Doctor Archive
Thread: How to reduce the desire to grind and fix the economy!
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Snikrop
Tue Mar 16, 2004 5:04 pm
#1
One facet that all of the past weeks' discussion was getting away from is that the only goods being bought on the servers are master produced goods. It seems to me that upon entering a crafting class there should be a few components that a master and a lucky novice produce at the SAME level.
If a master had an advantage at producing say "butter knives" it certainly wouldn't come in the ability of said knife to spread butter. Assuming heavily decorated knives cut the same as a well-crafted plain-looking knife so, arguably master knives would be produced quicker, and his quality would be more consistent (the in-game result would be less critical failures to produce the same high-level knife over and over). There's always the apprentice with real talent that could, by chance, produce the most heavenly of knives on his first try because he's got the gift. So, what am I babbling about?
Why not give a novice a chance at producing a very high quality good, perhaps as good as a "since-beta" master? Make critical failures MUCH MUCH MUCH more common as a newbie, but a person with time and resources should be able to roll the dice over and over again until they get a schematic that competes with a master schematic. In this new system I'm suggesting, most noob crafters do not have the piles of good resources laid up to out-sell the master crafters. Certainly there is a problem with crafters that can dabble and make their own goods, but I think we achieve one of the original goals of making master crafters more consistent through the reduction of critical failures.
This opens certain markets to low-level crafters with the creation of niche markets for the guy who has a stock-piled a couple hundred K of something and got lucky with a schematic one night. To prevent dabbler-abuse you could tie the number of items in a schematic to crafter level so that Master Crafters still create the products in bulk. Regardless of number of schematics produced, all of them are going to require resources that are finite. Hence, Joe-bob's butter knife of spreading is going to be around for a while and then no more will be made unless Joe-bob spends a large amount of time "rolling the dice" to get another amazing success. If a novice schematic could only produce 100 or 10 of these uber knives all of sudden the value to the crafter increases a lot, and therefore the price now competes with the master crafter's.
To tie this to the butter knife, you may have seen the multitude of late night info-mercials for Wonder-uber-super knives. Is the market already flooded with wonderful 200$ kitchen knives that will last until your grandkids need to give them away? Yes. Are their fewer and fewer ads from small start-ups selling knives that may, for a time, work as well as a 200$ knife? No. The path to selling a knife in a buyers' market is in specialization in the vertical market of people who need one knife to do it all and don't care if it's name brand or has matching steak knives. (of course throwing in 6 junk steak knives will sway some buyers) They guy hawking it on late night television is the newbie crafter, the company with 200$ knives in 5 different chains of kitchen stores is the Master Crafter. The customer shopping at the kitchen store is a Master Chef shopping at well-stocked vendor, while the customer purchasing from the infomercial is the one buying from the noob spamming the starport who carries much of his stock in his backpack. Allowing for a _chance_ (5%? 1%?) that new crafters craft the few things they can craft at the same level as a master, with decreased crit fails and increased schematic numbers for the master increases cash flow to new crafters while still providing incentive to climb the tree.
This also attempts to combat the resource hoarding mindset as current cruddy resources have a chance of competing with people who've mined/hoarded ultra-rare spawns of high quality resources. I'm sure it's not going to stop it, but if anything we need to open the door to new crafters entering the market and get away from the feeling that one needs to cross-server trade for 10 of each harvester type on each planet just to cover their rear ends when something good spawns.
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RocketM wrote:
You can't give a novice the chance to make items as good as a master because its possible for a person to be a novice architect, weaponsmith, armorsmith, droid engineer, doctor, combat medic, chef, tailor, and bio engineer all at the same time. It takes 237 skill points to do so.
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Given my implementation, you wouldn't have to worry about that very much as most of the things take advanced boxes to even gain the schematics. Certainly a redistribution of schematics could follow to increase the incentive to get to master. It actually makes more sense. Novice crafters can make serviceable butter knives, while Master crafters can make 47 piece knife sets with matching leather caring cases! I'd love to see novice crafters cornering the market of sub-compenents so I don't have to make them anymore as a master.
As I mentioned above, the number of items per schematic would be drastically reduced for novice as well so the situation you fear, a novice creating thousand of master-level items would be an oddity. To get to that under what I'm thinking about you'd have to spend weeks with hundreds of thousands of resources just to get a handful of schematics that would produce the number of goods to actually knock a Master out of business. If you are going to put that kind of time into it, why not get master whatever for a few days, produce the schematics at the high level and drop it? There's nothing to prevent that happening now.
