Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Understanding the Crafting Experimentation Changes
Matchstick said:
I've made so many posts on this subject my brain is starting to leak out of my head.
Essentially it's the same song that Sandoz is singing.
Bottom line... the content in this game is too easy. One of the primary factors in that is the ability to easily manufacture very high end goods in HUGE quantities. When everyone has the best stuff... what's the point of it all? Crafting has no meaning anymore really for most professions. It's not challenging or exciting. I've made about almost 3 dozen full suits of 63-65% base armor with 20% stun in my spare time. That's just goofing off with armorsmith. With the slices everyone in my guild has full effective sliced armor over with stun protection which with buffs makes you damn near invincible. And since I'm a master doc... guess how often any of my chars run around without buffs?
And it was cake. Why should I, who was just sort of piddling with armorsmith, be able to make products in the realm of what you make?
People are pissed off because it's a natural reaction when they make something that was easy harder. But in the long run... having the game be more challenging will be to everyone's benefit. We'll all enjoy it more. And having resource quality play an even larger role in crafting will really make crafting more interesting to me. People complain because some resources are gated in their stats... or that sometimes you get just TERRIBLE spawns... or that some things rarely spawn if ever.... to which I say... DUH! That's life. Not everything is going to be handed to you. It's supposed to be a challenge.
Anyway... I don't even care anymore. I'm tired of crusading around on this topic and defending what to me is an excellent step in the right direction. People are short sighted and only see things to their personal benefit... then they go make a post the next day about how boring the game is and how there's no content. Whatever. Anyone that wants to quit... quit. You'll be back... they always come back. Cuz we get to fly spaceships soon.
"With the slices everyone in my guild has full effective sliced armor over with stun protection which with buffs makes you damn near invincible." I'm a Wookie and I dont have'exploit melee defences stackiing' so this game is very hard for me. 
At this point in the game ifyou are making statements like "This game is to easy" you are trolling, IMHO. I understand that the troll is unintentional. If you can kill the tuffist MOB by yourself and that MOB takes 4 or 5 of us wookies to do, something is wrong and its not my expermentation points. If armor needs more down sides then add downsides to it. If one thing, armor, is throwing the whole game off, dont take a broad brush to every crafting profession.
Lets add more down side to armor like heavy hits to your speed, we need more than just HAM hits.
Change the bazzare: Limit the amont of items you can put in (10?), and remove the 6000 credit cap on auctions. This will get people shopping more and competting more and that makes for a lot healther economy. Latter in publish 8 overhall the Bazzars interface.
DS 
Cafa,
I tend to agree with you in part that crafting is too easy, but I disagree that these particular changes will do anything but make it even easier. The problem stems from the fact that in essence, the proposed changes just modify how the output is calculated, not the process of crafting. I will still put all of my experimentation points into effectiveness, but now I won't have the few left overs to reduce ham. How does this make crafting harder?
Crafting should be more varied, down to the choice of what type of material your using. In the automotive industry, engineers are slowly moving away from steel to aluminum/composites for reduced weight, but at a cost to the end price. Same thing with other parts of a car, where you can pick stainless steel for corrosion resistance, but it cost more than regular steel. These material trade-offs should be brought to the swg crafting process to really give you some decisions. Want light armor, well use aluminum, but it wont protect as well as steel. Want high resists, fine, use titanium, but there should be a downside to that choice that effects the final item.
In addition, the fact that the resists of a particular armor are set in stone reduces choice too. Why not give composite slots to add resistive layers of the crafters choice instead of having the same old resists? That way I can make armor that is more customized to the players needs if they only want acid, stun, heat, thats all the armor has. Same with weapons, let the crafter decide what the type of damage will be, but control that by the base weapons base capability. By this I mean that there should be several base pistols, one is fast, one is powerful, one is accurate, etc, but all have a resulting weakness to balance their strength. The crafter starts with the base, then adds components that can enhance the strength or the weakness, but not not both exclusively. This way I could go to a weaponsmith and say, I am a master pistoleer, so I would like you to make me a pistol that has high cold damage, speed/accuracy are secondary as my player mods handle that.
Right now you make an item the exact same way as the next guy. Yes, resources may be different, but since you play on the same server, your probably going to be using the same things anyways, or similar enough that it doesn't really matter. The devs have been really weak on this in my opinion, there are really few choices in the game, and the ones that are available really don't give you much balanced choice. Take armor, with the advent of doctor buffs and food, the only important thing now is the resistance. Here is your choice, several low resistance armors such as mabari and padded, or ubese and composite that will give you great protection, and of those, only composite gives great resists for several damage types. When only one thing counts, thats all that will be considered by a majority of the consumers. There is no choice because there is no benefit to using padded right now. There are few blast damage weapons, so the one thing it does protect against is very rare, so why bother with it?
I hate to say this but I am FOR a certain degree of change with the system for the long term (>12 months) stability of the economy. It will be hell for about 3 months with pre patch equipment but it will slowly become a thing of the past. You might lose a few customers on this one and I guess it depends on how strong you want to be in your decision. If you have had a team of people analysing the economy of the servers and worked out the best possible strategies for long term goals then you should implement them. Be strong SOE and do what you believe is the best given all the available information at your fingertips.
