Development Cycle Archive

Would like to see in experimentation a 0% chance of fail when the red bar on the right say so.

Therein lies the problem with your tests. You conducted them on the low lag Test Center instead of one of the live servers that tend to have excessive lag, such as Eclipse, specifically on planets like Dantooine. If you rerun those tests there instead of test center I'll bet you find a much higher rate of critical failures due the the excessive lag during peak hours.

I would like to add my input and experiences in this thread.

First of all, as pointed out, the critical failures are not necessarily the main issue (even though it's painful as well) - it's the frequency of results below "great" (anyone crafting anything which requires experimentation will not want to keep goods with experimentation steps below "great".

Some more possible variables:

• Complexity level: I fail relatively often (failure meaning below great) on enhance D packs and almost never on say advanced medic components or powerups.
  
• Lag: I haven't tested this myself, but a friend of mine whom I trust (especially because he called me crazy for complaining about sudden increase in experimentation failures) claims that on Dantooine (Kauri) he fails A LOT more than if he takes the shuttle to Corellia with a crafting droid (i.e LAG affecting results). Don't know why, but worth looking into (i.e if your test was done on Test Center, try it again on say Starsider on Dantooine during "rush hour").
  
• Materials matter. This might be why I fail more often with enhance packs as well, since typically the materials are somewhat worse.
  

Some notes:

• When doing certain components, such as enhance D's, I need 4 points to fill in the last 4 "small dots" (i.e the ones below the large ones). All points before that fill in 3 "small dots". Why is this?
  
• When experimenting it always says that I have zero percent of failure. Then why do I or get mediocre results so often?
  
• When experimenting with more points at once, at least on harder items, it fails a lot more often, despite zero difficulty.
  

Observations:

• I was sitting by my factory with a droid trying to make a Stim B schematic (easy item). I crit failed during experimentation like 3-4 times. Once I returned to my house, I finished it on the first try with only great results.
  
• Amazing rarely provide any benefit over great results, mainly because you'll need three of them to replace one experimentation point (this assumes doctor items in which I always want to experiment the effectiveness to max).
  
• The results dropped in the publish in which experimentation initially was supposed to change but where it later, supposedly, was reverted. Even if the original change didn't go in, something definitely changed.
  

Tools:
15.0 crafting tool (i.e perfect) and 42-43 (not sure exactly) crafting station.

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Trystan1969 wrote:

Buff packs are a bit buggy to begin with.

If you fill up the effectiveness bar with all the experiementation points, then all the points are worth half of what they're suppose to be. Using good materials, I can get a buff pack up to 80%. At start, there's 6 empty experimentation slots in the effectiveness category. If I fill up all 6 slots, a great success will only result in a 21% increase instead of a 42%. In order to fill up all the slots, I have to fill up all but the last 2 slots. I keep doing this until there's only 2 slots left. Then I spend the rest of my points to get it to max.

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A Master should never crit fail, period. Also, the crit fail code is buggy - you crit fail an abnormally high amount of time on your first craft of the day, and also crit fails come in pairs WAY WAY WAY too often for it to be random chance. The odds of you crit failing twice in a row if the crit failure rate is 4% is almost non-existent. The fact that almost every time I crit fail it is back to back means there is a bug in your code....

Is there any way you can do these tests under the load level (i.e. high lag situation) that live servers have at certain times on a daily basis. Because, that in my several months of crafting, definitely makes a difference. Btw, in my experience as a human master architect/artisan, I have a much higher critical failure rate experimenting on crafting artisan items than on architect items--definitely higher than 4-4.5% more like 12%. As for my tools I use 14.88 functionality tools that have never suffered decay (would this affect results as 20 deaths causes a tool to not craft at all?) and 43.54 functionality crafting stations (I am the main crafting station guy on my server) that also have not suffered decay (and why should they suffer decay if I die when I have them on me?).

Padre Book

There are some questions that I would like answered. You gave the failure stats but not the variables that you used to get them. Those variables are what I would like answered.

• What percentage of crafting station did you use, and was it public or private?


• What was the percentage of the tool that you used?


• When you did experimentation did you do 1 point at a time, put them all in at once or somewhere in between?


• What professions were you during the test?

Also as a side note I have been hearing more and more that people are putting in just one point at a time and getting as good if not slightly better results on experimentation. This goes against everything that I have ever read from the devs about experimentation. Isn't it supposed to work where the higher the risk the better the results? If a crafter can use 1 point at a time and get a success and never fail they would be able to max out a line and never lose a point. If I put all the points I can in 1 line and even if I get a great success I'm still going to lose a few of those points. Meaning I have to put more points back into that same line. Is that part of crafting working as you had intended? Because by going off of everything I've read it's not.

Thanks for looking into this, Chrysalide! It's been a thorn in the side of crafters for a while now; I expect you'll get a good payoff in complain reduction by addressing it with appropriate code changes.

Here's the gist of a message I posted last weekin the Core Professions forum (with minor changes from that message marked in square brackets); I can't figure out how to improve on it for spelling out a relatively cheapway to improve matters.

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I feel fairly confident that the critical fails on itemassembly or experimentationare an "implemented as planned" kind of issue. It's typical in most modern games to[impose] a certain minimum failure percentage where, no matter what, there's always a possibility of a negative result. The only question is what the percentage chance of failure is set at.

