Droid Engineer Archive
Thread: Project: Droid Engineer Chassis Experimentation System Upgrade
Drashk wrote:
The major reason that I put together this suggestion was to start discussion on what could happen in the future. We are seeing a major sweeping change happening with the Combat System and the Combat Professions. If something of this magnitude also was to effect the Crafting professions, what would you like to see happen?
I'm not talking about adding new modules. I'm talking about fundamental changes to how we craft. This would be on the same scale as what will be happening with the Combat Upgrade.
Saying that we are broken and should stay that way, won't stop what could happen if a change was to occur to our crafting system without us voicing what ideas we like and don't like, now.
Hillslayer wrote:
I disagree Straker. Credits are _NOT_ the only measure of success.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the amount of Credits a crafter has is the measure of success.
I'm saying that Credits are the only gauge of how much a product is worth. Sucess and product value are not the same thing. I could have an excellent product, but if I am a bad businessman, I could not be successful and make little money.
People pay what they feel something is worth, if it isn't worth it, they wont pay it. Sure some people will throw money away, but what the average person is willing to pay is how you gauge the value of a product.
If credits are not how you can gauge product value, then what is?
Message Edited by Straker_Atrella on 11-16-2004 11:07 PM
Straker_Atrella wrote:
Hillslayer wrote:
I disagree Straker. Credits are _NOT_ the only measure of success.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the amount of Credits a crafter has is the measure of success.
I'm saying that Credits are the only gauge of how much a product is worth. Sucess and product value are not the same thing. I could have an excellent product, but if I am a bad businessman, I could not be successful and make little money.
People pay what they feel something is worth, if it isn't worth it, they wont pay it. Sure some people will throw money away, but what the average person is willing to pay is how you gauge the value of a product.
If credits are not how you can gauge product value, then what is?
Message Edited by Straker_Atrella on 11-16-2004 11:07 PM
hehe depends man, i sell my r3 for something like 300+ cpu, most WS sell for like 50cpu to 20cpu. of course we make our sales half as much and have twice the work per product (34 subcomps on an r3?!??!) but overall the demand isnt there for droids so most de like me have high prices cause the droids are a pain to make and sales arent very fast...if they were quicker i might actually sell r3's again for 50k. i agere with the idea your presenting but demand is the other side of the value of an item in creds.
Gron_DM wrote:
Straker_Atrella wrote:
Hillslayer wrote:
I disagree Straker. Credits are _NOT_ the only measure of success.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the amount of Credits a crafter has is the measure of success.
I'm saying that Credits are the only gauge of how much a product is worth. Sucess and product value are not the same thing. I could have an excellent product, but if I am a bad businessman, I could not be successful and make little money.
People pay what they feel something is worth, if it isn't worth it, they wont pay it. Sure some people will throw money away, but what the average person is willing to pay is how you gauge the value of a product.
If credits are not how you can gauge product value, then what is?
Message Edited by Straker_Atrella on 11-16-2004 11:07 PM
hehe depends man, i sell my r3 for something like 300+ cpu, most WS sell for like 50cpu to 20cpu. of course we make our sales half as much and have twice the work per product (34 subcomps on an r3?!??!) but overall the demand isnt there for droids so most de like me have high prices cause the droids are a pain to make and sales arent very fast...if they were quicker i might actually sell r3's again for 50k. i agere with the idea your presenting but demand is the other side of the value of an item in creds.
The way that you gauge the value of a product in an MRPG is how much people are willing to pay for it. Value determines what a product is worth. The fact that normal Armor sells for 300k over nad over again, a good T21 sells for a million show their value.
The only TRUE way to ensure that DE is a healthy profession is by ensuring that it has a healthy place in the economy. Having fun crafting, feeling good giving droids away, and just digging droids in general does not mean a profession is healthy.
The only true way to gauge if a crafting profession is by seeing how CUSTOMERS feel about it. As a DE, our view is skewed, by our love of the profession, so we want to make things the way WE want it, not what is good for the game neccesarrily. Good for the game is how it will affect our customers.
If DE will ever be considered "healthy" as you said, then a good DE will make as much as a good AS or WS. Credits are the only true gauge of success.
