Business And Economy Archive
Thread: BUYER BEWARE !!!!!! DON'T PAY OUTRAGEOUS PRICES FOR WEAPONS OR ARMOR !
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?
what he's trying to say is that blixtev never came up with a good crafting system. he pretty much made a system that he felt was good but never consulted with anyone. all the ideas we through at him never came through. instead we got a crappy way to make armor. he wasnt dumb enough to say something like that he just made adumb crafting system.
Well I dont know about the 70% quitting thing. I can tell you this. I am a Novice Artisan 3-3-3-4. I plan to go Master Artisan and then Shipwright on Lowca server. I will soon open a "noob" shop for new players. Basic clothes, weapons, general novice artisan items for no more than 5000 creds an Item. Most in the 2-3 K range. IS that being unfair by trying to under bid?
Not IMHO. Its just me having a deisire to help out newer players by making affordable starter items. Of course...with everyone leaving I dont sell much. And I dont have Merchant 4 to use a SPAM droid and not sure I like using SPAM anyway. Point is, there is one Artisan on Lowca (me) who plans to hang around.
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?
I don't think that number of people quit on Radiant. I know that several haven't updated their vendors (At least not the SEA vendors), since I can't get the details downloaded at the vendor search from any bazaar. However, that could also be because of them quitting as well.
If there is a 70% loss of crafters across the servers, then I really, really need to go and start jacking up my prices...afterall, there's no competition now 
No, I dont.They arn't socailists in a traditional way, butThe way they influence and brain wash people into buying their overpriced goods makes them 'worthy' of a term that traditionally goeswith horrible markets (gov't)
Pawlin wrote:
BlackJango wrote:
...EXACTLY
These fat rich socailists with their uber1337 looters in their pockets convince people they NEED weapons that cost millions. THEY DONT!
They people have begun to realize this and I hope that these billion credit bobs will dwindle down to no bodies
Do you mean fat rich capitalists?
Vastar wrote:
Pawlin wrote: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.
They did make things easier for new Armorsmiths. They did so, as you said, by removing some of the advantage established ones had (AKA, nullifying effort). Just increasing the number of resources used was a good move for reducing existing stockpiles fairly. Changing what was required all together is what I have an issue with. You said that these barriers to entering the market were not fun. I disagree. To me, that's a big part of the draw. As I tried to point out for those that disagree with me, there are much easier professions already available that would be found more enjoyable by them.
The experimentation system was made pretty simplistic, yes. It's now simplistic for new and old smiths so, while stupid, it is at least fair. Of course, those 1-2M per point (or more) experimentation suits are now more like 150K per point suits. So, there's that same effect again. That's not so bad either though. Since the tapes are never really consumed but continue to drop, the value would only go down in time anyway. The process was simply increased by a factor of about a hundred (<- guess).
If thier ultimate goal was to create a larger supply of more affordable armor for everyone, they did a pretty poor job. I believe the idea was one of two things or perhaps both. One would be making things easy on the newer smiths. The other would be creating a system that's easier for them to code.
Im sorry, but as soon as you claim that collecting resources and stockpiling them in large quantities is "effort", your argument loses all value.
Under the old resource system, it was simply not possible for a brand new player to become a good crafter in any reasonable period of time, unless they were exceptionally lucky with the resources which spawned on their server. Even if they worked tirelessly for months, if they could not lay hands on a spawn of amazing resources, they could not compete with established crafters. In the real world that's called a monopoly and there are laws against it. I dont usually use the "real world argument" because it's often doesnt stand up, but in this case it's a fair equation.
The bigger problem was that the old system was self-perpetuating. Once a crafter had a stockpile of amazing resources(and again, it takes no skill or effort to check SWGcraft, log in, spend an hour surveying and then plonk down a couple of dozen harvesters while you enjoy yourself in real life/on an alt), they could make weapons which were far, far better than anyone could craft without said resources, meaning they sell more for higher prices, meaning they make more money, meaning they could afford to buy yet more amazing resources to sit on, meaning they could make yet more money....etc etc ad nauseum.
It was a game of roulette; a crafter could go on holiday for a week and come back to find they had just missed the most amazing steel ever to spawn, and they would lose 90% of their business to someone who was lucky enough to grab a few hundred K units.
An unfair, monopolistic system in a game is not enjoyable, and so they changed the rules. Tell me, do all crafters these days have a persecution complex, or is it just you? You seem completely inable to consider the fact that maybe, just maybe, the devs would prefer to make their game fun for as many people as possible rather than focus their efforts on destroying your personal game.
