Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Crafting Critical Failure Rates
I have been back on Corelia this week, and the buffs are landing consistently higher than back home on Dant or on Endor where I prefer to hunt. This is puzzling to me. I am still not getting the average I used to even on Corelia, but instead of a 1400-1500 average, I am seeing a 1900-2000 average. Why would the planet I am on affect the application of enhancements?
I would just like to see the MD get his 2300ish average back, and see the high rated enhance-D's mean something. I get the same results using base enhance rated 770's as I do 912's. I'll break the 973's out of the bank when all this is resolved. For now, I'd rather risk the mediocre packs I have left over.
Thunderheart wrote:
Jei_Lightfoot wrote:You can get a critical success?Yes - - with the same frequency.And thanks to everyone in this discussion. This has been not only a great discussion thread but a lot of great info has come up and its been interestingThere are a few different issues, but all of them are being considered for development improvement.
Quick sanity check: We've been told point blank by craft related developers that part of the reason we can see numbers go down on success is that a single box of experimentation, in a single track of the window, can actually be comprised of several checks. What we see at the end is the average (so an amazing success on, say, BE dna template for physique would have to be TWO amazings, one for each attribute. When we see a 'moderate success', we might've gotten a good success and a bad fail or somesuch, resulting in fortitude actually going down a LOT and the other attribute barely budging up).
So saying that 'amazing' happens just as frequently as critfail seems flawed from the getgo. I've never seen a crit fail do anything other than devastate my creation, during initial assembly or during experimentation, even on these 'multiple check' boxes (especially BE, where the example was first put forth). If it's really averaged, I should see vastly fewer actual critfails on these since any success should mitigate the horrific failure (resulting in, say, some sort of fail other than critfail, or a lesser success). What I get are a lot of critfails, very very few amazings, and lesser-than-great successes that pooch my creations a LOT.
Just last night, master doctor, +14 craft kits, making an enhance stamina D pack with (of course) crated subcomponents and very good avian meat and reactive gas. No critfails in teh set, but a moderate success at the end. My final enhance had a rating of HALF of one of my other substat D kits. Half. Including the odd thing that always happens with at least enhance kits, where when you pass a certain percentage during experimentation, instead of a 'great success' getting you a 7% increase, a 'great' only gives you 4. Then 3. Etc, as you get better. I presume the lower check blew the final rating because down wasn't as limited as up, but this was ridiculous.
Thunderheart wrote:
Jei_Lightfoot wrote:
You can get a critical success?
Yes - - with the same frequency.
And thanks to everyone in this discussion. This has been not only a great discussion thread but a lot of great info has come up and its been interesting
There are a few different issues, but all of them are being considered for development improvement.
I used to be a master weaponsmith up until about a month ago when I started on my holo path, back then I got WAY MORE crit failures than I did amazing successes and even worse when I did get an amazing success it didn't really add any more than a great success did.
Which says to me that the critical successes are just there so you can say that they are there yet don't "REALLY" do anything above and beyond the great successes.
Yet we are still left with the critical failures which most diffentitly do something REALLY bad to the product, heck even the Moderate SUCCESSES make yer product worse which doesn't make any sense to me. How you can have any kind of a success that is bad is not good.
When I was crafting I scrapped any product that I got any kind of result other than Great or Amazing Success on. So obviously something is broken about the crafting process I don't care what yer darn numbers tell you.
As for the critical failures making you lose the resources and components, that's fine with me except when you are using those rare or hard to get ones ie.. RIS components and resources, krayt stuff, rare drop NS loot, etc, etc... if you could set something up so certain resources and/or components wouldn't be lost but everything else still was that would be great. Would be a more selective form of the Architect fix that went in a bit ago.
Have you ever wondered why it seems most critical failures happen on final assembly? It is not your imagination at all. If you will notice when you are crafting there is a risk bar to the right side of the window. The more components and subcomponents there are in an item the higher this risk bar goes. The higher your risk the more chance you have of failure. Since final assembly by nature has the most components and subcomponents, the number of critical failures on assembly isproportionately higher.
The best solution to this problem I think is to not add up the total risk of all the subcomponents. Why should you? You already took the risk when you made the subcomponents. That way final assembly will by nature not have a higher risk and final assembly will fail much less frequently. Or make failure a looped process that takes into account each component separately and destroys only the pieces that fail.
made 10 more personal harvesters, tools 14.2, 42.93 + city specializations
using steel w/ 810ut and 874SR, 850 DR
alum with 720 ut and Sr and 820 DR
ore with 650 ut, 520 sr and 760 dr
after ten assemblies i got 8 4ber or no cf'si got 2 that had 1 cf's those 1 cf's made it a 3ber or subpar. 5% means nothing to frequency a CF ruins an item from being anywhere close to its potential max. an amazing gives you +8% to one stat line, a CF takes away 7%. (assuming you are doing 1 box at a time.) this means if you luck out and dont get another CF your down 14% so a 99% item is now 85% max or an item with 6 stats like a wpn is down from a dmg range of 180-300 for a midgrade pistol to 120 to 260 a few %'s points are so critical that these failures must be toned down on masters to less then 1%. whats the point of mastering, as a WS with the experimentation tree, there is little difference than master as far as CF frequency.
Nataku Valentine - The Aura of Chance
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
I would almost agree with all of this IF it were true for architects. Literally, to my knowledge, there are THREE Master Architects on Tempest that produce large amounts of anything. You talk in 20 or 30 house/harvs/whatever. I did 1200 harvs alone in January. And not always at a profit!
