Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Understanding the Crafting Experimentation Changes
First, the players understand this game 10 times better than the devs. The devs SHOULD know it better. But in this case clearly they don't. The "power-gamers" are probably more in favor of this change. They already have 100s of spares of everything. This won't hurt them. It will hurt everyone else.
I can tell what the devs are trying to do. I know what their concerns are. This change is counterproductive to those goals. It will be a shame if the devs don't figure that fact out in time.
Naufragus wrote:
jefmes wrote:
fanboi crap
from reading your posts i get the idea that you have utter faith in the devs.
sadly my experience has been much different....they often have good ideas that are implemented horribly and are very bugged for ages...
just to name a few..
cities drifting to 0,0 and losing structures
vehicles not storing, then auto storing and poofing
vehicles taking damage just sitting in front of your house
vehicle paint lasting a couple of days
pets just stopped following you and not obeying commands and insist on standing on top of you
droids have no purpose and still wont after the Droid Evasion
adding missions that are bugged for months and cant be completed (Nym, Ackbar, Darklighter)
vendors DELETING all items after the 30 day limit was added
Pet trade-in giving you worthless 300 ham creatures
Making a point of nerfing FWGs to hell then adding Republics that are superior and take no cert
so i am just a bit wary of them tweaking the entire crafting system
this, IMO, is something that needs some LONG TERM testing....some actual facts and figures to back up why this is a good thing..not something that sounds good on paper....not something that is toyed with by the test center people for 3 weeks before it is released onto the entire playerbase.
This just needs more testing time and more players testing it.
I don't remember writing "fanboi crap", but oh well, I could've 
Yeah, in general I think they are a bunch of fans (like us) who are doing their best to make the game fun for everyone. I don't understand the attitudes of some who think they are out to destroy the game - that just makes NO sense. I've been affected by some of those bugs you mention too, and yes they SUCK. But they get fixed...the scale of something like this is just so astounding in so many ways, and touches on so many computing principles that I'm continually amazed at what DOES work. I don't know, maybe it's just my background, but I just don't get flustered about these things. If I disagree with something they are doing I try to say my peace, and if they go the opposite direction I groan a bit and think, "LAME..." but then I move on and try to have fun.
I do agree though, 100%, that if there IS such an uproar on this maybe it needs to stay in testing longer, and (I'm sure I'll be utterly disagreed with on this) all current weapons should be re-scaled to the new system if possible so that these stockpiles don't ruin the intent of these changes.
Masen wrote:
Ok...so now it's 'attack anyone who has more accounts than me as a powergamer' week? Well..guess what? I got a couple accounts..and paid for my cousin's for a few months while he tried the game out. As for powergamer, I've never surrendered a class I like. I have no desire to hunt, or play, a jedi. I've seen them, and that's plenty for me. My creature andler, MONTHS old, still isn't master, because I chill at the cantina when I'm too stressed from the pets running into orbit. I'm not a rifleman in my other class either, I'm a pistoleer. I like to be in it as much as the next pistoleer, I got pets because I like 'em. that's it. Most of my pets are either grauls, or other big, impressive creatures, or mounts, plus the requisite low CL squall, that I still use now and then. My second account is a dancer/image designer. By choice, not due to a holocron. I got 2 other characters on a second server, that are both crafters, but I don't exactly monopolize. One is going for master tka, and armorsmith. I buy my cloths like any other armorsmith that's not in a guild, and I buy my vibroknucklers. My other is an architect/DE. I sell droid parts to architects on the side, by the crate. He's dabbling in weaponsmith, but only because it's hard to find bowcasters, and his rifle skills are pathetic. Yesterday it took me and my pre-patch gimp probot a half hour to clear 3 spineflaps off my factory, and they weren't even soldiers. hee. So much for powergamer. But I can say one thing here..this patch will totally screw me over. I don't got millions in resources. I don't even have the stuff to do a factory run of probot chassis, lol. I've made a few by hand, and that's it. Guys like me will be the ones screwed. The big crafting guilds won't even feel this for months, maybe longer. The super rich established crafters will be the same way. The ones that are getting the shaft are the ones this is supposed to help, it won't narrow the gap, it's going to widen it. Drastically. If it goes live, the damage to undo it after could take years, and sorry..I'm not paying for a game that's that busted. This will drive costs up, pre-nerf armors and such, that crafters have hoarded for YEARS worth of supply, will skyrocket in cost, while we sell our best stuff for half what it would have ben worth. How is this bringing balance?