I just want to take a sec to say that I disagree wholeheartedly with this statement. Put yourself in the shoes of the devs when SWG is concepted: They start coming up with profession ideas. One of their many goals is to try to give something to each of the types of people that will play the game. Not everyone that plays the game is out to make millions and millions of credits in the fastest, most efficient way possible. So they concept professions that appeal to other types of gamers. DE will be "healthy" if there is a decent portion of the subscribers who want to play the profession, regardless of their reasons. Period. You'd better come to grips with the fact that the devs will not measure all the crafting professions with the same yardstick. While credits must be a significant factor in determining "game balance," it is not the only one.
Omab
overall though as DE's we need to focus on what new functions aer going to be allowed and at same time will bring DE's a higher demand. And of course decay. If there is some new changes to crafting they wont impact DE's to much as we dont have nearly the demand of the other craft profs cept maybe tailor.... and they are hurting in a bad way. so everyone hop onto the decay thread and the need thread and lets brainstorm 
my droid customers are happy, of course i have like a quarter of them in comparision to my tools, craftstions, and wpns sales. DE's arent a fully realized selling point product we do not have the demand other professions have...irregardless of how you chose to interpret this whether its based on the fact DE's make less and our products are overall worth less creds...DE must not be very fun to play i know 0 DE's that are still DE's from when i started other then me...and of the latest crops of DE most quit after a few months. In fact id hazard to say i see fewer DE's then tailors...so obviously the devs arent doing something right if ppl dont want to play DE's. case in point 1 year ago i trained a fellow guildmate to be master DE she is leaving this january...even with the excellent sales she had from jtl she doesnt find DE to be fun anymore. im still here cause im a diehard.
snoman321 wrote:
The way that you gauge the value of a product in an MRPG is how much people are willing to pay for it. Value determines what a product is worth. The fact that normal Armor sells for 300k over nad over again, a good T21 sells for a million show their value.
The only TRUE way to ensure that DE is a healthy profession is by ensuring that it has a healthy place in the economy. Having fun crafting, feeling good giving droids away, and just digging droids in general does not mean a profession is healthy.
The only true way to gauge if a crafting profession is by seeing how CUSTOMERS feel about it. As a DE, our view is skewed, by our love of the profession, so we want to make things the way WE want it, not what is good for the game neccesarrily. Good for the game is how it will affect our customers.
If DE will ever be considered "healthy" as you said, then a good DE will make as much as a good AS or WS. Credits are the only true gauge of success.
I just want to take a sec to say that I disagree wholeheartedly with this statement. Put yourself in the shoes of the devs when SWG is concepted: They start coming up with profession ideas. One of their many goals is to try to give something to each of the types of people that will play the game. Not everyone that plays the game is out to make millions and millions of credits in the fastest, most efficient way possible. So they concept professions that appeal to other types of gamers. DE will be "healthy" if there is a decent portion of the subscribers who want to play the profession, regardless of their reasons. Period. You'd better come to grips with the fact that the devs will not measure all the crafting professions with the same yardstick. While credits must be a significant factor in determining "game balance," it is not the only one.
Omab
Straker_Atrella wrote:
I sort of agree with what you are saying, but now you are turning this into Hand crafting over Mass Factory crafting.
To be honest, I think this might be a direction that the DEVs are headed towards with all finished productions, such as Harvesters, Droid Deeds, etc..., much like is currently being done with Shipwrights. I'm saying that this topic has been brought up by the DEVs, I'm just saying that with the non-CURB coming we could see some of the mass factory crafting professions hit to a small extent. I could very well be completely wrong about this assumption as well.
Idon't agree with your Weaponsmith and Armorsmith analogy though. First, they all use Subcomponants, in which experimentation doesn't matter at all.
If I'm mistaken, all Weaponsmith and Armorsmith produced subcomponents are 90%experimentation driven. Its some of the non-AS and WS crafted items that do not matter. I am 100% sure that this is the case with Armorsmith Crafted items. There are only 7 crafted items total in the WS tree that do not require experimentation.
Second, the amount of resources that they use of quality is much much smaller then the scale of what you are suggesting here for us.
True for Weaponsmith, but not true for Armorsmith, when you take into consideration that a single piece of armor is as effective as a Probot without any modules. When you take the entire set of armor into consideration, as it has to be, Armorsmiths actually require almost 3 times the number of resources in a fully loaded Advanced R3.
Third they have a lot higher profit margin, they make more money because there is more need.
