ivanhedgehog Posted April 10, 2015 Share Posted April 10, 2015 What would be lost if we did away with crafting/gathering altogether then and just had everything we needed premade and cheap from a vendor? nothing, crafting is broken beyond belief Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scottocamp Posted April 10, 2015 Share Posted April 10, 2015 What would be lost if we did away with crafting/gathering altogether then and just had everything we needed premade and cheap from a vendor? Gathering crafting components can certainly be an enjoyable part of a game. I'm okay with material nodes. At least you are playing the game while you gather. But crew missions seem oddly designed. You send out crew members, log out of the game, log into another toon and repeat as many times as you can endure the loading screens. Doesn't seem all that fun. A slot machine can be designed to be as expensive to use as sending out crew members. Purple to blue drop rates can be set to the same ratio as now. Whatever. The difference being that you are actually logged into the game while you play the slot machine. And even better - you can hang out and chat with friends in your stronghold while you play the slots. Maybe not the most perfect alternative - but a much more entertaining, social and active approach to gathering than the current crew member design. I'm sure the community would be open to other alternatives - but something more fun and less frustrating than the existing system would greatly improve the game in my opinion. And is probably one reason the slot machines were embraced so enthusiastically. To answer your question - scrapping all gathering and crafting would certainly diminish the game. And I don't believe anyone wants that or is advocating for that. Nor is anyone asking for everything to be free and available with zero effort. I do think the slot machine demonstrated that the community would like a better and more interactive gathering design than currently exists. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Neglience Posted April 10, 2015 Share Posted April 10, 2015 (edited) And even better - you can hang out and chat with friends in your stronghold while you play the slots. Maybe not the most perfect alternative - but a much more entertaining, social and active approach to gathering than the current crew member design. It was sooo entertaining that people started to do it semi-afk watching tv (or scripting it completely) and yes, it is such an active gameplay to sit in front of a machine for hours (with the same drop rates crew missions give, with the old machine you will be done in like 30 minutes per character) doing nothing else than clicking a mouse button. Best gameplay a MMO company designed for crafting so far. With crew missions you can actually play the "game" and still get mats. Edited April 10, 2015 by Neglience Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MeNaCe-NZ Posted April 10, 2015 Share Posted April 10, 2015 Gathering crafting components can certainly be an enjoyable part of a game. I'm okay with material nodes. At least you are playing the game while you gather. But crew missions seem oddly designed. You send out crew members, log out of the game, log into another toon and repeat as many times as you can endure the loading screens. Doesn't seem all that fun. A slot machine can be designed to be as expensive to use as sending out crew members. Purple to blue drop rates can be set to the same ratio as now. Whatever. The difference being that you are actually logged into the game while you play the slot machine. And even better - you can hang out and chat with friends in your stronghold while you play the slots. Maybe not the most perfect alternative - but a much more entertaining, social and active approach to gathering than the current crew member design. I'm sure the community would be open to other alternatives - but something more fun and less frustrating than the existing system would greatly improve the game in my opinion. And is probably one reason the slot machines were embraced so enthusiastically. To answer your question - scrapping all gathering and crafting would certainly diminish the game. And I don't believe anyone wants that or is advocating for that. Nor is anyone asking for everything to be free and available with zero effort. I do think the slot machine demonstrated that the community would like a better and more interactive gathering design than currently exists. I wasn't really expecting anyone "serious" to respond to my post heh. I was just poitning out that more or less naivety to the "100 credit" post and why not take it a step further if that was really their point of view. I personally don't think either is a good idea but either way I wouldn't care too much since I no longer need gathering/crafting markets to sustain myself though I would feel sorry for newer players with an interest in making credits starting out if that ever became the case. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EnkiduNineEight Posted April 10, 2015 Share Posted April 10, 2015 Way back in the thread there was ample discussion from people with the honest costs to obtain various purple materials from gathering missions. BioWare can do this sort of math themselves as well (though after the .001 chance became .001% I am not sure I trust their math ) by mining the data and looking at the results. When the cost of obtaining materials is known, then the rate of return from the slot machine can be adjusted accordingly. Green Mats have 0 value. They can be obtained for free from gathering. They should not have much value when calculating their rate of return from the slots. Blue Mats have some value, but most wil tell you their use are limited as its green and purple mats that are most necessary in most all cases. Purple Mats have a defined value that equals the average rate of return from missions and the cost to run those missions. Token Cost + win/loss rate can thus be juggled so that mats from the slot have an equivalent cost of several multipliers (6 to 10 times) the cost of mats via missions. You then do not obviate the gathering missions (because its the cheapest/most cost effective means) but you create an alternative for 'spot needs' of materials where you pump cash into a machine to get a return. Doing this + adding other prizes (a selection of items from the packs the slot represents) makes the slots 'fun' and their stated goal with the slots was to make them fun like the Kingpin Bounty event. Right now they are zero fun. Making them fun also then helps spur their use in peoples strongholds, and increases the social aspects of the game as peole have others, gather around player 'casinos' and interact in a fun environment. The nerfing was needed (I asked for it myself, one of the first to do so) but what was done was less a nerf and more a nuking. They removed the fun entirely from the machines, they are now essentially worthless. And that's fine in some ways, most of our decorations are essentially worthless as is. But the issue here is that they released something very fun and desirable (too fun and too desireable IMO) and then instead of a measured response they made a completely screwed up response that really took the fun away entirely and then clammed up and haven't said a word about it. My issue is about the slots, but it is also about how the slots were handled by the Developers. If you are making a show of being engaged with your community and more transparent the slot machines reaction should be considered a textbook example of what not to do. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eartharioch Posted April 10, 2015 Share Posted April 10, 2015 Way back in the thread there was ample discussion from people with the honest costs to obtain various purple materials from gathering missions. BioWare can do this sort of math themselves as well (though after the .001 chance became .001% I am not sure I trust their math ) by mining the data and looking at the results. I'm pretty sure I stopped trusting their math when I saw the original drop rates...and as I've said before, if you think that the 0.001% chance was a mistake BW made when trying to implement your suggested value instead of the actual value they wanted to use, you have bigger problems than a nuked slot machine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hooty Posted April 10, 2015 Share Posted April 10, 2015 I think many in this thread are hoping for that, but not expecting it. I expect nothing. But on the slight chance someone at BW will eventually see the light, I keep one old saying in mind. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and I'm willing to keep this wheel squeaking for a long long time. That is how fundamentally wrong I think BW's handling of the situation is. Also, the periodic entertainment value of seeing someone make a post telling everyone else to stop posting. Priceless. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
branmakmuffin Posted April 10, 2015 Share Posted April 10, 2015 Also, the periodic entertainment value of seeing someone make a post telling everyone else to stop posting. Priceless. There is that. The best irony is unintentional irony. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Transcendent Posted April 10, 2015 Share Posted April 10, 2015 the right to party Wooohoooo disco balls! Oh wait, it got nuked. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kiiralee Posted April 11, 2015 Share Posted April 11, 2015 So since the chance of winning anything was nuked, how about nuking the price of the CC chips as well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Muljo_Stpho Posted April 12, 2015 Share Posted April 12, 2015 (edited) One of the very few things they said on the subject before the drop rate nukes happened was that part of their intention with this and future slot machines was always that the token prices were going to go up as they released more machines, and then they increased the cost from 500 credits to 750 creidts when they made the changes to the machine. They jumped the gun on the price increase, but still... I don't think you're going to have any luck requesting a nuke on the token price. Plus, it's intended to be a credit sink anyway. We can get a partial refund by vendoring the rep items (if I figured this correctly (throwing some numbers around in a spreadsheet) you can get just under 55% of your investment back (ie ~45% of the token cost is what you spent to acquire whatever few Jawa scrap and Cartel Certificates you managed to get out of it.)) But they specifically