Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Holobits?!?!?!
LukeBorgman
Tue Aug 10, 2004 8:35 am
#131
Naaah. There's no need to seperate them because after #1,I and others like me arepulling my stock to storage anyway. I will not be selling my stuff to a Merchant to profit off my labor. The economy in SWG is getting to be too much like real life. I'll be holding onto it for myself and my friends. I'll probably switch from architect to armorsmith since that will be more helpful to myself and my friends under the new Merchant-dominated economy. #1 kills cottage industry. What percentage of the 50% losing vendors in #1 do you think are going to keep selling stuff to the general public after this? ...given that they have to start selling to Merchants of sacrifice skill points permanently to Merchant.?. Maybe 20% is my guess, and I bet half of them quit crafting altogether after a few months. ...and I think the number cut by #1 will be more like 80%, so you can kiss 72% of current crafters selling their wares to the public good-bye. Of course, the remaining Merchant/Crafters will make a killing. Kudos to them.
Mkappus wrote:
TH,
Thanks for finally commenting on the vendor changes. My biggest concern is that you are implementing both changes at the same time:
1. Drastically reducing the number of vendors by getting rid of the ability to have a vendor without the appropriate skill. I would imagine that realistically 50% of the vendors in the game are invalid.
2. Drastically reducing the item count possible to have on a vendor.
I fully support the first change and think it is a great idea. The second idea I can see some reasons for caps, albeit much higher caps. However, change #1 is going to result in the need for a vast quantity of goods to find homes on new vendors. If chang #2 is implemented at the same time I don't think it will be possible for the merchants to absorb the goods. Hypothetically, I lets say there are currently 500,000 items listed on 5,000 vendors. After change #1 there will only be 2,500 vendors left, and if you get the cap raised to 1,000 items, there is only the possibility to have 250,000 items listed. So half of the goods for sale may wind up getting deleted from stockrooms of invalid vendors, because no one has anywhere to put them.
If SOEs goal is to purge the game of thousands of items, then go ahead and do both changes at once. However, I would recommend making change #1, allow 4-6 weeks to pass, then implement change #2.
StolenDiagram
Tue Aug 10, 2004 8:47 am
#132
TH, a member of the dev team stated about 2 months or so ago that the new quest method would be much more time consuming than the random profession grinding. By making these village quests soloable you're eliminating the difficulty factor thus lessening the duration of the quests. There should be a compromise. Obtaining a Jedi character should not be a walk in the park, nor should it take a week or 2 to obtain. The majority of the test center players seem to think you are handing them Jedi on a plate, and as one who unlocked via profession grinding I find this un-acceptable
Also, the message I recieved following my unlock was very vague. It stated my force sensitive skills would be unlock after publish 10. From what I gathered from TC, those players who obtained 70 badges will also become force sensitive. If this is the case, then how willthose players who unlock prior to pub 10 benefit?
Message Edited by StolenDiagram on 08-10-2004 08:47 AM
Sigrun
Tue Aug 10, 2004 9:23 am
#134
Thunderheart wrote:
On one hand, merchants need to be the vendor wranglers. There is no getting around tying vendor limitations to Artisan/Business skills and Merchant skills. On the other hand, I've been speaking with the team on the item number restrictions and I'm pretty sure we'll be able to get those limits raised to a suitable level.
That's all well and good, but you still haven't answered one of the KEY questions we artisans and merchants have been asking...
WHY ARE YOU IMPLEMENTING THESE LIMITS - AS IN, ANY LIMITS AT ALL?
We have conjectured that you're either doing it because of limitations in your database or because you want to exert some sort of control over the economy. But they're all guesses.
Please... throw us a bone. If you're going to nerf us (and this is a bigger nerf to us than taking Flamethrowers away from Commandos), please tell us WHY.
(I'm referring to item count limits here, not whacking vendors belonging to those with no Business / Merchant skill.)
Message Edited by Sigrun on 08-10-2004 09:25 AM
CharPrime
Tue Aug 10, 2004 9:26 am
#135
Propain666 wrote:
Blimigerite wrote:
TH, if you are unfamiliar about Intrepid's greatest player event please read up on all that is involved in Groovefest. A merchant item cap will kill off this event inwhich merchants across the server gather to sell their wide selection of goods and thousands of Intrepidians gather for this event to shop and party with smaller events being held to include every possible type of player from entertainer to combatants to roleplayers. The success of Groovefest has launched it into it's 5th occurance which is coming right around the bend (hopefully before this patch goes live) An item cap on the vendors will cripple the income provided to throw such an event in the future and as patron of this Festival I would be saddend to see it disapear.
Damn that sounds like alot of fun....