Jebu,
Several people have expressed the same thing as you, stating this will be good for the economy of the game, yet I can't see how lowering the bar on the quality of goods will fix the economy.
If that was the case, America should go back to making cars like they did in the 70's to fix the economy. My guess is that the "fix the economy" was nothing more than a convenient excuse that the devs picked. Afterall, who can complain if we say we are fixing the economy, rather than what I believe the real reason is that it is cheaper/easier to do this than actually create content that is challenging.
In the post Thunderheart posted about publish 8, he listed a change to armor/weapons/buffs as part of the combat rebalance, this is the real reason for this change, but that doesn't rally support like fix the economy does.
I completely agree w/ most of the posts on this thread. For me, the ironic thing is that most of the issue revolve around resources. If you have even a slight amount of time and interest you can make a ton of money w/ no expenditure of skill points. I believe there should be a mining profession to add some cost to the cost/benefit of mining resources. Maybe that class could pull up better resouces for longer (e.g. if the minerals were deeper or what have you).
-Jebu- wrote:
I hate to say this but I am FOR a certain degree of change with the system for the long term (>12 months) stability of the economy. It will be hell for about 3 months with pre patch equipment but it will slowly become a thing of the past. You might lose a few customers on this one and I guess it depends on how strong you want to be in your decision. If you have had a team of people analysing the economy of the servers and worked out the best possible strategies for long term goals then you should implement them. Be strong SOE and do what you believe is the best given all the available information at your fingertips.
Heh.
Heh heh heh.
3 months?
heh heh heh heh.
Okay... I know smiths who are well on their way to laying out schematics to account for a 20+ Million resource base so that they will have pre-nerf weapons for years.
I know smiths who are running off THOUSANDS of weapons, and tucking them away.
Myself? I have 12 factories. I decided I'm running off enough weapons that my rifleman guildmates, my IdunnowhatprofessionIwanttobe guildmates, and my Commando/??? alt will never have need of another gun.
3 months of pre-nerf weapons?
There were people with .4000. pre-nerf FWG5s. Those same people will look on this change as a challenge.
I am opposed to the crafting changes on the standpoint that I do not believe they will help the economy.
Creating a HUGE market for pre-nerf goods will only add to the mayhem.
Please rethink your decision.
Reldun wrote:
Hmm that's a good idea as well. At any rateI would be in favor of any change to stop this. The devs are constantly looking for ..ahem.."creative" ways to cut back on thier databse bloat. If this keeps up eventually people are gonna go out surveying and have a significantly hard time in finding somewhere to place thier own harvs simply due to the fact that extremely large areas are being taken over by permanent harvestors by the lot traders. One person should not be able to control 300+ harvestors. It's totally out of control, and effects the economy "which the devs see as needing to be fixed" in a very negative way.
jefmes wrote:
*OVER-GENERALIZATION ALERT*
If you have 3 accounts you're probably a power-gamer who tries to make his own little sub-economy because you don't like to deal with other players and like to min-max your way to riches by subverting the system instead of contributing to the galaxy-wide economy of other crafters. Removing yourself from the resource pool will help us all- so please, bu-bye!
*END OVER-GENERALIZATION ALERT*
Having said that, if you don't do this I apologize, but most people who have 3 characters can't help but play the game to screw the system over and ignore theACTUAL intent ofthe system.
Why do you even post? How would this be possible? It would not be possible.How can 3 accounts screw the system over? that would be a game breaker and under EULA that would be an exploit? So please explain how you come to thisassumption? So that many of us may show you how ignorant and incorrect you are. Saying that is thesame thing as saying since 3 people withone account eachonly support their friends. The Doc only buffs his Rifleman friend and the Weaponsmith only makes weapons for his Rifleman friend. So this is screwing the system?Oh but im sorry we dont all think the way you do so we must all be wrong. Not sure who during your lifespan told you that you were that important obviously they were just being nice and not honest. This talk of an economy in trouble is laughable at best. Yes, how the developers created this economy is pretty nice and for all intent and purposes it seems to work well. However this game does not revolve around that economy and it is not possible for this Virtual economy to be in poor shape. The Devs refuse to explain what "poor shape" or "broken" refers to in this economy. Tell me what damage can come from the economy in this game? Out of work Chefs / ArmorSmiths / WeaponSmiths / Doctors / BE.. Sales prices skyrocket? First of all price gouging laws are in place in the real world economy, no such thing exists in this game. It does not comply to the same rules of a real economy it is based 100% on player judgement and it will always be unbalanced.
Those FOR this change would have you believe that those AGAINST are a small vocal minority, when they speak within the same so called "narrow" forum. This claim that this forum is therefore irrelevant and that THEY speak the true voice of the players is therefore just as questionable. The question is why do they want it done so quickly? Is there money to be made for those who have prepared for this?
This issue is important enough to study further and not dump its experimental effects upon the players. If you think it is truly an issue supported by a small minority, go ahead and put it through.....you willthen see how many really care...but it may cost you dearly when all you had to do was study it more fully before you pulled the trigger.