Dancer Archive
Thread: Resource buff reduced.
Panthu wrote:
They did ask, here.
That was a link to a post in the Dancer's Message Board. You reallyexpect usgrumpy Smugglers and whiny Jedi to troll your Boards? If so you are braver than I thought.
Trolling our boards will only make us stronger than you can possibly imagine...
Actually I was under the impression that other profession corrs had been contacted for ideas. Maybe I've been drinking too much over the years but I have a memory of reading that..
... and Cay was the first person I ever saw say "inspiration buff" back when he was the Smuggler Corr, heh.
PoetDancer wrote:
Of course, the crafters against our resource use buffing would like to believe that they earned the rewards, when in reality they were just at the right place, at the right time. I imagine in a sense, the slot machine jackpot winner earned their jackpot as well. But I wouldn'tsay it was due to hard work. It had more to do with being at the right machine, at the right time.
SlickRiptide wrote:
Ummm... As an entertainer who made his money in the mineral market, I can assure you that mining is nothing at all like running a slot machine. "Luck" has nothing to do with it, other than the "luck" created by a game engine that decides what stats this week's minerals will have. If a miner is in "the right place at the right time" it's because he put himself there, not because it fell on him out of the sky. Being a successful miner requires patience, planning, an extensive knowledge of the crafting market, and a network of artisans and fellow miners that buy your minerals and keep you informed on the current state of the galaxy.
Mining is an entire game unto itself, and it's really too bad that the devs chose to drop the miner profession way back in the day. They seriously misjudged when they decided "nobody would want to be a miner".
I'll drop this here rather than hijack the thread further. Suffice to say that I personally believe it's a bit short-sighted to dismiss it as a "game of chance".
patience: waiting around, checking daily in-game and/or SWGCraft, for a decent spawn of resource_001
planning: do I have enough harvesters, and cross-lot trades, to harvest AND can I get a day off work to play
knowledge: grind resources at 1cpu, decent at 10cpu, uber at 20cpu
customers: plop down a merchant tent, deploy an ad-bot outside the Theed starport
Fixed!
Ninyania wrote:
SlickRiptide wrote:
Ummm... As an entertainer who made his money in the mineral market, I can assure you that mining is nothing at all like running a slot machine. "Luck" has nothing to do with it, other than the "luck" created by a game engine that decides what stats this week's minerals will have. If a miner is in "the right place at the right time" it's because he put himself there, not because it fell on him out of the sky. Being a successful miner requires patience, planning, an extensive knowledge of the crafting market, and a network of artisans and fellow miners that buy your minerals and keep you informed on the current state of the galaxy.
Mining is an entire game unto itself, and it's really too bad that the devs chose to drop the miner profession way back in the day. They seriously misjudged when they decided "nobody would want to be a miner".
I'll drop this here rather than hijack the thread further. Suffice to say that I personally believe it's a bit short-sighted to dismiss it as a "game of chance".
patience: waiting around, checking daily in-game and/or SWGCraft or the Tempest Co-op if you're lucky enough to be on Tempest!), for a decent spawn of resource_001
planning: do I have enough harvesters, and cross-lot trades, to harvest AND can I get a day off work to play
knowledge: grind resources at 1cpu, decent at 10cpu, uber at 20cpu
customers: plop down a merchant tent, deploy an ad-bot outside the Theed starport
Unless you have some special method to manipulate resource stats BEFORE THEY SPAWN, then no, I'm sorry...
it IS ALL LUCK.
it IS "being in the right place, at the right time"
it IS a slot-machine cr@pshot
ZallusNuranxis wrote:Panthu wrote:
They did ask, here.
That was a link to a post in the Dancer's Message Board. You reallyexpect usgrumpy Smugglers and whiny Jedi to troll your Boards? If so you are braver than I thought.
By my count, there have been threads about profession inspirations in the following forums:
Scout
Architect
Creature Handler
Armorsmith
Bio-Engineer
Droid Engineer
Squad Leader
Tailor
Weaponsmith
Artisan
Chef
Possibly more. Anyone who says they didn't know about this coming hasn't been paying attention.
Heorot wrote:
The problem is not that 2% for high end and 10% for low end is game-breaking its simply that you are giving a higher bonus for worse results. You are telling the C students that they really are B students, or in SOE terms you are upping the quality of lower end items, 155 Blob Candy instead of 150 Blob candy.
What is the point of that buff, other than to make people feel good about themselves by making low end product have higher numbers attached to it?
Its intellectual dishonesty, which is offensive to me.
