Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Understanding the Crafting Experimentation Changes
The reasons there is no differentiation between what one crafter makes and another crafter makes are:
1) Long term crafters all have the same (or similar valued) resources.
2) Most craftables only have one primary experimentation line that "optimizes" the item.
3) Substandard items do not sell well even at a large discount.
The proposed experimentation changes don't address these issues, and will have exactly the opposite effects that Chrysalide stated the dev team wants. Instead of making items more differentiated, items will become less differentiated as crafters are forced to put all of their skill points into the primary experimentation line. Instead of allowing new crafters a place in the market, it locks them out even more than at present. New crafters do not have the best resources, nor will they have any extra experimentation points with which to differentiate their items. These changes will also mean that if you are not a master, your items will be significantly worse than average. This effectively removes an entire class of semi-crafters from the game. Currently, you can take just two out of the four disciplines and be an armorsmith that specializes in Personal Shield Generators, or a Bioengineer that is truly just a Tissue Specialist, and still produce items that are only a few percent off what a master can produce given the imperfections of the resources used. But with this change, those crafting specialties will be gone, and becoming a master will be the end-all and be-all of crafting.
As it stands now, almost no one plies their trade while leveling in their profession -- they just grind to master in a week. This change simply reinforces that attitude because new crafters will see the horrid junk that their limited resources and experimentation points produce and either give up or grind to master without producing any items in the process (or only those items which require no experimentation).
If these changes go through, I would suggest removing all experimentation points from the Master Skill Box and redistributing them throughout the experimentation discipline in each crafting class. Leave a healthy chunk of Assembly Skill in the Master Skill Box to ensure that Master level items are better through Amazing Successes rather than simple experimentation points. This gives non-master crafters at least a chance in the marketplace.
I am not even slightly pleased about this proposed change. Basically you all are taking one of the BEST features of the game and ruining it. I have sold many friends on giving SWG a try simple by detailing the wonderful flexibility of the crafting system and heralding it's uniqueness in the MMORPG world. Currently I operate three accounts of my own and cover the monthly costs for a couple of friends. If this change ruins my enjoyment of crafting you can count on losing my business for sure.
There are better ways to fix the broken economy (in your view, to me it seems very capitalistic and appears to be functioning normally). I would recommend exploring other options before destroying the one system in the game that is robust, interesting and unique. Cause honestly that is what this change will do. Before the end of the month it will be harder to find any good weapons or armor and the PvP/combat orientated folk will begin to get bored. Which in turn will drive away the armor/weapon crafters as they will no longer have a solid customer base. So the economy will get worse.
Just my opinions for what they are worth.
erroroccured wrote:
I think this is a good idea.
This game is rampant in the uberness field. Having someone choose, if they want more resist or less encumbarance makes sense to me.
This will also change the playing field dramatically. I do not mean crafting weapons either.
Combat profession will have a very unique style on how they approach fighting now. Instead of uber weapons, with max damage, max speed and best ham abilities.
The player will have to decide am I going to be spamming specials, or trying to attack fast with less damage, or hit them hard and wait around for a bit.
This makes combat much more interesting and yes I will miss the current weapons and composite armor with the great stats.
But guess what, let's add a little variety in the game and watch two of the same professions play it completly differant.
Now there will be greater variety and a lot more complexity incrafting.
You're not a crafter I can tell.
I totally agree with your points, but not the solution.
A much easier way to deal with this is to change the ham system/special costs so that someone in 1K/1K/1K composite suit would be nothing but a slow tank, someone in a 500/500/500 composite suit would be able to do a little tanking, a little running and be able to use specials once in a while and someone in clothes would be very vulnerable, very fast and with buffs/food able to spam specials all day. At least thats the kind of balance I would like. These kind of roles have worked very well in teambased fps and I think they would work here as well.
Uber would be someone in a 80% ris with ns layers making it low ham as well. But uber should never ever be too far from good either.
I'm sure it has already been said but I'll say it anyway.
To create more variety you need to provide more choices for people to make at the experimentation stage (not less), such that they can never max all of them (infact only max25%-50% of the lineson offer to experiment). Each 'line' needs to be as useful as the others. This then creates "horribly difficult" choices for the crafter, do they go all out 100% on one line to create the highest damage, lowest speed, whatever, or do they mix and match to get a good quality all round balanced weapon. End users will then have their own choices to make according to their play still / character.
Take the doctors, more power or more uses, it's quite a tough choice sometimes.
Article57 wrote:
GD!!! if you whiners win again im gonna scream!!!
GAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!
A lot of us so-called whiners also said the game wasn't ready for release and people with your attitude accused us of wanting to delay the game further and just plain insulted us.
Looks like we were right eh?
I just wanna repeat what someone wrote before:
Advanced barrels requires rhodium steele that has never had any good stats, they are infact inferior to standard barrels in every way.
So if this change becomes reality you have to alter the stats on the Rhodium steele or alter the Schematic for Advanced barrels.
So im afraid for this "Scematics are balanced against the stats of the materials" thing is not entirely true..
/Benah
This is the kind of stuff that is getting me totally confused and kinda PO'd, honestly. Here, we have a post from a Master Armorsmith talking about hoarding and selling. Problem is, I see nothing in there where he has tested any of the proposed changes or done any kind of research on what the final effects might be on his designs? What, for the sake of discussion, would he do if AFTER the nerf, the resulting resists were better? There is SOOO much emotion on the topic, I can't separate the wheat from the chaff when trying to understand the change. From all the information I see coming out of Test, this is not the end all of the Crafting Era for SWG. Is it the greatest nerf to roll out since sliced bread?From what I read, that would be NO. To everyone who is posting here, PLEASE help me understand the ACTUAL effects of the change on the items I create. Thank you!