People standing outside there tents barking off what items there selling. A true Bazaar....
Very nice, to bad they dont do that on Flurry.
also to bad it will be nerfed into the dark ages....
you should just shut the hell up if you don't know anything about this player created event
MoSko
Tue Aug 10, 2004 9:51 am
#136
A lot of people are saying this cap is being introduced to help smaller businesses compete against player who have apparently got some kind of monopoly on their server's trade. Is this true?
I run a small operation. I have mastered three trades - Artisan, Architect and Tailoring. As you can imagine, I have a huge spread of items I could put on my vendor (just the one, it barely seemed neccessary to start another), but I don't. I stock some furniture, one of each item where I can manage and in somecases, where things sell well (the plants and a couple of the tables), I sometimes stock two or three of each. I'd stock a lot more candles and lights if I could as they shift straight away but I haven't the resources I need at the moment. I guess if I put the effort in, I could. But I haven't yet. It's nice to have the option, though.
Am I upset because someone else is selling a lot more than me? No. They're putting the effort in. I dread to think the amount of time they must need to spend searching out resources, the crafting and the restocking they do but if they're willing to stick at it, they surely deserve the rewards.
Would I like to be earning more, getting more customers? Sure. But not at the expense of the freedom I have within the game. Like I mentioned earlier, if I put the effort in, I could track the necessary 'nice' resources to makesome longer lasting candles and lights but there's other stuff I'd rather be doing in game.
I've mastered Tailoring and I desperately want to give my customers a wide choice of clothes to purchase. This proposed cap has pretty muchshattered those plans. I'd love to sell more but only on a level playing field, notbecause others have been forced to sell lessand not at the expense of my time.
I don't want to play SWG: Adventures In Restocking.
I know that through some planning, building up my stock and my resources and cultivating a base of regular loyal customers, I can make my small business work. I don't need some artificial help from the devs that, in the long run, will cripple me if I become successful.
Mejowepra
Tue Aug 10, 2004 10:08 am
#137
Thunderheart wrote:
Mejowepra wrote:
Thank you for your answers on the macros. This is helpful (timelimit is good). I assume this would also stop:
/pause 3600
/macro spam
things as well. It's so simple it's too obvious..
Vendors: yes, limits needs to be higher. We don't complain about there being limits but rather how low they are. Also aggregate limits is almost a necessaity (unless individual ones are high enough).
I have a vendor with, at the moment, 250ish powerups but my total is less than 610 right now (I dropped arch and haven't started with doc yet really).Thanks
This has been mentioned before on the forums in the threads regarding this but I think it could use repeating. It might be "as simple as that" to fix. How? Simply do a /dump (or equivalent) as a player goes AFK. Also don't allow players to disable auto-afk (really, nice feature perhaps but it doesn't make sense). That way VALID at-the-keyboard macros will continue working while the AFK macroing will be gone with a very simple (comparingly) code change.
Just an idea that needs repeating.
I appreciate that you're working to increase he vendor limits (despite certain conspiracy theories :-) and I do believe it's a first step on making the merchant class worth something. However I still think that the merchant limit isn't the only thing that needs looking into. Storage (in houses and such) is a major problem for crafters, especially ones with multiple master level professions. The simplest way to solve this is to allow bigger resource stats and crates.
I.e make max crate size 1000 and max resource size 1000000 or something. This alone will not only drastically cut down on the number of objects in houses (AND in the database) but will also make crafting a lot less tedious (I just moved around crates to make 300 buffpacks of each type between my 6 factories - that is a total of 216 crates! Can you imagine how nice this would have been with just 18 crates (one per component per buffpack)?
In either case, as you limit vendors (not a bad thing), please consider the effect this will have on storage for crafters. I have myself not really needed to use vendors for storage but I have two accounts and only one is a crafter. If I was just one account I would have no lots left for harvesting.
Thank you. Oh and thank you (SOE) for the 5 minute starport wait. Less wait == more fun == very good change.
Crimsonsplat
Tue Aug 10, 2004 10:14 am
#138
MoSko wrote:
A lot of people are saying this cap is being introduced to help smaller businesses compete against player who have apparently got some kind of monopoly on their server's trade. Is this true?
(snip)
I've mastered Tailoring and I desperately want to give my customers a wide choice of clothes to purchase. This proposed cap has pretty muchshattered those plans. I'd love to sell more but only on a level playing field, notbecause others have been forced to sell lessand not at the expense of my time.
I don't want to play SWG: Adventures In Restocking.
I know that through some planning, building up my stock and my resources and cultivating a base of regular loyal customers, I can make my small business work. I don't need some artificial help from the devs that, in the long run, will cripple me if I become successful.
