Shipwright Archive
Thread: Loot drops nerfed, now what
1st_Viduus wrote:
Arryth wrote:
1st_Viduus wrote:non-master ship...?Tier 4 ship at 300k is cost if you paid 5cpu for your resources average, (some at 3, some at 5, some at 10, for example) to come up with the 70% experimentation on mass allowance everyone clamors for, plus 4 or 5 uses of damn expensive Port to guarantee no crit fail.Selling it at 400k is hardly what I'd call gouging.For a weapon though... yeah, I'd have to agree with you there. A decent guide to pricing components (full-sized) is Cert Level Squared. But crafted guns are pretty horrid IMO compared to almost any gun I've RE'd, so I rarely bother making them.
My point is.. you guys should be bugging the deves to lower resourse requirements not nerf our loot, and thereby bringing the wrath of the pilot community down on you. All the asking for nerfs here is going to do is anger your customers. Were already still very angry about the last engine nerf. Frankly.. for ship parts and components.. I do not consider any more then 6cpu to be reasonable for ships and parts, adding to the cost the port if you use it. Thats still a decent profit, unless your buying overpriced resourses...Most of us are NOT asking for nerf loots. I'm a pilot first, MSW 2nd.
Most of us are asking for Crafted to be comperable/competitive with loot drops.The fact that the devs are choosing 'the lazy way out' and nerfing the loot is their 2nd infraction here; the first was making shipwright comps so poor in comparison to start with.
Stop blaming the victims and place the blame where it is due.
Thats a nerf by boosting the crafted stuff.. We want loot to be speciall and better on some parts.. period...
Chiwawa wrote:
Rowgue wrote:Pilots are hoarding all the good loot it takes me too long to assemble enough parts.I'm sorry but this argument does not fly, pilot takes no skill points and anyone can take pilot along with shipwright. If you want the parts go get them yourself. Before all of the loot nerfs it still took some time to gather up the needed loot to RE some good stuff, but it was actually feasible to make a business out of doing this. I know I was making good money doing it.And before the outcry of "I don't have time to fly for hours to collect the loot, I have to manage my crafting business" is thrown around. Well I am also a shipwright and I find the time investment in the crafting side to be bery low in my opinion. I check swgcraft before I log on, if there are any good resources out there I go throw some harvesters down on them. I walk away and let my harvesters do the work for me. About once every week I make schematics for all of the powerups to put in my finished products and do factory runs on them. Whenever my vendors are low on inventory I go home and craft up some replacement parts to throw on the vendor. All of this makes up maybe 25% of my gaming time, and I only play for about 1-2 hours a night. That leaves me with 75% of my time to either do custom orders for people, go try to loot some good stuff in space for RE'ing, or whatever else I want to do.If you really want to see some crafting with a timesink then try being a master doctor like I was before. Anybody that knows anything sells avian meat of any decent quality for at least 10-20 cpu. I was not willing to pay those outrageous prices, but instead of complaining about it I leveled up some combat and collected those things myself. And without the benefit of a second account I was limited in both my ability to fight and my ability to harvest said resources because most of my skill points were tied up in Doc and Medic and of course I had to have some artisan to be able to survey for the other resources I needed. As a shipwright I don't have to worry about insanely hard to get creature resources and therefore I spend much less time dedicated to doing the leg work to get to the point where I have enough resources to do anything with. Sure there are some specific resource types you need to harvest for the advanced stuff, but meds required those as well as the creature resources.Honestly I have tried architect, doctor, weaponsmith, and now shipwright. I agree that the resource requirements are a little high, but this is by far the least painful crafting profession I have experienced thus far. And when you sell stuff based on a cpu basis, why in the world would you complain about how many resources it takes. If I make a ship that needs 70k resources for say 5cpu which is a lot less than most shipwrights would charge then I make 350k on the sale. Thats 280k profit, of course you have to figure in maint on harvesters and factories and vendors, but you are still making a decent profit on this ship.And the "I have to buy my resources" argument does not fly with me either. I have five open lots that I use for harvesters, and if I find a good spot I can easily pull 100k of that resource every day they are running. The ships are really the only thing that require massive amounts of resources and lets be honest ships