Temporary Structure New Costs Sky-High!

ichimaruginx · April 2017

@asterdahl @terramak

I'm very concerned bout the costs required to build these buildings, especially the Masterworks Merchants and the Gem costs. They had shot up to 40k-60k Wood/Metal/Stone/Food. And the Gem costs are 80k for both buildings requiring them. Is this intended?

If it is, then I hope it'll be revised.

Gems

No guild, especially if the guild are small and building up, would be able to afford 80k Gems per week for the Assayer which gives a laughable 3 gold per 5hr (Total of 99 gold per week if tended exactly every 5hrs). At the current gems prices (not counting vouchers bc if they are small they won't get 80k pure vouchers), they are better off selling the gems for AD and buy stuff that gives gold when vendored. So the intention to help the small guild with this structure is kinda... just making the situation worse for them

Production Cost of Masterworks Merchants

I understand this is aimed at bigger guilds, but only GH 20 guilds will be able to barely afford them. Other level guilds will be too busy using up the resources to allot 40-60k of these badly required resources to build these merchants. Even for a GH 20 guild, (using stone as example) having a R10 Quarry only produces 600 stone per hour, that's 100.8k stone if tended exactly when full every time. This means we can barely support 2 temporary buildings (costs 60k stone each for a total of 120k stone per week) with some vouchers.

I understand that the support buildings (Smelter's) exist for a reason - but hardly any guild will build them since there are alot of other buildings which gives more benefit and are less pricey to build. Even with the main Helm of the alliance being GH 20, I'm sure they prefer to donate their resources to help out their Swords and Gauntlets which are still growing instead of building a support building. It would require approx a rank 5 support structure (100% production bonus) for all 3 resources (and an extra Production building for 1 of the resource) which gives 172k per week in total to cover the cost of having 3 temporary structures up (160-180k cost per week). Mind you, that's 160k-180k of EACH type of those 4 resources.

Mysterious Merchant

Again, the gem cost of 80k per week, makes this a very pricey merchant to build. What happened to the 2k gems per 24hrs? Gems are pretty expensive these days.. 25k AD for a stack of r5s

I hope you guys can shed some insight to this, thanks! And my intention is only to draw attention to it - I've been praying it's a bug lol - and not to criticize

ichimaruginx · April 2017

For reference: Cost of each Temp. Structure (As of 20th Apr)

beckylunatic · April 2017

While I get that the costs shown in this video were preliminary, they have been bumped an awful lot. Even the structures that already lasted a week had their costs multiplied, not just the structures whose costs were adjusted alongside their duration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WLHJBdAA3E

Note also that the output of various structures was nerfed. You've doubled or more the cost of the Recruiter, while making the output 2/3 as much.

IMO, the entire thing was initially balanced around needing to alternate summoning and tending the Gemcutter with other structures. Gemcutter wasn't so costly, but with the output of it topping out at 24192 gems/week if you ALWAYS tend it on time (not flippin' likely in a small guild, btw... we don't always have someone online), you're now looking at 4 weeks of Gemcutter to support building structures requiring gems. That makes the Assayer pretty thoroughly unaffordable, considering how pathetically little you now get from it. With the lower costs, I wasn't going to stress about whether the structures got tended on time or not, but with the costs of everything so much higher... up go my stress levels again. This sucks.

These changes look like they moved very sharply away from actually helping guilds, and the human beings in them.

qexotic · April 2017

Unfortunately, the revised costs have probably factored in the number of vouchers that players will be able to obtain from running the new Stronghold Marauders Guild Event. By setting the costs this high, they may hope to make the new event a 'Must Do' for any and all guilds. However, since only larger guilds will be able to run these successfully this strategy is a big mistake which will penalise smaller guilds.....again

beckylunatic · April 2017

qexotic said:
Unfortunately, the revised costs have probably factored in the number of vouchers that players will be able to obtain from running the new Stronghold Marauders Guild Event. By setting the costs this high, they may hope to make the new event a 'Must Do' for any and all guilds. However, since only larger guilds will be able to run these successfully this strategy is a big mistake which will penalise smaller guilds.....again