Funny you should say that. I just gave a lecture to a player in the merchant forum I accused of being a socialist, because he wanted government (Sony) intervention in the economy (SWG).
Quoting myself, talking about the success of my business:
Make me an oligopolist? Not hardly. Since then I've rented other lots from guildmates to add more harvesters and factories, and built my business up, despite moving it across the galaxy (his shop is nowhere near the guild town). The guild represents< 20% of my business by value. I am aten point Architect, and have no massive stocks; I busted my butt to buildup the business. I developed a plan, sought out a specific market, executed my strategy, and it is working.
Does it involve buying up everyone else's stocks so they're empty? No. I don't make enough.
Does it involve hogging all the best resources? No. I don't make enough.
Does it involve undercutting everyone else's prices to drive them out of business?No. In fact, I'm higher than most other vendors competing with me. Small houses: 20k, for instance.
What I am is *in stock.* And it requires a lot of items on the vendors to make sure I stay that way. I have a few other things I do to enhance my chances, but I'm not going to give away all the details. Every thing I do is aboveboard (except the cross-server lots, if you have an issue with that) andis a strategy found somewhere in these forums. And hard work. Lots of it.
In short, don't blame your lack of success on conspiricies, and then claim you need a nerf to help you deal with it. Thats a socialist's ploy: "government intervention to correct historical inequalities."
... I'm trying to make it perfectly clear: if you start blaming the world for your failures, you cannot be a success. Sony is about touse force majure to fubara winningstrategy used by many merchants. They havebased this action on their artificial (and distorted) views of what an economy should be, rather than what it IS.
Sony, do not think that trying to achieve 'equality of result' is a good idea. You said yourselves that the income & wealth curve matches the real world's, so why are you trying to flatten it now?
JediLowe
Tue Aug 10, 2004 10:26 am
#139
I don't think I am totally in the minority on this considering the last holobit, but I am not in favor of massive revamping of the combat system. I am a 'tweener', I have been playing for probably more than 6 months, but nothing like the first (or second?) dayers. I would classify myself as a hard-core casual player. I do indeed play most every night, though I am limited to one set of buffs most of the time 8).
I live in the biggest city on Starsider (at least most of the time the biggest) so I have a lot of exposure to hard-core and sometimes players; crafters and warriors; Jedi lovers and Jedi killas. I can say that the vast majority of hard-core folks, who come from a heritage of many MMOs love the idea of totally revamping the system. They want a system where there is always someone who can beat you, but always someone you can beat, which is fine for a simplified 'mage/fighter/thief' type world. They are also very used to learning new games repeatedly.
I will say, I am terrified of the revamp. I am just getting used to this system of play, and have only recently mastered some combat professions (spent time on ranger and creature handler takes forever!). I am a software developer by trade and I am massivly impressed at this venture as a whole. I have software running in space, on airplanes, and shuffling billions of dollars between people's and companies bank accounts, but this is much more impressive to me by far. I also know that the more complex things are the bigger the reprecussion of things are when they change.
I am sure this is well know, but I will state it anyway. The combat system is the core of the game around which the entire game revolves. Change the ham system, you alter chefs and doctors and armorsmiths. Thus the desirable resources change. Then suddenly as we move into a new world of fighting, missions could become either very hard or very easy, meaning it could be instantly harder to buy stuff, or so easy that everything is instantly devaluted. Suddenly living on Dantooine could become suicide, meaning we have to try to survive every day or jump back to a safer planet.
OK, doom and gloom ended, but I hopefully made a point. This is a really big undertaking, and I am not sure I want to learn to play the game all over again. I think of the things I should be spending 25 hours a week on, and this only falls onto the list cause I love Star Wars and really like the game, but I did wait a long time to get in, and if I suddenly had to start over, I don't know if I could justify continuing. That's not a threat, just the thoughts that run through my head as people talk about altering the rules of the world, much like that happens every few years as oil prices jump,or a diet craze starts, or war ensues. Hey, if anything it may become a good simulation for post-apocolyptic human behavior, /chuckle.
I am sure you have tons of pressure to revolutionize. I am sure it would be hard to say "Yeah, we spent a bunch of time on this, but maybe we won't use it". I would say though, that this massive change is probably the result of not doing little things often enough. As an example, I have seen a sudden renewed interest in carbineer now that new weapons have been announced. I have hear rumors of lots of small shifts, but I have not lived through many of them outside the loss of hologrinding (which I do think is a loss, since there is now less incentive to explore the game's professions). I think the tendency is to completely rethink things, instead of tweaking, so at least let this be one voice in favor of trimming, not rebuilding.
