Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Understanding the Crafting Experimentation Changes
JustG wrote:
Howdy...
Thanks for the feedback thus far.
I would ask that you try to keep the emotional responses out of it... that has no effect other than to make us skip that post. I really appreciate the rational replies.
We are still reading... and thinking about this.
- g
Rational- Changing this system, the best working system in game none the less, at such a late point in the game, without first fixing and addressing the known bugs and other issues that effect this system first is a bad idea. The excuse for economy is a poor judgment call, it's like your attempt to talk merchants in to accepting vendor item limits to help aid your still yet solid database. The change in effect not only decreases all overall player crafted item stats, but creates new and more difficult player based economy with the introduction of pre-nerfs, overloaded database of sub par resources, and skill tape dependancies.
Emotinaly this would put alot of your player base that has enjoyed this working feature in SWG to be up in arms about your proposed changes, going live at that, without note of how Test Center accepted the new code.
Please stop "improving" working aspects of this game and continue with your endeavors to debug and complete unfinished proffesions such as droid engineer, smuggler, etc...
JCatano wrote:
The change sounds great to me.
The cries you hear are from players that don't want to actually have to do some research and adapt to a new crafting enviroment. An enviroment, which makes complete sense, by the way.
Right now, these people don't have to play around with experimentation, because the current process is so straight-forward and brainless. Find a good resource, stack the points into damage, and you have a winner.......They like it this way, since it's easy. Remember, easy leads to boredom.
I'm looking forward to the new crafting and economic dynamics.
Let me ask this rhetorical question...
*Kettemoor
JustG wrote:
Howdy...
Thanks for the feedback thus far.
I would ask that you try to keep the emotional responses out of it... that has no effect other than to make us skip that post. I really appreciate the rational replies.
We are still reading... and thinking about this.
- g
Chrysalide wrote:
The driving force behind a change to a fundamental system of this magnitude is the current state of the game economy. To put not too fine a point on it, the game economy is in poor shape. There are a few factors that contribute to the detrimental condition of the economy, and we are reviewing and assessing them all. Of these factors, one of the most significant is the ability for many crafters to easily maximize the attributes of items and equipment through experimentation.
Our main concern centered around the fact that with most master crafters all making the best equipment possible, there is very little variety on the market. It seemed to us that there were almost no hard decisions to be made during the experimentation process by the crafter, and none to be made by the consumer when purchasing these items. When a majority of the equipment on the server is top of the line, there is very little reason for customers to seek out new sellers, and new vendors find it difficult to break into the business.
The primary goal of this change is two-fold. We want to take the first steps in rebuilding the economy, and we want to redefine the crafting game within Star Wars Galaxies. By having resource quality play a more significant role in the experimentation process, the focus should be shifting away from trying to make an item with maximum attributes and minimum encumbrance. We would like to encourage players to carefully choose where to spend their experimentation points, especially when using lower quality resources. For example, do you want to craft a faster weapon with higher damage but with heavier special move cost, or do you want a slower, less powerful weapon that is very easy to use? Do you want armor with higher resists and heavier encumbrance, or less protective armor that even the weakest person can use? Or do you want a general purpose item that is not especially strong in any area, but not weak in any area either? And after this, consumers will need to decide what types of equipment will best suit their playing styles.
We believe that the introduction of items with a wider variety of attributes will be a step leading to the leveling of the playing field between crafters. And hopefully, this will lead to an increase in competition between crafters. Keep in mind that with this change comes a paradigm shift of sorts. We are aware that in most cases, items that will be crafted after Publish Seven will not have attributes as high as items created pre-publish. But still, I have seen some cases in which the heavier dependence on resource quality in this publish has resulted in items with higher attributes than are currently on Live.
One valid concern that has been raised with regards to this issue is that there are certain resources that are required for higher-end draft schematics that have capped qualities. For example, a certain item that has a dependency on conductivity might require Plumbum Iron as a resource component. The trouble with this being that ferrous metals, and specifically iron, will most always have poor conductivity (and realistically so). The perceived result of this is that any experimentation line that depends on conductivity can never be raised to an acceptable level. It is important to note that we are and have been aware of draft schematics like this. In such cases, we have artificially inflated the maximum values in the draft schematic for attributes that depend on the capped resources, so that the end result is in line with the expected values.
