Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Crafting Critical Failure Rates
What affects the rate of experimentation succeess, and what affects assembly success?
Itchybacca wrote:
in my many months of crafting I had 1 critical success.
WHat a critical success does is makes it think you are crafting something using all 1000 quality material.
I had my first critical success ever today on a tangle pistol, it was 2.9speed 110 max damage (they are normally in the mid 3's and over around 100 max damage on Valcyn)
But in my days of crafting I get 10-15 critical failures every day. Maybe I should be seeing 5 critical successes per day.
How about a 4% chance at a crit success, a 4% chance of a critical success and a 92% chance of everything else inbetween.
I've been capped at 240k contruction XP for 2 months now, hand made over 7,000+ items, factoried over 40,000+ items.
To this day I have NEVER even seen ONE critical success. I didn't even know they existed until TH mentioned it in this thread!
Tools +15, station +44.3, +20 assembly in tapes, Master Architect. Averages on the last hand-made heavy florals I made were 964 in all relevant stats (2 days ago since last night was a little problematic logging in). Have one, greats tillBER 13. Harv two, crit assembly, passed that, great, then crit to 0. Well, at least I could go harvest!
Mystique is cool, but this is a little overboard devs. What am I possibly doing wrong that I have NEVER ONCE had a critical success?
May we have an official statement on at least *something* as too my knowledge, this in-game knowledge is about tapped out and no one has a clue about the truth of anything. I'm not speaking from the noob perspective. I hang with all the heavy crafters on Tempest and (to my knowledge) and one of the largest providers of harvestors on the server.
Fivo Asia
BristaAB wrote:
There is a general trend in SWG to become easier. This is unfortunate as it starts to detract from the game. Isolated corners of the adventure planets which once were the exclusive preserve of the game's best players are now full of day-tripping Novices using immune-to-attack vehicles
Probably where this trend is most noticeable and most deeply regretted is in the crafting professions.
Architects wrangled a break on critical fails. Now their profession is full of distressed veteran architects being brutally undercut by new people who are attracted by a profession which is completely easy and has had its main drawback removed. In the past the good architects planned for a crit fail disaster and coped. Now all you really need to do is find a good ore spot and cut & paste a macro and yay you're a Master Architect and can flood the market with 20k Medium mines
Crafting needs to become harder, not softer
Some of the same people who have posted here in favour of softening crit fails would be horrified if their professions become so easy that their competitors start charging 2 cpu per resource used in a finished product
What I would like to see is more of a range during assembly. Most crafts are great successes once you hit Master, a quite huge number. In fact I don't even look any more, I skip straight to experimentation without reading the "great success" message
This is where crafting assembly could be enhanced, let's make the game more interesting, no dumb it down further please
In truth I am fine with this. Harder would not bother me at all! What bothers me and makes the entire process frustrating to the point of absurdity (IMO) is the lack of knowledge. Now I will admit I have never been to any of the pay sites, but I've even talked to ex-employees in person and they're not even sure what the rules are for crafting.
As stated before, I'm fine with crits, I fine with risk/reward, I'm not fine with impossible to discover truths. I'm not fine with no official statement that a -15 tool is same/worse/better than a +15 tool, not to mention stations.
I fundamentally agree that droid crafting stations seem to work better and am really befuddled as to why this is. Hurray that DE's got something, but you can't imagine how much time, effort and money I've spent in game to acquire the resources to make on par stations.
I'm upset that I spent enormous amounts of time supporting the game economy to the point of absurdity and I see even the most basic parts of the crafting gig ignored until the fighters and **gasp** jedi have a problem. Nothing I have mentioned would make the game easier, just more concrete.
meroc wrote:
I'm sure losing a lot of resources is annoying, but losing hours ofreal lifetime is REALLY annoying when you lose a batch or two of Mutant Rancor DNA in a combine that CF"s.
Some days it takes me 4 or more hours to collect ten or so DNA samples of them and thats time sitting at the PC, not just waiting for a mine to collect stuff while your logged off....
Hey listen, we know BE's take it hard. No one said they don't. But labelling architects as "waiters" is not true. Even if it was it takes me 4 to 6 hours to collect harvest EVERY NIGHT to acquire the amount of materials I need to keep up with 40% of the orders I have.
I just commissioned a level 70 pet from a BE and gave him a blank check to 1 million cr. Don't tell me I don't appreciate BE's, and don't make the other crafters enemies to your frustration.
Fivo Asia
Itchybacca's terrific post points out what many of us feel is the central crafting concern:
He had 45.67% Great Successes and 1.28% Amazing Successes which add up to only 46.95% of his near 1000 combines being acceptable results. For most crafters, if the results is not Great or better, the end product is not wirth making and we end up exiting the crafting of that item with no product made.
Crits are a problem, but to many of us the problem goes much deeper as so many times we must have all Great results or better to have a viable outcome.