Thanks!
naples
Tue Aug 10, 2004 10:41 am
#140
its funny that we will see 300+ Jedis on every server ! Also Funny will be that there wil not be a Galactic war anymore No more Reb's vs Imp's ! no just "Cristal Hunters" this game are getting to a Dead End. Every Profettion is nerfed so far BUT NOT JEDI !!!! I was so exited about this game a Year ago ! and now that I found out the purpose of it ! :/ I ma frustrated and believe that the only way to get out anything of it is quitting !! I am not alone in this ! BTW hearing all of you just focusing on how hard would it be to become a jedi or what force ,...bla bla bla ... why not making a question like an NPC he ask you a question depending on your answer (everytime a different question) you will become a "chance" to go for Jedi; if you fail the answer you will NEVER have this chance! In the movie Star Wars as far as I can remember there were never 300 Jedi nor "hologrinders to work all profettions to become a Jedi ! Jedi is something random and not that you can buy it in a Shop. Jedi is a rare adn random Person that has the "abilitie to serve others. I am refering myself to the fact that the game is getting to a point that if everybody has become a Jedi he/she will quit the game anyhow. Quests like DWB are so hard and not Soloable,The Corvete either, something abotu that, I am looking since the puplishing of DWB for a piece of Armor... I was sitting on Yavin 4 for a week playing 10 H daily and I never I say NEVER saw even a Black Sun there ! no talking about Killing one what btw (as I heared ) is very hard ! The spam in the Hermit Cave is creazy, and the Badge quest (70 Badges ) to become force sensitive is a joke. now everybody is doing badges to become force sensitive in first place before publ. 10 ! this is nonsense. PLZ tell me that you will do something about the Jedi problem that will come up !!! BTW JEDI DIE like everybody else i.e: Obi-Wan, Darth Vader a.k.a Anakin Skywalker, and many others; so please let the game be the same way
Sincerlly
Torsten Starrider (Wanderhome)
Nap Floridian 
N R.I.P SOE N
naples
Tue Aug 10, 2004 10:46 am
#141
DON"T DELET THE MACROS !!!! SINCE we have just one thing to do !!! grinding XP to pay for BUFFs and do quests ! I we have no more Macros we have nothing left then going for JEDI in the squil Cave and that S**ks
Torsten Starrider (WanderHome)
DeathLemur
Tue Aug 10, 2004 10:47 am
#142
Thunderheart, before anything gets mucked around regarding vendors and merchant... WILL YOU PLEASE LOOK at this thread?
Talking about vendor limits is all fine and good, but you're missing the bigger picture: the system for getting resources from the producers (those that run harvesters and hunt critters) to the consumers (the crafters) is NOT FUN. At best, its haphazard and complex. What fun is it if a miner can't easily sell his goods? What fun is it if a crafter can't get all the different types of material needed to make an item? I learned armorcrafting and, for all practical purposes, gave up on it because I can NOT get the materials I need! Not unless I want to spend another 40 hours a week tromping through the universe. Sorry, but I already have a full-time job.
In my vision, vendors should be for finished goods. If they were just used for finished goods, then limits would make sense. HOWEVER, resources are in DIRE need of a new system to buy and sell them.
What I describe in my thread should even be easy to implement and code. Heck, I could post you some Java-esque pseudo-code to help...
Just look at the thread. Please. Before anything gets published that's going to tweak people's nipples.
Talking about vendor limits is all fine and good, but you're missing the bigger picture: the system for getting resources from the producers (those that run harvesters and hunt critters) to the consumers (the crafters) is NOT FUN. At best, its haphazard and complex. What fun is it if a miner can't easily sell his goods? What fun is it if a crafter can't get all the different types of material needed to make an item? I learned armorcrafting and, for all practical purposes, gave up on it because I can NOT get the materials I need! Not unless I want to spend another 40 hours a week tromping through the universe. Sorry, but I already have a full-time job.
In my vision, vendors should be for finished goods. If they were just used for finished goods, then limits would make sense. HOWEVER, resources are in DIRE need of a new system to buy and sell them.
What I describe in my thread should even be easy to implement and code. Heck, I could post you some Java-esque pseudo-code to help...
Just look at the thread. Please. Before anything gets published that's going to tweak people's nipples.
InfluenzaSWTA
Tue Aug 10, 2004 10:57 am
#143
In case a programmer actually reads this thread and hasn't thought of this already... change the macroing system under the hood to use a stack machine instead of a procedural machine (as I assume it is now). Limit the stack depth to 5 macro calls, and when a new macro is called, simply make sure an instance of it isn't already on the stack. Voila, no more recursive macros.