That may be a little confusing to follow so I will try to explain a little better with an example. Very simply, say that you have a weapon, and we want the maximum damage for that weapon to be no less than 50, and no greater than 100. Say that experimentation for maximum damage depends on conductivity, and the schematic requires iron and aluminum. For the sake of argument, let's say that the iron conductivity is capped at 10% of resource maximum, and aluminum conductivity is capped at 90% of resource maximum. When these two resources are used in crafting the item, the maximum conductivity possible is averaged out to be 50%. With this in mind, we have set the range of values for max damage on this weapon to be 50 to 200. The result of this is that with the maximum conductivity possible with these hypothetical capped resources (50%) the maximum damage that can be achieved with this weapon is what we wanted it to be (200 x 50% = 100). These artificially inflated values are not new in Publish Seven; these have been around since the launch of the game. In short, it is a valid concern, but it is one that we have always been aware of, and took steps to address in the original implementation.
In reviewing the threads on this forum regarding this new change, I have seen a lot of intelligent testing and discussion going on. More than a few people have mentioned that "if it isn't broken, we shouldn't fix it". The point as we see it though is that the current system is broken, and does need to be fixed. We feel that this is a change needed for the long-term health and enjoyment of the game, and we wanted to provide and frank and honest explanation of our reasons behind its implementation.
As always, we welcome and will happily address your comments and questions.
Most sincerely,
Well I think we are well above the 80% mark. This seems more like a 90%.
The bottom line is this. 90% of us don't like this change period. If for no other reason this is why it should not happen.
Alot of others have already spent a great deal of time and effort and thought outlining why this is a bad idea and shouldn't happen, as such I'm not going to bother.
1. Creating massive pre-nerf markets is game breaking. The crafting economy will essentially be ruined for many months or years to come.If not for the truly dedicated crafters the advent of "hologrinding" would ofalready destroyed it. But now you'veruined the dedicated crafters as well. Every dedicated crafter right now is stocking up on pre-nerfitems and will continue to sell only those items for months to come. And when that's run out, like many other fellow crafters they will quitcrafting. SOE would know that if they had actually been playing the game. Because many of us players are sure talking along these lines.
2. Quite frankly your changes are not in-line with your goals, andin reality will be in total defiance of your stated goals with this change, and this makes us suspicous. We are left to believe SOE isextremely incompetent, or is pursuing some "hidden agenda".
3. For many crafting was the one subset of professions where many of us could live free of "nerfs". This invades that in a BIG and terrible way (read #2) , and I like many other crafters will probably feel terribly disheartened about all of this. Personally I'm not making any more armor after this patch. I'm making as much as I can now and stocking up just like TH said to. Then I'm not making another blasted thing ever again. And when my pre-nerf stuff runs out..... so will my subscription. My armorsmith character is getting cancelled next month because quitefrankly I dont' know why I need him anymore.
I'm done with nerfing, and I'm done with this game.
Hi,
Just wanted to reiterate and agree with some of the points made so far as to why this change probably won't work as intended for quite some time down the road.
1) It creates an even greater rift between casual, starting, and low volume crafters ... and what some are terming power-crafters. Those that can afford the extreme prices being charged for skill tapes and other bonus items for crafters will have a huge advantage and secure the market that they will already own by having stockpiled pre-Publish items. I would expect that as that market for crafting enhancersgets saturated, the price of enhancers will drop as the gap in player wealth will be large at that point. In order to sell the enhancers, prices would have to come downso the next economic strata can afford them. Once that happens, parity will be reached and everyone will be equal again. Parity will once again be achieved and all comparable items will once again within a close range of each other. Therefore the net change from this alteration will be negligible.
2) Given the abilities to buff stats in a multitude of ways that stack and get stats to incredible levels, changing the focus of how to spend experimentation points will never happen. At least for weapons and probably armor as well. Combat is all about damage. Unless you inflate HAM costs to something artificially unrealistic, Weaponsmithing will remain pretty much a one line experimentation profession.
3) The economy has been ruined by other game factors than crafting. Duping, hologrinding,afk macro farming of items, cross server lot trading, EBay sales, andmulti-account usage have all contributed more to breaking the economy than anything crafting has done.
4) Reviewing, tuning, and adjusting schematics will have a greater impact than this proposed change. Also changes to various skilltrees and certifications wouldn't be amiss.
5) I predict the cycle out time for dominant pre-Publish items will be much longer than you anticipate. This will deter newcomers to the various crafting professions by making it impossible to compete or find a niche market. It may well also drive out existing crafters who play casually or run small operations.
Looking at this from a completely Artisian point of view I have already seen some issues with this experimentation system. My main concern is the changes will remove any variety from artisian goods. As a tester, I amalready getting requests for 100% crafting tools (15.00 rating); nothing less will do anymore. The new standard for artisian goods will be 100% crafted items only; sinceamazing successes allow these to be made without perfect materials by raising the material cap.