That's not only a population issue (testers were under the impression it could be an alliance activity?), but a scheduling one. Unless they're going to use it to sell more bells, I think you can only run it at fixed intervals. That's not particularly casual-friendly, and if I'm not about to start telling my players they have to show up for events... well, we're f'd, aren't we?

qexotic · April 2017

beckylunatic said:

qexotic said:
Unfortunately, the revised costs have probably factored in the number of vouchers that players will be able to obtain from running the new Stronghold Marauders Guild Event. By setting the costs this high, they may hope to make the new event a 'Must Do' for any and all guilds. However, since only larger guilds will be able to run these successfully this strategy is a big mistake which will penalise smaller guilds.....again
That's not only a population issue (testers were under the impression it could be an alliance activity?), but a scheduling one. Unless they're going to use it to sell more bells, I think you can only run it at fixed intervals. That's not particularly casual-friendly, and if I'm not about to start telling my players they have to show up for events... well, we're f'd, aren't we?

Bear in mind, this suggestion is pure speculation on my behalf. Your guess is as good, and based on your past record probably better

, than mine as to the actual thinking behind the new costs.

ichimaruginx · April 2017

beckylunatic said:

IMO, the entire thing was initially balanced around needing to alternate summoning and tending the Gemcutter with other structures. Gemcutter wasn't so costly, but with the output of it topping out at 24192 gems/week if you ALWAYS tend it on time (not flippin' likely in a small guild, btw... we don't always have someone online), you're now looking at 4 weeks of Gemcutter to support building structures requiring gems.

Good point. Initially the build plan for my guild wasn't gonna factor in the gemcutter to cover the cost - as we wanted to 'host' as many of the structures (mainly mysterious & masterworks merchs) as possible for our alliance, being a GH 20 guild. We were ready to pay the cost by farming the Event or otherwise. This will give the whole alliance - especially those who want to do MW but can't because their guild doesn't have a r6 Explorer's yet - a chance to experience the new stuff while not hindering their building goals.

Isn't that too the point of these buildings? To give smaller guilds without Explorer's r6 another option?

But right now it seems we (GH 20) can hardly support the Mysterious Merch even with the gemcutter on top of 2 MW merch.

The one's that are getting burned the most are the smaller guilds, I can't even imagine how any of our allies can build any of those, except the suppliers. And there are many more smaller guilds/alliance out there. I do hope the devs revise the cost for the sake of smaller guilds.

beckylunatic said:

qexotic said:
Unfortunately, the revised costs have probably factored in the number of vouchers that players will be able to obtain from running the new Stronghold Marauders Guild Event. By setting the costs this high, they may hope to make the new event a 'Must Do' for any and all guilds. However, since only larger guilds will be able to run these successfully this strategy is a big mistake which will penalise smaller guilds.....again
That's not only a population issue (testers were under the impression it could be an alliance activity?), but a scheduling one. Unless they're going to use it to sell more bells, I think you can only run it at fixed intervals. That's not particularly casual-friendly, and if I'm not about to start telling my players they have to show up for events... well, we're f'd, aren't we?

DF works since it is every 2hrs. Now this event will be thrown in too. Asking people to come every 1hr with long dungeons like FBI/mSP running..

We generally do alliance wide runs, and any guild's officers who are online can host. But we only do a couple of times per day, not gonna host every hour, that's too much for guildies and for the officers!! Even then I don't think racking up that much vouchers of a certain type would be easy - remember there are total of 13 guilds sharing them

beckylunatic · April 2017

I was feeling so incredibly hopeful about this module and what it meant for my guild and all smaller guilds like us, and right now I don't know what to think. It was looking so good and like such a HUGE improvement, but if these are the final costs it's not very sustainable and is going to be very stressful to manage. And we are less than two weeks out from launch.

