Business And Economy Archive
Thread: BUYER BEWARE !!!!!! DON'T PAY OUTRAGEOUS PRICES FOR WEAPONS OR ARMOR !
OK thanks for posting the original source. That second item about the experimentation change is interesting. As an architect I don't see how that will have any signifiant impact to our crafting.
I didn't think the devs would say they are 'punishing' anyone. And they didn't. If you want to interpret it that way then thats your opinion but that is not what he said. He did say that they are making the changes to 'not allow' people to sit on massive inorganic material stockpiles. That is not 'punishing' anyone.
If someone stockpiles materials or future use then they are speculating. Speculation has risks. For example, I've paid a high cpu for an OQ 990 material only to see an OQ 991 material spawn within a week afterwards.
Its not that I don't have empathy for people who invest a lot of money into buying things only to have the system change, but we also can't expect the game to be static forever and for all our in game purchases to be price protected forever.
Pawlin wrote:
didn't think the devs would say they are 'punishing' anyone. And they didn't. If you want to interpret it that way then thats your opinion but that is not what he said. He did say that they are making the changes to 'not allow' people to sit on massive inorganic material stockpiles. That is not 'punishing' anyone..
On the contrary - in the context of that question and subsequent ones, they said their motive and goal was as you noted "not allow"ing people to have stockpiles. That means that they remove or render worthless a significant portion of the stockpiles which, in my own case, can run as high as 250 million credits worth.
Removing or rendering worthless a valuable commodity for the sole purpose of denyingit to a person who already OWNS itis punishment - is punitive - and I cannot see how any other motive can be assigned to that action. It is punitive. It is punishment. It is specifically a 'taking' from a person without compensation. It is a form of theft at worst - a clear punishment for being successfulat best.
What other motive can you glean from that clear statement of intent? That they wanted to reward me by taking my money and making it unsatisfactory to be a resource collector? That in place of a pat on the head and a badge saying "You're A Swell Guy!!" they rationally thought that turning half of my riches into trash would be equivalent?
That's like going to your grandparent's wedding anniversary and instead of a gift, you just smash their car windshields in with a crowbar and light your Grandma's cat on fire. "Hey Gramps! Here's your gift!"
Message Edited by Handsnake on 05-06-2005 05:07 PM
Handsnake wrote:
Pawlin wrote:
didn't think the devs would say they are 'punishing' anyone. And they didn't. If you want to interpret it that way then thats your opinion but that is not what he said. He did say that they are making the changes to 'not allow' people to sit on massive inorganic material stockpiles. That is not 'punishing' anyone..
On the contrary - in the context of that question and subsequent ones, they said their motive and goal was as you noted "not allow"ing people to have stockpiles. That means that they remove or render worthless a significant portion of the stockpiles which, in my own case, can run as high as 250 million credits worth.
Removing or rendering worthless a valuable commodity for the sole purpose of denyingit to a person who already OWNS itis punishment - is punitive - and I cannot see how any other motive can be assigned to that action. It is punitive. It is punishment. It is specifically a 'taking' from a person without compensation. It is a form of theft at worst - a clear punishment for being successfulat best.
What other motive can you glean from that clear statement of intent? That they wanted to reward me by taking my money and making it unsatisfactory to be a resource collector? That in place of a pat on the head and a badge saying "You're A Swell Guy!!" they rationally thought that turning half of my riches into trash would be equivalent?
That's like going to your grandparent's wedding anniversary and instead of a gift, you just smash their car windshields in with a crowbar and light your Grandma's cat on fire. "Hey Gramps! Here's your gift!"
Message Edited by Handsnake on 05-06-200505:07 PM
I wouldn't say this was done to "punish" anyone, of course. It was done to aid the poor budding crafters that couldn't compete in an established market. How anyone can view having the bar lowered to where you are rather than working to achieve the status you seek as success is beyond me. So, the people that couldn't compete before still can't, they just don't need to anymore. What I'm trying to say is the devs' goal was to grant a false sense of accomplishment which just so happens to end up being the same thing as a punishment for established, dedicated, successful business owners.
