Tailor Archive
Thread: Clothing decay
Why wear any clothes to go out and fight? Run around out there in your undies. Clothing doesn't provide any extra protection. It is only a visual thing. Maybe a thing of status that in the current frame of "Dev" thinking that may never need to be replaced ever again. There are professions that don't go out and kill stuff and quite a majority that do, wear armor of some sort. Clothing is mainly for the non-fighting class. Entertainers, and others.
Clothing decay is needed. It was promissed to us since the beginning of the game. You say that you just removed something from the schematics that was never used. Well, I must be in the minority because I used it on every garment I produced and bragged about the durability of my clothes. I was prepared for what you had promissed us. I used experiment even for factory stuff like Synthetic cloth. Now with it gone, anyone can just crank out junk and use ore and hides that have bad "Decay Resistance" because it really doesn't matter anymore.
I used to comb the galaxy looking for the very best ore and hides for my clothes and I took pride in what I produced. This is what brought alot of customers to my store. Because they knew that eventually clothing decay would be there and they didn't want to put attachments into sockets on clothing that would decay quickly because of shabby workmanship and poor quality.
But now there is nothing for us. This is very depressing. There are many upstart tailors in Theed on my server. And now I have no edge and it is only time before my business plummets to nothing. Thanks alot for doing such a wonderful job in ruining my Star Wars Experience. I roleplay my tailor and his wish was to be even better than his father who was a tailor before him. But there is no way now that he can be any better than anyone else.
There is a guy on my server that found an exploit and wanted me to use it with him. He is Master now. This entailed us getting experience from each other and it was back when factories gave 100% experience. I refused. One of the reasons was that he never experimented on anything and I didn't want to make clothes from his components that were not quality. He laughed at me then saying 1000/1000 is as good as it gets and it will never change. Well, he is a cheater and I guess he is also the winner, not me because I was wrong.
When I see my business plummet and the gaming experience is ruined for me, I guess I will just have to move on and find a game that is fun and competitive because this just kills any competitive spirit that I had for Star Wars Galaxies.
Holo -
The problem is that the death solution, as pointed out here, won't do anything for archs or for tailors.
Nor will it do any good for that surgical droid that was bought by the medic who never leaves town - all crafting droids and medical droids are now effectively immortal. Who cares if they only have 1 HAM? They are just as usefull, and never, ever die.
Usage based decay is the solution, I think - combined with the ability to fix items.
Worn clothes should deteriorate. Stored should also, but much, much slower. And a tailor should be able to fix them.
Same applies to buildings. There should be a decay rate outside of maintainance, and it should take an architect to fix them.
And the same should apply to droids. When they are out of the data pad, they should very slowly decay. And DE's should be able to fix them.
The decay problem is not limited to tailors, and it is not going to be fixed with the incap / death solution.
Holocron wrote:
Raea wrote:
Just because it hasn't worked since beta doesn't mean it should be removed rather than fixed!
You misunderstand me, I think... It's not that it doesn't work. It's that players hated it during beta. You'd log in and find that some of your inventory was just gone. You'd check your bank and find that some of that stuff was gone. You'd visit your house, and find that some of the furniture was gone... you get the idea. It was time-based decay.
We don't have usage-based decay on many things because there's no real "usage" of them. We could theoretically implement something like a time-based decay only when being worn, or something, but that covers only clothing and leaves out all the other types of items that suffer from the same problem (furniture needs decay just as badly as clothes do, for example).
I agree that the death solution isn't a comprehensive one. We may end up having to do specific solutions for every item type in the end.
Can I say BS Raph.. the majority wasn't yelling over the decay.. some were yelling because you were decaying components by the time we were done making them to the time we went to use them which in some cases was matters of Hours.. some were yelling that if they logged off for 3 months and came back they would find everything gone.. Why don't ya shovel that somewhere else.. this is too little too late and your trying to repair PR that shouldn't have been so damaged as it is! Why not enlighten the masses to ALL the truths of Beta.. like how the Beta community told you the game was BROKE and shouldn't have been released as it was.. Stop telling truths so they make YOU look good cause your only gonna fool so many people
Holo when can we expect these additions to the game to be made? A month, more? This is becoming more and more of a problem and we need to be able to have customers coming back. Thanks for the responses.
