Business And Economy Archive
Thread: Ways to improve the time-consuming aspects of crafting
I will make more detailed replys when I get some time, but just a quick comment about the large scale crafter thing. By this I mean those who do factory runs of stock weapons or armor, houses etc. This to me is just one aspect of the market. The other side of the market is the custom order market, and particularly the enhanced item market. Weapons and armor in particular made with loots have to be hand crafted and can sell for a nice markup to make good profits. Small-time crafters can easily corner a market like this without requiring fields of harvestors or any factories at all. And I know many crafters who make a good living doing this. However, this does not help the fact that it can sometimes (especially post-CU) be tough to find generic things like basic weapons, armor, food, meds, etc. that people can use to level or just for casual play. It is much too cumbersome for a crafter to hand-craft these things and honestly the profit margins are generally small enough that its not worth the effort unless they can produce in large quantities. For example, I made a run of armor just before the CU that took over 3 weeks of factory time using 16 factories running pretty much 24/7. Not quite enough to fill the vendors up, but a good deal of armor. Took me two nights just to put it all up in labelled backpacks, etc. Then it all sells in like 2-3 weeks. So unless I am constantly making armor 24/7 there is no way I can keep up.
I think there is plenty of ways for new crafters to make money while still having the larger scale crafters supply generic runs of things for the general public. I feel that generally there is still as much if not more demand out there for stuff than there is supply. Anyone who makes quality products will sell them if they market them appropriately. How much you make is simply how much time you have to put into the profession.
More replies to come, I gotta get to bed!
Before I say anything else, thanks for taking the time to come up with these ideas, Striderr. It's creative work like this that keeps me hanging around SWG and this forum in particular.
Having said this, however, I hope you won't mind if I express some concerns.
Striderr wrote:
there are time-draining aspects of the system that I believe needlessly waste the time of a large-scale crafter.
I don't think the game needs to be made more difficult for anyone (particularly crafters), but why does it need to be made easier for large-scale crafters?
A major concern of mine right now is the imbalance between PA-backed crafters (who have access to many lots for harvesters and factories) and the independent crafter. It's already very difficult for a new or independent crafter to compete for sales because the large-scale players have significant advantages... so why do these advantages need to be compounded?
While large-scale crafters wouldbenefit from your suggestions, I'm concerned that it would further tip the balance away from new/smaller crafters. Given that it's already hard enough for these folks (and that they're also subscribers who are paying for entertainment in this game), I question the need for the changes you're proposing.
I'm not suggesting thatgameplay needs to be madeless funfor the bigger players. I just need to understand whygameplay should be madeless funfor the smaller players, which I think would happen if your suggestions were implemented.
Let me try to address your specific suggestions:
Finding resources:
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.
I'm not stronglyopposed to these kinds of ideas -- they're actually pretty inventive. (I'd expect nothing less from a crafter.
) But let's look at them anyway.
First, how is it "impossible" for an independent operator to keep track of resource shifts? We have 80 personalinventory slots now, plus 50 more if we carry a backpack. That's enough to haul all your survey devices, plus a lot of harvester deeds, plus armor and sundries, and still have enough inventory slots to hold a sample of every single type of resource on the ground. Following resource spawns is then just a matter of cycling through your survey tools to see what's new, destroying no-longer-existing resource samples in your inventory, and driving around toadd samples of the new resources. (Keeping track of space-based resources doesn't complicate this much.) It's like having your own personal, in-gameSWGcraft. 
Second, for some people this process isfun! It's the "mining minigame." Of course there are some people to whom this is boring, whose primary interest is in dominating all competitors and who therefore perceive anything that slows them down as a "problem" to be "fixed"... but where is it written that these folksget to decide how the game should be played? Don't the subscription-paying players who actually enjoy this mining process deserve tohave their interestsconsidered?
This particular playing field seems to me to befairly levelas it is. I'm open to ideas for improving the resource surveying game, butthere'd need to be a good explanation ofhow those ideas don't just favor one group that already has significant advantages.
Harvesting resources
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.
At first I really liked this idea. If nothing else, it's innovative, and that deserves credit.
But as I got to thinking about it, once again this looks like something that would mostly benefit the big players (who, again, already have the major advantage of being admin'ed to many, many harvesters and factories).
The problem is that collapsing ten harvesters down to one means that you're able to increase by an order of magnitude the number of harvesters you can place onthe center ofa hotspot.Where you could place ten heaviesnow, you'd be able to place 100 using harvester containers (assuming the containers have the same footprint as a heavy).Thisisn't muchhelp tothe individual who just has ten lots, but the big players -- who have no limit on the number of harvesters they can be admin'ed to --would be able to harvestvastly more resources than they currently get bybeing able to concentrate more harvesters on the very center of a hotspot.
To be fair,if this change were implemented it would bethe active players who'd profit, and that's a good thing. The big players who depend on having huge fields of harvesters that never get moved wouldn't benefit -- if a hotspot moves out from under you, it doesn't matter if you've got 10 harvesters there or 100.Only those playerswho actively redeed harvesters would get an advantage from this change. So that's a point in its favor.
Overall, then, this one might be a wash. It's not perfect, but it wouldn't be fatal.
Making schematics
Making schematics is pretty streamlined already. No real need to change this, at least for the purposes of saving time.
Funny... this is actually the point where I think crafting needs the most attention!