Pawlin wrote:
Handsnake wrote:
...Most MWS players have lost tens to hundreds of millions of credits on their resources due to the unannounced and untested experimentation calculation change that was snuck in without notice and was done according to Blixtev's post in the armorsmith forum specifically to punish long term crafters.
...
Huh?
What post is that you're refering to from Blixtev? I'm doubtful that any SOE dev would be dumb enough to say that they changed something to "punish" anyone.
And are you talking about Weaponsmith or Armorsmith?
First, to answer your last question - I'm talking about ALL experimented crafter professions. And for your first question - two specific responses by Blixtev in two separate threads (the first cut-n-pasted by the AS correspondent, the second written and posted by Blixtev himself).
I will post the thread url and highlight the quotes that are germane.
First, in : http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=armorsmith&message.id=90911
2) Named resource requirements are just hella high still. Especially for stuff NO ONE wants to harvest, like Naboo Bristley. I worked the following solution out with the community:
-Reduce all Named organics (i.e. Naboo bristley, lokian leathery) to just generic bristley or leathery. Then move the organics from the cores into the skin at a 1:1 ratio. You thus preserve the amount of resources we need, but still make it possible for us to craft decent armors.
This means the one point that experimentation is the most important (protection and condition) would be mainly controlled by resources that come out of the grounds in millions. Using organics allows us to reinforce some interdependencies and not allow people to sit on massive multi million stockpiles of metals/ores.
Blixtev wrote:
Nice find, this was a change to crafting that was made back in Oct-Nov that didn't make it live until the rest of the code did. It seems to have been overlooked so I will give a brief outline.
Old Crafting Method:
Resources range from 0-1000, the closer you got the stats to 1000 the better the outcome of the item. The problem in this system was that many items use several different types of resources that could never approach 1000 in the stat called for in the schematic. For example the conductivity of iron is very poor.
A gun calls for generic metal(can have a high oq and cond), copper(generally has high cond and can have high oq) and a named iron(terrible cond max and can have a high oq) This gun will always suffer from that poor iron in it simply because the cond range for this iron is 50-120 for example. No matter how good the iron you can never craft a beyond a certain point as the iron gates it.
Why you may ask?
Well the old method just dumped all your resources into a virtual bucket, and based the stats on the sum total of the bucket.
New crafting Method:
The crafting scripts now look at the RANGE of every material for the slot it is going into. So if an iron that has a conductivity of 99 needs to go into the conductivity slot, the script looks up and sees that the max iron's Cond can be is 150. This means your iron is weighted as 99/150 instead of 99/1000. This means your iron is much more effective now.
With the tweaks made to the system we can now control the values of the slots in a way that makes sense, instead of the virtual bucket sum total method.
Sorry about not posting anything on this.
So for example - rhodium steel. You have a choice between harving 990 OQ/51CON or a rhodium at 798 OQ/78 CON. What do you do? Well, you USED TO harv the first one because the OQ value made a difference and the gated under 100 CON values were identical in effect.
Message Edited by Handsnake on 05-06-2005 01:30 PM
Handsnake wrote:
Furthermore, nearly 70% of all crafters have cancelled. That means that supply is critically short.
Vastar wrote:
Again, Pawlin, the unlikley event of someone hoarding resources only to dump them later in an effort to bring down the market for that particular resource is still not the same as the crafting system being altered. One is a player interacting with the game world. The other are the rules being changed mid-game in order to even out expended effort between players.
Well I made the analogy about resources spawning and someone else dumping resources on the market to illustrate that the resources we have in stockpiles can see their value change at any time. There are no guarantees. Nobody should be expecting their resources to retain a specific credit value forever. The value of the resources is dependent on several variables and stockpiling them is speculation which carries risk.
If some people were working with the assumption that the rules of crafting were set in stone and would never change then that was a wrong assumption.
Rule changes with a point that have the side effect of devaluing effort are one thing. Rule changes that are done for the sake of devaluing effort are another.
I wouldn't say this was done to "punish" anyone, of course. It was done to aid the poor budding crafters that couldn't compete in an established market.
This I agree with. I've heard people say more than once that SOE doesn't want individual players to be able to monopolize a market place. The rule changes are most likely intended to curtail that kind of activity and open the door for more crafters to compete. And I think the devaluing of existing material stockpiles is a side effect.
