Business And Economy Archive

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IntoTheGarbage wrote:

Ok I want to see if I can resurrect this old debate. I think it has new relevance with the vendor reform.

Basically it goes like this: Factory made items should not be as good as handmade items. Not only is this true in real life, it would make it far easier for new masters to compete with established masters.

This isn't necessarily true. It all depends on who is making the item and how. Some factory made items are crap in RL, but that is only because they use low quality production methods or have poor quality control. Take for example the automotive industry during the 1970s. U.S. car companies, using automated methods, made cars that were of lower qualitycompared totheir predecessors, as well as their contemporary competition from Japan. The Japanese used automated methods to make very high quality vehicles (and still do, though U.S. companies have all but caught up with them).

Just because someone makes something by hand isn't a guarantee that it will be of high quality or long lasting. As above, it depends on who is making the item, and how.

I suggest the following principles for factory made items. Any crafting bonus received from SEA’s and FS cannot be transferred to a factory. A factory can only make items as good as a master crafter with no crafting bonus.

This could be accomplished by tweaking the way complexity works. If complexity were changed so that all items experimented up by a master craftsman without SEA’s or FS would hit the maximum complexity which a factory could handle. (Assuming they outstanding success with every try.) This means that a fully experimented control unit and a fully experimented lightning cannon would have the same complexity level.

This is an intriguing idea, though not for the reasons you bring up. One of architects main problems is that there is little differentiation in the products they sell. However, if complexity were an experimental aspect of a factory, that would help increase product differentiation for them. Some factories would be better than others, and thus could command a higher price.

As for using this to limit schematics to that of 10-point or less masters, I disagree. It would depend on the quality of the factory, and it should be at least theoretically possible to make a factory able to handle the complexity levels achieved by 11 and 12 point masters. I see no reason why 12-point masters shouldn't be able to do factory runs of standard production items.

An item can still be experimented beyond that point, but it cannot be run through a factory. As a failsafe, any item too complex for factories would simply not have the option to be made into a schematic.

This would gimp chefs and docs most of all, while having little impact on archs, DEs, WS, SW or AS. Individual bottles of 12-point Vasarian brandy is a huge hassle...I want that stuff in a crate. Likewise withcarrying dozens of individual buffs packs, or other meds, made by a 12-point doctor.

The reason for this is obvious. Allow new master crafters to compete with established crafters. It also makes uber crafted items more rare, and more valuable. That said, there is no getting around the fact that crafters who have invested a lot of credits into SEA’s would see their profits go down. Which is the biggest downside to this.

First off, most "uber" crafted items are hand made anyways. Secondly, why should a new master crafter be able to compete on equal terms with an established masterright off the bat? There's more to being a master than just getting the title.

Anyways, anyone else feel like hashing this out again?

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Slim Vargo, Corbantis

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IntoTheGarbageChuteFlyboy wrote:

Factory made items should not be as good as handmade items.

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I've agreed with this in the past. I still agree.

The tradeoff ought to be that a factory allows you to crank out lots of units, but they aren't as good as the best that a Master can make by hand. Meanwhile, mastery allows you to make "perfect" items, but you can only make a few at a time.

This provides a benefit for using factories to supply construction materials, but to make finished products that people really want requires the personal attention of a crafter. So if your interest in being a crafter is primarily financial (make a lot of money fast), factories will help you get there by getting a lot of items on the market. On the other hand, if your primary interest in crafting is the actual process of making high-qualityitems, then you need your hand-made items to be better than what a factory can make, otherwise you'll have no way to compete.

Actually this is sort of an interesting proposition -- it's a kind of artificial control that was neveractuallyimposed in reality. The quality of the textiles produced by thefirst big water-poweredmanufacturing plants in Englandweren't all that great, butthey came at such a lowprice that hand-made itemsrapidly became undesirable.As tens of thousands of textile workers lost their manual laborjobs, the economies of Europe were devastated. On the other hand, it freed up workers(after some years)to do more productive kinds of work, ultimately turning England into suchan economic powerhouse that it became (for a while) an Empire on which "the sun never set."

If factories in SWGwere allowed tomake items as good as a master crafter could make, we'd probably see a similar economic upheaval in SWG -- prices of most objects would drop,andhandcrafters would basically be put out of a job.But it's not as clear that productivity would ultimately increase, since "increasedproductivity" implies that there's some other, betterkind of crafting that can be done... but there can't be any such new kind of Improved Crafting unless SWG developers design and implement it and add it to the game.

So, given all this,would"perfect" factoriesbe a Good Thing or a Bad Thing for SWG?

--Flatfingers