Speaking of Critical Fails, this situation here horrifies me:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=jedi&message.id=246488
The Dev Team removed total loss of resources for Architects because of the high cost in resources required to make most anything in Architect. So, how bout doing the same for Jedi? I'd rather not see 40 mil flushed down the toilet with a single Critical Fail.
Canwe please get the oppertunity to comment on the idea once it's "fleshed" and before implimentation?
Thanks in advance ;o)
Thunderheart wrote:
I agree that its hard to find that information. This very important and I believe that it is something that players should be able to discover in-game.
Im working on something with the correspondents so that we might add something to the game to help this process. JustG and Blair said they would consider the idea, but we have to flesh it out a little more.
Are there customers involved? High level loot components? Rare tissues?
Yes crafting in itself is not so bad if we're just talking about the assembly stage failures but, when you add in 10 points of experimentation, impatient customers and rare items - its a whole different game.
I dont know any crafter who will repair people's items because of the HIGH risk that the item will be destroyed. They would rather sell a repair kit than take the chance.
I know I will never do custom orders using special components because sod's law dictates that I will fail and its not worth the hassle of an irate customer who's spent hundreds of thousands of credits on an item - to have it go poof for no reason.
From the responses you're giving - we are getting the impression very much that you dont care what WE say, YOU think its a good system and its very much a feeling of 'lalala I'm not listening'
We appreciate the community contact and that discussions are being had but unless our issues are acknoledge then this discussion is pointless.
So far, you've vaguely mentioned something about high level loot, possibly not being destroyed in a crit fail and the fact that the risk isnt accurately measurable.
The outstanding issues as I see them are :-
1. Critical Sucesses are meaningless with the resource cap in place - an amazing sucess will not make a better item than a great sucess in most cases - except in the case of having multiple attributes to experiment on, you may hit the cap earlier and gain 1 experiment point to put into something else - which still ahs the added risk of ruining the item completely - so the reward isnt really worth the risk.
2. No information is available as so what affects our failure rate, you say that you want us to 'discover' this for ourselves, how long has the game been live? If we were going to discover it we would have by now. *IF* tool quality is supposed to affect your chance of sucess then I would say that it is broken and needs looking at - I spent 39k credits on a +39 effective crafting station and it's no better than my +14 as far as I can tell.
Is lag supposed to make us fail more often? because as far as I can tell it does.
3. Droid Engineers use a *LOT* of subcomponents to make droids and a crit fail can mean an hour of work all gone up in smoke - 1 in 20. Not fun.
4. Bio Engineers have very limited space for carrying DNA, collecting DNA is very dangerous, which is fine you risk dying but the reward is some lovely mutant rancor DNA to build and Uber-bunny or whatever, that part is good - there is the risk vs reward - BUT to then critical fail even at the 1 in 20 rate is devastating (although I think BE are reporting the rate to be much higher - hard to test given the low availability of DNA samples) after a sucessful combine of the DNA template - 10 experiment points are spent, each risking 1 failure ruining the template and then there is the final creature combine.
Dont get me wrong - I think BE is one of the best and most complicated crafts around but the failure rate is too high given the risks.
5. Armoursmiths find the rate of failure to be too high also because of the 9 pieces of armour neeeded to make 1 suit and anything less than a great sucess on experimentation is considered trash.
Also many armoursmiths have to buy components from tailors therefore it can get very expensive for them - when these lose a large percentage of their components due to failure.
6. Tailors feel they have all the risk with no reward - tailors still risk a critical failure but varying levels of sucess have no affect on the final product.
7. Your tests are done under controlled situations - they do not reflect the realities of playing a crafter in this game - just crafting is not playing a crafter.
8. There is no noticable decrease in crafting failures as skill increases, a master is just as likely to fail as a novice.
PLEASE, show us that you are listening to us and not just putting your own opinions forward, by acknoledging that you have at least read and fully understood these issues.
We dont want WoW, we like the complexities of SWG crafting system - what we dont like is not being able to control our craft - we do not feel like skilled crafters - our craft has become routine and with the exception of BE, I would say there is very little difference between any 2 master crafters of a given profession.
OSULugan wrote:If crital fails are supposed to be a money sink, of sorts, then just give me an option to bump in 50% more of the raw materials/crafted components (loot items would still be required in the same amounts) in a "careful assembly" mode, which guarantees a great success (no more, no less), on each experimentation, and let me be done with it. When I want an amazing success, I'll risk the failures. This way, when I have some "uber loot" I can guarantee my customer that they'll actually get some armor back from me, and it won't be a piece of crap, 'cause I got a bad roll on an experimentation attempt.
GREAT idea!
FWIW in the last two weeks I have had an abnormally high rate of "good" and "moderate" successes, which, in schematic making, count as failures. We're talking 100% more bad results.
Also, actualcritical failure rates come in pairs or triplets 75% of the time, which is just bizarre if it's truly ~4%