Development Cycle Archive

This little speech was the biggest bucket of bullcrap misdirection to come out of SOE for at least 2 weeks.

End Result of these changes: They mathmatically changed 10 experiment points to be as effective as 8 experiment points. You basically lose 2 experiment points.

And this is supposed to fix the economy? Improve variety and make it easier for novices to break into the market?

I got some land in Florida I'd like to sell. Great prices.

How many speech writers did it take to come up with that load of hogwash? You should work for an election campaign.

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Chrysalide wrote:

I assure you that we are not doing a "post-and-run". We will be still be reviewing the comments and questions for a good while this evening, and over the weekend as well. I havecompiled a list of the top concerns from the thread already, and have put it up for discussion and commentto some of the other developers. We will review these and get some comments and feedbackto you all as soon as possible.

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The list of top concerns would appear to read like this, in order of severity:

1. The idea is being pushed to live

2. The Devs do not listen to the community

3. Crafting is not the source of the economy failure, we do not generate money

I've said it before and I'll say it again. All this change does is reward the very rich players right at this moment who buy up all the pre-nerf gear, allowing them to ride on their crates of weapons and armor for months while the rest of the player base toils with new substandard gear.

It rewards whoever has the time and credits to invest in the resource trade as if it were real life; at least right now a casual gamer can make things that are close in stats to a master. Under the new system, only the people that take the time to play the game 8 hours a day as if it were a job will be able to accumulate the high-stat resources to make items approaching the average quality that we have now. High-end weapons like we have on live now will no longer be possible, and the weaponsmith who only plays an hour or two every couple of days will be hurting to make something at above-poor quality.

In other words, you are pulling the rug out from underneath the casual gamer and fully rewarding the powergamer community. This game is NOT a job. It is supposed to be fun. And this crafting change is making it a whole lot more like work and a whole lot less like fun to be a crafting profession.

One of the comments in the initial posting, that it is hard for new artisans to get people into their shops when they can't offer anything differentiable from the next guy...

As a relatively new Master Armorsmith, I would disagree with this view. Armor is not in great abundance...when I set up shop, I posted my armor stats on the Forums and within 2 weeks had sold my initial 25 sets of composite for 100K per set. The next batch I ran, I had moved my shop and didn't advertise at all, and sold out in a similar period. I don't have any extra experimentation points. The armor business combined with smugger supplies and Powerups, has made my career, thus far a month and a half, turn over roughly 25 million dollars.

The server this experience is from is Kettemoor, not sure if there are similar stories on other servers. As an artisan just getting the range of current crafting, I do not look forward to having to learn a new crafting system.

I also thought part of the impetus for this change was that people with extra experimentation points were able to use the extra points to make up for lower quality resources...wouldn't an easy fix to this be to do away with experimentation tapes?? I think that would do more to "level the field" than a change to the way crafting works.

Given the way so many changes are made and implemented untested, or having disregarded the feedback from the testing population, I can only anticipate the problems we will face. Are the people making the decision that the economy of the game needs to be fixed even playing the game. Some of these changes seem to be made from a bean counter standpoint rather than a participant standpoint. Like a lawyer making decisions for a high wire artist...that makes as much sense.

Bitterly wishing to continue my current, but shortlived prosperity, but anticipating the worst.

Tadpole

so let me get this straight, you want a broaderrange of crafters, will all different types of item right? some with high HAM cost, some with power or defence. Sounds like just a nerf to me, you say you want to do it for the economy, i dont see how this helps it, your worriedthat the best smiths corner the market? thats still going to happen, they have the best resources, only after pub 7 all that will happen is that they will sell tons of crappy guns instead of tons of good guns. They will still have the monopoly and the enon isnt going to change what so ever.

This is just going to open up a massive new market in ultra expensive pre-nerf gear which as we all speak is more than likiely being stockpiled so high that it lasts a good long while. The econ is not very good because of the way cash income is, not because an armorsmith can make full comp sets with 80% resists and 30ish ham's unsliced.

No, I personally dont believe any of you for a second, i think this is either a lie or you are fooling youselves,what doi think? your trying to nerf buffs, armor and weapons so that the game is harder. Many people want it to be harder but i think this isnt the way to do it, they way to do it is though great work like you've been doing lately such as the geo cave and the forthcomming corvette.

