Droid Engineer Archive
Thread: Discussion: Hand-crafting vs. Factory-crafting (relating to Quality of product)
TheRealTK421
Mon Sep 13, 2004 3:13 pm
#144
/bow
Snikrop wrote:
While all this goes on, there's
a) no animation during any of the activities for the player or people approaching a crafter.
Yea...that's true. Art time is hard to schedule (especially with JTL getting worked on). /shrug
b) a lot of possibilities for a client-side data storage of materials and schematics used in the last (or better yet, recent) crafting session(s) to make it much more user friendly when hand crafting multiple items
Mmmm...not sure about this one. I'd have to check. It might be 'abuseable'.
c) room for the more stat math opportunities (maybe it's time for a simple /spreadsheet command so we can get the merchants behind this addition)
The spreadsheet thing might have some legs....I think a really doable proposal would have to get placed on the table though for this to ever happen as an in-game tool. Maybe when the full-on Merchant revamp stuff comes along...
d) no way to crate up hand crafted materials.
Errr...I thought where called factories.
This is going to be a major problem for chef, med, and droids as part of the really handy thing about factory crates involves minimizing inventory usage. I'd hate to see a new "rares" market that didn't bring the same advantages to all crafters.
But if something's rare, that means there's a very small number of them, right? Doesn't sounds like a giant inventory issue to me. What specific issues do you see at play here?
e) no great difference between a "bad" crafting station and a "good" station so there's little incentive to work on a really nicely crafted station.
Yea...I'd agree on this. There needs to be a quantifiable difference (in Assembly primarily but may on Exper. too).
Respectfully,
TheRealTK421
Mon Sep 13, 2004 3:19 pm
#145
Well...don't forget...I don't consider this a "job". I consider it a privilege to support and 'rep' the best profession community in the entirety of SWG.
babyblue_d wrote:
that to me means you do you job VERY well
TheRealTK421 wrote:
What's that mean?
/bow
Respectfully,
/bow
Respectfully,
Straker_Atrella
Mon Sep 13, 2004 3:23 pm
#146
TheRealTK421 wrote:
Correct....and to see if we can't find some reason to actually hand-craft. Right now, I just don't see (for the most part).
Akkori wrote:
It should be stated again that this isnt just about DE. Its a concept applied to ALL professions.
/bow
Respectfully,
I'm still fuzzy on the "need" for a reason to hand craft. Hand crafting is simply lower level crafting. People do it because they WANT to. Lot's of us do it. Why does there need to be a reason?
Again I say, the game is filled with lower level and higher level things. Should an Unarmed TKM do more damage with no weapon then he does with a VK? No, of course not. Sounds silly, but it's the same thing.
People use lower level things because they WANT too. That doesn't mean they should be better.
Straker_Atrella
Mon Sep 13, 2004 4:05 pm
#147
LonelyGhost wrote:
After reflecting on the issue for the past couple days, I have come to realize that this issue, the specific one of granting a bonus to hand-crafted items, is actualy targetting a large issue...that of too many goods out there. There is too much in circulation. As others have said before, *why* should everyone have the same top-quality goods? How *can* they? Becuase it is so easy to produce and distribute them. And big WS makes hundreds of one type of weapon per schematic. Dont quote me, but I think the T-21 is the one where the factory run is the lowest due to 10 Blaster Power Barrels needed...so thats 100 T-21's per factory run. The need is there too since people buy them by the crate to be sliced and destroyed. And *that* is due to the overpayment of missions.
While I would love to see a proposal outlined in this thread added, I think a much more significant and worthy fix is in order...and I spoke of it once already. Nerf harv ber's and mission payouts. There can be no doubt that our economies are hyper-inflated. The credit is worthless. If we could buy a Snickers bar in SWG, it would cost about 200 creds at least. Until something like this happens, nothing significant is likely to fix anything. Yes, it would still be cool to buy better equipment, and the volume of that equipment would be much less than the current "best" stuff produced by all the Industrialists (hand crafting takes too long to make that much in one sitting). But as long as people are pulling multi-millions of units of resources out of the ground...a SINGLE player even....there can be little done. Not all nerfs are bad. Most are not, actually, when taken in the context of the whole game.