How anyone can view having the bar lowered to where you are rather than working to achieve the status you seek as success is beyond me. So, the people that couldn't compete before still can't, they just don't need to anymore. What I'm trying to say is the devs' goal was to grant a false sense of accomplishment which just so happens to end up being the same thing as a punishment for established, dedicated, successful business owners.
Well SOE has to try and keep things from being too hard or too easy. Thats a tough balance. I thinkfrom someperspecitves come crafting profs have been difficult to break into.Apparently SOE thought it was best to make things a little easier in someways.
But crafters still compete with each other in the market so nobody is getting any automatic wins. The people whohad success in the past will still have success in the future.
As it was, if two crafters in the same profession made the same efforts, one could not monopolize anything. If one could, it's only because that one put in more effort somewhere along the line. To artificially change that is like saying half way through losing game of chess that everyone's pawns can now move and kill like the queen. Sure, you could do that and it would balance things out again a bit more. It would also make the game pointless and any victory hollow.
I tried to illustrate an idea about the effect of easing the barrier to enter a market. If someone wishes to do well in a profession, they can put in the effort to do so. If the effort required is lowered for those that have already put it in and for those that have yet to put it in, no one will be able to succeed in the profession as it was. They will be able to succeed in a completely different system. That being the case, why would someone that is unable/unwilling to work tword a difficult goal not simply pick one of the easier professions to get a start in? The effect is the same on the new crafter but it doesn't punish the established one. Part of the fun and the reason I wanted to do Armorsmithing is that it was difficult. It was a challange to get going.
As far as resources go I don't think they really made Armorsmith easier. They increased the number of resources and made them use more organics, right? By reducing the inorganics and increasing the organics, it makes it so that its harder to rely on a giant stockpile of the best materials.I think what they were seeing is that the established crafters have sit on large stockpiles of old high quality materials (the OQ 990-1000 type stuff). This gives them a big advantage over the new people. So if your new and don't have the super-metal from 13 montths ago then you either have to wait forever for something equally good to spawn, buy it at a huge price or make lower quality goods. THats not much fun. By changing the resource requirments to be more hide/bone then it limits the amount that people can stockpile at any time. Sure people will still stockpile but they won't be able to get as much as if they just used harvesters.
But I guess they did make armorsmith easier at least as far as experimentation goes. That might just have been a consequence of how they changed the way armor works. If you take away HAM costs cause HAM changes then armor looses an experimentation line. SOE still might have favored making armorsmith easier though so this might have been acceptable consequence for them.
SOE may have also wanted to make armorsmith a little easier in order to increase supply. As long as supply is low, prices are higher. If prices are too high then the average player has a harder time. The price of armor is something that people have frequently whined about and SOE might hear that and agree to some extent.
I do understand the concern that some Armorsmiths don't want to see their profession made too easy. Architect is not very hard in a lot of ways and it has negative consequences. You can grind to master in an hour. Most of our products don't have any quality and those that do aren't hard to maximize. This leads to more competition, less stability in the suppliers and more supply.
Zhundult wrote:
Handsnake wrote:
Furthermore, nearly 70% of all crafters have cancelled. That means that supply is critically short.
I'm curious, do you have any actual numbers on crafters who have quit? Not trying to start anything, just want to know if there are actual numbers, or if you're just making up that number to sound good?
Actually, that was an estimate downgraded from my experience on Lowca. On my contact list, out of49 competitors and suppliers of MWS and MDE, only 3 were not cancelled as of Wednesday (edit, had to check my dates).
On a quick survey of 2 other servers (Flurry and Kettemor) my friends and associates reported an average of 80% cancellations. I figured since we're on smaller servers that it wouldn't hit others as hard - thus my estimate of 70% instead of 80 to 93.9%.
Message Edited by Handsnake on 05-08-2005 06:13 PM
Handsnake wrote:
...On a quick survey of 2 other servers (Flurry and Kettemor) my friends and associates reported an average of 80% cancellations. I figured since we're on smaller servers that it wouldn't hit others as hard - thus my estimate of 70% instead of 80 to 93.9%....