Chef Archive

Hello there,

The developers have asked me to be the chef correspondent. Basically, what they want me to do to is sum up what people feel is wrong with the profession.

To start with, they have asked me to write a report about what the 5 biggest issues with the chef profession. Below is my report. Please look over it and let me know what you think. If there are any issues that you feel are more important than the 5 below please let me know. And if you have any suggestions on how to fix them let me know.

One thing I have seen suggested on the boards is being able to equip drinks and have drinking animations in cantinas. I love this idea, I really want to see this included…but I really don’t think it is something we need. Besides, something like that would probably take a while to do. There are some issues that we need resolved before the Chef profession is really playable, and as nice as that would be to see in the game we can live without it. After some other issues are resolved I would love to see a push for it.

Also, keep in mind that we may not see any changes for a bit. They have other things to work on, such as server stability. There will be no chefs if nobody can log on and personally I really want them to boost FPS in cities. However, I do think we should see some changes in a month or two.

And just remember, even though I have been asked to submit this report, it is suppose to represent what we, as the chef community, want. So please, tell me what you would like to see added. I would like to submit this report early Friday.

Ok, here is my report (this is only the first draft and written after midnight...I hope it makes sense.)

Developers,

Thank you for this opportunity to draw your attention to issues dealing with the chef class. While I think this is a great way for you to gather information on what the players want to see improved with this profession, please remember we need information from you as well. We are a patient bunch (believe me, chefs have to be), and if all you have to say is that you are working on things but not done yet, just let us know once in a while. We will be fine with it. We are also mostly role players, however, which means we are an imaginative group. If you don’t give us an update once in a while, we imagine the worse.

Ok, here are the issues I have identified from playing the game and reading the boards.

1. Milks and Eggs. For me this is number one and the most immediate. A lot of the other things I will mention are balance issues and may be debatable, but this is something that is broken. There is no way for us to get milk and eggs in the game. Without milk and eggs, we cannot make many of our recipes. People have said they found milk and eggs through foraging or getting them off dead NPCs, but this is not nearly enough for us to use. (Besides, getting milk off a nightwitch is just so wrong in ways I cannot even comprehend with my small mortal mind.) During beta you had creature farms that would provide us with milk and eggs, but they did not make it into the game. We don’t care if we them from bio-engineers, scouts or harvesters, but we need milk and eggs and in enough quantities that we can actually use them.

2. Factories. Right now, factories are borked. If I were to make jawa beer by hand I can create an item that has 3-5 uses. If I were to make the same item by factory, it will only have one use. Right now, factories are too expensive to maintain just to create an inferior product. (Note: Guys, I have not even made enough money to buy a factory yet. If there are other issues with factories let me know.)

3. Chefs vs. Scout & Smugglers. Right now, scouts and smugglers can create a better product than chefs can. Scouts can forage things out of the ground that is generally better than anything that chefs can create. And smugglers can create spice that has better buffs than our food, generally lasts longer than our food and is usually cheaper. We chefs cannot compete, so we are destroying a lot of what we create just because we have trouble selling out stuff. Really, most of our customers are now creature handlers buying food for there animals. I didn’t become a chef to make pet food and I don’t think I get any UXP for that. During beta, you mentioned food buffs will last for hours while spice would give better buffs but last a lot shorter. What ever happened to this?

(Suggestion: Can foods give other buffs besides stats? Can a sports drink give a temporary bonus to exploration skills? Can drinks found in bars help increase the speed of battle fatigue healing? Can food that wookiees like give a benefit to their roar or food that trandoshans like give a benefit to their regeneration? This would allow us to have another bonus over smugglers that will help us find a market.)

4. Chef vs. Homemaker. Right now, somebody with Domestic Arts IV can make better food than chefs. When you become a novice chef, you can no longer apply the experimentation points you had as an artisan to your chef recipes, and with those experimentation points the domestic arts recipes are better than the chef. Right now people are giving up on chef because the recipes are not getting that much better. For example, a Dom IV can create a dustcrepe which offers 45 stamina for 250 seconds. For novice chef we get wastril bread, which is, offers 30 stamina for 275 seconds. In addition, we get less uses out of what we create the further we go up. And this is all before the experimentation of Dom Arts. I know we get more experimentation as we progress, that that is a lot of progressing we need to do just to compete with Dom Arts. The recipes of novice chef should be just as good as Dom IV at full experimentation…and Mixology I should be just as good as novice chef at full experimentation. That way we can move up the latter and actually feel like we have accomplished something.