Based on my[personal crafting]results, I'd guess it's set around 5% (although sometimes it seems more like 50%!). What concerns me is that it doesn't seem to be keyed at all to the crafters Assembly or Experimentation skill level, but is set (again, at what I suspect is about 5%) for every crafter from Novice to Master. This just doesn't seem reasonable.

I have no problem in essence with a guaranteed minimum failure rate; it's just a question of how the rate is set for a given individual with a given set of skills. If I were the designer, I'd propose that the code governing assembly and experimentation generate the critical failure percentage rate for a particular item based on two factors:

1. the crafter's assembly or experimentation skill level, and
   
2. the item's complexity

Higher skill levels and lower item complexity would reduce the critical failure percentage (down to an absolute minimum percentage somewhere above 0%), while lower skill levels and higher item complexity would increase the percentage chance of a critical failure.[This wouldbe true forboth initial assembly (to which the Assembly skillvalue would apply) and experimentation (to which the Experimentation skill value would apply).]In this way novice crafters would have a few more critical failures [than they do now], but not terribly many more since the kinds of items they can craft have lower Complexity scores. But Master crafters would have much lower chances of failure... although there'd still be a chance, and it wouldincrease for the more complex items.

I think this system would achieve a much greaterperception of "fairness" in the minds of crafters than a system that doesn't appear to have any relationship to physical reality, but instead is a certain percentage chance no matter how high up you go in your profession.

--Flatfingers

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Chrysalide wrote:

Hello everyone,

Assembly attempts: 1448
Assembly critical failures: 65
Assembly critical failure rate: 4.49%

Experimentation attempts: 1284
Experimentation critical failures: 54
Experimentation critical failure rate: 4.21%

These numbers do fall within the expected parameters of the crafting system. Regardless, the significant number of people that have raised this issue does still lend this topic an air of legitimacy. I am interested in hearing any suggestions, comments, and/or concerns that the crafting community (or anyone at all) might have about critical failures as they relate to the crafting process.

Jeff "Chrysalide" Carpenter
Developer

Message Edited by Chrysalide on 01-26-2004 12:13 PM

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As a MBE I have to saythe experimentation failure rate you found seems awfully low. I've been keeping track of every step of the assembly over my last 200+ combines, which is 2000 experiments I've been tracking. I consistently get a 10% failure rate on experimentation using a +14.95 tool and +39 crafting station. This is particularly bad as it requires 10 experiments as a BE making a clone. I say this for 2 reasons, the first is that the failure rate seems to climb dramatically for BE's in the cloning system when you use multiple points and the second because your trying tobe careful not to exceed a given CL. This mean that ~90% of ALL my clones had at least 1 experimental failure during creation. This seems ridiculously high.

The problem is not how often crit failures occur. The problem is the "randomizer" getting stuck once you do crit fail, which causes the dreaded consecutive crit failures which everyone has experienced and post about on the boards.

More often than not if you crit fail and try to make another immediate attempt, you will fail again, and again. The best thing to do once you do crit fail, is STOP. Wait a few min, or open another tool, then try again. I never get consecutive crit failures unless I'm impatient and try to make another attempt right away.

I should add that the point Anruan made earlier deserves expansion:

Every single time I forget and get impatient (or when my clicking finger gets too itchy) and I double-click to load a second resource into a schematic while the first resource is still loading, I get a critical failure on assembly.

This is annoying, but it doesn't happen as long as I'm patient. (Then, I just get the usual percentage of critical failures. Sigh.) I'm not sure whether it's due to the number of items in my private crafting station's input hopper, or whether it's more related to server lag (like the "Enter/Exit" menu item problem on mounts/vehicles). Either way, I don't get bit by this bug as long as I'm patient and wait until my first resource has completely loaded before loading the next one.

What I reallywonder is whether this might not be the source of the critical failures that some other folks are suffering. Maybe not, but I figure it can't hurt to mention it.

--Flatfingers

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Chrysalide wrote:

I do have a minor change to crafting in development somewhat reducing the rate of critical failure. I believe this solution will be amicable to everyone, but I am definitely open to hearing any feedback about the existing system that anyone might have. While we may not be able to implement every suggestion, we do take them to heart and will do what we can to make it the best system for all parties involved.

Thanks to everyone for all your help, and your continued support,

Jeff "Chrysalide" Carpenter
Developer

Message Edited by Chrysalide on 01-26-2004 12:13 PM

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I'd also like to ask about crafting where factories are unusable. The entire BE cloning system prevents the use of factories. With most crafting proffessions you need to do about ~10 combines until you get the right great success on combine and amazing success to create the schematic you want. Then you feed it into the factory and produce 1000 units. This is a 100x return on investmentthrough the use of the factory. However if there is no factory (as in clone creation) then your getting 1 similiar great item for every 10 you work on. This is 0.1x return on investment. I realize BE's are not the only ones with this issue but it is especially problematic for BE's.1/2 our goods cannot be made in factories. The rest rely on resources which cannot be assembled in large enough quantities forlarge factory runs. Anyone know where I can get 25000 mollusk meat? I think the factory impossible or unlikely creations should be addressed. Some sort of failure insurance would be nice. That way DE's with advanced probots, R2's, ... , Architects with guild halls, BE's with clones, tranquilizer/cover tissues, WS with krayt weapons, etc could all decide whether they wanted to take the risk. It would put up the cost of the production but protect you current investment.