Development Cycle Archive
Thread: 19 Answers 5-26-04
Taewyn wrote:
Honestly, I would not press the Issue on the devs.
They already let the 1k schematics go through....They already let 13 BER harvesters go through...These are what allow one or two crafters to control the economy.
Small harvesters were supposed to be experimented from 1-2 BER personels....Mediums from 3-4......Heavies from 5-8. People on TC saw it a compained, so the devs gave them a big experimentation range, which resulted in these rediculous harvesters we see today.
If you really want to help the economy, and the data base...The reduce the range on all harvesters. to the below numbers..
- Personals 3 BER
- Mediums 6 BER
- Heavies 9 BER
Even thats probably too much.....However, the reason smiths can make so many goods, is because they can pull in like 250% more resources per day then the devs ever intended.
Thunderheart wrote:
RotorofCorRng wrote:
Would the database not benefit from this?
It would actually, but the economy would suffer. Don't think of it in terms of how many items you can make as a player, but rather, how many items all players can make. With only a few thousand playersper server,any player can manufacture enough several thousand items, thus making enough items for eveyone on a server. This creates a situation where the players who are part of the most efficient crafting PA's can saturate a market all by themselves and completely squeeze out most other crafters. If you couple this with that same crafter's ability to get the best possible resources at any given time, it is very easy for a a clever crafter to get the best materials and saturate the market with the best items and make it too difficult for anyone else to try and sell their goods.
Um....Thunderheart, What are you talking about here?
The question was on why a stacks did not gu up to 1000 on crates and 1MM on Mats.
If ANYONE wanted to make a ton of items, the current limit wont stop them one bit. From an economic stand point, the only problem you are describing is one in which people have an unlimited amount resources...whcih is not what this post is about. Power PA's have the ability of which you speak already. This would not help or hurt them in any way.
The only loss/gain from an economic bennefit standpoint isa gainof zero. You use the same mats amount irregardless of how many gourps of 1000 manufactured items or stacks of materials are used.
This is a zero sum game in terms of materials, production time, and sales rates.
The only group that would be well and truly helped by this is frankly, you. Less items to 'clog' the database and such.
Anyway, that is the annalysis that I can come to with my economics degree. No idea on the technology side.
I have to agree with the masses on this one TH.
Sometimes theanswers you give us, are either fluff, or simply not thought out.
We want the ability to store more stuff, so we don't HAVE to use vendors, or other houses, or lot trades, etc. Please stop making us do these things.
I don't understand the logic the devs seem to use when solving problems. If the problem is the players are making too much stuff,you decide tomake it a pain in the butt to store resources. This is the best you can do?
When you use FRUSTRATION to change behavior, the only people you will affect are the low end guys that need the help! Can't store enough items in a house? Then the small guy, who only can afford one house, is screwed. The power crafter, well, they just trade lots, buy several house, etc.
By leaving this 100k limit on resources, you do NOT slow production. You simply piss off the power crafters, and make life alot harder for the low end crafter... further encouraging them to quit.
I mean this TH... I don't feel you guys are really thinking from a gamer's position. I'm encouraged to see you guys make changes recently, that don't hold us back, but reward us for doing the right thing. But your decisions are not consistant.
How about this? (I saw this concept in another MMO in development) What if crafters Could only use their experimentation points for the first 10 items they made each day? Then after that, the next 10 would only have 8 experimentation points available, then 6, etc. This would do two things. 1. Simulate working fatigue. (you work late, your work quality goes down) 2. It means that only a few of the best items can be made each day, so we'll need more crafters! Oh, and as for the factories, Lets say you can only create factory schematics using 80% of your experimentation points? (I know some components REQUIRE a factory run. Maybe components are the exception) So big production runs make inferior products.
So the only way to make the really good items everyone wants, is to make no more than 10 a day, and do it by hand? Sounds like the little guy would be worth something again!
See how easily you can fix this problem, without making the game needlessly frustrating?
Again, this is just the first idea I came up with. Maybe you should ask the forums, or better yet the in game folks, and find out how THEY would slow down mass production.
For now... please don't punish the poor. Let us stack resources, clean up the database, and let us all use furniture again! (And give the Architects something to do for the next few weeks) :-)
Have a great day,
Frosty
Thunderheart wrote:
RotorofCorRng wrote:
Okay, you said No.
Why not?
Would the database not benefit from this?
It would actually, but the economy would suffer. Don't think of it in terms of how many items you can make as a player, but rather, how many items all players can make. With only a few thousand playersper server,any player can manufacture enough several thousand items, thus making enough items for eveyone on a server. This creates a situation where the players who are part of the most efficient crafting PA's can saturate a market all by themselves and completely squeeze out most other crafters. If you couple this with that same crafter's ability to get the best possible resources at any given time, it is very easy for a a clever crafter to get the best materials and saturate the market with the best items and make it too difficult for anyone else to try and sell their goods.
Um, this is already true? The whole game is in the hands of the very few, same people in each trackable category.
RbT
Dapper_Dan Wrote:
1: If there are only a few thousand players on a server, you should consider consolidating servers, to expand the community per server.
I think that was meant in terms of the servers max capacity, not necessarily how many people are playing on the server. If a server can support 3500 simultaneous connections then you probably don't want to have many more than 18,000 characters stored assuming that the average load at any time is 20%. Now look at how many members a large crafting PA has and you can see how easy it would be for them to make one of something for every stored character on that server.
