Weaponsmith Archive

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ana-mo-cara wrote:

Dragon this is part of the problem we discussed. I would say ninety percent of weaponsmiths are smugglers. Its damn near required that we slice our own wares. Its what customers demand in chooseing slices, and never haveing to deal with a smuggler face to face. So I would say no it will not work. Most weaponsmiths either slice for themselves on the spot before putting it on the vendor, or they call a smuggler buddy to come to their house and slice 100 or 200 items before they go on the vendor. 1 container can hardly fill the need.

Second since the sliceing is takeing place where the items are made no smuggler is even remotely required unless a stormy is standing between you and a factory there is no issue. If that werent enough most weaponsmiths have master smuggler and can smuggle quite well on their own.

Smugglers are getting raped of their content, and weaponsmiths are getting raped of their content by stealing smuggler content.

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Gotta disagree with ya. By bieng a MWS/M smugg I get to craft weapons (enjoy ws content) and slice stuff/hopefully smuggle stuff after smugg revamp (enjoy smugg content). It sounds to me like I get the best of two worlds here and I can have a great time doing it. No one is getting raped of content they are getting beat by the competion. To me it sounds like your argument would be there can only be one master smuggler per server, otherwise someone is bieng raped of content. Furthermore I don't think anyone should complain about having to be a smuggler to compete in the WS buisness. Your making that choice on your own, if you don't like the template don't choose it and accept you will have to find other ways to compete with people who enjoy a ws/smugg template. Sorry if that sounded like a flame it wasn't intended to be.

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DragonSnack wrote:

If illegal items are "banned" from vendors and the bazaar how are you gonna sel your stuff.

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Sell it unsliced, buyer gets it sliced. As was pointed out in the original post this would mean that craft quality would take precedence over the luck of the slice when determining prices.

I wouldn't worry too much anyway, this was merely one of the ideas we talked about. Personally I think the suggestion has its merits, but I can't see it ever being implemented.

Message Edited by Muzz on 02-14-2005 06:37 PM

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ana-mo-cara wrote:

1. Sliced weapons on the vendor. After a protracted discussion we came to the conclusion that they should only be tradeable not vendorable or sold on the bizarre. This promotes weaponsmiths skill over the quality of a slice, and it promotes a greater use to just plain smugglers in the game. Wes seemed to think this would be generally good for the smuggler community. This would also eliminate the bake and waste philosiphy. Where smiths make and then slice destoying poorly sliced weapons. This is time consumeing and pointless. It also undercuts back alley smugglers who cannot compete, because they are still subject to randomness in sliceing. While by tossing out weaponsmith/smugglers get an unfair advantage because the customer will always get the slice he or she wants. This includes the choice of damage or speed. Plus the choice of the number.

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I fail to see how this stops "Bake and Waste" under your proposal I can still run 1k VK's and slice em all and delete the bad slices, only difference is the fact that I can't use my vendor to sell them, however, I can still take an empty house and use it as a "make an offer" display house. You makeit only slightly more difficult at best. This would only make sliced weapons much more expensive.

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ana-mo-cara wrote:

2. Mineing rights we generally accepted that mineing certifications would be a good thing. If they were placed in artisan. Its too easy for someone to just place a harvester without even delegateing any points to the act. If you want to harvest meat you need to have scout. To harvest minerals or resources you should have to dedicate some points. To prevent resources from being field. This prevents players from simply buying into a profession. Being a decent crafter should require some work. Not just a ton of credits.

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Agree, but I feel something along the following lines is correct...

--Personal, no cert., any player can get a small amount of the resources they need. Personal units are simple day to day machines any player can understand.
--Medium, novice artisan, still fairly simple, but you need some ‘technical training’ to understand them.
--Heavy, survey 4 or master artisan, complicated industrial machinery that requires specialist training.

Allthough none of you regular posters in here might know me, I'm on my way to MWS, so I will probably post on this board more often in the future.
Well, all I have to say to the above-mentioned ideas is: AWESOME.
Sliced weapons are considered illegal, both with the Empire and, soon to come, most probably also with the Alliance. Selling them on the bazaarn should in no way be allowed. Give smugglers a chance to truly play their profession like it should: exercised in some shady corner or back-room f a cantina. People who are WS/Smuggler might not agree with this, but they still could craft and sell good weapons and advertise them with a little notice like "If you want your weapon to get that little special treatment, just contact me privatly" or something along those lines...

I couldn't agree more on the harvester certs, especially the way the poster above me had in mind, with private ones being open to everybody, heavies requiring Surv IV and medium ones somewhere in between.