Whatever they do, I hope they do it real soon.
If you Nerf Bers on harvs and mission payouts, you will be hurting exactly the people you have been trying to help throughout this post. The established crafters will then need to buy resources, having much deeper pockets then the newer crafters. The price of resources will rise.
Currrently many crafters harvest their own stuff, this means that new crafters can buy stuff at a decent rate. Not only would that go away, but so would the high paying missions, their ONLY hope of raising the cash.
Snikrop
Mon Sep 13, 2004 4:16 pm
#148
TheRealTK421 wrote:
Snikrop wrote:
You're sounding more and more like a dev these daysWhat's that mean?
/bow
Respectfully,
Specificly, doin' the SOE dance, and saying that it's "wrong" for everyone to have the best there is out there. It'd seem to me that a root cause of this is an underdeveloped crafting process that isn't as fun as it could be. In general "grinding" seems to be acceptable, and admittedly somewhat unavoidable, in an MMO, but the current crafting process isn't "a game." The move to nearly 100% factory crafted goods is not "wrong," it's the only sane thing to do unless you are really into S&M and carpal tunnel.
game
noun
1. An activity providing entertainment or amusement;
I can think of very few folk who describe the actual process of crafting as entertaining or amusing beyond the first fifty items. In the current system you pretty much have to be a stats/numbers geek to really have fun, let alone call it a "game." Organizing the crafted items, and dealing with the sale of said items, may be slightly more of a merchant issue so I'm not address that when I say it's not a game.
The process for crafting should be as fun as PvE combat, and hopefully PvP. The reward for hand crafting you've suggested is a higher potential stat value. I like this idea, so much so that I suggested similar things for new crafters to lessen the desire to grind blindly to master before ever unchecking the "practice" button. I posted across a number of the crafter forums: Check out the posts at the bottom of my tracker:
The weaponsmiths gave me the most feedback, but it was mostly "nice idea but it won't help" or "This change doesn't sodomize non-masters. It is therefore doomed to failure."
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=weaponsmith&message.id=40338#M40338
Any more posts on the Revamp docs over in the Corr forums?
Snikrop
Mon Sep 13, 2004 4:54 pm
#149
TheRealTK421 wrote:/bow
Snikrop wrote:
While all this (the crafting process) goes on, there's
a) no animation during any of the activities for the player or people approaching a crafter.
TK:Yea...that's true. Art time is hard to schedule (especially with JTL getting worked on). /shrugI thought we were discussing post-JTL when all the devs are done with the Jump to my Wallet expansion? At least let me /usecraftingstation it and then ever 5-10 seconds my character reaches out and presses a button on the console of that beast. I'd like to see more than this in terms of animated crafting process, even if was only on my screen. The materials turning into parts or the parts laying on a table waiting for me to assemble them, hell allowing me to see the finished item and throw my initials on.
b) a lot of possibilities for a client-side data storage of materials and schematics used in the last (or better yet, recent) crafting session(s) to make it much more user friendly when hand crafting multiple items
TK:Mmmm...not sure about this one. I'd have to check. It might be 'abuseable'.
I think it'd also be really nice to be able to open one crafting session and then craft the components and the final product without having to start a new crafting session for each. I can see this being a large coding change, so I'm less eager for the inevitable wait for this kind of change, but making the crafting process more user-friendly may help make it more of a game.
c) room for the more stat math opportunities (maybe it's time for a simple /spreadsheet command so we can get the merchants behind this addition)
TK:The spreadsheet thing might have some legs....I think a really doable proposal would have to get placed on the table though for this to ever happen as an in-game tool. Maybe when the full-on Merchant revamp stuff comes along...Snikrop: I'll start pokin' around for what I think are basic spreadsheet requirements and what kind of limits need to be set to keep this simple.
d) no way to crate up hand crafted materials.