I have three accounts which equates to 30 lots and 300 storage in bank accounts. I use the 30 lots for 5 housesand5 factories for additional stroage. I can place 12 harvesters and I am renting8 lots from a friend.My guildmates and I look only for the best resources and we are sitting on millions of the best WS and AS resourcesthat have spawnedon Eclipse. In most cases i will never lack for a certain resource. The only thing I ever need to buy is food because i do not have a character that can make food.
I have a small operation because I do not want crafting to be my second job. i dont have the 12 experimentation points and dont care to get them because all they do is increase the condition or the range modifiers on weapons or a slight improvement to the base%, HAM requirement (buffs negate), or condition on armor.
What i am getting at is that what I have is typical across the servers and in many cases it is more dominating for those who don't mind crafting as a job in SWG and havemade effective advertising campaigns There is no way a new crafter will ever be able to compete with those of who have such a grip on the economy. Just take a look at the auctions. Only those few people who have the fortunes win the best resources.
Yea exactly my point.
Riis wrote:
Thunderheart wrote:
It would actually, but the economy would suffer. Don't think of it in terms of how many items you can make as a player, but rather, how many items all players can make. With only a few thousand playersper server,any player can manufacture enough several thousand items, thus making enough items for eveyone on a server. This creates a situation where the players who are part of the most efficient crafting PA's can saturate a market all by themselves and completely squeeze out most other crafters. If you couple this with that same crafter's ability to get the best possible resources at any given time, it is very easy for a a clever crafter to get the best materials and saturate the market with the best items and make it too difficult for anyone else to try and sell their goods.
Um, this is already true? The whole game is in the hands of the very few, same people in each trackable category.
RbT
It's hard to decide whether TH's answer on resource/crate capacities is just that misinformed, or just that disingenuous.
The only rational explanation is that it's another aspect of the maddening timesinks the devs try to impose on us, because the explanation he gave .... well, it's already been pointed out by enough people how out of touch with game reality that is.
Thunderheart wrote:
RotorofCorRng wrote:
Okay, you said No.
Why not?
Would the database not benefit from this?
It would actually, but the economy would suffer. Don't think of it in terms of how many items you can make as a player, but rather, how many items all players can make. With only a few thousand playersper server,any player can manufacture enough several thousand items, thus making enough items for eveyone on a server. This creates a situation where the players who are part of the most efficient crafting PA's can saturate a market all by themselves and completely squeeze out most other crafters. If you couple this with that same crafter's ability to get the best possible resources at any given time, it is very easy for a a clever crafter to get the best materials and saturate the market with the best items and make it too difficult for anyone else to try and sell their goods.
You know, that isn't right. Making subcomponents cratable to 500 is what was being asked for, but not the final product. Also the larger resource stacks are troublsome, not inhibitating. The limiting factor here is factory time, total resource gathering - note harvesting time and hunting time for animal resources and the biggy, distribution. The storage game play issue doesn't prevent anyone from dominating the market. The biggest issue is the distribution. You are limited to 6 vendors. You can not have a vendor in every town on every planet. No one can do a walgreens in this game so market domination just isn't possible.
There is more to business than wharehouses and factory production. Distribution is half the work in getting products to end users in the real world and certianly in this vitural world. Maybe you should let some of your business managers in on some of these game design meetings you have. They probably have some real insight. In the mean time, reexamine this issue again and again until you find a way to solve the stupid game play issues arrising from the excess factory crates and resource stacks.
Thunderheart wrote:
If you couple this with that same crafter's ability to get the best possible resources at any given time, it is very easy for a a clever crafter to get the best materials and saturate the market with the best items and make it too difficult for anyone else to try and sell their goods.
Doesn't SOE already consider this to be a problem? I remember back when I first started in July, every non-Master Crafter was getting orders for items. Now you can't get many orders unless your a Master, have stockpile of 950+ required stat resources, and 52 experiment points.
Instead of Crafters moving into the "elder game" of providing rare quantity, excellent quality items at high prices... it's become a game of large quantities of common items with excellent quality,but still sold at excellent quality,rare quantity prices.
If you want to fix the economy, you need to stop caving into Crafter whines and jack this game back into shape:
- Remove the ability to make 32k on "solo group" missions (your nerfing last year of mission reward sharing finally backfired, eh). This is worse than the earlydays of biz natches and Ewoks, you can rake in overa million credits on a 3 hour set of buffs, while watching TV and not really even paying attention.
- Make higher end schematics require more "rare" resources andmake rare or high quality resources harder to farm. (limit max concentrations to like 33% for high qual resources)
- Instead of giving Masters a higher bar of better quality items, equalize the quality bar (experimentation) from Novice to Master (instead of 1-10, make it 7-10)
- Instead of money sinks, lower income generating methods. Great way to do this, is via Empire choking certain markets, or Crime Gangs trying to take over certain markets. Could even toss in some strongarm extorting or more "fines" events. People toss around money for only the best items, because large amounts of credits are so easy to get. If you dropped $5m cash over a neighborhood, you can bet that every household will own a new Plasma TV and a new luxury/sports car by dinner time.
Sure some people will scream, because for some reason their in-game wealth is either ego boosting or an actual RL money making scheme for them, but overall I think the player base will enjoy a balanced game that's not so ridiculously easy and imbalanced. I'd just like to see you Devs get a little more hardcore on fixing the economy. I realize there's a "balance of change" rate that is desired, but folks aren't willing to wait around for 6+ months to see if the economy straightens out.
Gaenjin wrote:
and 52 experiment points.
25.
I'm dyslexic and can't Edit in this forum.
