Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Understanding the Crafting Experimentation Changes
KrothParYskin wrote:
Just do what i do.........Grab the economy size lube.........bend over............and take it like everyone else does.
lmao...haha, what a great and true post.
On a different note, I was looking at becoming a Chef/BE pretty soon to start making some of the new food products. But now I'll need an extra 5 mil to buy good chef experimentation tapes just to compete with the people that are already masters and have tons of money. /sigh
I actually enjoyed crafting things with my Master MD on Eclipse, but now I don't think it will be as fun :/ Ooo, and this is going to make buff packs start to suck too so buffs won't be as good 
I am sorry Micco for lumping you in such agroup. I just get frustrated as a crafter when someone comes along and says just because Joe on TC got these results that they are invalid until everyone gets those results. All things being equal my armor I make today will not be as good as that on Wednesday after the patch goes live. Do I know this for a fact? Well, not really, but to invalidate the results that have been reported assumes something would be different on live that would change the overall result.
Yes, better materials on live would produce better results than that on test center, but those results would not be better than items crafted before the crafting change using the exact same materials.
plonger wrote:
I am sorry Micco for lumping you in such agroup. I just get frustrated as a crafter when someone comes along and says just because Joe on TC got these results that they are invalid until everyone gets those results. All things being equal my armor I make today will not be as good as that on Wednesday after the patch goes live. Do I know this for a fact? Well, not really, but to invalidate the results that have been reported assumes something would be different on live that would change the overall result.
Yes, better materials on live would produce better results than that on test center, but those results would not be better than items crafted before the crafting change using the exact same materials.
Plonger,
No worries, I completely understand. It seems like frustration is high on both sides of the fence regarding this issue.I feel it just as much, especiallynow that I am starting up the Weaponsmith skill tree. It would appear that Weaponsmiths have more concerns about the "gated" (or statistic capped) resources than anyone else, as far as I can see. I understand TC isn't like Live in some cases, since no two galaxies have the exact same spawns of resources. This issue has a direct impact on how I approach this profession. If you can, check out that link I gave to the Test Center Forum. I just need more information and I'm having a real hard time finding good solid stuff that I can make decisions with.
JustG wrote:
Thanks for the responses. I do understand it is an emotional issue.
Still reading... still thinking...
- g
Hey where did ya go? 
I hope you are still reading and still thinking on this. Keep your side of the dialogue going. 
This is a great game you have developed for us! I would like to thank SOE for creating it for me. I'm100% crafter and this is the best crafters game to date!
This change to expermentation is not the solution to the bad economic conditions in game. IMHO
Plz communicate more clearly as to what aspect of the economy you are tring to enhance. I think you will find the community very resourcefull.
DS
(Beta 1, 2nd shuttle)
The changes, as they are now on Test,will result in a few things happening:
1) Crafters will focus every point of experimentation into 1 line. Currently we can spend some on a second line on many items, this will be a thing of the past.
2) HAM costs will go up on crafted items
3) Condition will go down on crafted items
4) The best crafted items post patch will be less than they are now from the same materials (800-850ish Enhance packs post-patch versus 920-950ish now, as an example).
5)Us old-timers will dominate the market making life even harder on the newer crafters. You are contributing to the monopolies that already exist. Why? Because prices on decent to top quality items will skyrocket thus making the rich richer and resource hoarding will be worse than ever.
6) The Economy will not be improved, it will simply have a greater separation between the haves and have nots.
We were right when we said you were breaking CH, we were right when we said your initial idea for the Imperail Crackdown was too much, and we are right about this. This community has some of the most thoughtful and intuitive posters I have ever read on a game board, we should value their opinions not just as your customers but as the experienced MMO gamers many are.
Vinaddar
I haven't read the whole thread, but logic says to me that there are two ways to approach ANY problem:
1) Take something away (also referred to as nerfing) to reduce something
2) Add something to the game that counter-balances the problem
Option 1 will result in what you see before you: complaints and loss of customers.
Option 2 is good customer service and will get the best results.
Of course, no situation is representative of a perfect world, so you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. I like to think that the option with the least amount of associated headache with paying customers is probably the best option to look at.
