong poison and mild disease?
Now personally, I don't see why they couldn't just say make all VHQ dna samples of say voritor lizards have identical stats and stack. Every VHQ voritor sample has 500 dexterity, 300 intelligence etc. I see no reason why that shouldn't be the case and don't think this would effect gameplay in any way except to the positive.
ArthurDentOnBria wrote:
I totally agree with the devs about skill cost. Weaponsmith and Armorsmith are the richest Sumo? I can't quantify that, but we've gotta be right up there with them. I don't think anyone with a straight face can say that we are underpowered right now or have no ways to make money. The only thing preventing BE from becoming THE crafting profession is the high skill cost to achieve it.
How did this get on our top 5 list anyway?
Not gonna dig back to find my initial post, but yes... WS/AS are the richest professions in SWG. They make products everyone needs, and their products decay a reasonable rate.
BE's, while not poor by any stretch of the imagination, are a second tier crafter. I didn't want to give the impression that we are hurting for money, because we're not. Right now, the small population size of BE's is inflating the credit earning capabilities of the class... there just ain't alot of us. Our products have a pseudo-universality to them, however, there is virtually no decay on creatures, so return trips for a new 'gun' aren't as frequent.
Overall, i'm quite happy with where we fit into the economics of the server. We just disagree as to where we fit in the pecking order of millionaires.
Actually, as I recall, it used to be like that, but was taken out because people were abusing it and using them as storage modules.
ArthurDentOnBria wrote:
I totally agree with the devs about skill cost. Weaponsmith and Armorsmith are the richest Sumo? I can't quantify that, but we've gotta be right up there with them. I don't think anyone with a straight face can say that we are underpowered right now or have no ways to make money. The only thing preventing BE from becoming THE crafting profession is the high skill cost to achieve it.
Massive difference, really. Even with our profession almost fully working well now, we cannot even begin to compare bank accounts with Weaponsmiths and Armorsmiths. We're talking people who have hundreds of millions in the bank (dead serious here, I know a good number of them on my server) and think nothing of it. This is no complaint at all, as long as I make just as much as I spend I'm happy... but to put us in the same category as these other crafting professions is a no go.
The minimum CL cap on some clones is to restrict certain types of skins to Creature Handler only. Believe the Dev stated this in a previous post. Just pure and simple, it was so a non-CH couldn't have the variety of a CH.
Hhehe besides can you imagine how many Kimo's would be running around if anyone could have one? 
The +25 cap is total. Doesn't matter if you have +25, +17, +18 garments all worn at the same time. Your effective bonus caps at +25. I agree it is very difficult to get close to the CL55 to CL75 creatures we want to sample for the best clone production. 
While I still manage to do it with ALOT of effort, I really wish they'd tweak the effectiveness of Mask Scent upwards... I'd much rather they let us extract a single DNA sample from a corpse though.... all gets into skill point expenditures (ExpIV is basically a pseudo-prereq for the class, inflating our skill point requirements even further beyond the already inflated requirements).
Or better yet, have said storage unit be a droid unit. Possibly both? Have a wearable that's smaller than what a droid genetics unit could hold?
Templar1865 wrote:
3)Stacking DNA sounds like an absolute pain in the ar$e from a programming perspective. Duplicate items with the same stats stack. Statistically, finding DNA that does that would be one-in-millions (billions?). Another solution is to create a new wearable. It could be coded to only accept DNA samples, and would extend our carrying capacity by 50 (or whatever arbitrary number is assigned to it).
only one phrase to Talthazar!
you want play in this stupid game? when only one class of crafters looks like dumbass and always have full inventory, full backpack, full droid sotrage, full factories, full houses, full friends of bull**edit**s from killing machine named mob?
and only one class of crafter what even dont know what the dammnit stats he will got after days of sampling
you like this game? it open to you play and pay for it
i want pay for my fun, not for your fun
all thing like stacks of dna or increase of capacity inventory, add +masc scent +camo, resizing of skillpoints neede for MBE -can be sold in one sec by devs! but they want trade few years of our bakcstab paying for them non-working
SOE can say Bye Bye to my 9 accounts
tired!
I'd like to add my suggestions to the Bioengineer list.
If this is not the place to do so, please let me know so I can move it and/or move it yourself and take all the credit, I really don't care.
1. I really don't have to interact with any other classes to get what I want to make creatures. it would be really spiffy if dna samples dropped on corpses, or if I could take the meat, hide, or bone from a scout character and turn it into a dna sample with my crafting tool. that prevents me from ever having to do so much as pick up a scalpel. and it's really darn cool.
2. It's icredibly odd to me that taking a dnasample kills the creature some of the time, and that some creatures like vynocks can take several hits without dying. especially when after dropping the sample in my house, I realize that it is in fact twice the size of the vynock. My request here: shrink the dna samples down to about the size of a bearded jax. Once a creature has had a sample taken from it, disallow all future attempts. add "dnasample" to the radial menu. make it impossible to kill a creature by dnasample. I admit I've earned lots of "dirty money" doing this but I'll be among the first to say it shouldn't be like this.
3. give bioengineers a message like "you can't succeed on a dnasample while your inventory is full." it really bugs me that I could be sampling for hours and never figure out what's going on. then I found out and got angry.
4. give us something to do with our old low quality bagaraset samples once we've got better stuff. I propose the "Splice" option, which allows us to take 2 dna samples and combine them. without experimentation, nothing happens and it "fails" creating a useless item. however, by combining two dna samples that have similar traits, I could experimentally create a dna sample that has high prowess at the expense of everything else. which is neat.
5. Never going to happen, but I'd like the ability to create a creature that looks completely different from the original template. like a freaky bearded jax with spiderlegs, a vulture beak, and two pairs of bat wings. yeah. then we could really start earning some money.
6. make all creatures decay. get old. die.You see, without a decaying market, we have to charge exorbitant prices because our customers don't come back. just make sure that a creature doesn't decay to death before it reaches its prime. it'd be nice if the ingredients other than the dnasample had an affect on this.
7. Let us change the color of a creature and keep it that way. its kinda sad that my miniature kimogila bearded jax doesn't even share the color of the creature whose dna is in the little thing.
In my experience as a Master BE on Intrepid Server, clone crafting in the wild has several avoidable critical failure causes. The most comon cause of critical fail on ASSEMBLY occurs when anything is added or moved in inventory while loadingDNA into a schematic. For example, your working on template #2 with tool #2 and tool #1 finishes production of template #1 and drops the prototype into your inventory, you then finish entering all the DNA and hit assemble and *poof* critical failure. The next most comon reason is getting agro'd while loading a schematic, this is instant critical fail, all is lost that was entered into the schematic. Solution is obviously to always fall back a safe distance from the creatures your sampling from once youve filled your inventory with DNA. Hope this saves someone some unnecessary grief.
Arimah
Intrepid server
Master Bio-Engineer
Master Carbiner
First Holo: Tailor
to be continued...
DNA stacking is not an issue for me, I believe the generic template completely solves this issue. I find it easy to have 40-50 inventory spaces to work from when making clones. Take a shot of muon, spend 10 mins filling your inventory with DNA, fall back to a safe distance, sit and assemble templates, toss them into my backpack and Im ready to do it again. I head back to coronet with 2 dozen templates ready to be assembled into any creature skin the customer desires.
Arimah
Intrepid Server
Master Bio-Engineer
Master Carbiner
First Holo: Tailor
to be continued...