Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Crafting Experimentation Changes... resolution.
Allowing for a _chance_ (5%? 1%?) that new crafters craft the few things they can craft at the same level as a master, with decreased crit fails and increased schematic numbers for the master increases cash flow to new crafters while still providing incentive to climb the tree.
this also attempts to combat the resource hoarding mindset as current cruddy resources have a chance of competing with people who've mined/hoarded ultra-rare spawns of high quality resources. I'm sure it's not going to stop it, but if anything we need to open the door to new crafters entering the market and get away from the feeling that one needs to cross-server trade for 10 of each harvester type on each planet just to cover their rear ends when something good spawns.
RocketM wrote:
You can't give a novice the chance to make items as good as a master because its possible for a person to be a novice architect, weaponsmith, armorsmith, droid engineer, doctor, combat medic, chef, tailor, and bio engineer all at the same time. It takes 237 skill points to do so.
But, given my implementation, you wouldn't have to worry about that very much as most of the things take advanced boxes to even gain the schematics. Certainly a redistribution of schematics could follow to increase the incentive to get to master. It actually makes more sense.
As I mentioned above, the number of items per schematic would be drastically reduced for novice as well so the situation you fear, a novice creating thousand of master-level items would be an oddity. To get to that under what I'm thinking about you'd have to spend weeks with hundreds of thousands of resources just to get a handful of schematics that would produce the number of goods to actually knock a Master out of business. If you are going to put that kind of time into it, why not get master whatever for a few days, produce the schematics at the high level and drop it? There's nothing to prevent that happening now.
For example, I can think of very few Architects that love to make wall modules. This is just dividing the labor so that Masters produce all things at a high level, and Novices produce few things at a high level.
It wouldn't really hurt any of the starting crafters (long time crafters should have some kind of small edge if they're willing to pay through the teeth for it), and professions like architect and BE might really really enjoy having less crit failures at master level...really I don't think a single crafter would mind a change that would reduce crit failure rates...I could be wrong, there might be some crafters that like failing...you never know.
other than that...its a good thing the experiment % changes aren't going in...there would have been no end to the flame wars between new crafters, and those that hoaded tons of schems pre-patch.
one last thing...thanks for releasing the patch date along with this info...tuesday is patch day...
biwan:
JustG wrote:
We are going to revert the Experimentation changes. They are baked into P7, which goes out tomorrow morning, but we will take them out with a hotfix Wednesday morning.
[snip]
As a rule, we are trying to enact changes that are fun to the game. This one was not fun. Publish 7 is staged to go out tomorrow, and the crafting changes are baked into Publish 7. However, we will revert the changes on Wednesday morning (unless something critical comes up as a result of the publish... in which case we will revert them out as soon as possible.)
This is an opportunity for you all to play with the changes for a day, so in case we ever want to go down this road again, you will better understand what it is we want to do.
[snip]
It seems strange to me that the publish cannot be postponed by one day to avoid making a "known defective" publish go live. Either some interesting corporate politics are involved, or this is seen as a temporary delay of something that is seen as certain to happen.
If SOE has established policies that make meeting schedule dates more important than correct deliveries, that would be a really bad sign for our future. I have seen such things happen inadvertently, when management that did not understand the software development process, andput "objective" measurements into the performance review process that had to be "gamed" this way to get decent raises. I certainly hope this is not the case!
The other possibility I see, puts the weight on the last quoted paragraph. The objective may be to do a controlled introduction of something seen as an unpopular necessity. From what I have heard there will be some positives to this new system, and they want people to find them so it looks better next time. They may, in the future, say "well you have a choice between this new horrible nerf and that previously rejected system," and get everyone asking for it. This isn't a bad practice when managing small children, but I can't say I am fond of it here.
Whinners win again 
You know 10 to 1 the majorty of the people who play this game day inand day out would of excepted the changes. The whinners on these boards only make up a small percentage of the people actually playing this game. You dont hear from the ones who are having fun because of just that, there having fun and dont need to spendall there time in here whinning about every little thing. Sure this gamefor the most parthas some majored flaws in it, but by complaining everytime theDev's try tofix the stuff wont make it any better. If you let the whinnershave there way,they would have it so MasterCrafters would get 100% in all catagories so they could make god weapons/armor.
To me this new patch would of added a little more balance to the game.
Bad thing is the ones that were whinnig the most will probably end up leaving the game anyways from boredom. Boredom appears when you take out the challange from the game. These are the same people who when playing a single player game break out all the cheat codes so they can win easily. It's to bad the Dev's cater to them so much.
Personaly I would of welcomed the new changes, anything to add depth to this game would be welcomed.
Tunturi wrote:
Whinners win again
You know 10 to 1 the majorty of the people who play this game day inand day out would of excepted the changes. The whinners on these boards only make up a small percentage of the people actually playing this game. You dont hear from the ones who are having fun because of just that, there having fun and dont need to spendall there time in here whinning about every little thing. Sure this gamefor the most parthas some majored flaws in it, but by complaining everytime theDev's try tofix the stuff wont make it any better. If you let the whinnershave there way,they would have it so MasterCrafters would get 100% in all catagories so they could make god weapons/armor.
To me this new patch would of added a little more balance to the game.
Bad thing is the ones that were whinnig the most will probably end up leaving the game anyways from boredom. Boredom appears when you take out the challange from the game. These are the same people who when playing a single player game break out all the cheat codes so they can win easily. It's to bad the Dev's cater to them so much.
Personaly I would of welcomed the new changes, anything to add depth to this game would be welcomed.
Heh whiners? I have been playing as a crafter since launch. I don't think some of you get it. Stats would have been less on on every item that uses multiple line esperimentation across the board. Do you have any idea how many weapons I could have churned out with prepatch stats if this had went live? At the very least enough to last me into the fall or next winter. How exactly again does that level the playing field between new masters and old masters? Oh wait, it doesn't. Yep, us "whiners" kept a change from happening that would have made any new gear you bought be one of two things, lower overall stats or hellaciously expensive. Clue check bright boy, you can't kill things wihotu armor and weapons and meds and food. Yep us whiners won, which means you get to buy better stuff... cry more noob.