Under the new system I am able to make:
- 100% Crafting tools with 980 conductivity copper
- 100% CDEF weapons using 905 cond/ 989oq copper (all in damage)
- 100% Powerups using 989oq copper and 1000oq polymer (+33.5 max/+16.5min)
Granted these materials are pretty good there is no longer any chance for improvement. Most any artisian will just need to find material in the 950+ range to make the identical items any other artisian will be selling. Simply put: 100% artisian items will become the new standard with no variation other than price.
Even though I like being able to make perfect items, my biggest concern is that I could only do this because I am a human in the game. All of theses items made required all 11 of my experimentation points to make perfect. I choose the human species for this advantage, but this puts all the other species farther behind the human without having skill tapes. I have a Bothan Master Artisian on a live server so I do feel this pain.
KnightHawk420 wrote:
Then last week it was because we had asked for less critical failures (although I'm still failing to see how any of this changes that).
as it stand now krayt tissues are nice but not required neitehr are the enhanced components from loot drops. but with the changes we will be REQUIRED to find these things to have weapons crafted to match the quality of the current weapons we now enjoy.
turning this thing into SWG campfest online even more so than it already is.
chrysalide put forth an argument about evening the playing field. this change does not do that it just shifts that even MORE to the established crafters who can afford to purchase the high quality materials in massive quantity from the unofficial miner class. the little guy starting out does not have access to the millions of creds it takes to supply demand on good weapons and establsh themselves. if anything the established crafters should welcome this as it will further cement their supremecy in the top of the crafting food chain.
in a perfect world with all crafters having equal access to all resources this will further narrow the differences between weapons as only one type will shake out and that become the standard.
example: there are only so many ways to craft a weapon one layout will take preference over all others and we will be back to square one; and all the change will have done is mad the crafting community angry.
the premise that this change will diversify the crafting community is so obviously false even a non-crafter like myself can see this. i play the game and i know what I will buy and what types of weapons/gear i prefer and what types just dont work. right now there is diversity in weapons changing the system to make it such that all the points are required to bring one stat to max does nothing but shift the paradigm to a mirror image of what is going on. its no different a solution than copying the skill tree from rifle, just renaming the trees and specials, and calling it a "new" profession. the fevs have already said they dont want to do this and it wont be done. but here we are on the eve of publish 7 with just SUCH a change happening. all this is doing is copying and relabeling the same tired problems in a new format.
thanks for your attention.
AvaroT wrote:
jefmes wrote:
The fact of the matter is that the majority of you posting here are people who play the game a lot (like I do) and like being Masters and/or near Masters because you're making these best items. What do you normally experiment on when making a weapon? Damage. No one wants a weaker weapon - why? Because there are almost ALL max capability weapons out there.
Do you not see the other experimentation bars? Most of them go unused because the current implementation is lacking importance for these other stats. Part of what this crafting change is supposed to do (as Chrysalide mentioned) is make crafters make CHOICES. Right now we don't make choices, we go for the damage first, and speed second. The other stats need to have importance and effect overall gameplay to a greater degree. Does it water down the playing field a little. Yes - because it IS evening it out. There will MUCH greater difference between players, but on a smaller level.
I for one think these changes are for the better, as it's a step toward putting the economy where it was SUPPOSED to be in the first place. It ain't gonna be all that bad except for you freaking power-gamer min-maxers, and if it drives some of you away them I'm ALL for it.
Fine, so make SPEED matter more on weapons by reducing the speed skill mods that anyone can get. How does changing the crafting system help this? And what does this have to do with the economy? At best, it will screw up the economy for a long time to come, because of the huge "pre-nerf" everything market that it will create.
That's my point exactly AvroT (and thank you for responding with honest questions as well, I can't believe the level of ANGER in some of these posts...granted, a bit in my own post as well in response). Speed needs to matter more. Durability needs to matter more. Point Blank Modifiers need to matter more, etc. This is a step towards making ALL of this matter more so that we're constantly making balance decisions on what kind of weapons we want to sell. We still don't have the HAM combat changes implemented yet - I'm betting that better encumberance on these weapons and items will matter more then!
My point being, those of you who are being SO rude and so utterly against this...do you even TRY to look at the big picture? I'm starting to think more and more that the problem isn't the dev team, it's the thick skulled vocal portion of the player base. Seriously, what kind of debate is, "Well, well, I'm gunna cancel my account then you bastards!"
No.
Discuss it civilly, present your points, and if they still do something you don't like then move the hell on knowing you've intelligently made your case. There's plenty of us here who LIKE the game, who LIKE what the dev team does, and think they're doing their best to balance out these systems for a better play experience. And I'm sorry if this sounds like ass kissing but so many of you are just so freaking RUDE - it blows my mind!