Weaponsmith Archive
Thread: More crackpot ideas, this time on UXP
490 projectile rifle barrels requires about 24k steel, which can be produced in a day byfive BER-4 small harvesters on an 80% spot, which will probably be available within two days of server launch unless the initial resource set is exceptionally poor. Fifty scout blasters requires six different types of resources (aluminum, gemstone, copper, reactive gas, inert petro, ore), can't be macroed, and making fifty good ones will probably take a lot longer to craftthan 490 rifle barrels because of the high rate of poor assembly and experiment results at low levels. While you were making all those scout blasters, someone else was dropping harvesters on steel and grinding rifle barrels, and they'll be making better weapons and getting more sales because of that.
Something like this would be great. I hated the grind to master. Took me 3 months because I didn't have the time or patience to sit there and constantly click my mouse. I made a few weapons along the way, tested each new skill out, see what I could make etc but the xp I got for the time it took to make a complete gun was not worth it for advancement. If by making the gun and then finding someone to buy it I could have gotten a UXP bonus that would be worth the time to make the gun I would not have grinded at all. I hated it. I enjoyed crafting but grinding barrels for hours in order to advance was stupid.
/bitterness on
But we will never see something like this. Something like this would allow a casual gamer to compete and it would cause power gamers to go even faster through stuff. We have to keep the power gamer happy by giving him things to grind. To bad if it hurts the casual gamer. We don't have to worry about him quitting because it will take him 10x as long to finish a profession.
/bitterness off
Oh wait, dang it. Its stuck on.
Message Edited by Chavabegga on 03-04-2004 11:03 AM
- Lowering CXP awards
- Increasing UXP awards
- Retooling the skill tree to make novices more competitive
In my opinion, even an imperfect UXP system would be far preferable to none at all - sure, the hardcore grinder can still get there faster by grinding some warheads, but I know for a fact that there's still a market for cheap noviceweapons, even on old servers.
The way I envision this playing out, novices would waaay undercut masters on prices, because their goal is to get their weapons into peoples' hands and to make a name for themselves, not to make money hand over fist (at least not at first). There will always be people who don't mind buying sub-master quality weapons if they're a lot cheaper, and will run those guns into the ground because they don't feel a need to replace them. Of course, there are also people who always have to have the best of everything. The point is, there are different markets that smiths can target.
From what I've seen of Runesabre, though, I think he might actually listen to something like this.- It greatly simplifies the example calculations for figuring out how much usage goes into a skill box, as well as the actual implementation in code (most likely).
- The actual crafting effort involved in making a gun is more or less equivalent regardless of whether it's a rifle that uses 200 resources or a pistol that uses 100, so the XP payoff should be fairly similar.
The main thing that makes mehesitant is intensely low-resource weapons like swords - under the more resource-based system you generally have to sell twice as many melee weapons as firearms in order to advance, so making it purely condition-based changes those numbers by a lot. On the other hand, I don't think the market demand for melee weapons is anywhere near twice (or even as much as) the demand for firearms, so the resource-based system seems to unfairly discriminate against swordsmiths in that regard.
I'm thinking I'll change the doc to reflect the condition-based system, but archive the resource*condition-based system and link to it as an alternate example. Any other thoughts?
LLJK_Griz wrote:
You have a solid plan, but if it was implemented now, no one would see any real change. The hologrinders and anyone who wants to get master fast would keep grinding because it's easily macroable, the casual players (who are usually the ones who take months to get master and then whine about not being able to make anything because they don't have time to monitor resource spawns) would still take forever to reach master and then whine about being limited by resources that they didn't have time to search for.
A guildmate recently made master after over two months of grinding in his spare time. During all this time, he was only able to sell grenades and WUKs because there's like three people on the server who make grenades and WUKs aren't affected by experimentation. Any revision of UXP would have to add it to factory-created items to benefit lower-level crafters, because no one wants single grenades and WUKs.
Message Edited by p4Samwise on 03-04-2004 04:12 PM