1) It costs less to insure something than it does to buy a new one. The smart combat player wil insure the clothing he wears and get his 3 incaps before he gets decay.
2) The smarter combat player will dump his outfit in a house and only wer his armor, which he expects to decay anyway.
3) no combat entertainers rarely incap. A lot of our sales are to them. Good buy profit market.
1) ARMORSMITHS ARE NERFED. They require high quality synthetic cloth and panels. We cannot experiment!
2) How often do you die uninsured? I certainly don't. That doesn't help me be profitable.. Armorsmiths and Weaponsmiths get money from decayed weapons IRREGARDLESS of uninsured deaths.
Just because it hasn't worked since beta doesn't mean it should be removed rather than fixed! You've already lost a bunch of tailors either from the profession or the game over this... please reconsider!
I repeat... ARMORSMITHS ARE NERFED. By proxy.. so are MARKSMAN AND BRAWLER + THEIR ELITE PROFESSIONS. When armorsmiths cannot experiment as high as they used to.. armor quality goes down.. many many many professions suffer!
On another subject.. why are we capped for maintenance fees to structures to 100x their hourly cost? Do you mean that I have to waist hundreds of thousands of credits worth of structures if I want to go on a 3 day vacation.. do I have to redeed my houses with a grand total of 400 items in them (large + medium) spread out over 5 mule accounts just to go on a 2.5 day trip?
And... change sign doesn't work, vendor uniforms don't work
Lay off the damage control and think about the future of this class. In doing so, you will only find that item churn is the only thing that will allow this class to continue beyond LEVELLING to master.
Time based item decay needs to be for all items, or none.
The ideas you floated yesterday are _not_ good enough. Clothing wears out when you use it. Would you like for us to start a new thread? A poll so you can get a good count of the number of people that are not satisfied? Maybe you would like to start a constructive discussion about it like you did for some of the other issues. We are glad that you guys bothered to give this issue some consideration, but I think I speak for many tailors when I say that those ideas won't fly in practice. Just let us know what you want to see from us and you will have it quicker than you will be able to read it.
Clothing decay has not been in since beta.
Repeat, clothing decay has not been in since beta.
Yeah, we noticed. We were patient. We used our correspondent (who subsequently quit due to frustration). This was a key issue for us. You guys knew it was a key issue for us. Please don't attempt to play word games at this point. The only misconceptions are those caused between lack of communication in the SOE/SWG team.
It is good to hear that you realize that clothing decay has not been around on Live since Day 1. Oddly enough, I'm pretty sure most tailors knew that too. What I (and I presume other tailors) understood is that decay was broken and an issue that would eventually be fixed. I could handle that, even without an ETA, and was willing to invest time toward tailoring based on the promise that clothing would eventually decay and that on an ongoing basis, there would be a market for clothing to both old and new players.
Perhaps the patch notes for this morning were poorly worded. I can accept that, as such mistakes happen. The fact that experimentation was utterly removed with today's patch, however, speaks to where you see the future: Tailors will have no way to improve the durability of their goods.
I read the death idea you posted. Frankly I find it lacking. A dedicated player will do everything they can to avoid dying. A musician or dancer will be quite successful in this particular goal. A medic that purchases resources on the bazaar and works exclusively in the med center will also be unlikely to die any time. Presuming that musicians, dancers and medics have a viable income, I would also presume that the intent is that they would be a part of the clothing economy. And I think we can forget about selling more than one outfit to any Jedi down the line.
To be constructive on the death causes decay plan: I think that what you have outlined should go into place, but should not be the ONLY source of damage to clothing, merely the biggest single damaging event (perhaps 100 points of damage). Other events that should cause slight damage: /flourish, /heal /tend (a bit), /prone movement (a medium amount), any heat damage (a medium - large amount), any swimming (with the exception of swimming trunks/suits that will get added somewhere down the line).
Someone posed the possibility that one reason to not do decay on clothing is that once the item hits 0/1000 having the item vanish would cause too much embarassment. My suggestion on this is that when a clothing item turns 0/1000, change all colors on it to tan, pale blue or pale green. Have the item be unable to be equiped once it decays utterly. Perhaps even have it auto-delete after it is unequiped.
If you do add 'decay on incap', I have one request, as a crafter - please, please, please allow us to buy a 'safe deposit terminal' (or full bank terminal) for use in our house. I need some way to safely get my goods from one town to another, from my house to town, etc. I don't have any problem with this terminal either charging a per-use fee or having a maint fee associated with it (yep, yet another credit sink). You could even have that birdcage as one of the required components and have droid eng. make the terminal.
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.
This would then provide decay to a whole host of things that currently do not have it.
That is a terrible idea. How hard is it to insurance your 5 pieces of clothing? So all your are doing if forcing people to insure their items so they don't need to buy new ones later. And even if they dont' insure it the first time and are incapped the clothing still exists after being incapped. So run to an insurance terminal...end of story.
You really need to think of a better idea for decay. You said people in beta didn't like decay over time, but how else are you going to ensure that tailors and architects are going to survive in the closed economy you made. Without decay we are in dying professions that are already suffering from the market being flooded with the same items for cheaper.
There is no misconceptions on our end at all, the community simply thinks that what you are doing is wrong.
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Holo, I've talked about how to provide ongoing business in an Architect thread, but I think there are some similar possibilites here.
The short version can be summed up in two words: Dye Tubs.
No, seriously.
Let tailors get a schematic (better, a set of schematics) for Customization Kits, which allow *anyone* to apply customization to clothing items after the fact (potentially, armor and weapons down the road as well). Make the kit have charges, naturally (and experimented # of charges).
Most of the UI and logic to do this is already in the game, after all -- it just can't be done after the initial crafting right now.