Drterror
You are saying the following:
1. Clothing decay could be implemented technically; it was active in Beta. (Yes, that's what I remember too.)
2. It was turned off because players all hated it. (Whoops! We just went off the rails on that one: I don't remember an overwhelming hatred of clothing decay. I also don't remember the players clearly differentiating in Beta between hating armor decay and clothing decay, but hey, how about that, armor decays in Live and clothing does not.)
3. We just did a bit of housecleaning and got rid of the durability field in the clothing schematics.
4. We have an idea for a totally new way to get clothing to decay that ties into an idea we have for death penalties that is untested, probably won't be in the game for a long time, and is at the least of debatable wisdom.
5. This means, by the way, that the current suspension of insurance has nothing to do with a bug in corpse retrieval but instead because players "overwhelmingly" (there's that word again) hate having a death penalty.
6. Oh, by the way, the lack of a death penalty is one reason the economy is awash in credits and one reason people are doing things like solo-killing reds, just in case you didn't know that--and the lack of decay on all crafted items is one reason why the economy is heading for a serious structural problem, also in case you didn't know that.
But it's all because of "overwhelming" response from players. Or maybe because the developers have a plan that makes sense. Or maybe because the devs seem to be randomly drifting between fundamental design paradigm revisions more properly found in an early Beta.
Seriously, Holo, these patches are schizophrenic. I read the notes, I think "GREAT!", I'm proud of you for the things you fixed and forgiving about the few things that seem to have breakage in other places like factories, and then you come along with a post like this and up-end my entire understanding of what you're doing and how much of a grasp you have of what's going on with the game and where it needs to go. I assumed that the patch notes on clothing decay were a typographical error because even you had acknowledged some time ago that crafted objects needed to decay, and decay measurably. Now you're saying, "Yeah, well, players hated it in Beta3, so we took it out. But we'll put it back in some day when we implement a totally new death penalty." What, will players hate it less then than now? What's the difference between decay in one mechanism and another? It's decay however you slice it. What would be horrible about having to get a new suit of clothes every month or two of gametime? I'm sorry, but you're just wrong when you say there's an overwhelming consensus that it would be bad to have clothing decay: quite the opposite. Your logic is inconsistent at best.
Holocron,
Just keep in mind there needs to be something for us tailor to use expirmentation on. And something to keep our prefesion from stagnating. Loss of clothing during battle or otherwise woudl be fine. A very slow clothing decay rate would do as well. Heck I don't care of cloths last 3 months of real time as long as they eventually need replacing. I can live with that.Some ideas for you,
1. Allow us to sew more compoenets into our clothing. We can now use some bio components though must of it is bugged. Would be nice if we could create skill enahncers with very rare components and master skill. Also why not allow us to buya rmor segements off an armoror and sew these into clothing panels to provide some "bullet proof" cloth. That way we ahve to buy these different panels from armorers so we can make some protective clothign that does not reduce HAM. Though our clothing should not truly compare to real armor.. meaning resistances should stay in say 20% or below range. This would also give us something else to use experimentation on.
2. Schematics that have to be found to rare items that might provide some benifit to players. Example. Schematic for Butterfly cloak. So the schematic might require that rare looted item from lairs. "live butterflies" that I have seen before. So the tailor ends up with this cool thing he can make but he either has to search for the butterflies or pay the price from a master scout to get them for him.
We argued against time-based decay in Beta because it applied to EVERYTHING -- items in your pack, items in your bank, items in your house. It was a bad idea badly implemented.
I don't recall that anybody had an issue with USAGE-based decay, which is what we expected to be implemented for clothing. We had one stat that we could experiment on, durability. We had clothing repair tools. We were all geared up for a usage-decay system to be introduced. We didn't catch that it was obsolete (like, for instance, the whole factory system obviously is since the removal of the Industrialist).