You really have ticked off like so many players with this and i cant believe you cant see that or dont care. Nerfs lead to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to people cancelling their accounts I mean i have soe gone crazy? dont you care about money anymore? what happened to the good ole greedy soe that only cares about cash, borrow some staff from EQ already and promote this game as beign something good, spend you time fixing the classes not breaking this that work fine, and yes they do. Go make some new neat ultra hard zones instead.

well thats my rant, cheese to be delivered to the below address kkthx

Go read Thunderhearts post on the Friday feature and the armor/buffing reduction is listed as part of the combat rebalance, not a economy fix.

I just want to take the time to echo the points I agree with....

1) this "fix" will do nothing to fix the economy. Crafters who have the means and desire to stock pre-nerf items will make outrageous amount of creds, and after those items get less common, the "new standard' will take over at the same price.

2) This "fix" works fine for single item experimentation, but items with multiple items to experiment on are left out in the cold. There's no longer that little wiggle room to tweak here and there, it's all or nothing.

3) speaking as an armorsmith only, if you want to see more variation in armor, make the HAM experimenation a viable option, and change or add other viable armors. Composite or Ubese are the armors of choice, all the others are left undesired. Padded is too heavy for the protections it provides, all the others don't offer much to the user. PSG's and Taniel still have shifting stats, and taniel is still missing parts and an advanced segment. RIS is a fu**ing joke, for the effort required to get the components.

Please, take this back to the drawing board one more time, tweak the values on the items where there are more than one line of experimentation. Then try agian, but this is NOT ready to go live as it is.

I sense a great disturbance in the Force. It's as if a million people suddenly cried out about a change to the game they're trying to fix, yet are giving no constructive ideas to make it better themselves.

I would propose that they make all the current pre nerf items decay at a faster rate untill they're gone from the game world. Add new lines of experimentation to each crafting profession such as a speed line and damage line for the weapons, etc. Make quests for the experimentation skill tapes that only Masters of their craft can do. Make those same tapes random in their overall benefit to the craft. Have better resources spawn more regularly so others can aquire good materials to use. Make the crystals, pearls and combat type skill tapes spawn more often and not just in the caves, but on random NPC's that could spawn anywhere at any time. Thus eliminating the afk campers in the caves and regular low level npc spots and making the item overall less valuable since most people can find their own. Do away with the apprentice xp from other players and make everyone pay the npc's for their training thus creating a majory money sink. Increase that ammount they must pay for their training.

Pay more for shuttle service and set a cover charge at the cantina. Pay an Imperial tax on each purchase or service for both the buyer and seller according to the price of the item. Charge a luxury tax on items priced over 50k. These of course would really only apply to vendors and the bazzar. Charge more for player owned city features, vehicle repairs, structure maintenance, etc. These are some things I would suggest to help set this econemy back to where it should be.

As I posted earlier I like the coming changes they have planned. Instead of whining about it, either show your support or give some suggestions on what they can do to change it or add to it. May the Force be with all of you.

This change is probably the worst I have seen yet. It places a massive burden the players by making them even more dependent on the cruel resource allocation system. What game designer in their right mind makes a game mechanic that requires real time months or even years to aquire usable resources (or even the resource at all).

The resource system is the most casual gamer (under 25 hours a week) hostile component of SWG and this change makes it worse. If it was not for third part sites like swgcraft.com which maps resources for people it would be even worse, no thanks to SOE.

How I read this is that you are nerfing everyone to 8 skill points for many products, increasing the demand and thus cost of skill tapes, most of which do not work because of bugs further limiting demand and driving up costs, and buffing established players with large resource pools giving them an even greater lead on the competition.

Thanks

Come on Devs, how much more proof do you need? The crafters, the ones that spent extensive time playing and crafting objects, KNOW what they are talking about. Have any of the devs actually spent time playing the game? It is incredible the level of denial that the devs are showing with their efforts to shove this so-called change down everyone's throats in the face of strong feedback by the players that clearly have more of a grasp of what the real problems in the game are.