Back in beta there was a Miner profession you got to by way of Surveyer.
But Holocron took it out of the game because, in his words, "It was just a bunch of skill mods".
Being able to refine low quality Colat to high quality will get rid of some of the problems we are discussing here. Good post!
I feel these have been addressed in past posts but I would like to try and sum up and categorize the feelings here. First, although I think being purposefully vague is helpful sometimes, I do not think it is useful when communicating with your customers. Describing the economy as in a "poor shape" is vague and leads people to wonder what is meant by this. Is there too much stratification between the "haves" and the "have-nots"? It is my belief that humans naturally tend towards capitalistic behavior, and the number one tenet of capitalism is to earn as much money as possible. Currently crafting is the easiest way to do this. If, by describing the economy as in a "poor shape" you mean that the crafters have all the money, you would be correct.
In my view, crafting is currently only viable to the crafters who have acheived their master level boxes and have all 10 or more experimentation points open to them. Due to the way the game is designed, this means that they make the best armor, weapons, etc. simply due to the game design.
Some solutions I see for this:
1.) Give crafters more experimentation, but make each experimentation point count for less, and make the baseline stats (stats w/o experimentation) worse.
Instead of 10 points, why not 100? Since each individual category will need to be raised to an acceptable level, this will perhaps spend half of my points raising each category to that level. Then I can use the remaining 50 points on all speed, all damage, all HAM, or a mixture of these, et al. This will provide the much needed granularity and hence variety you are looking to affect.
For example, if I want to craft an FWG5 pistol, perhaps the start stats would be:
Damage: 30-75
Speed: 4.0s
Range Mods: -30/-50/-70
HAM: 90/70/80
(exaggerated for effect)
This way, if a crafter dumps all his or her points into just damage and gets a weapon that does 130-175 damage, for example, but the rest of the stats are still the same, no one will want to buy this weapon. Therefore the crafter will be forced to spend the points on each category, but doesn't have to.
Also, since experimentation points are much more granular, give them at every box. Yes, you heard me. Every box.
2.) Make certifications ramp vs. damage and speed of weapon:
Add more certifications! We like variety! It's obvious you like it too, and sense a great lack of it. This is totally agreed on both halves. There are only two useful kinds of armor. Each combat profession has at most 2 weapons with which they are most effective.
I propose that certifications be weapon type based as well as damage based. This way professions like Teras Kasi, who go from doing 300 damage at unarmed 4 to 1000 damage at novice teras kasi will have a more linear climb. For example, give a certification at unarmed 1 for vibro knucklers (or another weapon, maybe brass knuckles?!), but only let the user equip them effectively if they do less than 75 damage and the speed is slower than 2.5s. This way weaponsmiths will be asked to cater to these lesser certifications as well, providing granularity. This way combat professions also get to choose between weapons (do I want to use a T21 that only does x amount of damage but heavy armor piercing, or a laser rifle which does y amount of damage? Well, I'm certified for a laser rifle up to 300/4.0s, but a T21 only to 350/6.0s, so I'll pick the laser rifle even though the T21 is better. Currently no one above novice rifleman would do this, but if my changes were implemented, they'd at least consider it.)
3.) Make experimentation ramp vs. schematic complexity:
Currently complexity only affects how long it takes me to make something if I'm a master (this isn't a truism in terms of the game logic, but it is a de-facto truism in the SWG crafter's world). Make complexity count for something! This solves the problem of non-masters not being able to compete with masters.
This will help with the view of seeing all boxes sans master being worth anything. Let's say if a schematic's complexity is 20, and my current assembly/experimentation skill is at a 60 (I'm not a master yet, but about halfway) then I should be able to produce this weapon at close to master level.
Allow me to provide an example:
The Scout Blaster can be made at FireArms 1. Its complexity is 21. So let us say that once I hit an experimentation of +42 then I should be able to "unlock" the full experimentation for this weapon.
This last idea is still a little fuzzy in my head as well, but I hope I was explicit enough to at least convey a general idea.