As a socialist, I fully agree with the concept that if 99% of people benefit and you suffer: tough fecking luck.
GadonThek wrote:
...
Im sorry, but as soon as you claim that collecting resources and stockpiling them in large quantities is "effort", your argument loses all value.
...(and again, it takes no skill or effort to check SWGcraft, log in, spend an hour surveying and then plonk down a couple of dozen harvesters while you enjoy yourself in real life/on an alt), ...
GadonThek wrote:
Vastar wrote:
Pawlin wrote: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.
They did make things easier for new Armorsmiths. They did so, as you said, by removing some of the advantage established ones had (AKA, nullifying effort). Just increasing the number of resources used was a good move for reducing existing stockpiles fairly. Changing what was required all together is what I have an issue with. You said that these barriers to entering the market were not fun. I disagree. To me, that's a big part of the draw. As I tried to point out for those that disagree with me, there are much easier professions already available that would be found more enjoyable by them.
The experimentation system was made pretty simplistic, yes. It's now simplistic for new and old smiths so, while stupid, it is at least fair. Of course, those 1-2M per point (or more) experimentation suits are now more like 150K per point suits. So, there's that same effect again. That's not so bad either though. Since the tapes are never really consumed but continue to drop, the value would only go down in time anyway. The process was simply increased by a factor of about a hundred (<- guess).
If thier ultimate goal was to create a larger supply of more affordable armor for everyone, they did a pretty poor job. I believe the idea was one of two things or perhaps both. One would be making things easy on the newer smiths. The other would be creating a system that's easier for them to code.
Im sorry, but as soon as you claim that collecting resources and stockpiling them in large quantities is "effort", your argument loses all value.
Under the old resource system, it was simply not possible for a brand new player to become a good crafter in any reasonable period of time, unless they were exceptionally lucky with the resources which spawned on their server. Even if they worked tirelessly for months, if they could not lay hands on a spawn of amazing resources, they could not compete with established crafters. In the real world that's called a monopoly and there are laws against it. I dont usually use the "real world argument" because it's often doesnt stand up, but in this case it's a fair equation.
The bigger problem was that the old system was self-perpetuating. Once a crafter had a stockpile of amazing resources(and again, it takes no skill or effort to check SWGcraft, log in, spend an hour surveying and then plonk down a couple of dozen harvesters while you enjoy yourself in real life/on an alt), they could make weapons which were far, far better than anyone could craft without said resources, meaning they sell more for higher prices, meaning they make more money, meaning they could afford to buy yet more amazing resources to sit on, meaning they could make yet more money....etc etc ad nauseum.
It was a game of roulette; a crafter could go on holiday for a week and come back to find they had just missed the most amazing steel ever to spawn, and they would lose 90% of their business to someone who was lucky enough to grab a few hundred K units.
An unfair, monopolistic system in a game is not enjoyable, and so they changed the rules. Tell me, do all crafters these days have a persecution complex, or is it just you? You seem completely inable to consider the fact that maybe, just maybe, the devs would prefer to make their game fun for as many people as possible rather than focus their efforts on destroying your personal game.
As a socialist, I fully agree with the concept that if 99% of people benefit and you suffer: tough fecking luck.
You've decided that my arguement has no value based on me pointing out that collecting resources takes effort? Really? Are you kidding? You, yourself go on to describe the efforts required to do so. If it takes NO effort then I assume you'll have no problem harvesting resources I need on my server too while you're at it then? Actually, if it takes NO effort, you could have been helping all the poor new crafters everywhere by harvesting all the resoures they might ever need down the road and just passing them out as folks start down the crafting path. Please, mail me in game for my resource needs.
The old stockpiles of resources and experimentation suits were what gave established crafters a proportionate advantage to the time/effort they'd put in. Also, if you happened to miss a spawn of some super resource you needed while on vacation, recent resource shifts of popular stuff arn't usually very hard to track down and buy.
As for "monopolistic", I guess I just don't see it. How could two people that put in equal efforts not wind up with the same benefits? I would consider a monopoly (which might not actually be out of place in a Star Wars universe) a group that controlled a market without others being able to compete. No one crafter has complete control over thier respective market and others can compete.
