Weaponsmith Archive
Thread: Retirement is where every Master Craftsperson is headed
There's enough master WS now that the tells have dropped to a few a day, and either the idiots are allbothering someone else or the playerbase has figured out how to find and operate vendors by now. Sale volume has dropped massively since the days of 5 masters on a server, but appears to be constant now that the number of MWS has stabilized.
Huge amounts of credits are only used for bidding on auctions of experimentation SEAs and old resources against other equally rich crafters.
Most of the original masters are gone or sold their accounts, and most of the masters from a month or two later are also gone. The first MWS on Lowca were Macross, Ace, me, Kammi, Buffy, Nakasha, Rabbit, and probably a few more I don't remember. Macross seems to have given her account to a guildmate, Rabbit only logs in a few times a week to load factory and stock vendor, Buffy and Nakasha disappeared months ago. Interestingly, the ones wholeft seem to havequit the game entirely instead of just dropping weaponsmith.
When someone leaves, their resources usually get auctioned off or passed to a guildmate or friend so we end up with a shifting set ofpeople using the same set of resources to make the same quality weapons.
WS is a lot easier now that they've fixed the lag, the factory problems, most of the vendor bugs, etc. Everyone has 13-rate heavy harvesters, and there's enough dedicated miners that you can be a weaponsmith without having to mine your own materials. Novices are still useless but they benefit from the development of a grinding macro that's faster than the 100% factory exp was.
Thoax wrote:
From my personal experience, add the insane lag in the Bestine area (you can see very old patch notes to see that this actually needed a fix, because the lag wasn't just "bad" it was unplayabale) to the factory problems, and consider the number of people waiting by your lagged out vendor plus the number of people sending you tells, and you may want to admit...the early masters paid their dues just as much as anybody.
God, you've reminded me how much has been truly improved with this game.
It wasn't the manual factory loading that bugged me the most. Or the tellhell or the piddly 1 BER harvesters. But the lag, christ. Every night, every night was near unplayable. You wanted to craft, you went to RORI or TALUS! There was none of this "crafting" to be had on Naboo or Tatooine! Hell, you were lucky if you could sit down in thirty seconds.
Every night, 7PM-3AM, nothing but terrible, terrible lag. Get on, spend three hours trying to load the bloody vendors up. Get about 800 tells that customers cannot retrieve items because of the lag. Get 800 more tells asking if the resources spawned for LLCs yet. Go manually pay and power each. individual. harvester. one. at. a. time. Every day, fields of PMEs. Empty, pay, empty, pay, empty, pay. None of this /paymaint nonsense! There was no /addpower ability! Then you had to load factories. You would click on a crate and wait five minutes for the damned handler to pop out. Then you would slooooowly drag it into the hopper. And then you do it again. And again. And again. And finally, you have your crate of Scout "No, there isn't any better Pistol right now" Blasters.
And then they tell us that it was because of pets being stuck on zone lines. PETS BEING STUCK ON ZONE LINES, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD! DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE PAIN AND FRUSTRATION I HAVE ENDURED! Then they fix it and the world rejoices and we move on to happier times.
Yeah, I remember having to load individual components into my factories. Ugh. Not fun. I also remember having to re-deed the **edit** things constantly. That sucked. I once lost an entire batch of E-11 rifles because I forgot to empty the output hopper before re-deeding...
Even on Tempest, which is about a month younger than most servers, the bulk of the original crop of MWS have moved along. It took me about a month to reach master, and there were probably 8-10 people in front of me. Of those, perhaps 2 or 3 remain. And you're right, they haven't just changed professions, they simply no longer exist or have switched their assets to another toon.
It's been interesting to watch the evolution of the profession from both the outside (reading the boards before I started playing the game) and the inside... walking the walk. =)
Deathrobe wrote:
I have stated this before in another thread as well its going to be hard to find good quality
crafters in a few months
Willing to bet?
I am a master on Lowca who is retiring shortly. I was not one of the original masters, as noted by Jennai earlier, but I wasn't too far behind. Probably took me about 6 weeks to get there because I didn't know what the hell I was doing (nothing's changed, I guess).
