Combat Medic Archive

This idea was actually put forward in another thread, but it was kind of buried, so I am reposting it in hopes it may get a little more attention.

Currently, if you have a factory and a schematic, anybody can make anything. This is good in that the original intent was that Joe smuggler could contact his local weapon smith, purchase a schematic for weapon upgrade kits at some fee, and make them himself with a factory. This was well and good, and as designed (which is why you can limit the uses of a schematic).

However, in a sense, this lets a person get free skills. For example, I become a master architect andmake a few schematics for the more popular furnitures. then drop the class. For most intents and purposes, especially for hosting a vendor, I have the benefits of being a master architect but none of the SP costs for the class. The same can be done with doctor with stim B's, etc. Since schematics can be made for 1000 items, and as a droid data pad can hold 100 schematics, there is no practical limit to this.

To partially alleviate this, I would propose that they change factories, such that it actually builds things faster as you gain assembly skill, the justification being that as you are better at assembling things the factory could be operated more efficiently. Currently, a food and chemical factory makes items at 8 seconds per complexity of the draft schematic. I would suggest they change the base assembly time to be 16 seconds (so SOE can use the "100 skill means you are twice as good" formula they use everywhere else, although I personally think slower would be better), and as you gain assembly skill, manufacturing time would go down.

This would let masters of a craft have an advantage when crafting things, and also make it so crafters have a better incentive to acquire assembly skill tapes (which currently are significantly inferior to experimentation skill tapes).So in theory (if designed this way), somebody with 125 assembly wouldhave afactory run faster than the currentspeed.Non-crafters would still be able to supply their own items at a slower pace (which makes sense because they in theory shouldn't be selling to the mass market, so the slower pace would still supply them adequately).

The assembly time would of course need to be dynamically set though (maybe reset once a day), so that the existing problem of crafters having little incentive to keep their skills doesn't go away.

I don't even remember if we get XP anymore. There was a time (briefly) when full XP was given. Then it was cut to 10% or so of the XP. Then it stopped working completly but was supposed to be a bug, then I left the game for a couple of months.... I really don't know whats going on with factories and XP right now, sorry..

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