are not going to be flying off the shelves so fast that you need millions of resources every week to keep up with demand. You choose to buy your resources instead of harvest them yourself, for reasons of time, laziness, lack of knowledge about how to do it properly, or any other reason. If you have to buy the resources for 10cpu, you can't expect to pass that increased cost on to your customers without them getting rather irritated with you.It's your choice to make that resource dealer a rich man by buying 100k units of steel at 10cpu. I can harvest that same 100k units for less than 0.5 cpu when you figure in the maint and power for the harvesters. That is the main thing that inflates the economy in this game. People pay 15cpu for uber resources then pass that cost along to the customer in the finished product. But as long as there are crafters around that are willing to do that work themselves as opposed to paying someone else to cut that part of the process out then you will always be hearing complaints about how you are overcharging for your goods. I chose not to pay those prices when I was a doctor, and thus was able to make my meds much cheaper than otherwise possible with purchasing resources. Granted I could not produce the mass quantities that some docs could because it did take time to gather all this stuff. But do you really need to gather enough resources to craft 20 of each ship chasis to stock your vendor with. I find that if I keep three of each chasis on my vendor then I almost always have at least one left when I am ready to restock. If ships are flying off your shelves so fast you can't keep up, then the additional cost of having to buy your resources will be negated by the sheer volume of your sales.I think that most of the complaining about the amount of resources needed to run a shipwright business come from people that have just achieved master and want to instantly go out and buy enough resources to craft the stuff to fully stock a vendor overnight. Getting a business up and running requires some prep work, once you have it up and running the workload decreases exponentially.
I disagree, I cannot possibly harvest what I need for crafting myself, and I have 15 lots available. I also do not sell chassis, so go figure.
If you can't handle shipwright with 15 lots, your doing something wrong.. either selling too much or doing it all in an inefficient manner.. in either case.. its not my problem. Leave the loot alone. The only improvement I would consede to the shipwright are better engines (current are still to slow), and lower resourse requirements.
Arryth wrote:
1st_Viduus wrote:
Arryth wrote:
1st_Viduus wrote:non-master ship...?Tier 4 ship at 300k is cost if you paid 5cpu for your resources average, (some at 3, some at 5, some at 10, for example) to come up with the 70% experimentation on mass allowance everyone clamors for, plus 4 or 5 uses of damn expensive Port to guarantee no crit fail.Selling it at 400k is hardly what I'd call gouging.For a weapon though... yeah, I'd have to agree with you there. A decent guide to pricing components (full-sized) is Cert Level Squared. But crafted guns are pretty horrid IMO compared to almost any gun I've RE'd, so I rarely bother making them.
My point is.. you guys should be bugging the deves to lower resourse requirements not nerf our loot, and thereby bringing the wrath of the pilot community down on you. All the asking for nerfs here is going to do is anger your customers. Were already still very angry about the last engine nerf. Frankly.. for ship parts and components.. I do not consider any more then 6cpu to be reasonable for ships and parts, adding to the cost the port if you use it. Thats still a decent profit, unless your buying overpriced resourses...Most of us are NOT asking for nerf loots. I'm a pilot first, MSW 2nd.
Most of us are asking for Crafted to be comperable/competitive with loot drops.The fact that the devs are choosing 'the lazy way out' and nerfing the loot is their 2nd infraction here; the first was making shipwright comps so poor in comparison to start with.
Stop blaming the victims and place the blame where it is due.
Thats a nerf by boosting the crafted stuff.. We want loot to be speciall and better on some parts.. period...
Tell me, Arryth, why do you deserve to be special? Except for a few very rare cases, you can't loot usable, uber things in the ground game. Yet somehow the combat professions have managed to survive. If you deserve to be special then so do I as a Shipwright. Even so, I'm not sitting here saying that your loot needs to be nerfed down to the level of the ground game. I'm simply saying that you should NOT be able to loot something that is head and shoulders better than anything a Master Shipwright can make. Why is that so hard for you to comprehend? Put yourself in someone else's shoes for once and see that if you can loot something better than they, as the supposed Master of their profession, can create you immediately make their profession pointless.
