Thoughts on crafting

[(XBOX)TheEmersedPie]

Just thought it would be cool to add in a multi-craft feature or something. Like, for items such as gear, keys, or materials that need to be crafted (like coprite alloy), have the ability to select how many you want crafted. Say i wanted to make 30 ciphers (bc #*!% hacking), i could select cipher, increase the amount to 30 and it would tell me how much resources and overall time it would need. Then ciphers would craft for 30 minutes instead of me having to sit around on my orbiter doing nothing and refreshing it every minute. I know ciphers r a bad example because u dont need lots of them right away, but other things that u do need a lot of at a time. would make life a lot easier in my opinion, lmk ur thoughts.

[Voltage]

Foundry queues have been a request for a long time. I would like to craft anything in queue with a 24 hour time cap. That way, you still only craft 1 Forma per day and it fulfills DE's purpose to keep you logging in, but Restores/Ciphers/etc. could be queued. If this can't happen, just make Cipher x100/Restore x100/etc. blueprints at the very least.

[BETAOPTICS]

Well long time ago, many years ago they actually talked about a feature where, rather than multi-craft, you could queue up items so once one was complete, it would automatically start constructing the next item of same type (like Forma). Reason for lack of multi-crafting is in in-game economy. If you give players the ability to multi-craft components, on the surface it seems harmless because after all, you have to have resources for them. But what happens when old players with excessive amounts of resources and resource boosters running the entire year for several years can pour them into all kinds of crafting products and then sell them? What happens to the in-game economy? First there will be an influx of valuable items, then deflation of market value once excess is achieved and eventually a recession and inflation. 

There is another issue players often do not think about and it is a logistical one. All the data from the items within your account are held on the server and it will retrieve the data upon logging-in. Whenever you start crafting an item, the item, item count, the timer, the cost, and all other associated variables are all stored in the servers that run the game data. When you queue up an item, it takes server load space and the more items there are, the more server load and demand it takes and the more network traffic there will be. This is the same reason why in server downtime (for example with DDOS attacks on the server) item selection is often unobtainable because it is unable to receive item data.

So then if each individual item data reserves server space, and there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of players at the same time and each crafting none, one or multiple different items at the same time. Now imagine multiple crafting option and that growth in server space and network communication traffic exponentially multiplies, causing game server instability and workload. Now you can ask yourself why some games are able to perform multi-crafting and it is simply because a) they are either performed locally regardless or b) the company has the kind of resources to buy a lot of expensive server space to host and run such a service, the kind that a small indie studio could not afford typically.

[BLI7Z]

hace 8 minutos, BETAOPTICS dijo:

Well long time ago, many years ago they actually talked about a feature where, rather than multi-craft, you could queue up items so once one was complete, it would automatically start constructing the next item of same type (like Forma). Reason for lack of multi-crafting is in in-game economy. If you give players the ability to multi-craft components, on the surface it seems harmless because after all, you have to have resources for them. But what happens when old players with excessive amounts of resources and resource boosters running the entire year for several years can pour them into all kinds of crafting products and then sell them? What happens to the in-game economy? First there will be an influx of valuable items, then deflation of market value once excess is achieved and eventually a recession and inflation. 

There is another issue players often do not think about and it is a logistical one. All the data from the items within your account are held on the server and it will retrieve the data upon logging-in. Whenever you start crafting an item, the item, item count, the timer, the cost, and all other associated variables are all stored in the servers that run the game data. When you queue up an item, it takes server load space and the more items there are, the more server load and demand it takes and the more network traffic there will be. This is the same reason why in server downtime (for example with DDOS attacks on the server) item selection is often unobtainable because it is unable to receive item data.

So then if each individual item data reserves server space, and there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of players at the same time and each crafting none, one or multiple different items at the same time. Now imagine multiple crafting option and that growth in server space and network communication traffic exponentially multiplies, causing game server instability and workload. Now you can ask yourself why some games are able to perform multi-crafting and it is simply because a) they are either performed locally regardless or b) the company has the kind of resources to buy a lot of expensive server space to host and run such a service, the kind that a small indie studio could not afford typically.

Enlighten me... what items that can be crafted in the foundry can be traded?

DE isn't anymore a small indie studio... with millions of accounts, and being backed by a big Chinese company, I guess they already got a nice amount of income to invest with. 

[(XBOX)TheEmersedPie]

34 minutes ago, Voltage said:

Foundry queues have been a request for a long time. I would like to craft anything in queue with a 24 hour time cap. That way, you still only craft 1 Forma per day and it fulfills DE's purpose to keep you logging in, but Restores/Ciphers/etc. could be queued. If this can't happen, just make Cipher x100/Restore x100/etc. blueprints at the very least.

this is a great idea. that way, only certain items of low value can be mass made and also, dont quote me on this, but im pretty sure the way variables work making a 100× crafting option could be designed to still only take up 1 variable space. havent coded in a long time so cant remember exactly how that works, but theres a way to do something like that conserving space.