I was going to suggest simply letting tailors customize items directly, but you'd need a tradewindow for that, or at least an image-designer-style session. Kits lets them make them in factories, lets them sell them via vendors, requires resources...
As I said, similar options are possible for Architects, and probably other classes as well (e.g. advanced weapon powerups for weaponsmiths...).
One final possibility is to let clothes wear a la armor, but make it so the elite classes can make better repair kits -- ones that WILL work with almost no chance of failure let alone destruction of the item, and have charges, etc. Again, this would also work for armor and weapon smiths. I 100% agree that crafters need an ongoing revenue source, but I'm not at all convinced it has to be all, or even mostly, in original sales when it could just as easily (perhaps more so) be done as follow-on support.
After all, in the long-haul, here in reality you frequently spend more maintaining a precision-made or finely-crafted item than you do on the initial purchase...
First, whoever wrote that patch message should be shot. Clothing never decayed and its a very sore point. Your player run econmy is never going to work until you have a decent decay ratio.
I was VERY upset to find that experimentation had been taken from tailored items. This means that a person who just barely gets a particular component can make it as well as a MASTER tailor. Experimentation meant that synth cloth and reinforced panels gained from a MASTER tailor had more worth and viability to an armorsmith. Master tailors were sought out for their cloth and their panels...but no more. You've messed this up too.
Listen, I LOVE the new colors, however you guys did not implement them right. There are NO NEW colors on leather palettes, cloak palettes...and something I've NEVER understood...the exotic leotard. Our shoes and boots will not match the nice colors we can give some of the other items...and trust me...there aren't enough of them for me to overlook the mistakes you made in this patch.
I WANT clothing decay and its beyond me how ANYONE could complain about something that was NEVER there to start with. It SHOULD have been in THIS patch. I WANT experimentation back and I want it to have meaning. I can't believe that you've let it go THIS long...now we have to wait another month.
GEEZ I better stop before I get truly insulting. Holo...you can't smooth this over. Tailors...MANY of them are going on strike until YOU fix it. I'm tired of getting the short end here...we have a LOT of needs and valid complaints that are adding up EVERY DAY. Do you not listen? Or do you only listen to particular professions?
I'm a little reluctant to say that incap decay is a good idea for an all-across-the-board solution to item decay.
Furniture is one example of something that would never decay under such a premise.
Second, all it takes is a one-time insurance and the item is guaranteed to be immortal, and we have the very same problem we are all trying to avoid all over again.
Some people are against decay over time because they just don't want to invest time and money to maintain thier posessions. Catering to this is not only unrealistic, it puts crafters out of business.
I think that decay over time/use is the way to go provided that the decay rates are carefully thought out. You don't want decay so slow that crafters are barely making ends meet, however you don't want it so fast that every player has to spend an outrageous amount of time and money replacing/repairing their posessions. If the decay rates for clothing are not unreasonable, you will probably not anger the consumer community that much. They might whine a little at first, but when they realize the decay isn't insanely fast I think the would settle down.
I think that clothing should have similar decay to armor, since many people wear clothes in battle. The more fights they put their well-tailored outfit through, the more damage it should take.
Despite what people say I think it should have a timer-decay when worn as well. Although dancers do not go through scathing battles with narglatches, they do dance around in the outfits, and that does cause some degree of wear and tear. Ask any real life dancer, or gym goer about the stress of physical activity on clothing. Especially shoes!!! When I was kickboxing on a regualr basis I went through a new pair of nikes in 3 months!
Not to sound like a poor sport, but I liked having the item experimentation to increase durability which was recently taken away. I like the idea that tailors could experiement to come up with good, durable clothing that has a better chance of lasting. It made me feel like I was doing my best to create a quality product for my customers and gave me a sense of pride. It's a shame to loose that.
I completely agree that the wording in the patch notes is pretty bad. That's what happens when you get two different people writing things.
1) Feedback on time-based decay in beta was that in fact, just about everyone hated it, including tailors. So we removed it, and that's what the patch note is echoing rather confusingly.
2) We agree that tailors (and others!) need decay in their crafted items so that there's market turnover. We're trying to solve that solution for all the professions at once via a general solution, though, not implementing a tailor-specific solution.
-Raph Koster Chief Creative Officer, Sony Online Entertainment
First off, even though others aren't saying it, we respect the fact that you came in here to explain the issue personally. No joking aside, I consider it an honor that you posted, as I'm sure that this was not on your list of things to do today. Obviously, any replacement for clothing (and other) decay as the community had assumed it had been implemented should be considered carefully. It should also draw on the suggestions of both sides affected within the user base. However, that is an issue for another day.
I believe that the trust issue between the community and SOE is the main concern this afternoon. The patch notes quoted above were poorly worded. It accomplished two things. One, you made a significant portion of your userbase feel like it's input into the issue had not been asked for, and worked to cause an "us versus them" attitude here within the community. Two, due to it's bullet-point format, it did not convey the explination you posted here, and could be easily misconstrued.
The fact is that this breach of trust has occured. Nothing can be done to change what has been said, but your post here is a step in the right direction to regaining the community's trust back. It is my belief that several things must occur in order to resolve this issue as it stands now. You must consider the whole community's input on the decay issue, as I mentioned above. Furthermore, if there is a technical reason for the change in implementation of clothing decay, please do us the courtesy of telling those reasons to us. Most of us are adults with some level of technical expertise, and a high-level overview of the implementation problem can only serve to give the community some part of ownership in the problem. Who knows, someone out here might have a brilliant idea on how to fix your implementation problems?
Thank you,
-Egna Dragonn, wanderer based out of Nashal, Talus (Chilastra)
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.
-Raph Koster Chief Creative Officer, Sony Online Entertainment
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.
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.
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That's what happens when you get two different people writing things.