It's not.
Masen, I'm at least not talking about you then. You're playing as intended, I have no qualms about what you're doing.
Maybe it's just me being naive, but I just DON'T see the hoarding being such a problem. Why do people hoard? Because people are WILLING to pay those prices. If that's the case, then we have too much money in the economy and these crafting changes ARE NOT the problem - the problem is that we need things to move out of the game more quickly, crank up the decay, make things cost more or offer more expensive services to eat up those funds. I mean, jeeeezus guys, this game has only been live for what, 9 months? The whole economy can turn around in half a year then I'm betting.
jefmes wrote:
Alright, work is slow tonight so I'll bite.
Honestly, I think the Holocrons being pushed into the game were not so much the devs as it was marketing and LucasArts corporate who wanted to get the word out that, "Hey, look! Jedi are in game, just in time for the Holiday season!" Everything we've been told (and not told so directly) leads me to believe this is the truth. I talked to enough of the devs during beta to get a feel for what THEY wanted out of the game, and I still think it did not come from the core team. We all wanted something more mystical than this, more special. I really do think the marketing dept.won out on that one, and money talks.
I'm not sure of the exact timeframe, but I'm pretty sure Holocrons were placed in the game and operational long before the Holidays. People were farming the weapons bunker on Naboo for Holos long before Christmas. Anyway, if we assume your hypothesis is correct (which I agree that it has a certain sense of validity to it), then we have a game that has (at times) a split personality in terms of development and gameplay issues. Probably not one of the best environments to be in, either as a developer or a player.
I don't want to come off as antagonistic towards you. You raise some valid points, as do those who stand on the opposite side of the fence from you. I am curious about one thing though. How can you justify the Chef revamp, given that you think players are extremely overpowered? I mean, here are the players who can already be buffed beyond belief, and you give them even more in the way of decent duration multi-stat buffs that stack? Marketing/LucasArts didn't force that one down their throats. Even if the crafting change goes through as it is currently coded, the amount of buffage a player can achieve is still fairly phenomenal. Add pre-nerf and pre-pre-nerf weapons and armor into the mix and what really has changed? How long will it take for all this stuff to 'cycle out' so that the real effects of the changes to crafting and combat can truly be measured? Do you think the players will tolerate another 'crate lock bug' incident to happen? I mean it appears to have been a fairly transparent ploy to get legacy weapons out of the game.
Best Wishes,
If this proposed crafting change was a bill in Congress, I would suggest it go back to committee. If it were a loaf of bread, I would suggest it go back to the mixing bowl.
It needs more discussion, testing, and careful analysis. Pull enough seemingly innnocent threads from a rug and it all comes unraveled....
jefmes wrote:
First, the players understand this game 10 times better than the devs. The devs SHOULD know it better. But in this case clearly they don't. The "power-gamers" are probably more in favor of this change. They already have 100s of spares of everything. This won't hurt them. It will hurt everyone else.I can tell what the devs are trying to do. I know what their concerns are. This change is counterproductive to those goals. It will be a shame if the devs don't figure that fact out in time.I don't really agree that the players understand the game 10 times better than the devs. We (generally speaking) have no CLUE about how many different sub-systems each system is inter-connected with. We get the highest level view of the code on a more regular basis of course, and hell yes, that's what matters in the end - but we don't always understand everything in the back end that might have other effects that are unaware of. I understand the general concern over why a good chunk of the posters here think this is a "bad thing" but I don't agree that it's, 1. Going to be NEARLY as bad as everyone thinks, and 2. The wrong decision for the game economy.I suppose the one point that I would agree with is that the "power-gamers" will be the only ones to stockpile to take advantage of the system changes. I've known about this change as long as everyone else here has - I choose to NOT take advantage of it though because it's harmful to the intent of the system. I know that most people don't give a crap about overall goals and only care about themselves though - doesn't mean I'm going to play along with it.IF this does go live (and I'm starting to doubt that it will with all the uproar) I suppose we'll see how it turns out!