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ana-mo-cara wrote:

The prechat is over and we had a good time discussing weaponsmith some of what came out of this. Plus a big thankyou to the smuggler correspondent for comeing in thanks wes.

I am going to break it down into parts on the subjects we touched on. For the communities viewing. We are hopeing to have another chat discussion. For the sake of consistency the same time next week will be the target time. 6PM est. Though this may be changed up to get more people involved.

1. Sliced weapons on the vendor. After a protracted discussion we came to the conclusion that they should only be tradeable not vendorable or sold on the bizarre. Lol, how presumptuous for 8 self-appointed experts to think they should decide what's best for everyone else. In case you didn't know it, smuggling is about transporting and making available prohibited items. Don't propose a solution that runs counter the to core notion of what a smuggler is as it makes you look um....not very smart. If you really care about smuggler (I don't think the ws among you do, keep reading to find out why).

Instead, let's try to harness that collective brainpower to come up with some good ideas that actually benefit the smugglers rather than the weaponsmiths. What if the empire did periodic probes of vendors and fined merchants for violating laws against possession of sliced weapons? What if the WS could pay smugglers protection money to jam imperial probe droids so they couldn't scan your vendors or if the jam was unsuccessful the smugglers could "bribe" imperial officials to overlook what as almost assuredly a relatively minor infraction. After all, few thousand sliced weapons are not going to bring down the empire are they? What if somone could report you to the empire for selling sliced weapons on your vendors? What if your smuggler could take your name off the terms before the bh's come to do the hit? What if the smuggler could use his connections to find out who reported you to begin with and could then put a contract out on them on your behalf?

This promotes weaponsmiths skill over the quality of a slice, While at the same time making it harder for emerging weaponsmiths to compete. Sure, their 35 slice might only be equivalent to your 33 but at least they can compete with some of your weapons. Stop being so selfish.

and it promotes a greater use to just plain smugglers in the game. "Just plain smugglers?" There is no such thing unless you are talking about players so dedicated to the profession they refuse to tarnish their template with non-smuggler related skills. Anyone who has smuggler skills is a smuggler. There are no "just plain" or "kinda sorta" smugglers. A smuggler is a smuggler.

Wes seemed to think this would be generally good for the smuggler community. Why should he care? All sliced weapons are sliced by smugglers. Why would he show favoritism for one smuggler over another?

This would also eliminate the bake and waste philosiphy. If you don't want to do it, then simply don't, but don't presume that just because you've convinced yourself of your own omniscience that other players want you deciding how they should play the game. Hahaha, don't you realize that if I make 100 weapons and only keep 80 of them that I'm paying for 20 slices I'll never use, therefore increasing the amount of slicing for smugglers.

Where smiths make and then slice destoying poorly sliced weapons. This is time consumeing and pointless. I monitor, survey, and mine the resources. I make the components and the weapons. You have no business telling me whether I should or shouldn't make a thousand and destroy 900. It's my resources, my time and my decision whether there is a point to how I choose to spend my time and resources.

It also undercuts back alley smugglers who cannot compete, because they are still subject to randomness in sliceing. You seem to be unfamiliar with the mechanics of smuggling. All slicing is done by smugglers. All slicing is random.

While by tossing out weaponsmith/smugglers get an unfair advantage because the customer will always get the slice he or she wants. This includes the choice of damage or speed. Plus the choice of the number. This may be the silliest pair of sentences in the bunch, and that's saying a lot. I'll reiterate; Weaponsmiths make weapons and smugglers slice weapons, among other things. Ifa player is crafting weapons, they are wearing their WS hat, if they are slicing then they are playing the role of a smuggler. How dare you tell someone that they can't create the template of their choosing. In case you hadn't noticed, the slice that all players want is a 35% slice and there is less than 1:100 chance of that. You have grossly overstated the advantages of discarding subpar slices while ignoring the cost to the crafter of doing so. Those weapons will be destroyed anyway though you seem to prefer having that cost borne by the player rather than the crafter while I feel the crafter is better able to absorb the cost of a bad slice.

2. Mineing rights we generally accepted that mineing certifications would be a good thing. If they were placed in artisan. Its too easy for someone to just place a harvester without even delegateing any points to the act. If you want to harvest meat you need to have scout. To harvest minerals or resources you should have to dedicate some points. To prevent resources from being field. This prevents players from simply buying into a profession. Being a decent crafter should require some work. Not just a ton of credits. A momentary lapse into sentience amid the fog of cluelessness.