So we get this crazy curve ball of everything going away, and maybe we'll get a decay system in the future -- but only for people who get incapped a lot. Hell, with bottom feeding as prevailant as it is, that doesn't even cover most fighters.
Thanks for standing up and addressing the mob, Holo, but I don't think anyone's putting down the torches and pitchforks just yet. The alternatives should have been ready to go before the 'obsolete' props that were giving us some hope were taken away.
Holocron wrote:
I agree that the death solution isn't a comprehensive one. We may end up having to do specific solutions for every item type in the end.
Why not just bring back time based decay but just adjust the rate that items decay on a per item basis? Furniture might take a long time to decay, clothing a little less,etc... Then you can keep fiddling with the durations until everyone is happy. Or equally unhappy I guess.
Holocron wrote:
Our current thinking for clothing decay is the death idea I floated in a thread yesterday. Basically, all items in inventory or equipped (including clothing) would suffer some damage when you get incapped, unless they were insured.
First, thanks for posting in here today, instead of making us wait a week or so for a response.
But that combat-based decay idea is absolutely unacceptable. Many of our best customers are entertainers, and while many entertainers may take combat skills and go out and fight, many don't. So their clothing would never decay. And those who do fight for fun will always just drop their best entertainer-wear in their houses when they go out to hunt. In fact, many folks who are only combat characters will probably do this. Everyone will just stop carrying anything that they're not wearing, and only wear their fancy, expensive items while hanging out in town.
I'm also disturbed that insured items will be exempt from damage. So anyone that really wants to protect their clothes can just insure them. This is great from a money-sink perspective, but it's bad for us tailors. The wealthiest combat characters, the ones that can most easily afford the spare credits to replace damaged outfits, will just be flushing that money on insurance instead of giving us any business.
Decay is our number one issue, as reported by our correspondant. Our correspondant response promised that decay would be added soon. So I hope you can understand how betrayed this makes a lot of us feel. If this combat-based decay is your idea of fixing our problem, thanks but no thanks.
Tailoringis hard enough already. Advancement is painfullyslow for those of us who don't want to injure our wrists by grinding. Our experimentation or materials used have never made any real in-game difference, so those of us who seek out high-quality material and experiment get no real in-game benefit over the folks who just use any type of materials. And now we can't experiment at all. Several of our schematics have had broken colors for weeks, and we've bug reported and posted on the boards with no response. Our high level clothes still drop as loot (though not as much nowsince hardly nothing drops). There's at least one loot drop clothing item that we can't make at all. These are just a few examples of our issues, there are more being posted about every single day. And we never seem to hear back about any of them. The one time tailoring issues got any kind of dev response was our correspondant response post.
I've wanted to be a tailor since I discovered the profession in beta. But it's just getting discouraging. We knew this whole time that decay wasn't in. But we knew that it was essential to have use-based decay in order to keep our profession viable. We've all worked so hard and tried to be patient, fully believing that some kind of real use-based decay would be implemented. After all, it's what we were lead to believe.
Please explain why ALL (or even most) items need to decay?
I understand that crafting classes need to have a long-haul demand for their products and/or services.
What I don't understand is why you seem to be focusing exclusively on making everything they make have a finite lifetime -- there are alternatives you should consider as well.
I don't think you can come up with a decay scenario for furniture that both makes sense and is "acceptable" to the player base. You described very well why simple time-based decay just won't cut it, for example, even though that's arguably the most realistic for furniture items.
The ideal solution, of course, would be for items to *visibly* deteriorate (heh, imagine a cracked glass table, or clothes that are little more than dirty rags), but letting them be repairable as well as replaceable. I can see why that solution is probably unreachable for either time or technical reasons (or both), however.
As I said earlier, consider aiming for long term *services and support*, rather than or in addition to recurring sales.
the death solution is a good one, ... for clothes for example
but not for furniture, furniture stants in your house and will therefore not decay
just a thought
Everything should decay. Period.
Clothing that's stored (not worn/used)should decay the slowest.
Clothing that's worncasually (tooling around, entertaining, crafting, etc)should incur intermediate decay.
Clothing that's worn in combat should decay the quickest.