Development Cycle Archive

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Sumorex wrote:

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Thunderheart wrote:

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Gnomepunter wrote:

Yes, critical failures are fine and should be in a crafting system but, with Architects, you loose TONS of resources. 100 times more at one shot than every other crafter out there.

We Architects never asked to do away with them totally, just do away with loosing subcomponents on a final combine. We could deal with loosing the raw resources on a final combine but, to loose all those subcomponents that ALREADY PASSED is wrong.

Woulda car manufactuere throw away the whole car because the axle failedwhile makingit? You don't throw the entire car away, you replace the broken part.

On a crit failure, pick ONE of the pieces to fail and ONLY that piece fails. The crafter then replaces that ONE part (or resource) and continues on.

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Stick with me guys, thats what Im saying.

First of all, its a good mechanic, but in this setting the risk and penalty have to be measured and thats whats being discussed...

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Go gather some high level DNA (Mutant rancors) then crit fail. You'll see that an Architect's subcomponents isn't anything special.

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Thank god a fellow BE is fighting the good fight here.

I spent days gathering enough mutant rancor dna to make a few pets with. Took it back to my Research Center city, and then proceeded to critical fail 4 out of 5 times.

BE's have to use 1 of a kind unstackable materials to make our pets.

We can critical fail on the initial combine of the dna template, then on any of the 10 experimentation phases, then on the final dna template combine, then again when we take the final template to make the pet. That's what... 13 different steps that can ruin our end product? And it's not as though we can have ton's of dna laying around. It doesn't stack, so a small house can hold just enough dna (barring ANY failures) to make 30 creatures...

I know that for now I have a critical failure at some point in the process almost every time I make a pet.

That's just too much.

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Thunderheart wrote:

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Vashner wrote:

Will removing fizzles unbalance SWG and it's economy? NO.. will it threaten people learing crafting professions NO. ...

Then why do we have it?

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For the same reason there are critical fails in all games. There is a chance for critical fail and also critical successes. Its a great risk vs reward mechanic. Its game play. Without risk versus reward, there is no "game".

There isn't an RPG out there that doesnt include a chance for failure and "crit fails".

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are there critical successes in this game? i never noticed... or are those called "amazing success" ?

-duck

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Thunderheart wrote:

Stick with me guys, thats what Im saying.

First of all, its a good mechanic, but in this setting the risk and penalty have to be measured and thats whats being discussed...

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TH, you have to understand the game though, it's more than a risk vs. reward part when it comes down to it. Critcal failures are a customer service nightmare for crafters. We are constantly being accused of swiping loot like tissues and armor segments when we get a critical failure. It's a hassle and it's depressing for the person who loses those items.

The best analogy I can think of is hiring someone as great as Bob Villa to work on your home, and when you come back from work for the day, you see your house burned to the ground and a note that just says "sorry". Except in the game, you have no recourse.

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Thunderheart wrote:

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Vashner wrote:

Will removing fizzles unbalance SWG and it's economy? NO.. will it threaten people learing crafting professions NO. ...

Then why do we have it?

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For the same reason there are critical fails in all games. There is a chance for critical fail and also critical successes. Its a great risk vs reward mechanic. Its game play. Without risk versus reward, there is no "game".

There isn't an RPG out there that doesnt include a chance for failure and "crit fails".

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World of Warcraft will have it. Games should be rewarding people for spending time to do something and not randomly failing hours worth of effort. Then the game goes from being a game to being work as you recollect the resources to build another and redo components and put together the final product. If you want to make this a game as described above, then why did you remove crit failures that use up resources for architects? Be consistent. The path of no crit failures is more FUN...and FUN is what this game is supposed to be about.

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Thunderheart wrote:

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Vashner wrote:

Will removing fizzles unbalance SWG and it's economy? NO.. will it threaten people learing crafting professions NO. ...

Then why do we have it?

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For the same reason there are critical fails in all games. There is a chance for critical fail and also critical successes. Its a great risk vs reward mechanic. Its game play. Without risk versus reward, there is no "game".

There isn't an RPG out there that doesnt include a chance for failure and "crit fails".

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Sorry TH ... there really isn't a critical success!!

You have crit failiures ... but no counter part.

You do have *amazing* success, but that really just gives you an extra *experimentation* point ... but the counter on that, Moderate Sucess, basically ruins the weapon instead of just *taking* an experimentation point away. In most cases if you get 1 or 2 moderate sucess's you can't *spend* points to recover those loss's.

ie: if I am working on something ... and the *max* quality is reached after 7 exp points ... that leaves me 3 extra points to play with.

I should be able to get 3 moderate success and still reach the *max* of that mix ... this is not the case and needs to be looked at.

There is basically not enough *reward* ...

Plus I will re-iterate something I said before ... the chance of crits (of any kind) should go down as the quality of the resources go up. Working with nearly perfect resoruces should mean a *much better* chance of being successful ... where as working with bad resources should increase the chance for crits.

After all ... if the materials are the *best* that means they are *easy* to work with ... when the resources are easy to work with then you have less accidents or failures ... cause the resources do what you want due to their high quality.