The difference in profit margin is an issue; however part of this is to do with the fact that experimentation quality has played a very small part in our profession. Add this to the near miss modules that we can produce and you have a formula for lower overall income.
Do you expect Droid prices to go up after this?
Without the fleshing out the rest of the system that would go along with it? Marginally. When coupled with the other suggestions that I have mentioned, but have not listed yet...YES.
Ok, here is another reason why your proposal is wrong on a fundamental level.
A lot of other stuff written...
It seems far more oriented towards making droids "cooler" and hand crafting, then increasing our market need.
You are still assuming much. You are 100% under the assumption that a system such as this would produce worse droids, when, if implimented fully, would allow you to produce better droids, if you have the resources to do so. Sure, some DEs will see an impact if a system such as this was intorduced; however people will quickly adapt to such a change. It has happened before, and it would happen again.
We aren't talking about only a partial change to the Droid Engineer crafting system. We are talking about a profession wide crafting change, that would effect majority of our crafted items. I'm trying to suggest a grand sweeping change, so that it stirs up more discussion on the matter, so that IF the DEVs plan on changing the crafting professions with as much vigor as will be put into the CU, we have a place to start from, and work our way down. I'm already working on a second version of the idea suggested here. One that is a little less grandiose, but still has as much of an overall effect.
I think that you are misinterpreting how I feel about Droid Crafting. If push came to shove, I could more then likely out produce you in a single month, using what I have left collecting dust on Shadowfire. 8 Factories, over 800 crates of parts and at least 3 million resources sitting in storage and I haven't logged on to that server to build droids full time in many months now. Even though I haven't collected a single resource in at least 3 months there, I still have some of the best to ever spawn on Shadowfire. When Shadowfire was younger, I more then likely supplied the highest number of droids on the server.
After taking up the Correspondent position, I stopped and took a look at the overall game and how DE fits into the greater picture of things and how crafters in general effect each others markets and the crafting market as a whole. The ability to Mass produce goods is actually a one of the fundamental flaws in the crafting system, when compared to the game economy, but it is neccessary in order to keep up with supply and demand in some aspects. Let me repharse that... Mass producing goods isn't the problem, the problem is that we have the ability to mass produce too many goods. (Talking about all crafters and not just DE)
Something has to give somewhere. I would rather see the requirements on crafting go up, then to see a change towards less factory usage, as seen with Shipwright. Then again, I may only be seeing a possible outcome of what the DEVs could do to handle the issue of mass producing in excess.
k so you are hinting that the devs are going to try to harm bulk production? is this substantiated or just a hypothesis? im not trying to doubt you but the way you are describing this doesnt come across as 100%. If the devs are looking to take bulk production a notch and have said as much well DE's wont take to hideous a hit...worse will be the lack of 1000 item schems for artisan components. i dont exactly do 1000 item runs of MSE's for gods sake...even though there probably is a few that do...i guess point is if we have to take an increase in resources/experimentation to avoid a factory nerf i guess we will, but id really like to know where this is going.
Drashk wrote:
Straker_Atrella wrote:
I sort of agree with what you are saying, but now you are turning this into Hand crafting over Mass Factory crafting.
To be honest, I think this might be a direction that the DEVs are headed towards with all finished productions, such as Harvesters, Droid Deeds, etc..., much like is currently being done with Shipwrights. I'm saying that this topic has been brought up by the DEVs, I'm just saying that with the non-CURB coming we could see some of the mass factory crafting professions hit to a small extent. I could very well be completely wrong about this assumption as well.
Idon't agree with your Weaponsmith and Armorsmith analogy though. First, they all use Subcomponants, in which experimentation doesn't matter at all.
If I'm mistaken, all Weaponsmith and Armorsmith produced subcomponents are 90%experimentation driven. Its some of the non-AS and WS crafted items that do not matter. I am 100% sure that this is the case with Armorsmith Crafted items. There are only 7 crafted items total in the WS tree that do not require experimentation.
Second, the amount of resources that they use of quality is much much smaller then the scale of what you are suggesting here for us.
True for Weaponsmith, but not true for Armorsmith, when you take into consideration that a single piece of armor is as effective as a Probot without any modules. When you take the entire set of armor into consideration, as it has to be, Armorsmiths actually require almost 3 times the number of resources in a fully loaded Advanced R3.
Third they have a lot higher profit margin, they make more money because there is more need.