For example, I can think of very few Architects that love to make wall modules. This is just dividing the labor so that Masters produce all things at a high level, and Novices produce a few specific things at a high level.
If a master had an advantage at producing say "butter knives" it certainly wouldn't come in the ability of said knife to spread butter. Assuming heavily decorated knives cut the same as a well-crafted plain-looking knife so, arguably master knives would be produced quicker, and his quality would be more consistent (the in-game result would be less critical failures to produce the same high-level knife over and over). There's always the apprentice with real talent that could, by chance, produce the most heavenly of knives on his first try because he's got the gift. So, what am I babbling about?
Why not give a novice a chance at producing a very high quality good, perhaps as good as a "since-beta" master? Make critical failures MUCH MUCH MUCH more common as a newbie, but a person with time and resources should be able to roll the dice over and over again until they get a schematic that competes with a master schematic. In this new system I'm suggesting, most noob crafters do not have the piles of good resources laid up to out-sell the master crafters. Certainly there is a problem with crafters that can dabble and make their own goods, but I think we achieve one of the original goals of making master crafters more consistent through the reduction of critical failures.
This opens certain markets to low-level crafters with the creation of niche markets for the guy who has a stock-piled a couple hundred K of something and got lucky with a schematic one night. To prevent dabbler-abuse you could tie the number of items in a schematic to crafter level so that Master Crafters still create the products in bulk. Regardless of number of schematics produced, all of them are going to require resources that are finite. Hence, Joe-bob's butter knife of spreading is going to be around for a while and then no more will be made unless Joe-bob spends a large amount of time "rolling the dice" to get another amazing success. If a novice schematic could only produce 100 or 10 of these uber knives all of sudden the value to the crafter increases a lot, and therefore the price now competes with the master crafter's.
To tie this to the butter knife, you may have seen the multitude of late night info-mercials for Wonder-uber-super knives. Is the market already flooded with wonderful 200$ kitchen knives that will last until your grandkids need to give them away? Yes. Are their fewer and fewer ads from small start-ups selling knives that may, for a time, work as well as a 200$ knife? No. The path to selling a knife in a buyers' market is in specialization in the vertical market of people who need one knife to do it all and don't care if it's name brand or has matching steak knives. (of course throwing in 6 junk steak knives will sway some buyers) They guy hawking it on late night television is the newbie crafter, the company with 200$ knives in 5 different chains of kitchen stores is the Master Crafter. The customer shopping at the kitchen store is a Master Chef shopping at well-stocked vendor, while the customer purchasing from the infomercial is the one buying from the noob spamming the starport who carries much of his stock in his backpack. Allowing for a _chance_ (5%? 1%?) that new crafters craft the few things they can craft at the same level as a master, with decreased crit fails and increased schematic numbers for the master increases cash flow to new crafters while still providing incentive to climb the tree.
This also attempts to combat the resource hoarding mindset as current cruddy resources have a chance of competing with people who've mined/hoarded ultra-rare spawns of high quality resources. I'm sure it's not going to stop it, but if anything we need to open the door to new crafters entering the market and get away from the feeling that one needs to cross-server trade for 10 of each harvester type on each planet just to cover their rear ends when something good spawns.
=================================================================================================
RocketM wrote:
You can't give a novice the chance to make items as good as a master because its possible for a person to be a novice architect, weaponsmith, armorsmith, droid engineer, doctor, combat medic, chef, tailor, and bio engineer all at the same time. It takes 237 skill points to do so.
=================================================================================================
Given my implementation, you wouldn't have to worry about that very much as most of the things take advanced boxes to even gain the schematics. Certainly a redistribution of schematics could follow to increase the incentive to get to master. It actually makes more sense. Novice crafters can make serviceable butter knives, while Master crafters can make 47 piece knife sets with matching leather caring cases! I'd love to see novice crafters cornering the market of sub-compenents so I don't have to make them anymore as a master.
As I mentioned above, the number of items per schematic would be drastically reduced for novice as well so the situation you fear, a novice creating thousand of master-level items would be an oddity. To get to that under what I'm thinking about you'd have to spend weeks with hundreds of thousands of resources just to get a handful of schematics that would produce the number of goods to actually knock a Master out of business. If you are going to put that kind of time into it, why not get master whatever for a few days, produce the schematics at the high level and drop it? There's nothing to prevent that happening now.
For example, I can think of very few Architects that love to make wall modules. This is just dividing the labor so that Masters produce all things at a high level, and Novices produce a few specific things at a high level.
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