4.) More resources or some other way of providing more granularity in this area
I know database issues are a concern, but currently it is possible for the elite crafters to mine everything they need in each resource pass (7-10 days typically). Make it so that this is not possible. Make so many different resources (not resource TYPES, mind you, but different NAMED resources) that it would be next to impossible for anyone that does not spend 20 hours a day playing to mine them all. Make it so that crafters must make sacrifices (do I want this iron which has a higher conductivity or this ore with a higher overall quality?).
Remember, we only have a certain amount of lots. Most crafters have alternate accounts for harvester lots as well as storage. If the variety of resources was increased, this would also foster trade and interdependence.
Think for a moment if, instead of 20 or so unique resources per pass there were 2000. Even if they lasted a month it would be darn near impossible for anyone to mine the majority of them, much less even discover what they all are. This way surveying would mean something also. Everyone would be interested in scouting around for resources while they adventured hoping they found the next uber spawn of copper.
Also, no one would have the storage to keep all these resources. You'd have to have 10 accounts each with PA halls to stockpile just one cycle's worth of resources.
Unfortunately, this idea is probably not feasible without an entire subsystem dedicated to keeping track of resources since this is very database intensive (a record must be kept for every resource).
(Actually now that I think of it, it might not. Resources have a unique name and 8 stats. If there were 2000 resources per month that would only be 24000 resources a year. Each resource could be described with a 32 byte (1 char = 1 byte) name and 8, 4 byte integers per resource, which is 64 bytes per resource. 24000 x 64 bytes = 1,536,000 bytes in resource data per year. That's less than 1.50 MB in resource data per year. That might even fit on a floppy disk! In reality there's probably one more field the resource would have to have, and that's the field which would link to a static database of the resource type heirarchy (i.e. Inorganic, Mineral, Metal, Steel, Carbonite). This could be minimized very easily though (client data tables, anyone?).
Other ideas I've heard and liked:
Miner/Farmer professions: these professions should have never been removed.
Rare resource drops: This is a good idea in practice but could quickly escalate to krayt-perl-esque status.
My gripes with the system that is being considered:
It has less granularity, not more. This is a bad thing. We NEED MORE VARIATION. The current system will provide LESS VARIATION.
Let's take an example schematic. It takes 10 units of copper. The experimentation is two things: one depends on conductivity and the other on overall quality. Currently if I find copper with 800 conductivity and 200 Overall quality, I can put a maximum of 8 points in the first experimentation bar, and 2 in the other. This would be the max value on each bar that I could spend to "max" that attribute out with respect to the resource.
In the proposed system, I can put 10 (as I understand it) in either to fill it up. This means that if I wanted to experiment on the thing which depended on overall quality, I would be spending 10 experimentation points to boost that stat to its max of 20%. The same applies for the other. I would be spending all 10 points to max it out at 80%.
Mathematically this does not make sense to me.
Honestly, to me, this looks like an attempt to put a "quick fix" in place for a problem that has very deep roots. People can see through this very easily, and see that unfortunately the devs don't really have a handle on what's going on here. Hopefully with all these posts they will get a handle and consider making a more robust and worthwhile change that will benefit everyone, instead of making a quick fix that in reality will simply create even more instability and confusion (pre-nerf markets, etc.)
I totally agree variation is a good thing. This is not increasing the variation.
Remember, the more you tighten your grip, the more star systems (crafters) will slip through your fingers.
That is all.
--Generelz
Also, I think that the main problem with the devs and their thinking is that they try to think about how players should play and not how they actually play. There probably isn't one Powergamer or L33t d00d among them. You really think that crafters (like armorsmiths) try to balance out their three lines of experimentation? Heck no. Players want the Highest resists first, then HAM a distant second, then Durability third if it is even considered at all (which I doubt).
The way it sounds is that the devs expected players to want durable items so they last while sacrificing some HAM or Resists. LOL!!! Everything is throw away in this game. Players want the highest resist or the highest damage and to hell with the other lines unless you have the points left over. This isn't buying a car where you want something that is reliable yet safe and affordable!!!! If they made cars in RL like items are made in this game then they would break down every 100 miles, get 10 gallons to the mile, but be able to survive a nuclear attack.