Anyways, for me, the problem is that I have completely lost interest in the resource gathering aspect. It has just became too much of a chore for me. The reason I wanted to do the profession initially was because making weapons sounded interesting, but now that I've made each one a number of times, it has lost its luster. Like Merrett, I tried to keep a moderately low profile to keep things under control. And also like Merett, the thing that used to be the most fun to me was the excitement that a new shift would bring at first. Those first few shifts, there were so many new "best ever" resources that you absolutely had to grab. It was exciting to make that first new gun with it and get a significant improvement. Now it's travel all over the place, try out a little of each, and if you're lucky, there is one item that makes a weapon better.
And wow, do those posts by Jennai, Ace and Merett bring back bad memories. Loading power handlers individually? UGH! That was horrible. Redeeding factories? What a pain. I did the master grind with no factory, no macro, and probably lifelong arthritis as a result. 
To answer the question on how my outlook's changed...
Well, for one thing, when I posted here, I was doing melee weapons only. I guess I became greedier, and started adding in various guns to my inventory.
I don't even bother looking at my bank account anymore...it's like 17 or 18 million or something, and I know I'm probably one of the poorer MWS. I think having more and more Masters around has really allowed me to enjoy the game a lot more. I'm still known as "THE SOURCE" for melee weapons on my server, so I get to answer a lot of tells from Brawlers, but that's cool, cuz that's what I wanted to do anyway. Plus, I don't feel so guilty now about being really mean to customers that are mean to me.
I think overall, the game has gotten much more enjoyable...the players are more educated, there's more stuff to occupy your time with, and now that there are plenty more MWS sharing the market, I don't feel so overwhelmed as an individual.
BTW, FelKel...I started a new character on your server by pure coincidence...it's funny that you should ressurect this post.
If you get a tell from "Zikiri", that's me...I'm playing a totally hot Human chick. (Don't tell anyone...I get lots of free stuff from my "boyfriends".)
Starlin wrote:
Stupid names - the thing is, run the character creator for *Bacca's. That's where a good chunk of 'stupid' names come from (disclaimer - I could care less what your name is, just as long as YOU'RE not stupid)
Star Lin
Actually I think I read somewhere if you pick a wookiee and accept a random generated name, the SYSTEM assigns a *bacca. Being a wookiee selling bowcasters I too thought how sad it was - purchase emails from Studbacca, Treebacca, Jedbecca, Thisbacca, Thatbacca ... but it appears that the random generated name is somewhat to blame.
Of course you could pick your own name ... but hey.
Regards,
Ker'shakk(bacca)
Starlin wrote:
2.100% for factory experience. Fixed (approximately) 2 weeks after harvester bug.
Just a minor point. I didn't benefit from the 100% factory experience so I am not biased toward it, but I think it is highly unfair to call this an exploit in any way or form.
What did you expect them to do? Stop using factories? Stop making weapons that require identical components? Sorry, I can't make you a Laser Rifle because it's giving me too much xp?
I envy that they got the benefit of this quirk but I certainly don't hold it against them.
Well, it took me about 2 months of just not answering e-mails or tells anymore before people finally started to realize that whenI had told themI was retired that I actually meant it. I'll never surrender the skill though. When I got boredI made a new character on a new server...it was wonderful to just play in peace and quiet...and if I was talking to someone I could use the /r again! Woohoo!
Anyway, I've started to miss the crafting again so have come back, but only craft certain things I am considering specializing in just melee..it seems to have had a nice resurgence of players.
BTW, I still never wear my MWS title....that is just begging for tells from hell. LOL, I wear a "Rogue" title and still get asked to slice stuff....lame.
about every 7th to 8th.
It does generate some long, really untypeable names though. I didn't choose one of
those.
BTW, if you play Knights of the Old Republic, you'll know that Bacca was actually a great Wookie warrior, the first to witness an extraterrestial. He built a ceremonial blade out of parts he pulled out of a crash-landed ship and vowed to keep "outsiders" off Kashyyk. Wookies use "bacca" in their names in homage to him.
It's actually not an uncommon thing to do. From my limited knowledge, a lot of Asian surnames originate from the name of some great patriarch.
So, I don't have anything against the "baccas"...they just provide me with a rather easy to type, standard ending to what would otherwise be a very long name.