Hope you get both of those points :-)

Returning to the math side of the argument, let's talk about stim B's. A Stim B has three components, all of which need to be experimented on, which then go into the stim, which has to be experimented on. The formula for finding the failure rate is

( 1 - ( .96 ) ^ 44 ) = 1 - .166 = .834

So, the chance of critically failing at any point during the manufacture of a Stim B is 83.4%, and of not critically failing is 16.4%. That is assuming 10 experimentation points are being used.

These numbers are just for critical failures. Considering that we need to experiment to an amazing success (or at least close to it) before we are satisfied with making a schematic for a factory run, it is amazing that we ever make a good schematic. I used up 30 each of factory made components trying to experiment to a good Stim B last night, and never made one that I was satisfied with. And that means that I have at least 30 less Stim B's that I will be able to factory produce from the schematic that I hope to eventually make. Considering that I charge close to 1000 credits for each Stim B, that is a minimum loss of 30,000 credits due to not getting a good enough experimentation result.

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Thunderheart wrote:

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Gnomepunter wrote:

Yes, critical failures are fine and should be in a crafting system but, with Architects, you loose TONS of resources. 100 times more at one shot than every other crafter out there.

We Architects never asked to do away with them totally, just do away with loosing subcomponents on a final combine. We could deal with loosing the raw resources on a final combine but, to loose all those subcomponents that ALREADY PASSED is wrong.

Would a car manufactuere throw away the whole car because the axle failed while making it? You don't throw the entire car away, you replace the broken part.

On a crit failure, pick ONE of the pieces to fail and ONLY that piece fails. The crafter then replaces that ONE part (or resource) and continues on.

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Stick with me guys, thats what Im saying.

First of all, its a good mechanic, but in this setting the risk and penalty have to be measured and thats whats being discussed...

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If you want to use "good mechanic", we'll get into item repair issues, which is a whole different discussion...

But we're not the mechanics... we're the builders, the creators... the engineers.

it's definetely a different viewpoint.

Please check on why I fail and have far more 'poor' rolls when crafting combat medic stuff than I do when crafting doctor meds.

It just plain doesn't make sense that a failure of any sort will completely destroy a product. It would be reasonable that you might have to redo a few steps, but, come on! I mean, to totally destroy something like a weapon would require some sort of huge explosion that reduced all the elements to base atoms. There should be a way to salvage items. Heck, there should even be a way to salvage already manufactured items, IMHO.

Crafting would be a lot more enjoyable if the information that is already partly available was fully available and up-to-date.

For example…
For each sub-component that contributes to a characteristic in a combine the sub-component characteristics that contribute to the combine's characteristics should be visible. For example, power in advanced liquid suspensions makes a difference in the number of heals in the final stimpack, and is a visible characteristic of the advanced liquid suspension. But even though droid storage compartments appear to make a difference in the effectiveness of crafting stations they don't show any characteristic at all.

On the other side of the equation, schematics do a good job of telling crafters how resources affect the crafted items. But they don't say anything about how sub-components affect the crafted item. They should. The schematic for a stimpack should say how much and to what the characteristics of the advanced liquid suspension contributes.

I can accept that there is some game-mechanic value in having things discovered through careful experimentation. But with regard to the documentation I just mentioned, the principle of giving crafters the information is already established. It just needs to be fully implemented.

As for the broader issue of what can be discovered by experimentation...
Careful consideration should be given to the practical ability of players to perform enough experiments to get meaningful results. If we are talking about power-ups -- where a dedicated crafter could hand-build 1000 items for testing -- rules can be discovered. But in practice very few players could hand craft a similar number of crafting stations and all the optional subcomponents -- especially considering that different kinds of crafters need to be involved in their construction.

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Thunderheart wrote:

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Arrya wrote:

Uggg, whatever you do - for god sakes, don't turn this game into World of Warcraft! SWG has the basis for one of the best crafting systems in MMOGs out there, it just needs a few tweaks.

Critical failures are fine. But we definitely need more information on what exactly causes them, how we can reduce that risk, and how we can get better successes!

This does not really seem like a difficult concept. And I should mention that TH seems to be understanding the concept pretty well, it just doesn't mesh with what is actaully in the game

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Well, I must admit that I've been crafting a lot lately and I love it

I was exhausted from a long day yesterday and I still ended up crafting until a little after midnight...

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I really like this point, of course failure is necessary, without it there is no game. However more information is very important and all of these unknowns like

Quality of tools
Quality of crafting stations
Quality of resources (does maleability matter??)
etc..should be known to players.

The problem is not the risk itself but the fact the game lacks an explanation to players why they fail and that is what makes people feel like it is unfair.

If I loose at Chess it is because my opponent played better than I did.
If I loose at roulette it is because the wheel came up on red not black, or not on my number(s).

In both cases it is easy for the player to know why they lost. In SWG it is so fuzzy as to why you loose (fail) that you hardly can help but feel you have been ripped off. Especially given that with so much not known it makes it very hard for players to mitigate or manage they risk.

The risk debate is not so much about how often you fail and is more about a need for a massive increase in the transparency of why you fail.

You can start off by answering he question why precisely a 14.94 general crafting tool is better than a -4.3 crafting tool if at all and if it does matter why?

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Thunderheart wrote:

There is a chance for critical fail and also critical successes. Its a great risk vs reward mechanic. Its game play. Without risk versus reward, there is no "game".

There isn't an RPG out there that doesnt include a chance for failure and "crit fails".

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