The difference in profit margin is an issue; however part of this is to do with the fact that experimentation quality has played a very small part in our profession. Add this to the near miss modules that we can produce and you have a formula for lower overall income.
Do you expect Droid prices to go up after this?
Without the fleshing out the rest of the system that would go along with it? Marginally. When coupled with the other suggestions that I have mentioned, but have not listed yet...YES.
Ok, here is another reason why your proposal is wrong on a fundamental level.
A lot of other stuff written...
It seems far more oriented towards making droids "cooler" and hand crafting, then increasing our market need.
You are still assuming much. You are 100% under the assumption that a system such as this would produce worse droids, when, if implimented fully, would allow you to produce better droids, if you have the resources to do so. Sure, some DEs will see an impact if a system such as this was intorduced; however people will quickly adapt to such a change. It has happened before, and it would happen again.
We aren't talking about only a partial change to the Droid Engineer crafting system. We are talking about a profession wide crafting change, that would effect majority of our crafted items. I'm trying to suggest a grand sweeping change, so that it stirs up more discussion on the matter, so that IF the DEVs plan on changing the crafting professions with as much vigor as will be put into the CU, we have a place to start from, and work our way down. I'm already working on a second version of the idea suggested here. One that is a little less grandiose, but still has as much of an overall effect.
I think that you are misinterpreting how I feel about Droid Crafting. If push came to shove, I could more then likely out produce you in a single month, using what I have left collecting dust on Shadowfire. 8 Factories, over 800 crates of parts and at least 3 million resources sitting in storage and I haven't logged on to that server to build droids full time in many months now. Even though I haven't collected a single resource in at least 3 months there, I still have some of the best to ever spawn on Shadowfire. When Shadowfire was younger, I more then likely supplied the highest number of droids on the server.
After taking up the Correspondent position, I stopped and took a look at the overall game and how DE fits into the greater picture of things and how crafters in general effect each others markets and the crafting market as a whole. The ability to Mass produce goods is actually a one of the fundamental flaws in the crafting system, when compared to the game economy, but it is neccessary in order to keep up with supply and demand in some aspects. Let me repharse that... Mass producing goods isn't the problem, the problem is that we have the ability to mass produce too many goods. (Talking about all crafters and not just DE)
Something has to give somewhere. I would rather see the requirements on crafting go up, then to see a change towards less factory usage, as seen with Shipwright. Then again, I may only be seeing a possible outcome of what the DEVs could do to handle the issue of mass producing in excess.
Message Edited by Gron_DM on 11-17-2004 02:39 AM
Gron_DM wrote:
woah back the truck up they(devs) are actually talking about going back to some kind of change like that? well i cant say this would be good or bad until i saw what the devs were proposing i know based on the "patch" day system we would have seen a huge gash between old master crafters and new ones that would take awhile to close...and pricey as well....if we are going to see a change to the fundamental way crafting is done id like resource quality to mean little to nothing and a system involed that goes off the users skill in determining the quality of the products....but since there is no "levels" in swg just a few skill boxs and then master that system will never work and we are slaves to our harvesters in order to craft.....instead of being focused on production the bulk of crafter attn is resource acquiring...that is a big beef i have with swg....in the mean time overall i agree with straker unless there is some changes your not outlining well the experimentation to subcomps will cause much more problems then it will fix....chassis and decay well and fine...maybe you need to paint a bigger picture here....or is this a "dev told me cant say till that say i can thing"?
Hard to see is the future..
I'm not suggesting that this is something that the DEVs are going to do, I'm suggesting that this could be something that could happen.
Like the CU, the non-CU could have a major impact on the crafting game. What this impact could be, no one knows. I was just giving you something to think about.
Gron_DM wrote:
k so you are hinting that the devs are going to try to harm bulk production? is this substantiated or just a hypothesis? im not trying to doubt you but the way you are describing this doesnt come across as 100%. If the devs are looking to take bulk production a notch and have said as much well DE's wont take to hideous a hit...worse will be the lack of 1000 item schems for artisan components. i dont exactly do 1000 item runs of MSE's for gods sake...even though there probably is a few that do...i guess point is if we have to take an increase in resources/experimentation to avoid a factory nerf i guess we will, but id really like to know where this is going.
Unsubstantiated hypothesis based on a few coverstations with non-DEV-type people.