(Suggestion: If we make the chefs that much better, we can force the Dom IV out of the market. I had some thoughts on what might help this. One thing that might help is make the Dom IV really cheap to make. Also, I had the idea of seasonings: things that you can create at Dom IV but loose the ability to create as a chef. Each chef recipe has an optional slot for seasonings. At Dom II you get a seasoning that adds to taste, at Dom III you get a seasoning that adds to quantity (dietary supplements) and at Dom IV you have a seasoning that adds to nutrition (vitamins.) They basically count as one experimenting dot when you add them to chef recipes. This is a market that only people with Dom Arts skills can have that is useful to the chef but not dependent.)

5. Bazaars. Please move the food and drinks out from under misc and give them their own category. If you want, create a food category and put jewelry under clothing. And stop putting spices under the food category on the bazaar. When people are buying from the bazaar they have no way of knowing what is food and what is spice. Give spice their own category.

Finally, you said I can add a personal request. This request is to please look at UXP. Some people say it is working fine, others are not. Some people say you get UXP from factories, others say you don’t. I don’t think I am getting UXP when the food is fed to animals, but others say they are. I don’t know if it is working properly or not, so can you please take a look at this.

And just stop by in the Chef forum and say hi once in a while. We are really nice people and would love to hear from you.

SirVimes
Chef Correspondent.

Oh, and I just wanted to add:

I just recently made chef after a lot of grinding through Domestic Arts, but I played around with the chef profession a lot in beta. My main goal in the game is to become a master chef and master merchant and open up my own cantina, so I am really motivated to help make this a fun profession. I think right now the chef class is totally screwed up, but once some things are fixed can be a lot of fun.

Thank you, you've hit quite a few things right on the money.

Okay, I'm typing as I read:

Great intro...I don't know if the devs want you beating around the bush, but I like what you wrote.

Yea, I don't know about factories either.

For number 3, be sure to mention that even selling to CH's aren't a steady business because most of them are perfectly capable for foraging for their own food to feed their pets. Only 1 in every 5 CH's I talk to say that foraging isn't good enough for their tamed creature.

Okay, no offense, but I really think you should remove the suggestions entirely. Right now, I think the VERY LAST thing the devs want to do isadd more to theChef mechanics. Your job it to point out immediate problems with the Chef profession, not offer advice and suggestions for the future. Not trying to sound mean...I just really feel that if you add all this unncessary clutter, the devs will be more likely to ignore us.

As for your personal request, I think Usage Exp is a good one. I wish you would expand upon it though--it would be nice if you add that if Usage Exp was increased significantly, it would really prevent people from grinding and make this profession more fun as a whole. An even better personal request is to seriously ask the devs to make food/drink visible in your hands. I was dissapointed when you pointed that out in your intro, but then you didn't make a note of it in the actual report. Anyway, I know this is your PERSONAL request, lol, but I still feel that there's nothing wrong with trying to persuade your opinion

Okay, now about the order:

First of all, I really think that Milk and Eggs, while possibly being the easiest thing to add to the game, are probably the most useless thing. We almost can predict for sure that Jaar, Bantha Butter and other milk/egg recipes will be just as horrific as the others. Why bother adding this now, when in the end, I'm sure chefs won't be making these dairy treats anyway...just using common sense. Personally, I'd eliminate Milk and Eggs from the list entirely. After the dust settles, believe me, Jaar will be just as bad as any other drink we can produce...

For number 1, you should really just say, "Make our buffs BETTER." Simple as that. This is obviously the #1 problem with our profession. While everything else I've wrriten in my post I'm not super interested in, I feel that it's neccessary that this is added. "Make our buffs BETTER" deserves its own category--it isthat crucial.If fixed, it will undoubtedly make chefs more popular, allow us to succeed, and greatly reduce grinding. I know that you added this fact into the Chefs vs Scouts vs Smugglers and Chef vs Homemaker, but it really deserves a category of its own, don't you think?

Number 2 is great!

Number 3 is great!

Number 4 is great!

Number 5 is good, too, although I would suggest pointing out that it might be better for balancing out Chefs and Smugglers if spices couldn't be posted on the bazaar AT ALL. They are illegal, and one would assume thatthe bazaar is monitored by Imperials and what-not.Not only does this fit in with SW continuity, but it further balances the game as a whole.

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Phew! I guess I wrote a lot in the end, but make no mistake. You did a GREAT job, I just feel like your priorities were a little off here and there. But it's very well written and overall pointed out all of our problems. I hope you make use of my--and other posters'--suggestions.

I thought of an idea for food distrubution....lunch boxes. They have a slot for drink, entree, and dessert...and take up only one slot. You don't pull things out of it, the stats combine and you eat it all at once. To take care of how many uses each item had, it averages them out.
I know it's silly, but i thought it's something interesting.