It's not intellectual dishonesty... it's the idea of making the buff at least marginally useful to someone other than a person who already has 980 quality resources. To use your completely inappropriate A-B-C grade analogy anyway, imgaine an exam where the teacher includes, in addition to the normal 100 pts for the exam, a 5-point bonus question. Imagine further that the teacher includes this bonus to reward those who attend class, and so the bonus is easy: if you were in class, you get it.
Now, whether you are an A, B, or C student, if you are in class, you get a 5-point bonus. The A student got a 100 on his exam, so his bonus amounts to 5% of his grade increased (100 to 105). The C student got a 70, so his bonus amounts to 5/70ths or a 7% increase. And wait for it... the student who flunked everything and got a 10 out of 100 on the exam, but got the bonus, saw his grade increase by 50% (of his exam grade total), from 10 to 15 total points.
Was the F student with the 10 given a "greater reward" for the bonus than the A student? Um... no. They both got a 5 point bonus. The bonus was worth less to the A student in theory, because it was only a 5% increase in a grade that was already capped, and assuming the school does not give A+ grades (a few do, but not many) that 105 is wasted, because the 100 is already an A, or a 4.0 for his GPA.
But look at the C student, for example. The +5 got him from a C- to a C (or a C to a C+ depending on your school). He benefitted from the bonus. And what of the F student? Well he got a 50% higher score, but he still failed.
So the bonus, in this case, is not really helping the A student because he's already "capped" -- he's already got an A. And it's not helping the F student because the F student is so far gone he's hopeless. Who it's helping is the people in the middle -- the D-C-B students , each of whom can, with that bonus, see a half-letter-grade (or so) improvement, and that improvement is being rewarded to them because the attended class and the teacher, in this case, values attendance enough to award points for it.
The system I described might not be the perfect way to do it, but I offered it as a way to get the devs thinking about building a system that helps people in the mid-range. If you have 1000 quality resources you don't need it, and we don't want people who have 900 resources to effectively have 1000... That is, to use your A-B-C analogy again, we don't want the C students getting a B+ from the bonus. What we *do* want is for the bonus to be useful to people with mid-level resources, and a straight 1% really isn't, because a 700 resource is low enough that the difference between 700 and 707 is basically irrelevant (while a 990 to 1000 jump is NOT irrelevant). So the question is, how can we make the buff mean something for both groups, and the answer is to put something in that provides diminishing returns. You do this either with straight numbers (i.e. a 5 point bonus no matter what), or by using a scaled system similar to what I described (I never intended it to be used unaltered, but as an example of how one could do it).
Now perhaps you think that any bonus on an exam is not fair and attendance should not count. Perhaps you don't think bonuses should be given or that they should only matter to people with over 950 resources. If that's so then we should probably just end the discussion right now, because we will never see eye-to-eye on it.
I, for one, would like to see people with all but the most hopeless resources get something useful out of this, and a 1% addition is not likely to be useful across the board to crafters. The PROBLEM people had with the 10% buff was what it does at the high end to screw up the crafting "ubergame" of trying to one-up yourself with slightly better stuff over time. That means a 10% buff is a bad idea for the 900+ resources, but it might not have been as much of a problem below that. It's not about rewarding people for mediocrity, but about doing something that will help both the mid and high-end game, and as you should be able to see by now, the same thing will NOT work for both equally well (which is why +10% is fine at 500 quality out of 1000 but not at 910).
C
Say student #1 has two hours to complete an exam. Student #1gets a 99% score.
Ninyania wrote:
patience: waiting around, checking daily in-game and/or SWGCraft, for a decent spawn of resource_001
Fair enough. The waiting around part I don't really see, but maybe that's because I was rarely looking for "resource_001". I was normally evaluating the current crop and finding out who could use it.
planning: do I have enough harvesters, and cross-lot trades, to harvest AND can I get a day off work to play
/eyebrow_raise - A day off work? That's pretty hard core. I assume that's a bit of sarcasm directed at the time involvement, rather than a serious notion that miners do that regularly. Planning rather obviously involves more than "do I have enough harvesters?". Which harvesters do I use this week? Do I need energy or should I buy it? What projects are my customers working on? What special requests have I had and how can I best fill them? Do I feel daring enough for a surveying trip to Dathomir or Lok? So on and so on...
knowledge: grind resources at 1cpu, decent at 10cpu, uber at 20cpu
Knowledge: Which smiths are located where. Which need this, which need that, which have their own mining alts and are only good for boutique good. Which smiths would rather pay for a location and do their own mining. Which parts of which planets are safe, which are dangerous, where the level terrain is in various mountain ranges, what my competition is currently charging for this or that, so on and so forth...
customers: plop down a merchant tent, deploy an ad-bot outside the Theed starport
Ugh! If that's someone's idea of a customer network then it'd be no wonder that they felt like the mining game was mechanical. Speaking only for myself, I'd never touch an adbot with a ten-foot-pole and I certainly wouldn't ad to the noise pollution around Theed. Call me old-fashioned, but I built my customer network by establishing relationships in person with the smiths I mined for. A computerized merchant isn't a network.