3. Heavy weapons. We decided it would probabally be a good idea if heavy warheads took the place of protons in the rocket launcher schematic. It simplifies this item just a little bit, and will allow the weaponsmith to make more and charge less for them. Hard to convince a smuggler that a 30 use weapon is really worth the price it has to go for. Cutting out five assemblies would do a world of good. Who cares what smugglers think about Commando weapons? I don't make these at all. Too much time and resources for a consumable.

4. We discussed the new global bizarre system. Sorry guys fealings were generally mixed at best some liked some disliked. No cohessive thought came out of this This last statement can be applied broadly to all I've read so far. This is a great idea. Only people like the ones who participated in this discussion group and who want to devs to intervene with protectionist measures rather than open competition will opposed the global bazaar.

In case you are wondering, I should disclose that I have never sliced a weapon before, though I have paid many millions to many slicers to slice several thousand weapons for me. I've destroyed a few here and there but not that many, certainly no more than 10% or so.

As you can tell, I think it's dangerous for groups of self-appointed experts to get together and ponder our collective futures because someone in a position of influence might pay attention to them without realizing that they have no idea what they are talking about.

Let me tell you what this is all about. First, you have some WS's that are too lazy to sell sliced weapons, so they don't want anyone else to. They also don't want their unsliced weapons to have to compete against an emerging crafter willing to do the extra work of selling sliced weapons, so they want that stopped too. But they are at least smart enough to realize that sounds greedy and protectionist, so they try to effect these changes under the guise of helping the poor helpless smuggler, when in reality far less slicing will go on under their protectionist policies.

Let's be clear about one thing; smugglers are not expected to make all their income from slicing just as scouts are not expected to make all their income from masking their own scent. It's an ability they have but one of many, depending on how they've designed their template. I'd imagine you'd be hard-pressed to find a smuggler that says he wants to spend all his game time slicing or looking for slicing customers. I

f there is one thing that Weaponsmiths like me do is provide a service to the smugglers I work with in terms of consolidating the work of slicing. I'll usually have anywhere from 300-800 weapons to slice at a time once or twice a month and in addition to paying 3k a slice I provide all the tools they need.

One thing I will say is that I've almost never been approached by smugglers about them wanting to do work for me. I'm pretty well known on my server so that's a little puzzling. Maybe smugglers need tents like the ID's have where they can hang out and wait for customers to come to them since that seems to be the dominant mindset in the profession.

5. ADK we generally accepted that nothing could be done about that.

6. While wes was in we took the time to ask him a few questions. He didnt seem to think that sliceing heavy weapons would be all that bad if the slice was for added uses. We asked him if he thought that sliceing should be more skill based in the form of tools. He said paraphraseing hear he was more in favor of an experimentation system.

7. Near the end we discussed the weapons repair kits weapon repair bonus, Didnt get far with this.

Anyway the chat went decently well for such short notice around 8 people showed up. Hopefully with the next one we can get somewhere closer to 20 people involved.

The plan now is 6pm eastern time next sunday. This is not firm want to hear from you guys if there is a better time.

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Message Edited by Hurlobacca on 02-14-2005 05:41 PM

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SeaRaptor wrote:

Sounds like a good meeting.

While I like the IRC idea, it's probably best if we stick to the Launchpad Chat simply because it's something that everyone has access to with minimal hassle.

I should be there this Sunday.

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Felton, do you sell sliced weapons? Whether you do or your don't, do you feel that as correspondent you should represent all weaponsmiths regardless of whether they sell sliced or not? It seems to me like the foremost item on their agenda was a pursuit of a ban on selling sliced weapons on vendors. Curiously, at least some of them are WS's who also slice, something I've never cared to do myself because I don't have time and also because I don't think I should have a vertical monopoly on every aspect of selling weapons since I do everything but the slicing. The fact of the matter is that all weapons are sliced by smugglers, and taking sliced weapons off vendors doesn't help smugglers and only penalizes some WS, as each weapon can only be sliced once and by a smuggler and they already own 100% of the smuggling business.

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Giamai wrote:

as an alternative, one of the many arguments went, instead of nerfing everyone else, give artisans valuable bonuses to the surveying tree. a commando can't plant a harvester on the side of a hill but an artisan can. or an artisan gets 13 BER on a heavy but a swordsman lacking some mechanical skill is only able to get 8 BER out of the same harvester.

consider this alternative in your discussions...i think it helps artisans without taking too much away from others

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• Having a vendor should draw the attention of security types who willhunt you more and more with every sale


• Being caught with spices (in amounts over 1 crate) should result in confiscation ofsaid spices


• The wear and tear on weapons that are modified should be increased