I was so looking forward to less stress. I have a headache. Again.

scathias · April 2017

Are these tooltips for stuff like the influence building correct? That you can store up a maximum of 100 influence per hour? I am reading that as having to tend the structure once every hour or i lose out on my influence? Because if that is how it is going to work then that is truly bloody stupid. These structures were meant to be for small guilds who definitely don't have people online 24/7. They need to have enough space for 8 hours of production, and if you actually want to be nice and not just scraping the barrel for the minimum you should make it 12 hours so that people have some leeway in when they can log on.

and yeah, the costs are really really high as well. These temporary buildings are supposed to be extra stuff to make life easier for small guilds not something we need to farm ANOTHER bloody thing for in order to maintain.

I'm really hoping I am wrong in how i read those tooltips.

ichimaruginx · April 2017

@beckylunatic
You're not alone. Headaches here too.

scathias said:

and yeah, the costs are really really high as well. These temporary buildings are supposed to be extra stuff to make life easier for small guilds not something we need to farm ANOTHER bloody thing for in order to maintain.

I'm really hoping I am wrong in how i read those tooltips.

You've not read wrong. They are supposed to be tended EVERY hour. And I have a feeling all the decisions making we've seen until now are based on the assumption of a hourly tended structure... Geebus, even if there is someone online 24/7, they won't be tending them like a robot, precisely on the clock!!

adinosii · April 2017

With those numbers the Assayer (Gold-creating structure) is effectively dead and useless. It would be most useful for the smallest guilds, but they just cannot afford it at this price.

The Recruiter (Influence) and Gemcutter (Gems) are not quite as bad, but after looking at the numbers I am not sure how many guilds will actually bother with them. Influence and Gems are the bottleneck for many guilds, and while larger guilds can certainly afford those structures, keeping them up week after week might be too expensive, in particular as the guilds also need resources for the profession structures. So, I think those are pretty much dead too

The thing is, the new Stronghold Marauder event may actually generate sufficient Influence and Gems for the Recruiter and Gemcutter not to be worth the effort.

The Recruiter can create a max of 16800 Influence per week. That's the same amount you get if 28 guild members participate in Stronghold Marauders just once.

So, my advice would simply be to ignore the Recruiter altogether and just encourage people to do the marauders with one additional alt, once per week to compensate. It is a perfectly good activity for an alliance to do together, just like DF.

As for the Gemcutter, well, that's where things get interesting. It can create a max of 24192 Gems per week and I know you get Gem vouchers from the Marauder event - the problem is just that I have not yet participated in a really successful multi-round event. You need to have people in 3 different locations (4 if you count the enemy catapults), and I would say 10-15 people is realistic for a multi-round event - I have not yet been able to get that number together in our test guild on Preview.

Anyhow, assuming a really successful run will reward you with something better than the 25-gem voucher we got, my guess is that you could match what the Gemcutter gives with a medium-sized group of people doing the Marauders a couple of times per day.

I need some better numbers to really determine whether the Gemcutter is feasible or not.

Now, regarding the Mysterious merchant:

The mysterious merchant is pretty expensive - 600.000AD, 400 Gold and 80.000 Gems, I think. I really do not see smaller guilds build it at all. What I do see, are GH20 guilds building it for their alliances, and charging others for the privilege of a 10-minute guild membership to access the vendor.

That leaves the profession structures - and for those there is no alternative - you cannot get what they offer except by building the structures. They are a bit too expensive for an alliance to build them all constantly, so what I expect is something like the following:

The first week, the alliance will make sure each structure (Bloomery, Goldsmith, Atelier, Tenterground and Tannery) gets built in one (and only one) guild within the alliance. This will allow people to start Masterwork and stock up on items.

Later, the structures will be guilt on a "rotating" basis - so that each one will be available, say one week out of 4. They are not needed non-stop, but you shouldn't have to wait too long to be able to access them. This will save resources, while giving people "sufficient" access.

beckylunatic · April 2017

I am less certain about the alarmism re: tending every hour, and I want to nip that in the bud before a well-meaning dev decides that's the most important thing to respond to and ignores our concerns about costs.

Farms and stuff also tell you their output in resources/hour, but they *hold* 8 hours worth of resources at their default. Unless @ichimaruginx built some and tested that as well, I wouldn't assume 100(ish) was their capacity. The Assayer gives it in different terms because you can't divide 3 by 5 and come up with a whole number (the output remains gawdawful).