Rowgue wrote:
I usually stay out of these sorts of topics on the forums, as they are usually nothing more than childish pissing contests to see who can flame the other side more. Indeed this is my first post ever to the SWG forums, but I just couldn't take it anymore.
I have read endless posts from shipwrights calling for an end to uber loot drops.
I will preface this by saying that I am a shipwright as well as a master pilot. I had no intention of becoming a shipwright when JTL came out. I was a master pilot for about three weeks, and was desperately trying to outfit my new master level ship with the best stuff I could get my hands on and also fit into my ship. I was looting some nice components but most of them were too huge to fit on my ship or had one good stat and the others sucked. After asking around for days and days and browsing every shipwright vendor I could find on every planet it seemed that not many shipwrights were interested in RE'ing stuff. They just farm level 1 components and RE them in hopes of getting Firespray disks so they can make millions selling them. So I decided to drop master doctor and take up being a shipwright specializing in the RE'ing of components for me and the people of my town.
This started off pretty well. At that time I was able to go to kessel or deep space and kill tons of tier 5 ships. In about 3 hours time I would have a full load of loot about half of which was level 8-10. Now mind you about 90% of that high level loot was good for nothing more than fillers to RE good components with and only about 0.1% of it was actually usable straight out of the box. I was still grinding up shipwright at the time, so I was stockpiling all the high level stuff I could so that I could RE some of it later when I had the skill.
Over the past week I have noticed a significant decline in both the quantity and the quality of loot drops. Even though the only thing I hunt are tier 5 ships, they now drop 95% level 1-7 components which are pure crap 99% of the time. It also takes me about 3 times the amount of time to get the same amount of loot I used to get. Over the past week I have looted a total of 2 level 10 components and both are pretty crappy and good for nothing more than filler for RE'ing components that are actually worth doing something with.
They have already nerfed loot drops in space whether they have told us so or not. I think the problem was not that the loot drops were too good, but that not enough shipwrights saw that RE'ing components could be a viable business. Too many of them started doing it for free just so they could get the Firespray and make a few quick million credits. I don't know for sure if they have already nerfed loot drops or not, this may just be some really back luck on my part. However the way I am going right now, it would take me about 2 months to gather up enough level 10 components to be able to RE a good level 10 final product with good stats in the important categories.
If space loot is going to or has already been nerfed then RE'ing will be dead. It will take so long to collect enough parts to RE something good that they will become the holy grail of ship parts and people will be charging 200k for one level 10 blaster and 2 million for a RE'd component.
I wish more shipwrights would see that RE'ing can be a viable business on it's own or at a minimum a nice addition to your normal shipwright crafting. Even though I have not mastered shipwright yet and can't make money crafting, because as everyone knows the quality of your product is inferior until you have all the experimentation points you can get, I was still able to make some good money selling RE components of level 1-6 or charging people who brought me parts to RE for them.
Let the flaming begin!
You have to realize the devs put an entire system in place to help bootstrap the newbie pilot without having to engage the ground game. This system accommodates the individual that went out and bought JTL for the space game. The system consists of the following elements:
- Starter Ship - you didn't have to do anything except sign-up with one of three pilot factions and they give you a ship. This enabled the player to begin the experience of being a pilot without a single red credit to their name. Later, the devs felt that shipwrights were in general asking too much for the upgradeable, hyperspace-capable version of the same ship, so now they give pilots a upgradeable, hyperspace-capable starter ship, complete with a set of components. These components aren't the best in the galaxy; however, I will point out that players without a lot of credits will accept mediocrity over spending credits that possibly don't have.
- Ship Component Loot - to help fledging pilots climb up their respective skill trees, pilots received ship components as loot. This relieved the pilot of the burden of having to spend credits on components. I will reiterate that a player will accept mediocrity over spending credits and use whatever loot they may find. Some more entreprenurial pilots even sold these components to shipwrights that saw a business in selling these components. Later, when the devs saw that shipwrights had little interest in buying components from shipwrights, they allowed pilots to sell these components to the chassis dealer. Thus, the pilots not only have components for their ships, they also have a respectable source of income that enables them to buy those things that they can't loot, like chassis, countermeasures, missiles, repair kits and fees, and droids.
