Business And Economy Archive

When it comes to finding and harvesting resources, I'd prefer a player driven solution. Perhaps some of the abilities you talked about could come with Surveying IV (or a reincarnation of the mining profession). Harvesting as intended, I think is alright. If you're looking to harvest something and someone has beaten you to the spot, well they beat you to the spot. I've personally not had troubles with placing non-harvester structures due to harvesting operations. It seems to me the biggest problem with a field in the way would come from static lot trades. There have been several ideas on that but this might be a bad pace to discuss it.

I think increased factory crate sizes and resource containers would be super. I mean, a factory with space for 100 items and 50-item crates would really be the same as a factory with space for 50 items and 100-item crates in terms of database requirements. Of course, the second would be easier to load for us.

There have been quite a few ideas brought up on the Merchant forum about easing the pain of running a vendor. One such idea was to list a whole factory crate at a time with a price set per item. Then, people can buy what they like with the vendor removing what's needed from the crates. While on the subject, I'm compeled to bring up the need for a restock all button that saves prices and descriptions as well.

now that the CU has come and gone, I thought I'd give this a little bump and see if it can be seen by the powers that be so maybe they can give the crafters a little love now

I think we need to worry more about Looted Items being better then the crafted items (i.e. Weapons) then the time wasted making them.. Also Armor smiths have to wait a painfully long time for their components in factories.. but I think its irrelivant since players can go get a snazzy set of clone armor for a reward.

Meh I am just beign negative sorry

Great ideas. I would like to see harvesters instanced though that would make a big difference.

---

Striderr wrote:

The time-draining aspects I think can be broken down into 5 categories:

1. Finding resources


2. Harvesting resources


3. Making schematics


4. Running factories


5. Placing items for sale on vendors

---

---

Reggi wrote:

Meh I am just beign negative sorry

---

I find that if you ignore what SWG could be and lower your expectations to near nothing, you'll really enjoy yourself more. Then, you can move from the annoying state of negativity to soothing and enjoyable sarcasm. (It may sound like I'm kidding but I'm not. Seriously, just stop caring.)

Ok

#1 and 2 are not a big deal for me but I really like the idea here. Large mining fields are really an eye sore. But, if you allow 10 harvs in the space 1 or 2 previously took up then the lot traders will merely place 5-10 times the amount of harvesters in the same space.

Instead of the 10 harvs in the space of 1 or 2 I would make all harvesters and generators be underground. Mark the spot of the harvester with a metal plate with maybe a hatch or something and have a terminal come up from it that you use for maintance, hopper, etc. This will solve the problem with it being an eye sore and disrupting spawns while still taking up some space to keep strip miners in check. (they are not evil it is just the entire game is built on checks and everyone needs some restrictions or else the econ collapses.)

The selling of resource locations would be nice maybe make it an option in the surveying menu to put this location up for sale. Another thing I would like to see in the surveying line would be a tool to see what size harvester a resource spawn point could hold and add that to the resource location waypoint. Would advise to make the buying and selling of resource location player driven, with the game mech. only to keep everyone honest.

An idea on factories though with factory fields being equally as disgusting in the landscape of SWG is to make super factories. Maybe a building that can hold 10 factories, still takes up 10 lots but only the space of 2or 3 factories. Multiple hoppers (input), Single hopper (output albeit bigger depending on how many factories you have). Maybe the ability to make sequential runs (segments dump into input hopper 3 when segs finish factory 3 kicks in to make cores). And I really like the idea of being able to pay more maint/power to make your runs finish faster. Maybe 3x maintence and power to shave off 20% of the time. Would make things a lot easier without completely imbalancing things. Or as an alternative (or in addition) make factory speed experimentable within a large range. (would give arch. another quality based product.)

---

Striderr wrote:

The crafting system as a whole works pretty well, its far better than any other game. But there are time-draining aspects of the system that I believe needlessly waste the time of a large-scale crafter. I propose a few or all of the following changes to take place, in order to give those who like crafting a chance to be able to play as a crafter and as a combat type and not live in the game 24/7.

The time-draining aspects I think can be broken down into 5 categories:

1. Finding resources


2. Harvesting resources


3. Making schematics


4. Running factories


5. Placing items for sale on vendors

Almost everyone who is serious about crafting uses swgcraft.com to find their resources. It's impossible for one person and pretty damn difficult even for a large guild to be able keep up with all the shifts otherwise and not miss something super. Maybe that was the intent, I dunno, but I think we need to level the playing field and streamline this effort. Perhaps there can be a crafters guild of sorts in NPC cities (there kinda already is, where the trainers usually are in that building). In it, players could perhaps talk with NPC's to buy tips on resource shifts (pay for a list of whats out there). Or maybe even an exchange system where players could offer a waypoint to a juicy shift and payers could pay the asking price to download the waypoint into their datapad. Don't give players a reason to have to use outside websites to play the game. I love swgcraft, but I'd like to be able to take care of all my crafting duties inside of the game.