When the market gets to the point that I can bank 1000 walls again I'll give this validity (for Tempest). Until then all I see is a bunch of architects unable to craft viable products without turning into me. Fully 15 of my so-called apprentices have quit because they cannot deal with the requirements and the utter necessity for perfect success or the product be worthless.
I think the current rules are fine, I just want them DEFINED and am tired of the guessing game. I'm sure EVERY BE, doc, etc... feels the same way.
Fivo Asia
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Amazing Successes are still bound by resource quality.
A Critical Failure can turn 1000oq resources into 0oq resources,
but Amazing Successes can NOT turn 1000oq resources into 1100oq resources.
In the end, you LOSE FAR MORE from a Critical Failure than you
could EVER hope to gain from all other Amazing Successes combined.
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Chrysalide wrote:Experimentation attempts: 1284
Experimentation critical failures: 54
Experimentation critical failure rate: 4.21%
***
Personally, and I dont mean any offense by this, I have to say that I find these statistics to be rubbish.
I am a very busy architect with a constant stream of orders.
Let's just take an example of what I saw tonight in my harvester experimentations:
Out of 10 heavy mineral harvesters I made, I got one single base 13 harvester using materials that were all extremely high in the required stats of heat, shock, and unit, and using high quality ore mining units as well.
Out of the 10 combines, one was a base 13, no CFs during experimentation. Seven were base 12s with one CF during experimentation. The other two remaining had two CFs in a row in each experimentation, bringing the harvesters down to base 11.
Your fail rate of 4.21% in experimentation, from my point of view, is completely inaccurate...so inaccurate as to have entered the realm of total fantasy. I would run around the galaxy with joy in my heart and a song on my lips if I were lucky enough to get that kind of CF rate during experimentation. I'd love to know what tightly controlled environment that test run of yours was done in! The small snapshot in the example I gave above is only the tip of the iceberg.
Today alone I have to make 55 harvesters, and I don't have enough factories to keep up with my demands, because for some reason crafters are expected to get along with the same hugely insufficient number of lots and with the same tiny, wildly insufficient amount of storage that the combat types have...but that's another topic. I get this kind of experimentation failure on a consistent basis...it happens every single day. I am an independent architect and I cannot afford to make big runs of the heavy harvesters. Even if I could, the CF rate in experimentation would still be there, trying to create the schematics...which should definitely NOT use up the resources they do, but that, again, is another topic, isn't it?
This has me utterly furious. I've been a master architect for months now. Why bother being the master if your critical fail rates are so incredibly high that you might as well be a novice? Critical fails should definitely fall to well under 5 percent of the time for a master. I use the best tools I can make (15% tools and +42 crafting stations), I live in a populated area, which is supposed to increase crafting successes, or so I have been told. Short of moving into a city, which I dont want to do, and building a special "crafting outfit" with pluses to structure experimentation (which I am in the process of doing), there is nothing more I can do to make my chances better...and still, the incredibly high experimentation failure rate I am having *should not occur* for a master crafter, no matter what profession they are, where they live, or what tools they use.
Incidentally, as a master artisan as well, I find the critical fail rates for experimentation in the different components I make to be just as crippling. I've often had to sit there for 10 or 12 tries just to get no CFs during experimentation of a component in a profession I mastered months and months ago.
This is totally wrong, and as badly flawed game design as the inexplicable, rage-inducing 10 minute shuttle waits that the dev team seems completely unwilling to understand is nothing more than enforced downtime with absolutely no positive side benefit whatsoever. I don't understand why decisions and frustrations like these are built into the game, which is supposed to be fun. I am frequently more stressed out while playing SWG than I am while I'm at work deadling with nincompoops and bimbos.
A master is a master for a reason. They fail at their craft extremely rarely, or they would not be considered masters.
What I'd like to see, of course, is a marked lowering of the CF rate in assembly and experimentation at master level...and I mean a really significant change. Though as an architect I no longer have to worry about CFing in creation...which was a game breaking issue until the dev team kindly sorted that for us by giving us a chance at another combine...I recognize that this is a significant, serious issue for other professions. One of my good friends is an armoursmith and the critical fails he has during assembly are heart-stopping. It's totally inexcusable.
Along with a lowering of the overall CF rate, I'd like to see things like high quality tools and stations actually *make a difference.* Right now, they don't, as far as I can tell. Whatever station I use makes no difference whatsoever. I still get terrible CF rates.
And finally, I'd love to see some kind of percentage based lowering of chance of CF as one advances along any profession tree. Just as we get experimentation points with each level gain, we should get a CF percentage to succeed. For architect, for example, it could be added to the harvester line...or of course the construction line, which is what you advance in to gain experimentation points as well as city structures. I'd like to see master level professions receive, ideally, something like a 50% decrease in CFs overall...10% per level in the specific branch, and then 10% at master, equaling a 50% lowering of CF rates. Heck, even with a 50% bonus in CF resistance, I'd still be CFing in experimentation 40% of the time, hehe. This, I feel, just cannot be right. And you can look up my game log or whatever to prove it. If I've got the numbers wrong, I'd love to know...all I know is that one base 13 harvester out of 10 tries is a 90% fail rate, and wholly unacceptable.
I am really looking forward to a significant reworking and taming of the CF system. It's totally out of control and it makes life miserable, especially for those of us who have put in so much time to reach a master profession and have a nice business to run in the game.
Thanks for the opportunity to voice my opinions, and thanks for taking a good look at this issue. I am anticipating good things in the future.
May the Force be with you.