Chef Archive

Here is my second report about the revamps.

A lot of people are not happy with this. Many are saying it is more of a nerf than a revamp. I do think it is important to note, however, that those on the test center who are working with the buffs are much more optimistic than those who are learning about it second hand. We all agree, however, there needs to be some changes. These changes are in what I believe is in order of importance, although there will be those that disagree.

• The rate the stomach empties must be increased to half an hour. This is the one thing that everybody agrees with. An hour is just too long to make some of our buffs effective. There are two reasons I can see you for doing this. One is the worry about stacking buffs and, secondly, other crafting professions don't have as high an input as chefs do. However, most other crafting professions don't have the resource demands we do. If we have many harvesters and a couple of factories and a place to put our vendor, we are still not completely self sufficient because of the resource demand. Making the decay rate an hour, it reduces the amount of food people take in. With the filling, people will only take a few per hour. With a lot of quick effect foods with high filling, this means they must wait a full hour before they can use food for antyhing else. This, I believe, turns food into a novelty item. We can't really make enough money on novelty items to keep all our harvesters going. (IT should be noted that SciguyCo found a "bug" that works to our benefit. It seems that the stomach empties out in 45 minutes, not an hour. There is the possibility, combined with the fact that the stomach reduces gradually instead of all at once, that this might work for us. I still think 30 minutes will be ideal. It will prevent people from overly stacking while allowing people to use a variety.


• Experience: One of the biggest complaints about the chef profession is that it takes a long time to grind. Now it is even worse. In old way, we got Wastril Bread at novice chef, which gave us 78 experience. This was our highest experience food until we got to mixology II. Now, all chef food gives just 21 experience points. Considering you need 32,000 experience point to make it out of novice chef, that is 1524 items we have to grind to make it to the next level. I don't know if you need to increase the resource requirements of novice food to banalce out the new experience, or if you can increase the number of experience per resources, but please give us something that provides a decent amount of experience.


• Milk - There are a few points with Milk:




• Domestic vs. Wild. I did a search for Domestic milk and it took me three hours to find 64 units, and those were from Motely Eopies. Domestic milk needs to be more common. I am told that there is a greater supply on dantooine, but that will make it very expensive to get since Dantooine is a fairly high level planet and expensive to get to. Many recipes, like smuggler's delight, requires 2 bantha butters from the same factory crate. So that is 20 bantha butters for the schematic and 40 for each aditional smuggler's delight we want to make. I think it would be a lot more resonable to make bantha butters require generic milk...either that or put more domestic milk in the game. Too many of our recipes need it. There is also the question of wether we need two different types of milk. Won't combining the two reduce wear and tear on your database?


• Speaking of which, please put more milk in the game. Chefs have to produce a lot through factories, and I don't see milk in enough quantities for factory runs. Double or tripple the amount of milk coming into the game and we should be ok.


• Domestic Eopies gives us wild milk. Go figure.


• Bring back experimentation on components. It seems that many of our chefs enjoyed being able to experiment on components. I suspect you took it out for technical reasons dealing with the experiment equations. If this is not the case, can you please bring them back?


• Pet Buffs - I talked with some creature handlers. Low level creature handlers would buy our buffs. Higher level say they probably wouldn't since their pets already have high enough numbers for their primary stats. They are looking for buffs to their secondary and tertiary stats.


• Containers. Reaction to the containers for drinks is a very mixed bag, so I am not sure of the over all reaction to them. One thing that is common, though, is that if they require so many resources (and the higher up ones require a lot) then the results should be pretty darned amazing. I remember the numbers that Greenmarine gave me about the multipliers...and I must say that compared to the resource requirements they are not worth it. Either reduce the resource requirements or increase the multipliers.


• Bug: Old Foods not working properly. I am getting some conflicting reports about this, but it seems that pre-patch foods are not working properly. From what I understand, any pre-patch foods in crates do not have any buffs or modifiers and do nothing when you consume them. Food out of crates seem to be ok. We were told that pre-patch foods will remain as they were, and if this goes to live a lot of chefs will be unhappy.


• Aircake: In your original you had aircake in domestic arts II. Now it is in novice chef, but still giving artisan experience.


• Stomach Bars: The bars for the stomach under the ctrl-c screen are not updating as they should. When you first log on they read full until you eat something, and after that many people are reporting they are not going down as they should be, although they can still eat.

Message Edited by SirVimes on 01-26-2004 01:35 PM

I think that about covers it...however for experimenting on subcomponents...