Now, the new system is more fun? That's about as subjective as you can get right there. I guess the majority does find easier things to be more fun. That I don't understand but, as I've pointed out, the majority have other crafting professions to pick from (I'm sticking to speaking for my Armorsmithing profession.)
Vastar wrote:
GadonThek wrote:
Vastar wrote:
Pawlin wrote: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.
They did make things easier for new Armorsmiths. They did so, as you said, by removing some of the advantage established ones had (AKA, nullifying effort). Just increasing the number of resources used was a good move for reducing existing stockpiles fairly. Changing what was required all together is what I have an issue with. You said that these barriers to entering the market were not fun. I disagree. To me, that's a big part of the draw. As I tried to point out for those that disagree with me, there are much easier professions already available that would be found more enjoyable by them.
The experimentation system was made pretty simplistic, yes. It's now simplistic for new and old smiths so, while stupid, it is at least fair. Of course, those 1-2M per point (or more) experimentation suits are now more like 150K per point suits. So, there's that same effect again. That's not so bad either though. Since the tapes are never really consumed but continue to drop, the value would only go down in time anyway. The process was simply increased by a factor of about a hundred (<- guess).
If thier ultimate goal was to create a larger supply of more affordable armor for everyone, they did a pretty poor job. I believe the idea was one of two things or perhaps both. One would be making things easy on the newer smiths. The other would be creating a system that's easier for them to code.
Im sorry, but as soon as you claim that collecting resources and stockpiling them in large quantities is "effort", your argument loses all value.
Under the old resource system, it was simply not possible for a brand new player to become a good crafter in any reasonable period of time, unless they were exceptionally lucky with the resources which spawned on their server. Even if they worked tirelessly for months, if they could not lay hands on a spawn of amazing resources, they could not compete with established crafters. In the real world that's called a monopoly and there are laws against it. I dont usually use the "real world argument" because it's often doesnt stand up, but in this case it's a fair equation.
The bigger problem was that the old system was self-perpetuating. Once a crafter had a stockpile of amazing resources(and again, it takes no skill or effort to check SWGcraft, log in, spend an hour surveying and then plonk down a couple of dozen harvesters while you enjoy yourself in real life/on an alt), they could make weapons which were far, far better than anyone could craft without said resources, meaning they sell more for higher prices, meaning they make more money, meaning they could afford to buy yet more amazing resources to sit on, meaning they could make yet more money....etc etc ad nauseum.
It was a game of roulette; a crafter could go on holiday for a week and come back to find they had just missed the most amazing steel ever to spawn, and they would lose 90% of their business to someone who was lucky enough to grab a few hundred K units.
An unfair, monopolistic system in a game is not enjoyable, and so they changed the rules. Tell me, do all crafters these days have a persecution complex, or is it just you? You seem completely inable to consider the fact that maybe, just maybe, the devs would prefer to make their game fun for as many people as possible rather than focus their efforts on destroying your personal game.
As a socialist, I fully agree with the concept that if 99% of people benefit and you suffer: tough fecking luck.
You've decided that my arguement has no value based on me pointing out that collecting resources takes effort? Really? Are you kidding? You, yourself go on to describe the efforts required to do so. If it takes NO effort then I assume you'll have no problem harvesting resources I need on my server too while you're at it then? Actually, if it takes NO effort, you could have been helping all the poor new crafters everywhere by harvesting all the resoures they might ever need down the road and just passing them out as folks start down the crafting path. Please, mail me in game for my resource needs.
The old stockpiles of resources and experimentation suits were what gave established crafters a proportionate advantage to the time/effort they'd put in. Also, if you happened to miss a spawn of some super resource you needed while on vacation, recent resource shifts of popular stuff arn't usually very hard to track down and buy.
As for "monopolistic", I guess I just don't see it. How could two people that put in equal efforts not wind up with the same benefits? I would consider a monopoly (which might not actually be out of place in a Star Wars universe) a group that controlled a market without others being able to compete. No one crafter has complete control over thier respective market and others can compete.
Now, the new system is more fun? That's about as subjective as you can get right there. I guess the majority does find easier things to be more fun. That I don't understand but, as I've pointed out, the majority have other crafting professions to pick from (I'm sticking to speaking for my Armorsmithing profession.)
I do argue that it takes no effort.
If you had based your points about the time it took to set up a successful business, or the time it took to establish a reputation as a good crafter, or the time it took to make factory runs, your argument would have carried more weight, but all of those points only make a brief appearance in what is, essentially, a gigantic whine that you speculated by stockpiling resources and you lost out.