Unless you have some special method to manipulate resource stats BEFORE THEY SPAWN, then no, I'm sorry...
it IS ALL LUCK.
it IS "being in the right place, at the right time"
it IS a slot-machine cr@pshot
Chessack wrote:
Heorot wrote:
The problem is not that 2% for high end and 10% for low end is game-breaking its simply that you are giving a higher bonus for worse results. You are telling the C students that they really are B students, or in SOE terms you are upping the quality of lower end items, 155 Blob Candy instead of 150 Blob candy.
What is the point of that buff, other than to make people feel good about themselves by making low end product have higher numbers attached to it?
Its intellectual dishonesty, which is offensive to me.
It's not intellectual dishonesty... it's the idea of making the buff at least marginally useful to someone other than a person who already has 980 quality resources. To use your completely inappropriate A-B-C grade analogy anyway, imgaine an exam where the teacher includes, in addition to the normal 100 pts for the exam, a 5-point bonus question. Imagine further that the teacher includes this bonus to reward those who attend class, and so the bonus is easy: if you were in class, you get it.
Now, whether you are an A, B, or C student, if you are in class, you get a 5-point bonus. The A student got a 100 on his exam, so his bonus amounts to 5% of his grade increased (100 to 105). The C student got a 70, so his bonus amounts to 5/70ths or a 7% increase. And wait for it... the student who flunked everything and got a 10 out of 100 on the exam, but got the bonus, saw his grade increase by 50% (of his exam grade total), from 10 to 15 total points.
Was the F student with the 10 given a "greater reward" for the bonus than the A student? Um... no. They both got a 5 point bonus. The bonus was worth less to the A student in theory, because it was only a 5% increase in a grade that was already capped, and assuming the school does not give A+ grades (a few do, but not many) that 105 is wasted, because the 100 is already an A, or a 4.0 for his GPA.
But look at the C student, for example. The +5 got him from a C- to a C (or a C to a C+ depending on your school). He benefitted from the bonus. And what of the F student? Well he got a 50% higher score, but he still failed.
So the bonus, in this case, is not really helping the A student because he's already "capped" -- he's already got an A. And it's not helping the F student because the F student is so far gone he's hopeless. Who it's helping is the people in the middle -- the D-C-B students , each of whom can, with that bonus, see a half-letter-grade (or so) improvement, and that improvement is being rewarded to them because the attended class and the teacher, in this case, values attendance enough to award points for it.
The system I described might not be the perfect way to do it, but I offered it as a way to get the devs thinking about building a system that helps people in the mid-range. If you have 1000 quality resources you don't need it, and we don't want people who have 900 resources to effectively have 1000... That is, to use your A-B-C analogy again, we don't want the C students getting a B+ from the bonus. What we *do* want is for the bonus to be useful to people with mid-level resources, and a straight 1% really isn't, because a 700 resource is low enough that the difference between 700 and 707 is basically irrelevant (while a 990 to 1000 jump is NOT irrelevant). So the question is, how can we make the buff mean something for both groups, and the answer is to put something in that provides diminishing returns. You do this either with straight numbers (i.e. a 5 point bonus no matter what), or by using a scaled system similar to what I described (I never intended it to be used unaltered, but as an example of how one could do it).
Now perhaps you think that any bonus on an exam is not fair and attendance should not count. Perhaps you don't think bonuses should be given or that they should only matter to people with over 950 resources. If that's so then we should probably just end the discussion right now, because we will never see eye-to-eye on it.
I, for one, would like to see people with all but the most hopeless resources get something useful out of this, and a 1% addition is not likely to be useful across the board to crafters. The PROBLEM people had with the 10% buff was what it does at the high end to screw up the crafting "ubergame" of trying to one-up yourself with slightly better stuff over time. That means a 10% buff is a bad idea for the 900+ resources, but it might not have been as much of a problem below that. It's not about rewarding people for mediocrity, but about doing something that will help both the mid and high-end game, and as you should be able to see by now, the same thing will NOT work for both equally well (which is why +10% is fine at 500 quality out of 1000 but not at 910).
C
WOW! thats the way to put that (improper) analogy into the correct perspective. I like the idea of the diminishing returns a bit when I first saw it, but this really puts it over the top
definately a very bigQFE!!!
* * * * *
K'erry Nylo
Mayor of Landsend, Naboo {StarSider}