One doesn't need to be sitting in front of the systems to understand generally how the backend works. If one has a reasonable computer science background (like me), one can come up with general ideas about how most of the stuff works and communicates with each other.
One example is when you travel to one planet, it being more laggy than another planet. Things come up slower, etc. One wonders why that happens, but most likely these computers are parallel computed where either different individual servers, or different sub-clusters are handling that particular planet/city. This has been confirmed through various exploits and stuff in the past.
As far as game code - you're right, we don't see the actual way things are computed within this game, communicated with the server, and computed on the server. Given that this game acts most likely very similar to those of other games in the past, It's reasonable to assume that most of the ideas of past games work here as well. What does this all mean? basically it means that we don't need to see everything to make educated guesses on how stuff works.
Well, then I guess there's more of a problem there than I've seen - just from personal experience mind you, I think I've only been thrown forward once when stopped fully, and I can't even say for certain that I'd stopped completely that time. Ah well...any word on if this is resolved to any degree on TC?
I hate to tell you this, but today alone - about a good 20 times - I've come to a full stop then got off my bike. What happened? Most times I was thrown about 75m in the direction I was pointing. I would then immediately be launched back to about 30-40m behind my orignal starting point.
Stopping first, before getting of the bike, does help to keep from being thrown extremely far to never come back but by no means does it help totally. Please keep in mind that with my problems I did some to an *absolute* full stop prior to dismounting. I even go as far as typing in the /dismount command, further giving time of sitting still.
I hope they fix this sometime, because while sampling DNA today I got agroed by some pretty nasty things because of this bug. I can't complain too much, it seems to only happen heavily on Lok, and Dantooine. The rest of the planets seem to be fine...but for some reason lok and dantooine are extremely flooded with people, causing heavy lag.
Hopefully it's fixed sometime.
willowbend wrote:If this proposed crafting change was a bill in Congress, I would suggest it go back to committee. If it were a loaf of bread, I would suggest it go back to the mixing bowl.
It needs more discussion, testing, and careful analysis. Pull enough seemingly innnocent threads from a rug and it all comes unraveled....
I've learned one heavy lesson over the past year or so this game has been going (more or less a year) - the devs really aren't too concerned by the flaming feedback of change given by people. To be honest, I'm not sure why this is - but all changes are generally done after they read up on what needs to be changed...and they decide who does what and how.
We really don't have much of a say in the setup. Seems kinda odd considering that we are paying money to keep these people in business, but so far that's how most MMORPGS work. Ralph or whatever his name is has a personal site that was given on these boards somewhere - it's excellent reading because it really shows how SOE/devs/etc think about our comments, suggestions, and worries.
I don't regard you as a powergamer. Still there are people (with multiple accounts) who have so much spare time to powergame or powergame for the sole purpose of making proffit by selling stuff on auctions, that in thiscurrent system they can dominate a whole server. It's like in UO wherepowergamers -using speed loot-
Senatious wrote:
I've only read the past couple pages or so (in addition to the dev posts..) but I simply cannot believe that the dev's would even CONSIDER making this huge of a change 9 months into the game. This time they aren't simply creating prenerf/postnerf economies for a type of weapon or two, but for EVERYTHING. This game is no longer in beta, and thus there should be no GIGANTIC changes like this.
Whats worse, instead of simply dropping this on us which would have beenbetter for the economy, they announced the changes days before the patch goes live. Meaning tons of players, myself included, went out and stocked up on everything we could need. I'm typically a poor person, but I went and did missions for about 5 hours and went out and bought a bunch of weapons, food, and another set of good composite. How will this patch help ANYONE? Maybe in a year when the majority of prenerf stuff is broken or gone it might. But for the upcoming year the entire ecnomy is going to be BASED around the prenerf goods.
I know almost my entire PA went out and stocked up, so I can easily assume that most informed people did the same. Even if this change somehow doesn't happen, a big dent has already been put into the economy. I personally do not see what this 'fixes'. All it does (on the non-negative spectrum) is add more diversity to items. Well so what? This doesn't help ANYONE whatsoever. The fact is it's simply inconceivable to change the very basis of crafting and the entire economy on an idea that 'may' add diversity, when in fact, people are still going to be building one type of item. Will people try to increase a T21's speed over damage? Of course not. Will people try to do a better encumbrance over defense? No, because most people stay buffed anyways, nullifying the difference.