TK:Errr...I thought where called factories.
This is going to be a major problem for chef, med, and droids as part of the really handy thing about factory crates involves minimizing inventory usage. I'd hate to see a new "rares" market that didn't bring the same advantages to all crafters.
TK:But if something's rare, that means there's a very small number of them, right? Doesn't sounds like a giant inventory issue to me. What specific issues do you see at play here?Snikrop: The first thing that came to mind is brandy, but almost everything a chef makes, bounty hunter droids, and all the "packs" a medic uses. I'd want much higher, like two or three times the current number, of "uses" on these rare items to
- a) make them easier to stock on vendors, especially with the hard limits on the number of items in the new vendor changes
- b) limit inventory space required to carry the items as compared to crated products
e) no great difference between a "bad" crafting station and a "good" station so there's little incentive to work on a really nicely crafted station.
TK:Yea...I'd agree on this. There needs to be a quantifiable difference (in Assembly primarily but may on Exper. too).
Respectfully,
Snikrop /thanks TK
Malitevv
Mon Sep 13, 2004 7:55 pm
#150
babyblue_d wrote:
no my questions based off your answer to your self .. did you need to think for a while before you got your answers? my bet is yes.
why do you insist on "betting" on what my answers to your questions are going to be? your"bet" is again completely wrong. it took me a split second to think of crafters on my server who hand craft.
as for the rest of it. We're going to have to agree to disagree.
Malitevv
Mon Sep 13, 2004 8:02 pm
#151
LonelyGhost wrote:
Nerf harv ber's and mission payouts. There can be no doubt that our economies are hyper-inflated. The credit is worthless. If we could buy a Snickers bar in SWG, it would cost about 200 creds at least. Until something like this happens, nothing significant is likely to fix anything. Yes, it would still be cool to buy better equipment, and the volume of that equipment would be much less than the current "best" stuff produced by all the Industrialists (hand crafting takes too long to make that much in one sitting). But as long as people are pulling multi-millions of units of resources out of the ground...a SINGLE player even....there can be little done. Not all nerfs are bad. Most are not, actually, when taken in the context of the whole game.
Whatever they do, I hope they do it real soon.
Nerfing BER's hurts everyone except for the players who have already stockpiled millions and millions of resources. This means the nerfing BERs would hurt everyone except for the people that you are currently stating have an unfair advantage. It will simply increase the power of their current advantage. It would most definitely hurt the people you are trying to help more than anybody else.
Nerfing mission payouts does the same thing in the short term, and in the longterm does nothing. If you nerf mission payouts, the first thing that will happen is that only the people who are already rich will be able to afford the best things. Then slowly as money trickles out of the rich peoples hands, eventually the amount of money in the economy will be diminished, but prices of all items will diminish by exactly the same ratioand the overall net affect will be NULL.
GrandPotato
Tue Sep 14, 2004 12:21 am
#152
One thing I'd like to throw into this discussion is the experience granted for crafting final products. This is an issue that pertains to all professions, but when I craft an R3 that takes over a half-dozen components, some of which require components themselves, it is not an easy task. I should be rewarded with a fair amount of XP. The problem with the xp rewards as they are now is that it encourages grinding of useless parts because they give xp. As far as FS is concerned, if I am supposed to gain xp by "playing the game," we should be rewarded for what master DE's actually do: create final droids. I make my parts by factory, and assemble the final droids by hand. The xp awards for final assemblies need to be REALLY looked at.
Malitevv
Tue Sep 14, 2004 12:37 am
#153
On a side note for those who think that the power gamers have all the advantage in the crafting game and the casual players have none: are you all aware of some of the little changes that SOE slipped in with the merchant revamp regarding the deletion policy for vendors? This is it:
Any vendor that is abandoned is deleted. But the game currently seems to define "abandoned" as "any vendor that has not had it's stock modified by the owner in the last 2 weeks". In other words, any crafter who logs off for two weeks is likely to have every vendor he owns deleted along with all of its contents. That penalizes the casual player beyond all comprehension. Shoot, its so harsh a policy that if SOE doesn't change it I'm going to shut down all my vendors and close up shop because I like to take 2 week breaks from the game too.