- Reverse Engineering - this feature supposedly was to enable a shipwright to make a business out of buying loot (and thereby giving the pilot a source of income). Furthermore, to increase the incentive, the devs threwFirespray disk fragments into the mix.
So, there's the system the devs set up that would allow a newbie pilot to come into the game and be a pilot without ever having to become too involved in the ground game.
Frankly, the system is broken for one simple reason.
Since I started playing SWG, sixteen months ago, I heard the devs repeatedly tell us players that they had to be careful with what they gave us for loot. Loot could not hurt the player economy. Loot could not hurt player that were crafters. Well, JTL came out and we experienced an entire system that ran smack in the face of this basic philosophy.
It might be a cynical perspective, but it has been my opinion that devs created the reverse engineering as a distraction. They must have figured if we had this really cool way to "take looted components apart and make something better out of them", that we wouldn't see how looted components actually hurt us more than they helped us. Come on, we're supposed to make a business out of buying ten RE level 10 reactors, and all we have to sell is a single level 10 reactor? How do you tell pilots that will give them 10,000 credits for these reactors and then turn around sell the end result for more than the 100,000 credits you had to shell out? It doesn't add up, and the devs knew this, and hence the Firespray disk fragments.
Again, my entire view may be cynical, but the way I look at it, SOE had little choice but to push this system out to live. They were losing subscribers for a variety of reasons. Some were none too happy about the number of Jedi camping anything worthwhile in the game. Some were upset that the Jedi revamp took priority over fixing combat and the GCW. Some were even upset that JTL took priority over fixing combat and the GCW. They needed new subscribers, and fast, and they figured the best way to do it would be to invent systems that decoupled the space game as much as possible from the ground game.
However, the whole thing has backfired on SOE for one simple reason. To become a shipwright, you pretty much had to be established in the game. A player needed vast resources to become a shipwright and start a successful business as a shipwright. Established players understand the system, the economy, and the nuances of the game. Those players that decided to take up shipwright soon had a list of problems, and looted ship components topped the list of most shipwrights I know.
In my opinion, the devs need to look seriously at this system they've crafted. If they want to continue to make it easy for the newbie pilot, I don't have a problem with that, but not at the cost of the player economy. Either they have to make RE'ing worth it, or they need to remove looted ship components and RE'ing entirely from the game.
What would make RE'ing worth it? Simple, give us shipwrights the option of cranking out a component or a limited use schematic from our component analysis tool.
SmallpoxA wrote:
Rowgue wrote:
I usually stay out of these sorts of topics on the forums, as they are usually nothing more than childish pissing contests to see who can flame the other side more. Indeed this is my first post ever to the SWG forums, but I just couldn't take it anymore.
I have read endless posts from shipwrights calling for an end to uber loot drops.
I will preface this by saying that I am a shipwright as well as a master pilot. I had no intention of becoming a shipwright when JTL came out. I was a master pilot for about three weeks, and was desperately trying to outfit my new master level ship with the best stuff I could get my hands on and also fit into my ship. I was looting some nice components but most of them were too huge to fit on my ship or had one good stat and the others sucked. After asking around for days and days and browsing every shipwright vendor I could find on every planet it seemed that not many shipwrights were interested in RE'ing stuff. They just farm level 1 components and RE them in hopes of getting Firespray disks so they can make millions selling them. So I decided to drop master doctor and take up being a shipwright specializing in the RE'ing of components for me and the people of my town.
This started off pretty well. At that time I was able to go to kessel or deep space and kill tons of tier 5 ships. In about 3 hours time I would have a full load of loot about half of which was level 8-10. Now mind you about 90% of that high level loot was good for nothing more than fillers to RE good components with and only about 0.1% of it was actually usable straight out of the box. I was still grinding up shipwright at the time, so I was stockpiling all the high level stuff I could so that I could RE some of it later when I had the skill.
