Cities And Housing Archive

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Cafa wrote:

I'm missing something here. We're supposed to screw everyone in the game who interacts through the admin of structures because why? Some perceived injustice that you cannot even prove has done you any harm?

Fivo Asia

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Lots swaps are bad for the game. They have allowed industry to get too big mostly due to excessive resource production and storage and loot storage. They have shifted the intended balance of economic power away from crafters as well as allowed some to become so big that new crafters can't compete.

Part of the problem we currently have with armor having excessively high resists is due in part to how overharvesting and storage of superior resource spawns has allowed them to be much more commonly available. Sure the devs were short sighted, but they figured on us having 10 lots a piece and perhaps a few more from friends, guildies and paid lot leases.

They did not plan for crafters with 100 harvesters and 50 houses to store the best resources. Top-notch resources are readily available to these crafters thus, all their product can be made with them. This creates a situation where more uber gear is produced than was planned on and new crafters can't compete until they have gathered resources for 6mos in order to produce something approaching what the estasblished lot-swapping crafter makes with great resources he has stored by the million.

Since many people have more storage than they should they are allowed to horde or store more items they would otherwise have to sell off to make room. This has the effect of raising prices as the owners can wait out the sale a bit more and also enables AFK loot camping which steals newbie content from the players it was meant for.

They also prop up cities that are higher ranked than they should and end up being ghost towns because they are populated by cross server ghosts and alts. Cities lie nearly lifeless as only a testament to their founders' ability to skirt the rules and prevent legitimate cities from being placed or advancing.

Excessive lot placement also badly clutters the land. Harvester farms and other extra structures inhibit travel, reduce spawning, and generally take up up good places to build. Wouldn't it be great to not have to drive around massive static farms and kilometer long medium house walls places by shell characters? Wouldn't it be great if a few more Krayts spawned on some servers whose graveyards are heemed in by overdevelopment? Wouldn't it be great if you could build your house on that prime overlook because there is only one harvester there instead of four?

You can call it unfounded if you like but,I see these complaints over and over again, as well as a few others. Ithink they seriously degrade the game and the practice should be halted. If you read my previous post fully, you will see thatI actually prefer limiting admin list functions so only the owner can maintain the structures. However I think that might not have enough of an effect and limiting how many other people's structure's admin lists you could be on would be a reasonable inconvenience (screwing? pfft!) to further address what I feel very strongly to be a big problem with the game.

My point was that most of the reasons for being on more and more admin lists are of a convenience nature and can be worked around in most cases. It would be a small hinderance for me but, one I feel would be well worth the effort, especially if limiting admin list functions was not enough.

SakeO

Actually back when I was an MDE and Master Atrisan, I was unble to place my few harvesters on many resource spawns because someone had placed 40 there before me, and was the same everywhere the resource spawned, unless I wanted to settle for some minute percentage spot.That is not just percieved my friend, that is an injustice. And it was more the rule than the exception. When a spawn of resource is dominated by the very few, there is an unbalance. By addressing your statement here I've highlighted in the red, I just want you to see that yes, some people are adversly affected by this issue.

Even though I no longer harvest much of anything anymore (TKM/Doc now), I still say its not right to the crafters that dont trade lots to have to settle for much less because of it.

This was an issue long before the "Droid Invasion" patch, and as you can see, it continues to be an issue. The problem is that the Devs havent officially come out on either side of the issue, so no one has any guidelines to follow here. I'm sure if they said it is "Working As Intended", most peeps would move on.

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killaz22 wrote:

Cool, as long as it doesn't effect him everyone else can stew! Great player that one.

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If you are referring to me, I 'll let you know I am on several admin lists and it would have the negative impacts on me that many here fear so badly. I don't think they are actually such big problems and certainly possible to work around. I, personally, am not a crafter but, I know alot who are and this is a big issue to most of them. I don't mean to portray myself as any kind of Martyr but, I would be losing more than I gain in a direct fashion. The upside for me comes from having an overallfairer, more inclusivegame that does not reward metagaming as the best way to get ahead in the game.

SakeO

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GrafvonSoden wrote:

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Cafa wrote:

I'm missing something here. We're supposed to screw everyone in the game who interacts through the admin of structures because why? Some perceived injustice that you cannot even prove has done you any harm?

Fivo Asia

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Actually back when I was an MDE and Master Atrisan, I was unble to place my few harvesters on many resource spawns because someone had placed 40 there before me, and was the same everywhere the resource spawned, unless I wanted to settle for some minute percentage spot.That is not just percieved my friend, that is an injustice. And it was more the rule than the exception. When a spawn of resource is dominated by the very few, there is an unbalance. By addressing your statement here I've highlighted in the red, I just want you to see that yes, some people are adversly affected by this issue.

Even though I no longer harvest much of anything anymore (TKM/Doc now), I still say its not right to the crafters that dont trade lots to have to settle for much less because of it.

This was an issue long before the "Droid Invasion" patch, and as you can see, it continues to be an issue. The problem is that the Devs havent officially come out on either side of the issue, so no one has any guidelines to follow here. I'm sure if they said it is "Working As Intended", most peeps would move on.

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This is multiplied by having lot swapped homes to store the resources mined. It does need to be addressed (And they have said that any trade across servers is out of the game's control. If you reneg on a credit swap across servers the CSR's won't do a thing) but there are multiple ways to do this. Easiest and most sensical is to make the cost of lot swapping greater then the reward.