Whrlwnd13 wrote:
The below post is from a Master Armorsmith, explaining his plans to combat the crafting NERF.
Devs have said that one of the reasons that they're making the changes is so that begginners breaking into the field have better chances. I'm sure most Elite Weaponsmiths have the same plan (and I don't blame them I'd do the same if i were in thier position).
So explain to me, a WS in training (soon to be master if I don't drop it due to the changes). How exactly does the NERF help mecompete with the Masters that have been established since day 0???
How does my "choosing" to make weapons with better HAM costs (lol) help me compete??
Do you really think anyone will buy my weapons??? No they'll save their credits and buy from Masters that have the schematics and the resources to make weapons with high damage.
Hell, I'd probably be better off not doing WS and saving my credits so that I can buy some of their weapons.
mawgspawn wrote:
Here is a non emotional response to why the crafting nerf will not fix the economy.
I have 1 million + units of each of requierd resources to make advanced composite segments, and 1million plus of the resources needed to make sweet sweet kinetic layers that in the final product will make me a triple layered suit of advanced composite with 80% kinetic damage and 60% everything else. I got schematics out the ying yang. And the resources to use them.
Rough calculations work out to I can make 1000+ suits of 80% kinetic composite.
Once these changes go into effect, i will sell them at 500k to 1million each. they will sell. THey sell at 300k a suit NOW. I sell 20 suits a day when I stock up on it on my vendor.
I have then 1,000,000,000 (thats ONE BILLION) credits worth of schematics already made up, just waiting for this change to go into effect.
Ill be selling only 10 suits a week. JUST SO I CAN KEEP THE GOOD STUFF IN THE CIRCULATING ECONOMY FOR THE NEXT 100 WEEKS. Nearly 2 years.
Your options to stop this are as follows:
Delete my "horded" resources by accusing me of duping them (when all it takes is10 days on a 90% spot with 8 heavy mineral harvesters of the best quality) as you have done with several other people I know
Retro nerf all premade schematics, which would turn thunderheart not into a liar but into a provider of crappy advice when he told us, TOLD US, that the smart crafter would stock up on schematics now.
You havent nerfed the prenerf fwg5. SO option 2 aint happening. probably.
just thought id let you know what MY plans are. ANd I KNOW that i am probably only one of a thousand masters on Bria who are planning on doing the EXACT SAME THING.
Micco and all the others who have said that we shouldn't complain until we try this out for ourselves are overlooking the fact that if the results that have been shown on TC are repeated 20,000 times, the results will be the same. I don't quite understand the concept that if joe blow weaponsmith makes a gun on test center that is worse than they were able to before, why would it be any different if I did the same thing? I would experiment the same way wouldn't I? Granted my resources might be different, but that doesn't change the fact that all things being equal, a crafter after this change can't make things as good as before.
As mentioned before, pre-nerf experimentation on a piece of armor might consist of using 8 of your 10 points on effectiveness fully filling that line, then dumping the remaining 2 points into reducing encumbrance. The new system using the exact same resources would require you to use all 10 experimentation points to get to the same effectiveness value, leaving nothing to reduce encumbrance. Please tell me how this is better?
HOW IN THE WORLD DO THESE CHANGES EFFECT CFs AND BAD EXPERIMENTATIONS
NO WHERE DO I SEE THIS ISSUE ADDRESSED
WILL WE STILL BE GETTING CF'S 1/5 AND TOO MANY GOOD/MODERATE/CF EXPERIMENTATION
THAT IS WHAT WE WHERE ALL CONCERNED ABOUT
Here's how they would work:
Make a public building in cities where crafters (or people with resources and money) can go to smelt/refine their resources.
In the process of refining their resources, impurities must be melted away and discarded, and money must also be payed to compensate for the power and time of the refinery.
Also, have this system use an exponential curve diminishing returns type of investment. If I want to take a stat from 200 to 300, it should cost phi**cost (exponentiation) for the next one (phi is a nice number. It's been mentioned before. It's the golden ratio). If you square the cost, it will become too cost-prohibitive.
This way if i begin with a stack of 100,000 units of copper with a malleability of 300 and I want to raise that to 700, I should have to sacrifice a substantial amount of time, resources, and credits to make this happen (think: I only get 6,125 units of this copper back and I had to spend 95,000 credits to do it).
This will provide a much-needed money sink for the upper echelon of crafters who are able to amass millions of units of materials and hundreds of millions of credits.
See my other post to view more fixes I've suggested.
--generelz
This is not true. The advanced barrels improve the ideal range mod much more than the basic barrel. Ideal range is crucial in making an excellent weapon. I said earlier, it doesn't matter how much damage or how fast a weapon is if it cannot hit the target. I still can't understand how some melee weapons have negative range mods. I mean, really, how hard is it to hit some huge creature with a sword, axe or giant hammer?
I've always wondered why all weapons have the range range mods, for huge 30 foot tall Rancors to fast moving butterflies...
Marvin5 wrote:
Advanced barrels requires rhodium steele that has never had any good stats, they are infact inferior to standard barrels in every way.
/Benah
Don't remember saying we shouldn't complain, I'm just asking for facts instead of speculation. I have made no decision on whether I like this or not.
plonger wrote:
Micco and all the others who have said that we shouldn't complain until we try this out for ourselves are overlooking the fact that if the results that have been shown on TC are repeated 20,000 times, the results will be the same. I