Over the past week I have noticed a significant decline in both the quantity and the quality of loot drops. Even though the only thing I hunt are tier 5 ships, they now drop 95% level 1-7 components which are pure crap 99% of the time. It also takes me about 3 times the amount of time to get the same amount of loot I used to get. Over the past week I have looted a total of 2 level 10 components and both are pretty crappy and good for nothing more than filler for RE'ing components that are actually worth doing something with.
They have already nerfed loot drops in space whether they have told us so or not. I think the problem was not that the loot drops were too good, but that not enough shipwrights saw that RE'ing components could be a viable business. Too many of them started doing it for free just so they could get the Firespray and make a few quick million credits. I don't know for sure if they have already nerfed loot drops or not, this may just be some really back luck on my part. However the way I am going right now, it would take me about 2 months to gather up enough level 10 components to be able to RE a good level 10 final product with good stats in the important categories.
If space loot is going to or has already been nerfed then RE'ing will be dead. It will take so long to collect enough parts to RE something good that they will become the holy grail of ship parts and people will be charging 200k for one level 10 blaster and 2 million for a RE'd component.
I wish more shipwrights would see that RE'ing can be a viable business on it's own or at a minimum a nice addition to your normal shipwright crafting. Even though I have not mastered shipwright yet and can't make money crafting, because as everyone knows the quality of your product is inferior until you have all the experimentation points you can get, I was still able to make some good money selling RE components of level 1-6 or charging people who brought me parts to RE for them.
Let the flaming begin!
You have to realize the devs put an entire system in place to help bootstrap the newbie pilot without having to engage the ground game. This system accommodates the individual that went out and bought JTL for the space game. The system consists of the following elements:
- Starter Ship - you didn't have to do anything except sign-up with one of three pilot factions and they give you a ship. This enabled the player to begin the experience of being a pilot without a single red credit to their name. Later, the devs felt that shipwrights were in general asking too much for the upgradeable, hyperspace-capable version of the same ship, so now they give pilots a upgradeable, hyperspace-capable starter ship, complete with a set of components. These components aren't the best in the galaxy; however, I will point out that players without a lot of credits will accept mediocrity over spending credits that possibly don't have.
- Ship Component Loot - to help fledging pilots climb up their respective skill trees, pilots received ship components as loot. This relieved the pilot of the burden of having to spend credits on components. I will reiterate that a player will accept mediocrity over spending credits and use whatever loot they may find. Some more entreprenurial pilots even sold these components to shipwrights that saw a business in selling these components. Later, when the devs saw that shipwrights had little interest in buying components from shipwrights, they allowed pilots to sell these components to the chassis dealer. Thus, the pilots not only have components for their ships, they also have a respectable source of income that enables them to buy those things that they can't loot, like chassis, countermeasures, missiles, repair kits and fees, and droids.
- Reverse Engineering - this feature supposedly was to enable a shipwright to make a business out of buying loot (and thereby giving the pilot a source of income). Furthermore, to increase the incentive, the devs threwFirespray disk fragments into the mix.
So, there's the system the devs set up that would allow a newbie pilot to come into the game and be a pilot without ever having to become too involved in the ground game.
Frankly, the system is broken for one simple reason.
Since I started playing SWG, sixteen months ago, I heard the devs repeatedly tell us players that they had to be careful with what they gave us for loot. Loot could not hurt the player economy. Loot could not hurt player that were crafters. Well, JTL came out and we experienced an entire system that ran smack in the face of this basic philosophy.
It might be a cynical perspective, but it has been my opinion that devs created the reverse engineering as a distraction. They must have figured if we had this really cool way to "take looted components apart and make something better out of them", that we wouldn't see how looted components actually hurt us more than they helped us. Come on, we're supposed to make a business out of buying ten RE level 10 reactors, and all we have to sell is a single level 10 reactor? How do you tell pilots that will give them 10,000 credits for these reactors and then turn around sell the end result for more than the 100,000 credits you had to shell out? It doesn't add up, and the devs knew this, and hence the Firespray disk fragments.
