Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Crafting Experimentation Changes... resolution.
I don't think most of you realize what will happen...
If anything comes out better than post patch so many schematics will be made Tuesday evening that the top current crafters will never produce anything else.
By asking those changes to be pulled you just doomed any future crafter that will try to master their profession and start a business.....
Fivo Asia
Leiser wrote:
Droid-S128 wrote:
I am disappontied that this is not going in. I hope you continue to work at it, for I really like the changes.
SO am i, something needs to change and because change is never accepted well even if its for the better of the game the devs are just giving in to a bunch of whiners. Oh well, i guess this game is suppossed to be boring and lack any challenge at all.
I think the most important thing to take away from this discussion was that the bulk of the posters weren't trying to prevent change. They were, rightly so, pointing out that the changes being made did not achieve the results the Devs said they would. snipaho posted:
Chrysalide wrote:
"When a majority of the equipment on the server is top of the line, there is very little reason for customers to seek out new sellers, and new vendors find it difficult to break into the business."
From the Publish 7 patch notes:
"Adjusted experimentation so that the overall quality of resources will play a larger role in how much or how little someone could experiment with an item's attributes... This will help give master crafters more of an advantage over their less skilled counterparts in this area."
If your goal is to combat these "monopolies", you sure as heck aren't going to fix it by making those people who run the monopolies even more powerful than noobie crafters. Starting Tuesday morning, new crafters are even more screwed, and the monopolies become stronger. People will always buy from the best, and the only way to be the best is to be a monopoly with your 12 experimentation points and huge resource supplies/buying power. No novice crafter stands a chance to sell anything that needs to be experimented on.
Creating a stronger tie between resource stats and the stats of the final product only makes master crafters that have been on since the beginning of the game have more of a monopoly due to the rare spawns of key resources in the crafting process.
-Is it their fault that being on since the beginning puts them ahead of the new crafters? No.
-Is the increased resource stat dependence discourage new master crafters from entering the profession and ultimately producing equally high level goods? Yes.
-Does the resultant set of goods have more variety? No. For example as the weapons market is looking for high-damage, low speed weapons across the board, making it harder to craft said weapons doesn't decrease demand for said weapons. Weapons and armor are taxed the most in the new set up as they have to experiment in multiple areas to get desired stats.
Going forward...
Yes, this change was not destined to achieve what it was supposed to - however the overall reason for proposing the changes does remain valid.
Thank you SOE!
I'd like to thank you for listening, and suggest what I hope you will find are some constructive ideas for revisions which are this major. For the record, I support a change 'of this type' which actually leads to greater variation in items, but I don't believe this change (as many others didn't) would end in the intended result.
My suggestions:
1) Be clear on the changes being made. The conjecture at the initial announcement of this change before any clarification caused almost as much damage to it as the change itself. Change is an emotional issue and is simply made worse by a lack of understanding.
2) Set up a 'test center 2' with copied characters from other servers. This server would exist only for the testing period, but would allow volunteers to bring over their own resources and character to really test the changes empirically. This would give you a lot more real live data than the Test Center community alone.
3) If the result of the change is of detriment to the quality of many crafted items (as this one was), please say so, and please expand on how you intend to combat the 'pre-patch' market in order to prevent the current crafters from having to take advantage of the pre-patch period, and enabling new crafters to start without a major disadvantage. With enough notice, even something along the lines of 'Every pre-patch item will become unrepairable, and every crate or schematic unusable.' would actually be successful - the secret really is in the communication, and though you won't please everyone, informed people aren't filling the air with rumour and conspiracy.
I would like to suggest that you do some specific testing on LIVE Servers (preferably on Friday Night through Sunday Evening for most accurate load levels) with the current crafting system to see what we are talking about when we say that we get 10-15% critical failures. Also the rate is noticably higher when higher quality resources and/or optional enhancements are used. We aren't imagining that--the rate of critical failures particularly on experimentation is far higher than your stated percentage of 5%!
Padre
I was against the change to experimentation, but since they will be on live for a bit...
Perhaps you could leave the changes to crafting in through the weekend to give everyone a chance to test them out for themselves?
Then everyone could give you feedback based on actual testing as I have relied on others for my information, people I trust, but there is nothing like testing for yourself and formulating a truly informed opinion.
As happy as I am you don't go forward with this, I jsut have to say one more thing:
Did we learn something from this? Maybe that if you know you are making so significant changes, and even state that "we decided to move forward with the change, provided that we put up a post to the players explaining exactly what the changes entail.", that in those cases 72 hours review period before the patch goes live it too little? (Review for the explantion, I'm not talking about TestCenter here).
It was the one part of the change I thought was worth any problems. Wanna make this funner for us, explain the actual code and verify that it works for crafting stations.
Fivo Asia