On some of the points made by others: i do know handcrafters who sell stuff baby, there is one who has a vendor right next to mine at the mall that I sell out of. /shrug. your entire argument was premised on the assumption that my answer to that question would be no. well it's yes. dunno what else to say.
On this notion of wal-mart and the big time industrialists: with the exception of architect vendors, I have never seen a vendor that had one of every single item that could be made by a single profession. The reason architect vendors are sometimes an exception is likely because 1) architects make the friggin' factories so access to a factory is very easy for them. 2) demand for architect products is very low. Most players never have to shop at an architect vendor more than once, hence archictect vendors tend to accumulate a lot of cruft on them over time.
As far as weaponsmith's and armorsmith's go: my combat alt'sfavorite weapon shop is one where the weaponsdo appear to behand crafted. I haven't met the weaponsmith but he only has a few of each weapon type usually and the names are fairly varied so it doesn't look like any of them were made in a factory to me. Took me a while to find it, but I found it. All of my combat alt's armor is hand crafted as well, because color is important to me. I know of two armorsmiths that I can go to for that sort of thing for me and I use them and refer them whenever I can.
For food items: these are similar to BH droids in terms of what the customer wants. Nobody wants to buy them if they aren't in factory crates,cause they take up too much storage space. The same is true of meds. Anybody who tries to run a hand-crafting business off food or meds is a fool. it is impossible to succeed at that endeavor, because it is contrary to what the customer wants. hopefully none of your friends who quit were trying to do that.
As for me: I do factory runs of pure combat probots and factory runs of newbie storage/combat droids. I also do factory runs of BH droids, because the BH droids do not sell if they aren't in factory crates. The vast majority of the other items Ioffer on my vendorare hand crafted because the demand for droids is too low for me to go through the trouble of doing a factory run for most of the others. I do factory runs of almost all the major sub-components and modules though, but even those last me a long time per factory run and aren't done all that frequently.
Now, you are demanding thatindividual examples are not relevant LonelyGhost, but individual examples are all that any of us can offer without direct access to the game's data base records. And individual examples are all you have offerred as well so far as evidence is concerned.
In any case, I don't mean to be saying that industrialists and wal-mart type shops do not exist in this game. What I am saying is that they don't have the power to stop you from selling your items. They certainly are an obstacle to you if you are foolish enough to try and build a hand-crafting business around rapidly decaying commodity items like meds or food or bh droids (just examples, there are others). but the only advantage they have over you for other types of items is name recognition. but quite frankly, that is going to be true no matter what the crafting rules are.
any crafter who wants to runa business in this game is going to have to go through certain paces. he's going to have to work hard at advertising his shop. he's going to have to accept the fact that for a few months his shop will suffer a net loss and he will have to subsidize that loss by doingmissions on the side and spending quite frugally (I made that latter point already and it was dismissed as an "unreasonable" requirement). I suppose some people may have done all that and still not been successful. But in my experience, the crafters who quit because its "too hard to compete" in an existing market, are largely people who never advertised and never accepted the fact that businesses run at a net loss when they are struggling to establish themselves.
Message Edited by Malitevv on 09-13-2004 12:40 PM
ArveMennderchukk
Tue Sep 14, 2004 8:30 am
#154
Like I said, all....I was very worried about trying to bring this up cause I knew it would be hard to explain via text/posts as opposed to in person. When we had a chance to really kick this around in person, we were able to cut right to the heart of things much faster and better. Comments and concerns weren't misread, glossed over or misunderstood. I'll have to think about how I can try to reproduce that here...
TK, it isn't that you are not able to communicate your desire in a fashion that can be understood -- it's that a significant number of people (myself included) understand what you're saying and disagree with it. Vehemently.