Again, my entire view may be cynical, but the way I look at it, SOE had little choice but to push this system out to live. They were losing subscribers for a variety of reasons. Some were none too happy about the number of Jedi camping anything worthwhile in the game. Some were upset that the Jedi revamp took priority over fixing combat and the GCW. Some were even upset that JTL took priority over fixing combat and the GCW. They needed new subscribers, and fast, and they figured the best way to do it would be to invent systems that decoupled the space game as much as possible from the ground game.
However, the whole thing has backfired on SOE for one simple reason. To become a shipwright, you pretty much had to be established in the game. A player needed vast resources to become a shipwright and start a successful business as a shipwright. Established players understand the system, the economy, and the nuances of the game. Those players that decided to take up shipwright soon had a list of problems, and looted ship components topped the list of most shipwrights I know.
In my opinion, the devs need to look seriously at this system they've crafted. If they want to continue to make it easy for the newbie pilot, I don't have a problem with that, but not at the cost of the player economy. Either they have to make RE'ing worth it, or they need to remove looted ship components and RE'ing entirely from the game.
What would make RE'ing worth it? Simple, give us shipwrights the option of cranking out a component or a limited use schematic from our component analysis tool.
Arryth wrote:
1st_Viduus wrote:
non-master ship...?
Tier 4 ship at 300k is cost if you paid 5cpu for your resources average, (some at 3, some at 5, some at 10, for example) to come up with the 70% experimentation on mass allowance everyone clamors for, plus 4 or 5 uses of damn expensive Port to guarantee no crit fail.
Selling it at 400k is hardly what I'd call gouging.
For a weapon though... yeah, I'd have to agree with you there. A decent guide to pricing components (full-sized) is Cert Level Squared. But crafted guns are pretty horrid IMO compared to almost any gun I've RE'd, so I rarely bother making them.
My point is.. you guys should be bugging the deves to lower resourse requirements not nerf our loot, and thereby bringing the wrath of the pilot community down on you. All the asking for nerfs here is going to do is anger your customers. Were already still very angry about the last engine nerf. Frankly.. for ship parts and components.. I do not consider any more then 6cpu to be reasonable for ships and parts, adding to the cost the port if you use it. Thats still a decent profit, unless your buying overpriced resourses...
We SW have and do still. Why do you still think we got the loot nerfed? It was going to be nerfed if we complained or not because the devs have said before that they don't want loot to be every time you kill. Look at the ground game. It barely drops common loot let alone anything worth your time or effort.
SW NEVER ASKED FOR LOOT TO BE NERFED. I remember beta testers saying that they got so much loot that they were throwing most of it away before they completed there missions. I know i had way to much loot then. It had to be brought down, not for SW or SW complaints, but sheer game mechanics. The database is only so big and can only handle players having so much. it was nerfed for other reasons than you keep claiming.
If you're paying 400k for a Tier 3 ship (the X-Wing) then that's your fault, not the SW's. I have never seen a Tier 3 ship go for that much (I sell mine for 300k).
If you think SWs are asking for loot nerfs you're not reading closely enough. Very, VERY few SWs want loot nerfed. We want the stats on crafted loot RAISED. And if that is not possible we want loot to be unuseable until RE'd or to have a limited run schematic come out of our RE tool instead of a prototype.
Arryth wrote:
No, but 400k for a non master ship or for a single crafted ship weapon is too much money as long as any form of decay is in the picture.
Arryth wrote:
1st_Viduus wrote:
non-master ship...?
Tier 4 ship at 300k is cost if you paid 5cpu for your resources average, (some at 3, some at 5, some at 10, for example) to come up with the 70% experimentation on mass allowance everyone clamors for, plus 4 or 5 uses of damn expensive Port to guarantee no crit fail.
Selling it at 400k is hardly what I'd call gouging.
For a weapon though... yeah, I'd have to agree with you there. A decent guide to pricing components (full-sized) is Cert Level Squared. But crafted guns are pretty horrid IMO compared to almost any gun I've RE'd, so I rarely bother making them.