I think its important that we be able to experiment on subcomponents...but not containers...if the containers are going to require us to keep 3 or 4 more different types of resources (and if kegs stay the same...2 subcomponents for the container)...it would definately be a plus for us to not have to worry about the stats on those resources as well.

as far as other things I'd like to see:
being able to see drink uses when experimenting...if that hasn't been done already...
getting to see some numbers when experimenting on subcomponents
BE additives changed from % increases...to flat numbers...+x uses..instead of 100% bonus
this might not be possible for filling, or duration (since minutes vs. next x times...)
BoH reduced from 6 alchohols to 4...2 sets of 2...since we now must have a container...
and can add an optional BE additive...using both would plus the 6 alchohols...8 subcomps
which means a lot less can be made in a single run.


I think thats about it for now...just gotta wait and see if any major bugs/non functional buffs are found.

How about bringing back our class defining items like Fishak, Glazed Glucose, Tatooine Sunburn, and Corellian Fried Ice Cream just to name a few. It seems as is if we have become the agent of the temporary SEA(skill enhancing attachment) producer as opposed to chefs who produce food and drink with viable buffs. If I want mask scent or a dodge increase I can get a skill tape for that. Give us something you can't get anywhere else.

As someone who decided to take up Chef as soon as I hear about the revamp.. I must say the revamp seems to be an attempt by the Devs to ignore the world outside the cubicle they inhabit and yet another example at how out of touch the Devs choose to be from those that ultimatley pay the bills.

We now have a new craft basically that us just as badly badly bugged as the last, just in different ways..

BAH SOE BAH I say

I think a lot of us are ready to accept that we need to consider the stat buffs we get in the light of the new combat changes.

While it's nice that we now have the skill-modifying market, the issue remains that our stat buffs continue to be dwarfed by doctor buffs in both duration and magnitude. Not slightly worse, utterly dwarfed by. (11k seconds vs 4 min?) If chef stat buffs are to be regarded as good after the HAM revamp, they remain puny and largely unnecessary in the light of 1000-2000 buff stat buffs that last for upwards of two hours. :/

(I realise the normal argument about how you can't always find a doctor applies, but I felt that this needed saying, just to get it into this thread so Vimes can see it. =)

If you're including bugs, here's some more I found:

1. Casks in Novice Chef gives general crafting xp. If no other adjustment to novice xp is going to be done, this at least should be fixed. Ok, it'd take purchasing 8 crates of trim to get to a tier 1 skill, but there would be an option other than risking carpal tunnel with 1524 combines.


2. Caf is not experimentable in Flavor. The only changes to duration is from the initial assembly.


3. Fullness does not update until you eat/drink something with the status window open.


4. Fullness bars always display 100% on login.


5. Soypro uses 20 resources, but only gives 20xp instead around 40 you'd expect using the "2x resources" rule of thumb that everything else uses.


6. Foods that have an triggered effect or "do x for y times" (starshine, damage mitigation, ormachek, etc) display an icon in the buff UI with a timer countdown. The damage mitigation icon wentaway after the number of attacks, but ormachek had additional problems (see #8).


7. Ormachek does not display a quantity. If this is intended to be a single-use stack, that experimental category should be removed.


8. I'm not sure how Ormachek's xp bonus is supposed to work. I had a "3% for 14 assembly" ormachek, so I made 14 small glasses and 14 alcohols. I ate the ormachek, and started crafting Ithorian Mists. The first gave something like 212 xp (not in practice mode, and I may have mis-recorded the starting xp), all the rest gave 170 non-practice, 178 practice. I'm going to try some more runs to get more details (had someproblemsdue to #9)


9. Being "under the effect" of Ormachek does not wear off after 13/14 combines (whatever the flavor experimentation gets you to). After making sure my stomach was empty (in case it was an incorrect error) I still had the status icon in the buff UI, and I could not eat another. I even tried logging out. On login, the buff icon was gone, but I received the same error when I tried to eat my second ormachek. I'll try again tomorrow, maybe the server reset will fix it.


10. Interplanetary shuttling may clear current buffs. I took a ship from naboo to correlia, and a couple stat buffs that I had disappeared. It's possible that I just missed the expiration. Shuttling between cities definitely doesn't cause this.


11. So far, every food I can make (highest complexity 12) can be done in a generic crafting tool. I'm assuming that the crafting requirements (generic vs. specialized vs. public station vs. private station) are still determined from the complexity, so with those being reduced to improve factory times, the requirements have eased. I'm not sure if this was intended.

Other thoughts:

Good:
I like the variety of things that chef buffs do, although it seems to still be up in the air as to what would be useful, and whether the values we can experiment to would make them viable.