You claim that if two people put in equal efforts they would come out at the same level, but that simply isnt true, it was entirely dependant on whether or not one had the luck to get hold of a large quantity of top-quality resources. If one crafter makes large amounts of T-21s with 800-1000 damage and another makes the exact same amount with 850-1150 damage, which are people going to buy? The latter. How did the latter crafter make more effort than the former? They both spent the same amount of time and effort building up their business, but one of them went on holiday two months before the amazing resource spawned and one was unlucky enough to be away for a week while it was in spawn.
Ill ask you a question: do you really believe that the old system was fair, or are you just acting like a bitter child because you lost out?
There was simply no way for a player new to a crafting profession to be successful unless he already had several million credits from selling loot or somesuch. Why should a new player be excluded from becoming the profession they want to be just so you can make another few million credits?
GadonThek wrote:
I do argue that it takes no effort.
Well, I guess I can't agure with that... (I'll check my mail again but I didn't see one from you in there about collecting resources for me.)
GadonThek wrote:
If you had based your points about the time it took to set up a successful business, or the time it took to establish a reputation as a good crafter, or the time it took to make factory runs, your argument would have carried more weight, but all of those points only make a brief appearance in what is, essentially, a gigantic whine that you speculated by stockpiling resources and you lost out.
So, I said "effort" when you wanted to read "time"... excuse me. If that's all I guess we can move on.
As for me making an unprofitable specualtion, I already addressed that earlier in this thread...
"A better resource spawning is not even close to having the crafting system chagned to require a (for all intents and purposes) new resources. Say I'm out looking for a resource I need. This resource needs to have two high stats, A and B. Let's say stat B is gated at 500. If I get a supply that's got 976 in stat A and 416 in stat B, I know nothing that much better is going to spawn. If the system is changed out from under me, that's not something I should reasonably have to plan for."
GadonThek wrote:
You claim that if two people put in equal efforts they would come out at the same level, but that simply isnt true,
it was entirely dependant on whether or not one had the luck to get hold of a large quantity of top-quality resources. If one crafter makes large amounts of T-21s with 800-1000 damage and another makes the exact same amount with 850-1150 damage, which are people going to buy? The latter. How did the latter crafter make more effort than the former? They both spent the same amount of time and effort building up their business, but one of them went on holiday two months before the amazing resource spawned and one was unlucky enough to be away for a week while it was in spawn.
Luck isn't as big a factor as you make it out to be, I think. Watch the spawns. If something comes up, snag it. Where is the luck in that? Both crafters have the same limitations put on collecting resources. I'm not sure if your example is asking about someone not being around for a week or two months but it's really the same either way. If one crafter is here and the other isn't, the other isn't putting the time/effort/whatever that the first is. As I mentioned before, the crafter that decided to put less effort in can make up for it later by buying those resources. Week old spawns arn't very hard to track down. This whole "problem", by the way, has been made much easier by introducing the free resource kits.
GadonThek wrote:
Ill ask you a question: do you really believe that the old system was fair, or are you just acting like a bitter child because you lost out?
I'll refrain from rising to your mature implied derogatory labeling level and stick with the question. I believe the old system was fair, yes. We all started with (at least) 250 credits, newb clothes, a mellon, etc and the same game mechanics. If everyone starts equally and is operating under the same system, how is anything not fair?
Anyone that knows me knows I don't brag about wealth. For conversation's sake I'll say this. I've got enough credits without making another dime to last me as long as I need them too. The amount lost is important to me but doesn't hold a candle to the importance of the principle here. When people are in competition and the rules are changed because someone is winning, that's pathetic.
GadonThek wrote:
There was simply no way for a player new to a crafting profession to be successful unless he already had several million credits from selling loot or somesuch. Why should a new player be excluded from becoming the profession they want to be just so you can make another few million credits?
That's right, without putting effort into it, a new player would have a harder time getting into things that one that did. As for things remaining for the sake of me making a few more credits, please, you have no idea. I've had a shop outside Coronet since the begining. I've always allowed anyone, competition included, to place a vendor there for free. Beyond that, I've assisted other armorsmiths, new and old. One Armorsmith, I even took as an apprentice. I gave her guidance, a shop next door to mine and my resources for wookiee armor. I assure you, purity of competition and enjoyment from that is my only motivation.
Message Edited by cl0kwerq on 05-19-2005 05:24 PM