The fact is, everything is going to end up being the exact same as everything else with a few small changes; everything is now worse, the economy is broken, and a lot of people are very ticked off.
I don't have vehicle problems there either.
Maybe this is just a server thing....I know that lok and dantooine are extremely populated, something I don't think the devs intended when originally setting up this setup. Im sure they will fix it sometime. I'm on a cable modem, and I get disconnected once in awhile while on those planets (from the galaxies server, everything else is fine).
Dunno though.
Awesome! Thank you very much for listening to our pleas and taking the time to rethink the crafting changes.
**Very much against the changes to the crafting system. Lower failure rates for masters but that's it.**
If the problem they're trying to fix is the game economy, I've yet to see a rational explanation as to how this nerf (and that's what it is, you're intentionally reducing the expected outcome of the one core system that has been more or less fully functional since release) will fix the economy outside of driving more current players out of the game so the you can 'reset'the economyfrom scratch.
If the problem is that items are too powerful, please keep in mind that you (SOE) nerfed the crap out of MOBs a couple publishes ago as part one of the broad combat rebalancing. Please finish with one broad core system adjustment before you start adjustingother systems, THEN take a look and see if the situation still needs addressing.
There is no point in worrying about the long-term game economy if your fixes destroy the game completely in the short term. And I guarantee that the game as it stands will NOT survive the number of crafters cancelling accounts if this system is put in place over the vociferous objections of virtually the entire crafting community (not to mention most of the non-crafters).
- Is the current SW:G economy broken so badly you are willing to lose large numbers of customers over the fix?
- Will an SW:G with a better economy and fewer players be better than one with a functional if less-than-ideal economy and more players?
Here's some more questions that I think can help answer these questions.
- Are you absolutely positive that this change will help the economy?
- What exactly is "wrong" with the economy currently, other than some players saying their server's prices are too high - but people can pay the higher prices or the prices would be lower. In ANY free market economy, there will be 'haves' and 'have nots'. I, for instance, couldn't possibly afford a top-end luxury car in real life. But I can afford something "good enough".
- Just how rational is it on your part to expect crafters to "buy in" to the concept of having to choose between, for instance, damage and special move costs, WHEN WE'RE IN THE MIDDLE OF A COMPLETE COMBAT SYSTEM REDESIGN!?!?!?!? Who in their right mind would go "special move cost" when they have no idea if the special move cost will even be MEANINGFUL in a month?
If the problem you see in the economy is too much money available, introduce better money sinks. 5x the cost for a shuttle ticket to be able to go RIGHT NOW not in 8 minutes is one of the best ideas I've seen. Allow merchants to advertise in starport areas WITHOUT spamming, but charge money. (Advertising budget? What's that?) Fix the starport autostore bug that repairs speeders, but for the love of sanity reduce the repair costs to something reasonable.
You've insisted on making player crafted items superior to non-crafted. That's fine. BUT, that means money does NOT leave the player side of the economy when people buy supplies. If you really want to take money out of the economy, introduce items that are NOT player crafted that HAVE to be used. Power packs for blasters for instance, or a blaster recharge station. If you make it player craftable, you will not remove cash from the game.
You've talked about making it easier for lower-level crafters to break into the economy. But the fix you're introducing will make it impossible, instead, as you're making anything but master crafted items economically non-viable. And if you DO remove money from the game somehow, you're still hurting the new crafters, not the old ones. The old crafters/masters can afford to pay insane prices, if need be, for the best materials. New crafters, if you somehow reduce the amount of money in the game, will not be able to afford those resources, so again they will not be able to compete.
Everything you're introducing with this change goes against everything you say you want to accomplish with it!
Please, please, PLEASE do not break the most functional remaining core system with this ill-considered change.
Thank you.
ps - Just to let you know where I'm coming from on this argument: This change, in theory, will have no affect on the crafting side of my business. I sell items that are either not experimentable at all, or where they can be experimented, they still have no stats, so they're effectively unexperimented anyway.
The only affect this change will have on me is that my business will lose customers when they quit the game. Any MMORPG has a certain minimum player density needed to support it, and I really think you will lose enough players (especially elite crafters) over this change to endanger SW:G's ability to remain a viable (profitable for SOE) venture.