Not just for making schematics, but for crafting generally -- the process ought to be more interesting and fun. I've outlined some ideas for how to achieve this in my Crafting: A Blueprint for the Future thread -- you're welcome to reward me for my disagreement here by taking a baseball bat to my ideas there.
Running factories
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.
Again: why?
Players who are admin'ed tonumerous factorieshave a significant advantage over other players -- why shouldn't those advantages come with costs (in the form of more work to do)?
I'm not suggesting that we need to havepointless busyworkadded to the process ofcrafting things; that's not fun. But there should always be problems of scale to contend with. That's part of the price one should expect topay for being a major player.
The devs apparently said at the Anaheim Fan Fest that the factory crate thing isn't going to happen, so let's talk about factory run times.Let me suggest a compromise: I'd be willing to go for shorter factoryrun times if you'd be willing to accept that factory-made items could neverbe as good as handcrafted items. The privilege of being able to crank out hundreds or thousandsof units of some item should come at the cost of slightly less utility than something that's made by hand. (Plus it's intuitively sensible -- mass produced items shouldn't be as good as individually constructed items.)
Combined with shorter run times, this would allow the folks who are focused on the sales aspect of crafting to be able to try to dominate the market through productavailability, while still allowing the individual crafter to be able to earn a survivable living in the game based on the quality ofthe items they craft individually by hand.This seems like a fair balance to me, but I'm open to other points of view.
Placing items for sale on vendors
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.
This seems like it raises the same concern: all it does it make things easier for the guy who's trying to flood the market without an equal improvement in the game for the individual crafter.
But how about meeting you half-way: What if the first listing had to be by individual item, but you could relist multiplesimilaritems at one timefrom the stockroom (along with their sales text)? It wouldn't give you everything you want, but it would help out the dedicated long-term merchant, as well as giving Merchants generally something they've been wanting since SWG first launched.
Overall, I have to say that I'm not persuaded that the crafting system in SWG need to be tweaked to make things easier for the big players. If anything, it's the little guy that needs new and improved features for competing with the large-scale,PA-backed players.
Ifthere are waysin which your ideas can be reworkedto achieve this, I'll be happy to support them.
For whatever that's worth.
--Flatfingers
For a small guild (5 people), each take 2 planets and go there with your survey tools and sample everything new. Will take maybe 15min/day if you do 1 planet a day and alternate them. When you have your info, input it into SWGCraft (takes minutes to do an entire planet using the quick method) then your servers SWGCraft is never out of date.
Both methods involve a little work, give you huge benefits, and make sure you have something to do every day rather than requesting any further dumbing down of the game.
survey droids dont give you stats, and you need to actually find a resource spot to sample. it would take a lot longer than 10 minutes to check all the resources on a planet. if survey droids gave stats of the resources, i'd be happy and there would be no reason to change things. there needs to be some way to get resource stats other than swgcraft, thats my point. shouldnt be forced to use a website to get stats. the selling of waypoints was just an added idea I threw in, it really doesn't change much as far as saving time goes, becuase someone has to get that waypoint and theres no telling if it would be camped by the time you got there if you did buy one.
Striderr wrote:
survey droids dont give you stats, and you need to actually find a resource spot to sample. it would take a lot longer than 10 minutes to check all the resources on a planet. if survey droids gave stats of the resources, i'd be happy and there would be no reason to change things. there needs to be some way to get resource stats other than swgcraft, thats my point. shouldnt be forced to use a website to get stats. the selling of waypoints was just an added idea I threw in, it really doesn't change much as far as saving time goes, becuase someone has to get that waypoint and theres no telling if it would be camped by the time you got there if you did buy one.
I would buy survey droids by the heart beat, infact, i probably pick up DE if they did give me resource stats. The only reason i don't use them is that i am a pilot, but if they gave me stats, it would save me hours of time waiting on the loading screens.
Selling waypoints has always been something i like to seen in the game. It looked like it was a beta idea that never got out. Look on the bazaar, there is some options that look like data selling that never was fully explored or even looked at.
For factories, i think the biggest problem with saying less factory support is the fact to many items required factory made sub-components. Why i love SW is the lack of factories, but, here is why i explain my opinion, is the fact that SW parts don't need the extra component always. A lot of times, it makes the item less usefull than helpfull. If end parts didn't require sub-components, a factory wouldn't be such a requirement. The sub-components should be additions that give you bonuses and negitives that make a player really have to decied if its worth the risk or not. Just like a pilot has too. Do you add that extra component to squeeze a little more juice out, or don't put it in and save mass for another part you need. My feeling is that all the crafting professions other than SW are way to dependent on factories. Remove the dependancy and the crafting world will be better. There be less AFK crafters, which i mean by is, put schematic and resource in factory, then go do something else, come back next day and put up for sale.
Again, the factory thing is my opinion, not a fact nor a solid statement. Just how i am viewing it at this time.
I don't think 1-4 should be changed at all.
Hand-made items are not always or necessarily intuitively better than mass produced items. Your schematic for instance is hand-made. The way to introduce problems is to upset production by factories breaking down or stopping suddenly or using more power/maintenance. I don't advocate any of these ideas, but those should be the most common problems with factories. Production problems are more common than quality control problems. I imagine occasionally a factory problem could be bad enough to degrade the product, but how often does that happen?
As for listing items, I wish a mass relist and a mass list option were available. I wish you could break apart a crate to all its individual items without having to break the crate one by one. I wish you could crate or re-crate identically serial-ed items.
- Finding resources
- Harvesting resources
- Making schematics
- Running factories
- Placing items for sale on vendors