TheRealTK421
Tue Sep 14, 2004 9:28 am
#155
ArveMennderchukk wrote:
TK, it isn't that you are not able to communicate your desire in a fashion that can be understood -- it's that a significant number of people (myself included) understand what you're saying and disagree with it. Vehemently.
A. This isn't my desire. It's a topic that I wanted to discuss and get thoughts on since it was brought up by some Corrs. at the Summit as being fodder for a possible 'crafting revamp/balance' type thing (affecting core design issues).
B. I can see that there's a good number of people against changing hand-crafting in any way (and some that are for the idea of having it looked at in some way). If you all were universally against it...I'd have let the thread die. It's clear that there are some people for this.
C. This has less to do with how to 'buff' hand-crafting and more about how to get it fun/rewarding/worthwhile or simply give any reason to hand-craft in the face of factory use as the norm (as it relates to the overall marketplace).
/bow
ArveMennderchukk wrote:
The way it looks Straker is that it doesn't matter whether some people think this "handcrafting" proposal is slap-in-the-face madness -- it will be railroaded through by TK and the like-minded obstinate minority.
Straker_Atrella wrote:
I'm still fuzzy on the "need" for a reason to hand craft. Hand crafting is simply lower level crafting. People do it because they WANT to. Lot's of us do it. Why does there need to be a reason?
Again I say, the game is filled with lower level and higher level things. Should an Unarmed TKM do more damage with no weapon then he does with a VK? No, of course not. Sounds silly, but it's the same thing.
People use lower level things because they WANT too. That doesn't mean they should be better.
Whoa, whoa whoa. You've obviously misread the spirit and intent of the entire thread and discussion. No one's getting railroaded.
This is all just talk. Nothing more.
People who disagree with the "necessity" for hand-crafting rewards will be ignored.
I don't want the discussion to be about the "necessity" to handcraft. Instead, how to get it better/cooler/more fun so that there's reasons to hand-craft (even if it might not affect stats). It still can be on the table for a core design 'pass' and/or overhaul (and so should factory use as well).
We have no voice.
That's so silly I'm not even going to respond to it. Oh....wait,...
Chill out, man. We're just talking. Nothing is happening here and I'm not sold on anything. It doesn't really matter what I think. I bring forward what the community as a whole seems to fall behind on any issue or another. /shrug
Even though it may sound it, I'm not on a personal crusade or anything even marginally like that. We're just talkin'...
Respectfully,
LonelyGhost
Tue Sep 14, 2004 9:40 am
#156
I find it hard to believe that you dont feel there are problems in this game. Everyone knows combat is unbalanced. And to me its just as obvious that the crafting side of things...the economic side of things, should also be adjusted. Remember, this game should NOT cater to the powergamer (remember, I fall into that category as well). The powergamer will ALWAYS achieve more than the casual player...such is the nature of their gameplay. Thats great, too! Powergamers fill a needed role in the game. They know a lot about a lot of things, and are able to assist and teach. But there are still casual players, and they deserve to have fun too. I challenge you to find anyone who likes runnign survey missions for hours a week. A change to the crafting game (including aquisistion of resources and distribution of goods as well as manufacturing) is needed. The ease of which the powergamers can corner the market on *mass* production of *top* quality goods is unbalanced. By giving hand-crafted items a bonus, the number of *top* quality goods in the game will drop significantly, and yet the demand for them will not. What this will do is spread out the business a bit. Powergamers will *still* make the best of the best, but even casual gamers will be able to make a few *top* quality goods. Shoot, for acasual player, being able to sell a T-21 for 50k would be a huge deal. Right now I can hit at least 3 WS shops in the game and find over 100 of these T-21's up for 50k-70k. Each shop! Pumping out 200-300 of these a week is cake for a powergamer. And they all sell.
I too think it might be time to refine this concept and start a new thread. I think we've taken this one about as far as it can go.