And of course, fix the profession FIRST, then get to the silly things

Whoops, forget to add. If you can fit it in somewhere, try to mention that Tatooine Sunburn is greatly over-powered. AFTER, and only AFTER, they increase the potency of chef foods, they should consider decreasing the potency of Tatooine Sunburn. We don't want one and only one drink flooding the market, do we?

Once again, great job!

Not bad. For me it's a toss up between increasing buffs/duration and getting milk and eggs into the game. I might give it buffs/duration only becuase it will help make the profession economically viable.

Felzers, no offense, but it seems that most chefs are like me and are into the RP aspect of this profession. As a chef, I can live without Mixology, but but to lose a whole line of foods becuase a curcial element is missing is something that needs to be fixed pronto, regardless of whether the food is gonna suck or not. How would armorsmiths feel if they could not make helemts or one of the other parts of their craft?

Hopefully I'll have a factory up in a few days I'll and I'll let you know what the issues are there.

1. Milks and Eggs. For me this is number one and the most immediate. A lot of the other things I will mention are balance issues and may be debatable, but this is something that is broken. There is no way for us to get milk and eggs in the game. Without milk and eggs, we cannot make many of our recipes. People have said they found milk and eggs through foraging or getting them off dead NPCs, but this is not nearly enough for us to use. (Besides, getting milk off a nightwitch is just so wrong in ways I cannot even comprehend with my small mortal mind.) During beta you had creature farms that would provide us with milk and eggs, but they did not make it into the game. We don’t care if we them from bio-engineers, scouts or harvesters, but we need milk and eggs and in enough quantities that we can actually use them.

Sir yer on the money Lets get the **edit** creature Harvesters back into the game! Or maybe Raph or Kevin will come and grab a pail and a stool and Milk those Fambaas!

I think that looks great, but I have a couple of personal opinions to make, when comparing market potential and likely future outlooks(the game is young, very few people read manual's. Lots of people think that food and drink are purely social items like clothing. Very few people know the benefits, those that do come back for more frequently).

IMHO high level chefs are pretty balanced to other buffing professions. Low level smugglers are too good(and its far too easy for them to advance to better spices). Compare a high level chef to a high level smuggler and chef takes the cake(literally and figuratively) even without taking smuggler penalties into account. Also, smugglers and chefs dont need to compete, as their buff's can STACK together.

As to dom art vs. novice chef, this is the exact same for weaponsmith. Weaponsmiths novice guns are total crap. I'm not saying its right, but its the case for nearly all elite artisans(mousebots lol): their starting schematics suck ass in a grand way, and they just have to grind past it. This isn't profession isolated, its an overall game issue.

1-4 look good

please change number 5

please replacee 5 with a request to change chefs food experimentation line to work in reverse

so the first 3 level give +20 and the last level is +10

right now its the first level is +10 the last 3 +20

To FelzorsBrother:

I totally agree that Milk and Eggs should be eliminated from the game. Just change the recipes to use other ingredients. This should make it possible to get a quick fix.

To Hoggle :

You mention medium and large flora farms. This is actually an architect bug. I've heard that this has been a bug since beta. It is not possible to make Harvesting Mechanisms because they can't be loaded into the crafting tool. This sounds like an easy thing to fix...... (maybe I'm wrong). Medium and large flora harvesters need this component. I think this should have a high priority as it will greatly affect the chef's ability to make large amounts of food.

I also want to mention something that hasn't been mentioned here befeore :

I'm also an architect. When making personal harvesters from Engineering III i get structure crafting XP. When making food from the domestic line shouldn't I then get food crafting XP instead of general crafting XP ? One of these need to be changed.We should get food crafting XP from making food from the domestic line of artisan.

Personally, I'd put non-craftable flora farms in the top 5, and merge the scout/smuggler/homemaker points.
I cannot craft at the level I do economically atm. I have 5 flora farms, where 2 large would be more than enough, the rest I buy off the Bazaar after doing 4hrs+ missions to pay for the maintenance & resources.
Personally, that is a higher priority.

About the UXP - it is currently 50% when the eater finishes a stack.
To get the UXP you must be on the same subserver as the eater and online (subserver=zone - each planet appears to be made from a number of these and if you have a pet, you can track the boundaries as they get stuck on em )
Also I have never had UXP from a factory item.

Other than that, a very good report.

I disagree with your bazaar issue being in the top 5. I thik the reason you have it there is that you dont own a factory. Number 5 should be harvesters. Plain and Simple, we need medium and large Flora Harvesters. The suggestions on chamges to chef should be moved to a seperate report, I think you should just focus on issues.