New Art! I have yet to find a duplicate piece of art on final foods (although large glasses and T'ssolok have the same Sunburn glass graphic). These are very impressive. Has anyone with a house tested whether dropping them leave them at table height (like Durindfire, BoHand Spiced tea do on Live) or do they still drop to the floor? Right after the patch we may have a booming business just from the interior decorators, some of these look so nice.

Chef clothes! Now if only they could come in different colors for that true Iron Chef feel.

Drink quantity displayed during experimentation! I'm hoping this also made it into the crates...

The BE additives included in almost all foods will make for an interesting time.Although depending on how much of an effect they do, and how quickly customers come back for refills it may become more of a pain than it's worth.

Bad:
Experience at Novice Chef is really going to be a stopping point for new players. Out of 6 recipes, two currently give general crafting xp, one requires a BE component (and probably only gives 30xp anyway) and the rest give 20 xp. And even at higher levels, any high-resource/high-xp recipe requires components, several using artisan components.

Lack of +Health foods. For players who do not use doctor buffs, health is generally where they get hit the most . Well, at least that's the stat I get incapped on. I generally hadinfrequent but somewhat regular sales in thakitillo, vayerbok, and flameout. Based on reported effectsfrom other chefs, the only non-pet health buff is Garrmorl?

Some food effects seem overly-focused. Is trandoshan regen really used that much? Does wookie roar even *do* anything? And reports from some scouts makes it sound like the mask scent bonus isn't really that useful.

We've heard a couple of times that these buffs are intended to sync up with the new combat HAM system. How long will we be buffing for the new system under the old one?

Suggestions:
Component experimentation: regarding your comments, I'd expect it was a "technical decision" to remove this. The pre-patch components had stat buffs (visible or not, I know they're there) which were added to the final food. With the new variety, a component couldn't keep this design, since what would "+20 mind, 10s" mean in a "+fire resist" food? My suggestion (hoping for this publish, but pushing for next) is to re-use the BE additive code. Have components be mini-additives, and as a simple suggestion, give each a multiplier that is applied to the component's experimentation category. If you experiment a carbosyrup to 50/50/50/50, that acts as a 2.5/2.5/2.5/2.5 additive (multiply the component's experimental percentages by 1/20). An alcohol could have a 1/10th multiplier. This would give some variety to the foods we can produce, either putting all points in components and final item to one or twocategories, or keep things broad for general usage. Higher level components would have larger multipliers, although they should all remain under the effectiveness of even a light additive. Well, maybe not a really crappy additive...

I'm not sure whether or not my stomache findings were a bug or not. It may be that the devs adjusted the digestion time when we first complained about it. Or maybe the fill graphs always had 45 small bars, so they stuck in 1 bar = 1 minute. Was there ever information saying that it would be exactly 60 minutes? The patch notes do say "about an hour"...

Just a note, Dantoonie is actually over crowded on most live servers causing bad lag and poor animal spawns. Please do not give them the impression that dantoonie is empty. If there is D. Milk there, there will be a lot of people to harvester it, if there is a spawn that is. It may also get problematic to find an unmilked aminal on Dantoonie because of the population problems.

Nice work as usual SirVimes, jus a couple of bits Id like to throw in.

Stomache : 30mins is fine IMO for skills, not for stats. People can pop a Muon 3mins after the buff on the previous wears off. Doctors can rebuff people the seconf their buffs drop, Dancers and Musicians can do the same (5-15mins to buff though). Im still not sure if the stomache decays from the time the item is consumed, or when it ends, if its when it is take, then maybe we can accept 30mins as a compromise as some buffs seem to last a while, but others have a pitiful duration.

Stat Buffs : these may be a good level when the new HAM system comes in, but it isnt coming in NOW and our buffs are.
Doctor's, Dancers, Musicians and Spice buffs aren't getting nerfed yet, so why are ours ? This puts us at a massive disadvantage yet again. I want to see them put back up to pre-patch levels until they add the new HAM system AND change all other buffs at the same time. I am not prepared to stand by and let them ruin our business yet again. They left us for months with bugged to hell food and drink, and are now going to leave us for months with crap stat buffs.

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fatgit wrote:

Im still not sure if the stomache decays from the time the item is consumed, or when it ends, if its when it is take, then maybe we can accept 30mins as a compromise as some buffs seem to last a while, but others have a pitiful duration.

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Ok Im just starting out as have a suggestion (thou it migh tbe too late). What if chef foods could increase the speed of statmigration? Alot of people complain that the statmigration is realy slow, so there is a demand for an increase in the speed at which this happens. Maybe even make it so that statmigration can only happen when eating food and result varies from food type to food type. This would make the chef proffesion truly special... Its just a thought... Maybe its too late to come with coments like these, but hey you have to try =)

Vado