want to avoid the possibility of players pulling a profit out of the machine. Lower the token cost and players might actually be able to profit off of it even without selling materials and decorations purchased with whatever scrap and certificates they got. (If I calculated things correctly, a token cost of 409 or 410 credits would have us expecting to break even. In the long term at that cost, we could expect vendored rep items to get back just as much as we spend on tokens. In that situation, it would pretty much turn the low drop rates on scrap/certs into a minor annoyance and we could obtain any number of scrap/certs for "free" if we just give it enough time. They're not going to put the price per token at a rate that's too close to that "break even" point because that would make it really easy for bots and "slave labor"-like farming to produce "free" materials.) Edited April 12, 2015 by Muljo_Stpho Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dscount Posted April 12, 2015 Share Posted April 12, 2015 Well it's a waste of time now. If they bumped CERT drops back up then it might be worth it. Right now it's just REP machine. Mount is a POS and the drop in chances on Cert's was not needed. Sorry.. I won't be spending any CC's on the next one after BW screwed the pooch on this one big time. First time I ever bought coins for something I really wanted, and the last time I will ever buy coins. I knew the nerf to mats was coming (as it should have been), but the rest was just plain shady business and BW knows it. Hence NO comments since it changed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MSchuyler Posted April 12, 2015 Share Posted April 12, 2015 I expect nothing. But on the slight chance someone at BW will eventually see the light, I keep one old saying in mind. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and I'm willing to keep this wheel squeaking for a long long time. That is how fundamentally wrong I think BW's handling of the situation is. Also, the periodic entertainment value of seeing someone make a post telling everyone else to stop posting. Priceless. And THAT'S why PvP gets the classes nerfed one after the other at the expense of PvE, which doesn't give a rip. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jbonetx Posted April 12, 2015 Share Posted April 12, 2015 And THAT'S why PvP gets the classes nerfed one after the other at the expense of PvE, which doesn't give a rip. Did not realize the slot machine could be used in pvp, learn something new everyday..... Always nice to see this thread bumped though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ivanhedgehog Posted April 13, 2015 Share Posted April 13, 2015 Did not realize the slot machine could be used in pvp, learn something new everyday..... Always nice to see this thread bumped though. it will stick around for a long time Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dscount Posted April 13, 2015 Share Posted April 13, 2015 Did not realize the slot machine could be used in pvp, learn something new everyday..... Always nice to see this thread bumped though. Yes Apparently it has a 0.0000001% change to generate a new PVP Map in 2015 for Bioware. BUT... should someone actually win that on the slot machine a quick "Coming Soon" email would follow in game stating it's not a bug and then delete it without warning. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kianabamin Posted April 13, 2015 Share Posted April 13, 2015 Yes Apparently it has a 0.0000001% change to generate a new PVP Map in 2015 for Bioware. BUT... should someone actually win that on the slot machine a quick "Coming Soon" email would follow in game stating it's not a bug and then delete it without warning. Funny. But seriously back to the issue at hand.... And back to the front page too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ivanhedgehog Posted April 14, 2015 Share Posted April 14, 2015 Funny. But seriously back to the issue at hand.... And back to the front page too. thats always good Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kianabamin Posted April 14, 2015 Share Posted April 14, 2015 thats always good Didn't seem to last long though. How many pages we at now? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Djiini Posted April 14, 2015 Share Posted April 14, 2015 Didn't seem to last long though. How many pages we at now? Too many. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ivanhedgehog Posted April 14, 2015 Share Posted April 14, 2015 Too many. never enough Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ivanhedgehog Posted April 15, 2015 Share Posted April 15, 2015 still nothing? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kianabamin Posted April 15, 2015 Share Posted April 15, 2015 still nothing? I know, it's hard to believe this thread is still alive and yet, it's dead. I'm telling you, it's a Schrödinger's post. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zaldun Posted April 15, 2015 Share Posted April 15, 2015 R.I.P. Contraband Slot Machine Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ivanhedgehog Posted April 15, 2015 Share Posted April 15, 2015 R.I.P. Contraband Slot Machine its alive!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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