My point is.. you guys should be bugging the deves to lower resourse requirements not nerf our loot, and thereby bringing the wrath of the pilot community down on you. All the asking for nerfs here is going to do is anger your customers. Were already still very angry about the last engine nerf. Frankly.. for ship parts and components.. I do not consider any more then 6cpu to be reasonable for ships and parts, adding to the cost the port if you use it. Thats still a decent profit, unless your buying overpriced resourses...
Most of us are NOT asking for nerf loots. I'm a pilot first, MSW 2nd.
Most of us are asking for Crafted to be comperable/competitive with loot drops.
The fact that the devs are choosing 'the lazy way out' and nerfing the loot is their 2nd infraction here; the first was making shipwright comps so poor in comparison to start with.
Stop blaming the victims and place the blame where it is due.
the reason that RE'ing can't be a viable stand-alone business is because SW are willing to do it for free in order to have a chance at getting the kuat fragment. a good analogy would be smuggler slicing...
a novice smuggler is willing to slice for free, or even pay to have locked containers to slice. however, a master smuggler would refuse to slice anything for free since there is no more xp incentive.
so, the way to change SW's willingness to RE for free is to change the appeal of getting Kuat fragments... this is done by making firesprays ridiculously easy to get or by making firesprays really bad compared to other master ships.... i'n bit sure either choice is a good solution.
Arryth wrote:
Chiwawa wrote:
Rowgue wrote:Pilots are hoarding all the good loot it takes me too long to assemble enough parts.I'm sorry but this argument does not fly, pilot takes no skill points and anyone can take pilot along with shipwright. If you want the parts go get them yourself. Before all of the loot nerfs it still took some time to gather up the needed loot to RE some good stuff, but it was actually feasible to make a business out of doing this. I know I was making good money doing it.And before the outcry of "I don't have time to fly for hours to collect the loot, I have to manage my crafting business" is thrown around. Well I am also a shipwright and I find the time investment in the crafting side to be bery low in my opinion. I check swgcraft before I log on, if there are any good resources out there I go throw some harvesters down on them. I walk away and let my harvesters do the work for me. About once every week I make schematics for all of the powerups to put in my finished products and do factory runs on them. Whenever my vendors are low on inventory I go home and craft up some replacement parts to throw on the vendor. All of this makes up maybe 25% of my gaming time, and I only play for about 1-2 hours a night. That leaves me with 75% of my time to either do custom orders for people, go try to loot some good stuff in space for RE'ing, or whatever else I want to do.If you really want to see some crafting with a timesink then try being a master doctor like I was before. Anybody that knows anything sells avian meat of any decent quality for at least 10-20 cpu. I was not willing to pay those outrageous prices, but instead of complaining about it I leveled up some combat and collected those things myself. And without the benefit of a second account I was limited in both my ability to fight and my ability to harvest said resources because most of my skill points were tied up in Doc and Medic and of course I had to have some artisan to be able to survey for the other resources I needed. As a shipwright I don't have to worry about insanely hard to get creature resources and therefore I spend much less time dedicated to doing the leg work to get to the point where I have enough resources to do anything with. Sure there are some specific resource types you need to harvest for the advanced stuff, but meds required those as well as the creature resources.Honestly I have tried architect, doctor, weaponsmith, and now shipwright. I agree that the resource requirements are a little high, but this is by far the least painful crafting profession I have experienced thus far. And when you sell stuff based on a cpu basis, why in the world would you complain about how many resources it takes. If I make a ship that needs 70k resources for say 5cpu which is a lot less than most shipwrights would charge then I make 350k on the sale. Thats 280k profit, of course you have to figure in maint on harvesters and factories and vendors, but you are still making a decent profit on this ship.And the "I have to buy my resources" argument does not fly with me either. I have five open lots that I use for harvesters, and if I find a good spot I can easily pull 100k of that resource every day they are running. The ships are really the only thing that require massive amounts of resources and lets be honest ships are not going to be flying off the shelves so fast that you need millions of resources every week to keep up with demand. You choose to buy your resources instead of harvest them yourself, for reasons of time, laziness, lack of knowledge about how to do it properly, or any other reason. If you have to buy the resources for 10cpu, you can't expect to pass that increased cost on to your customers without them getting rather irritated