Case in point; 40 high BER harvestors dropped with little effort has no cons outside of upkeeping those 40 harvestors. Now what would you do if dropping those 40 BER harvestors required grinding out a crafting profession (the higher lvl you get the higher BER can be placed) with your mule character that will never be used? What if you where the only one able to add power and maintenance to these harvestors so the only way to keep them running for long periods of time is an instand drop of 5 million credits and power or consistently bugging the swapped player to come back to add more maintenance. How willing would people be to lot swap now with these requirements placed on them and more?

And that's just what has been thought up so far in this thread there are probably harsher ways to keep alternate characters usable as an actual player but not effective as a mule. This also goes without harming everyone in the game which limiting admin would do.

Tell me, sake, if your guild had over 100 members and you plan on keeping them all fully armed and armored how would you go about storing the weapons and suits of composite and pup's and swoops for them if you had access to 6 homes? Would it require forcing a dozen people acting as gatekeeper to assistance? Where do you put all the loot they gain to help crafters out? Where do you put all the mountains of resources your 20 crafters use up to keep their vendors stocked since they're pre-eminent in their trade on your server. What do you do if one of your 6 slots suddenly had to leave the game for a myriad of reasons and inable to log back in for months at a time. How do you manage your character's abilities now being slightly crippled in that respect? That idea has too many con's and the pro's can be achieved by different methods. Why make the game into a job due to all the "minor" inconveniences that exist when there is no true need for them.

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PsychoticChipmunk wrote:

Tell me, sake, if your guild had over 100 members and you plan on keeping them all fully armed and armored how would you go about storing the weapons and suits of composite and pup's and swoops for them if you had access to 6 homes? Would it require forcing a dozen people acting as gatekeeper to assistance? Where do you put all the loot they gain to help crafters out? Where do you put all the mountains of resources your 20 crafters use up to keep their vendors stocked since they're pre-eminent in their trade on your server. What do you do if one of your 6 slots suddenly had to leave the game for a myriad of reasons and inable to log back in for months at a time. How do you manage your character's abilities now being slightly crippled in that respect? That idea has too many con's and the pro's can be achieved by different methods. Why make the game into a job due to all the "minor" inconveniences that exist when there is no true need for them.

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Admittedly, this is the toughest to address. By 6,I assume you mean the 5admin accessesbeyond those owned, which was a quickly thought out number, plus the additional slot owned leftover from 9 for a guild hall? I did mention that 5 or 10 might be how many are allowed and might add that guild halls take too many slots. Further focused thought might turn up a best livable number but, even this worse case scenario might be able to be handled.

possible solution:

The largset group I belonged to was not actually a guild but we all shared items through a series of depots. It only numbered 25 to 30 but a few organized people and the rest cooperating with the most basic of guidelines kept everything running smooth. In a guild of over a 100, it is folly for one man to try to run it all. It would need to depend upon a number of regularly active players keeptoeveryone properly equipped. I would suggest that you split your 6 lots in to2 incoming depots and4 out going depots with a least two other regularly active player/officers to have admin on each one.

Incoming depots would be drop-off points for either loot or resources with the two assigned officers in charge of them with you overseeing them. Depending how many extra admin slotsguildmembers have they would be on one or both and could drop off or access these stores or at least the one most related to their needs. Both would be ideal but if half your memebers had one or the other, there would probably be enough so that you could always find someone to drop or pick up something from them.

Outgoing depots would be post offices for sub groups of your guild. Each of the 4 would handle 25 people and officers or others in their subgroups could drop off items for one guildmember or another, probably in a labled backpack or such. Players would pickup items meant for them in these depots. If they could be broken down by similar professions (combat, medical, entertainer, crafting) it might work smoother.

You might also want to create small specific crafting depots and teams for storage of crafted goods to be delivered to outgoing depots when necessary. Monitoring officers of the outgoing depots and the members of those teams would have access to these crafting depots but the guildleader might not need it. They might even be a good place for storage of relaed resources and crafting material if large enough and could possibly be a factory.

The guild hall could function as one depot, so there is one admin list back. You would need perhaps 6 trusted officers each listed on two depots and all the rest of your guild members listed on 2 or 3. Depots with larger capacities will help alot unfortunately lots per items held is something else than needs to be adressed on the larger buildings, butI digress.

You can argue it would take alot of coordination and structure involved, not to mention every member devoting 2 admin lists of their limited amount but, with a guild of 100, structure, coordination, delegationand some level of guild member buy-in are sort of neccessitated. A possible side effect might be a better organized guild or there may be some system that might better fit your guild structure. I am not in it, I don't know. Ultimately, it is just one way off the top of my head, there are likely others.

If they were to limit how many admin lists we could be on,I would hope that it would come with an acceptance and cancellation mechanism, better item capacity per slot on larger buildings (possible freeing some guildleader lots) and your aforementioned idea of reducing the fuctions available to administrators. I'll agree that 6 is probably be too few but, steps could be taken that couls make even that work. Reducing the lots taken by a guildhall and allowing something close to 10 admin lists to be on might give the 100 member guildleader a dozen or so lists to be included in(counting some of his own)which would be used to facillitate the guild.

If there is a way to effectively stop or greatly reduce lot swapping and even multiple account muling, i am all for it. Reducing administrator fuctions and leaving more to the owner is probaly the best start. My way of limiting the numbers of admin lists is more of a second step if it proves that players are willing to put in the extra effort to manage the harvesters of those they are swapping with. All else aside, I wish they would at least declare it an exploit and start telling people to stop doing so. Then start working toward eliminating it.

SakeO