Harvesting resources is also an area that could be streamlined. Everyone has undoubtedly faced some sort of anger or frustration before due to massive fields of harvesters taking up space on a planet, or causing lag because so much stuff is loaded on the screen at once, or messing up creature spawns, etc. Allow architects to craft a new item, call it a mining facility or something of that sort, and have it basically be a container for mineral harvesters. Since players have 10 lots, each player can potentially lay 10 harvestors down on a resource shift, depending if they use lots for something else or not. Allow the new structure to act as a multiple harvestor, up to 10, as one object no matter how many harvestors were packed in (keep it about the same size, maybe the size of two harvestors). A player could place it if there were any number between 2-10 harvestors in it, and it would take the appropriate amount of lots depending how many harvestors were packed in the container. it functions exactly like harvestors do now, but takes up less game world space and gives the heavy harvestors the opportunity save some time.

Making schematics is pretty streamlined already. No real need to change this, at least for the purposes of saving time.

Running factories can be quite frustrating for a large scale crafter. This mainly boils down to 2 things. Factory run times and crate sizes. Lessen run times a tad, thats an easy fix. Crate sizes are also an issue not only for ease of loading things into factories, but to create less items in the game which means less of a strain on the servers. While you're at it, increase resource stack sizes too. If you make things take up less inventory space, you won't have to increase our storage sizes or have poeple have to have 25 houses to store all their crap in.

The vendor system isn't bad overall, but when it comes to factory runs, it gets a bit tedious. Why not allow us to place up multiple items for sale at once, if they are a run of items all for the same price? Less time wasted, and again, less of a hit on the servers.

If you like my ideas or have some of your own to contribute, please reply here. With enough support, maybe we can get a few of these changes to actually happen

---

First off I'd like to say that this is an excellent post, and deserves some Dev (er...sorry....not the real devs, just the PR devs...)

I really agree with your first point. Where this hits the hardest is people looking for flora, where each planet has it's own full set. What's so great about this idea is that they already have the groundwork laid for it. Droid Engineers make Interplanetary Survey Droids. As it is they only give you the name of the resource, which is useful only for knowing if the resource shifted. If they also offered the option (at some kind of cost of power or tools, or perhaps usage at a higher surveying skill level) to find the resource stats on these, it would save the enormous amount of time it takes to find the stats on all the resources. This would also have the effect of increasing Droid Engineers usefulness, as well as surveyors, not to mention bring in a market for large runs of surveying tools. The other changes you make are of a big scope, but would really improve the game in respect to item number 1 on your list.

I also think your second idea has great potential. It would give the architects a high-end market, which they sorely need now or will soon. The thought of just dropping 1 variable lot harvestor instead of trying to find the space for ten is excellent. Maybe even take it a step further and allow architects to make harvesters that take 2-10 lots seperately, since the main market for these would be high end resource junkies it would spread some of those stagnant credits around, and have the benefit of taking up far less space, thus allowing more people the opportunity to compete with multiple account users. It would also save a tremendous amount of time while placing harvesters. I'd also like to see the terrain requirements for harvesting lowered if not removed completely, or perhaps different types of harvesters added do deal with tough terrain. Someone also mentioned having the harvestors marked and most of the graphics placed underground to avoid the main concern of the static lot dealers: the space it takes to have those mines down. Very excellent solutions.

It would be nice to see 4 and 5, but those aren't my biggest concerns. I don't mind that factory runs take a long time. It allows me time for other pursuits, otherwise I might be tempted to craft more

Your last suggestion is probably the easiest to implement and the most important. I have sat at a vendor for over an hour relisting items. Due to lag it can take the vendor almost forever to upload new items, and with the current vendor bugs it's even worse having to do it over and over again. The ability to list multiple items simultaneously is so vital as to make one wonder why they didn't include it in the original design. They already have the multi-item select framework laid down, all they have to do is allow a singular price to be attached to all items, as well as the description. The only forseeable problem would be the increased server load of having to sort each item into it's proper category, but that framework is already there in the item code, and would have to happen with singular additions to the vendor anyhow. Adding the multi-item list feature would simply make life easier, and the game more enjoyable amd put no more stress on the servers.

I really hope we see some of these ideas on the older systems implemented before they release another expansion.