Development Cycle Archive

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JustG wrote:

We are still reading... and thinking about this.

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How can you really expect us to believe you are "thinking about this" under the following circumstances:

-- Publish 7 has already started to "trickle out" to us

-- The original post of this thread contained no disclaimers or caveats about the intended change. The post very matter of factly stated what WAS going to happen.

"I'm going to kick you in the ####, here's why" doesn't make it hurt any less

I'm curious to know what and how this change is affecting the bio-engineering profession. You've made a clear case explaining how standard resource based crafting is being tweaked with these changes, but that in no way relates to the majority of the crafting I do. Pets are created with unique "resources" in every slot, and have five lines of experimentation. Essentially, BE's are making the products now that you say you would like to see in every profession, though I don't quite see how this change will accomplish that.

For whatever reason, we've not heard from our correspondant in over a week, all requests for information on the Test Center server forum have sunk like a stone with no usable feedback, rather claims that some people know somebody who might be a BE on test. There is no mirror server for established BEs to test out these changes, and anyone concerned about this change would be hard pressed to aquire the raws resources required to speed-grind a master BE on the test server today to answer our questions.

We have no official documentation on the BE profession, only best guesses made by dedicated players who have reversed engineered likely formulas to determine how the stats on our dna relate to the finished product. Even these estimates are not 100% accurate, and there are several areas that still cannot be pinned down to even a best guess. We are flying blind. We have no way to know if the affects of this change on our crafting are intended or bugs, or even any way to gauge what the changes are.

Bio-engineers are a crafting profession, and we would appreciate the opportunity to voice our opinions on this change, but the data of the change has been so far unavailable to us. I would respectfully request that someone from the dev team inform us of exactly how this change will or won't affect us, and how we can determine if any unintended changes do occur.

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Glum_Moonfist wrote:

So what about all the current weapons in the game? Am I going to have to worry about someone stocking up super weapons that I'll never be able to compete against?

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They will become the biggest commodity in the game - the "pre-nerf" items to end them all.

People regularly pay a million+ for pre-nerf FWG's - it's going to be like that, multiplied by just about every product that has experimental quality stats in the game.

Audio

I realize I may be a minority, but both me and my wife have double accounts and do most kinds of crafting, but I actually look forward to this change. Yes, it will hit like a kick in the nuts, but in the long run it will make grounds for a better game, especially after most "pre-nerf" items is gone form the market.

Might take a month or three, but I am sure this will just make the game work better in the long run, and that is what the Devs must concentrate on.

This will save you people soooo much time concerning this subject.

Dont argue anymore. The Devs Don't listen to player's concerns.

Just do what i do.........Grab the economy size lube.........bend over............and take it like everyone else does.

They haven't listened to people before this and they aren't about to start now.

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Fluxxen wrote:

I realize I may be a minority, but both me and my wife have double accounts and do most kinds of crafting, but I actually look forward to this change. Yes, it will hit like a kick in the nuts, but in the long run it will make grounds for a better game, especially after most "pre-nerf" items is gone form the market.

Might take a month or three, but I am sure this will just make the game work better in the long run, and that is what the Devs must concentrate on.

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Fluxxen wrote:

I realize I may be a minority, but both me and my wife have double accounts and do most kinds of crafting, but I actually look forward to this change. Yes, it will hit like a kick in the nuts, but in the long run it will make grounds for a better game, especially after most "pre-nerf" items is gone form the market.

Might take a month or three, but I am sure this will just make the game work better in the long run, and that is what the Devs must concentrate on.

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KrothParYskin wrote:

This will save you people soooo much time concerning this subject.

Dont argue anymore. The Devs Don't listen to player's concerns.

Just do what i do.........Grab the economy size lube.........bend over............and take it like everyone else does.

They haven't listened to people before this and they aren't about to start now.

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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.

After 4 months as a Master Weaponsmith gathering resources, I can make any weapon in the game, but not as well as my neighbor because he has skill tapes, so I sell mine for 50% of his.

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,

I tried experimenting on HAM, but with the return so low (now it will be even lower on most weapons) I went to damage only

and none to be made by the consumer when purchasing these items.

I have never received a tell for a weapon stat request other than Min/Max/Speed, it's all they care about

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.

I would still be classified a new vendor and the gap between me and my neighbor with skill tapes would appear to broaden with the implentation of this patch

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,

There would have to be a reason to spend points other than on damage, a bigger return on investment to make a difference in the weapon or a change in the fighting classes to make them want something different

especially when using lower quality resources.

I don't have the option to use low quality resources, unless I want to fill up the bazaar with garbage weapons, I don't see how changing from 7% per point to 2-3 on low quality resources will help that

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.

Most certainly my Master Artisan parts will hit 100% with lower quality materials, they are 99% now but with995 OQ materials, that's not a big enough boon to even consider thumbs up

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.

So, Advanced Blaster Pistol and Rifle Barrels are working as intended? I don't use them, they aren't worth the slight improvement in damage for the speed cost

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.

The only question is, are the T-21's I make now at the intended max, or the ones next week that will be significantly lower?