[BETAOPTICS]

29 minutes ago, BLI7Z said:

Enlighten me... what items that can be crafted in the foundry can be traded?

DE isn't anymore a small indie studio... with millions of accounts, and being backed by a big Chinese company, I guess they already got a nice amount of income to invest with. 

Eh you are right, my economy point is flawed since now that I remember it, aside from temporary mistakes you can no longer trade built items these days. See, I am an old demented fart.

Anyway DE is still a small indie developer team. They have grown over the years, they are not three people working at a garage, but they do not have the kind of economy major game development companies have. DE employs a total of 310 people of which only a portion is developers like in any other company. In 2014, 61% of the company was sold to Chinese holding company Multi Dynamic, now Leyou, for $73 million, giving us some idea of the total production cost,  licensing fee values, hiring and product in total would cost. From this sum only a portion goes into the development.

Contrast that to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) which costed about $50 million to develop, $200 million to market and total costs with market inflation costing total of $292 million according to Activision annual company success report released at the end of the year. In both of these cases the reserved amount of money includes every service, infrastructure and architecture service each game has.

In large companies it is calculated within the industry that annually around $100 million dollars goes to server and network maintenance and another to software development, patching and hotfixing. Now even from majority company value we can see that DE is not big enough to afford one of them, let alone both, nor do they have the other resources (like enough developers) to maintain the kind of level service large server space allocation would require. That is of course excluding all the other logistical factors like development itself and having back up in case some development does not produce as much income as estimations project and the developers hope, thus avoiding immediate bankruptcy.

Edited June 17, 2019 by BETAOPTICS

[BLI7Z]

hace 2 minutos, BETAOPTICS dijo:

Eh you are right, my economy point is flawed since now that I remember it, aside from temporary mistakes you can no longer trade built items these days. See, I am an old demented fart.

Anyway DE is still a small indie developer team. They have grown over the years, they are not three people working at a garage, but they do not have the kind of economy major game development companies have. DE employs a total of 310 people of which only a portion is developers like in any other company.In 2014, 61% of the company was sold to Chinese holding company Multi Dynamic, now Leyou, for $73 million, giving us some idea of the total production cost,  licensing fee values, hiring and product in total would cost. From this sum only a portion goes into the development.

Contrast that to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) which costed about $50 million to develop, $200 million to market and total costs with market inflation costing total of $292 million according to Activision annual company success report released at the end of the year. In both of these cases the reserved amount of money includes every service, infrastructure and architecture service each game has.

In large companies it is estimated that annually around $100 million dollars goes to maintenance and another to software development, patching and hotfixing. Now even from majority company stock value we can see that DE is not big enough to afford one of them, let alone both, nor do they have the other resources (like enough developers) to maintain the kind of level service large server space allocation would require. That is of course excluding all the other logistical factors like development itself and having back up in case some development does not produce as much income as estimations project and the developers hope, thus avoiding immediate bankruptcy.

I thought I might have not seen some tradable stuff =P

Well, that's true, they are not a major company with hundreds of millions to spare. They've grown certainly anyways, and I hope they keep growing so they can make Warframe even better.

On topic, I guess those database problems can be avoided by putting some x100 blueprints for some kind of things, like the restores, ciphers, and mining stuff, and some x10 or more of the Derelict keys. A 24hs limit would be the best so it's still necessary to log in. I have no knowledge in programming, but there must be a way to make those queues really low storage demanding. 

[BETAOPTICS]

8 minutes ago, BLI7Z said:

I thought I might have not seen some tradable stuff =P

Well, that's true, they are not a major company with hundreds of millions to spare. They've grown certainly anyways, and I hope they keep growing so they can make Warframe even better.

On topic, I guess those database problems can be avoided by putting some x100 blueprints for some kind of things, like the restores, ciphers, and mining stuff, and some x10 or more of the Derelict keys. A 24hs limit would be the best so it's still necessary to log in. I have no knowledge in programming, but there must be a way to make those queues really low storage demanding. 

It does help to alleviate the problem because the database treats it as a singular item. My best guess for not having this work around is development time as they spoke about the same thing many years ago but never got around developing or at least releasing it, and orienting player impatience for platinum sales. But your guess is as good as mine there.

Edited June 17, 2019 by BETAOPTICS

[VanFanel1980mx]

1 hour ago, BLI7Z said:

DE isn't anymore a small indie studio... with millions of accounts, and being backed by a big Chinese company, I guess they already got a nice amount of income to invest with. 

B-but the game is still in beta!

[peterc3]

2 hours ago, BLI7Z said:

with millions of accounts

Each having paid nothing to play the game. This just means more drain on a system with no pay off. More players doesn't make storing or transferring data cheaper or easier.

2 hours ago, BLI7Z said:

and being backed by a big Chinese company

Where are these mythical companies that will buy my game and hand out money for no return expected? Why is "Chinese" relevant?

1 hour ago, VanFanel1980mx said:

B-but the game is still in beta!

I mean, it is. Everything in the game can and probably will be changed at some point.