with you.It's your choice to make that resource dealer a rich man by buying 100k units of steel at 10cpu. I can harvest that same 100k units for less than 0.5 cpu when you figure in the maint and power for the harvesters. That is the main thing that inflates the economy in this game. People pay 15cpu for uber resources then pass that cost along to the customer in the finished product. But as long as there are crafters around that are willing to do that work themselves as opposed to paying someone else to cut that part of the process out then you will always be hearing complaints about how you are overcharging for your goods. I chose not to pay those prices when I was a doctor, and thus was able to make my meds much cheaper than otherwise possible with purchasing resources. Granted I could not produce the mass quantities that some docs could because it did take time to gather all this stuff. But do you really need to gather enough resources to craft 20 of each ship chasis to stock your vendor with. I find that if I keep three of each chasis on my vendor then I almost always have at least one left when I am ready to restock. If ships are flying off your shelves so fast you can't keep up, then the additional cost of having to buy your resources will be negated by the sheer volume of your sales.I think that most of the complaining about the amount of resources needed to run a shipwright business come from people that have just achieved master and want to instantly go out and buy enough resources to craft the stuff to fully stock a vendor overnight. Getting a business up and running requires some prep work, once you have it up and running the workload decreases exponentially.
I disagree, I cannot possibly harvest what I need for crafting myself, and I have 15 lots available. I also do not sell chassis, so go figure.
If you can't handle shipwright with 15 lots, your doing something wrong.. either selling too much or doing it all in an inefficient manner.. in either case.. its not my problem. Leave the loot alone. The only improvement I would consede to the shipwright are better engines (current are still to slow), and lower resourse requirements.
Dont make me laugh, I am one of the most successful MSW on our server, i've seen your posts about costings on your server and im sorry you have to deal with that, but quit bringing your servers issues to all of us.
I can handle this profession as anyone that knows me will reaffirm, fact is 15 lots do not produce enough to keep up with my production levels.
Just as a side point, with all your moaning about costings, and wanting free stuff from to fall from the sky how much do/did you charge for a buff?
Dont make me laugh, I am one of the most successful MSW on our server, i've seen your posts about costings on your server and im sorry you have to deal with that, but quit bringing your servers issues to all of us.
I can handle this profession as anyone that knows me will reaffirm, fact is 15 lots do not produce enough to keep up with my production levels.
Just as a side point, with all your moaning about costings, and wanting free stuff from to fall from the sky how much do/did you charge for a buff?
Ok first of all I don't have any problem with any shipwright pricing their goods at whatever level they feel is appropriate. It was other shipwrights who hijacked the thread that brought this issue up, I was merely responding to them.
You say 15 lots can not keep up with your production levels. You are illustrating the point I made in one of my responses. I allow for the fact that you may not be able to harvest enough resources to keep up the kind of production you want. That is however your choice. Your the one that needs to have a huge business for whateverreason thatmay be. You can go buy your stuff if you want to be able to keep that up, and you can charge more for your products. I'm not judging here I'm just saying that not everyone needs to have a massive amount of products on 14 vendors at all times, and there is no promise either implicit or explicit that you will be able to do so. So to say that it is not plausible because 15 lots does not support the scale of business you feel you need to run proves absolutely nothing.
I will ignore the personal attack in your final comment and just respond to your question. I reiterate I never mentioned "costings" until shipwrights started bitching about how they have to charge so much because they have to buy tons of resources. I also never asked for free stuff to fall from the sky. If you bother to read the original post I was talking about how I used to make good money asa shipwright selling RE'd components, but now it takes me weeks to loot enough parts to put together a finished RE component. As for buffs I never really did buffs for money, as the starports were always flooded with 10 other docs spamming their stats and prices. As I do not believe in spamming for any reason, I quickly determined this was not my bag. I just used my doc skills to support myself and my friends when we went out hunting. I made a few bucks doing it as sometimes people would send me tells saying "I'll pay you 10k if you'll buff me" even though I was not looking to do so at the time. I made very little money as a doctor, I used my skills almost primarily to support me and my friends in battle, and I made my money from running missions.