I am generating discussion for people to take into consideration on what could happen at some point. I'm not trying to suggest that it will, only that there maybe a possiblity. Don't read too much into what I say in the Project: DE Threads. I'm creating them as different senarios as to what we could see during the non-CU and not as spoken truth. The clearer the reactions of people's comments on possible changes, the better chance I will have information to bring to the DEVs when information is actually given out on the Corre forums.
Think of this as a 'fact finding mission' before I have any substaniated facts to work with. 
Guess I spent too much time as a Boy Scout.....Just trying to be prepared.
BTW, Just wanted to say....Excellent feedback on this thread. Not too many fires and plenty of discussion.
Message Edited by Drashk on 11-16-2004 11:54 PM
Drashk wrote:
BTW, Just wanted to say....Excellent feedback on this thread. Not too many fires and plenty of discussion.
Straker_Atrella wrote:
1. We already have a lot of named reources that we need, some quality some not. You probably quadruple the amount of quality resources we would need. If I need to have uber steel or fibro just to fit 6 modules into a droid, you will run out fast. This change would make a DE's job insanely more difficult.
This actually doesn't change any of the resource types. It would be a change to the experimentation process, not the required resources. You might want to re-read the suggestions again, especially the parts mentioning where average resources would produce an average rating. *IE - Recources with 50% would create an R3 with 4 Modules and 1 Armor, which is the average of a basic and an advanced module R3.
2. While this makes "experimentation matter" far more, it actually makes all of our other problems worse. Can we get more then 6 modules? Can armor go over 20%? Will they get more HAM then we have now? The answer to all of those is probably no. Increasing all of those would unbalance Droids. What that means it that our Current HAM, Armor, and module numbers would be "maxed" numbers. Meaning across the boards, Droids everywhere would get worse. We already know that we have problems with people needing droids, do we really want to make droids worse? That is what would happen.
Only the HAM and the Armor on current droids would stay the same. The maxium number of modules could be increased on each droid depending on the success. If based upon a weighted scale such as that used in Harvester construction, an 80% success on any experimentation would produce a droid that we can already craft. Its the successes at 90% and 100% that could be used to gain extra function, beyond what we see now.
3. Droids would be a ton more complicated to customers. Already DE's complain about having to spend hours explaining droids to people. Do you really want to add the time of saying, "sorry, but server resources limit R3's to 5 module slots, and i can't build Droids that move that fast. We need to make Droid simpler, not more complicated.
Not if the success rating is set at 80% to produce a droid that is equal to a current Advanced Module droid. .
4. You would make it totally impossible for new DE's. Not only would they be more confused, but they would have tremendously larger lists of resource needs. They would no longer be able to "get by" selling Med droids and Entertainer Droids or other non-quality droids. They would now need to aquire large stockpiles of quality resources.
None of the resources would change. The only thing that would change would be that more resource qualities actually mattered more then they do now. Any one is able to find resources that have greater then 500 quality per stat, within 1 - 2 shifts. Confusion wouldn't be a factor for a new DE, since they would be learning the system as they go.
5. Need and Decay are our primary issues, this does nothing to fix them.
Setting up for a Decay system is one of the goals of this design. That is what the Integrity rating on each and every subcomponent and chassis is for. The Integrity rating is something that would be 100% experimentable and will be futhur fleshed out in a later doc in the Project: DE series. As soon as a Decay system is introduced, people will instantly ask, how do I get a droid that can last longer? If there isn't an experimentable attribute, people will whine louder.
So basically while this would be another "cool" fix it would drastically increase our workload yet actually decrease our sales. Sounds like a lot of work for bad results. I can't think of a single positive thing from this change, other then saying "well experimentation matters now."
In the past we have talked about making Experimentation matter within a decay system, making quality chasis's last longer before they decay and such. In a situation like that, I would support it, it would be mattering on something new that benefitted the customer. It would not be drastically lowering already current statistics on Droids.
There is no drastic lowering involved in this design, unless you are only using resources with with less then 600 weight on required stats. Something needs to give, in order to promote better experimentation within our profession. The Droid subcomponents and chassis are the root of the problem. Unless they are addressed, experimentation will not matter beyond what it already does.
In later threads, I will flesh out the rest of the additions/chages that go along with this idea. Hopefully, after the rest of the idea is laid out, a better understanding of the changes proposed here will become clear. Either that, or I get to scrap certain parts of the idea. 