I am going to try to dig up a post by @rgutscheradev with some numbers to check something.

Found:

The really big change, though, is focused on smaller guilds: the temporary structure that earns influence. While some temp structures are aimed at bigger guilds and have higher costs, the influence structure should be viable for even a small guild. If you imagine a 10-person guild, with those 10 players earning their 400 Influence four times a week, that would be 16,000 Influence per week. The temp structure would roughly double that (it gives just over 16,000/week). So those small guilds would see a real increase. A larger guild might still build the influence structure (or they might decide to build one of the other ones), but 16,000 Influence just won't move the needle as much for a 100-person guild at Guild Level 17.

So these numbers were provided with the structure output adjusted from 144 inf/hour to 100 Inf/hour. I wonder if that was also looking at the significantly higher cost. Sigh.

adinosii · April 2017

...and to take the example of the 10-person guild - what are the chances a 10-man guild can spare the resources needed to build the Recruiter (the assayer being absurdly expensive for them of course) every week?

beckylunatic · April 2017

adinosii said:
...and to take the example of the 10-person guild - what are the chances a 10-man guild can spare the resources needed to build the Recruiter (the assayer being absurdly expensive for them of course) every week?

The Recruiter costs SH-produced resources and Labor. So does the Gemcutter. It's not entirely about being able to spare the resources, but the fact that if it's possible to build both concurrently, this comes very close to draining our current coffer capacity on a weekly basis, and that means someone needs to go around and tend those buildings far more often than has previously been necessary. And that's more of a strain on personnel in a small guild than a big one, and more of a stressor when losing resources from an untended temporary building, even a small amount each day, is chopping into your guild's investment in the structure. With the older, lower costs, taking a fairly relaxed approach was clearly in evidence and I wasn't feeling the least bit anxious about the additional resource management duties. Looking at it now, I feel sickened by it.

But on the Labor cost... this was not just doubled on the Recruiter, rather increased TENFOLD. The Gemcutter had a Food cost replaced with a high Labor cost (this might be welcomed by some guilds as I know Food is a late-game bottleneck). There is a profession pack in the upcoming lockbox, so maybe the market on profession workers will bottom out again and the best solution will be to throw this coffer open rather than keep it locked so alliance whales can throw their unwanted slaves into it. Maybe. But this isn't something everyone can count on, let alone permanently. Labor vouchers have been stripped from more recent lockboxes as a trash resource nobody wanted or needed, but this now means the supply of cheap Labor vouchers will not be replenished. Stronghold quests that give a Labor voucher have been long dismissed as not worth the time it takes to do them, and difficult to find anywhere to deposit even the low-value vouchers from them if you did. I suspect they've overcompensated in creating demand for Labor.

So hypothetically, say I'm trying to fund these two structures entirely with Corvee Labor. I have to run that task 200 times for the Recruiter, and twice that again for the Gemcutter. At the lower cost, it wouldn't have been a problem for me to run Corvee Labor 21 times in a week, even with only rotating my professions once a day except on weekends. And because for many players, profession slot occupied by anything you can't sell = income lost, I don't ask others to run SH-related tasks unless they wish to do so voluntarily. It's all on me, and that has previously been sufficient.

beckylunatic · April 2017

Here is maybe a slightly different way of looking at the problem. Temporary production structures last a week. They don't require as many different kinds of resources as permanent structures, and not typically the kinds that someone has to go out and actively farm, but the adjusted costs are comparable to the one-time cost of building a rank 5 or 6 permanent production structure, yet their output is, while useful, not exactly enormous. And yet, we will have to replace them every week. We will have to replace those resources every week.

http://neverwinter.gamepedia.com/Farm

If you can't build anything because you're short on a particular resource you can't farm quickly, it's true that you might be wasting stone and wood that you can't harvest, but the flipside of that is that you don't have to worry about whether or not anyone tended the lumberyard in the last 8 hours. Making these structure costs so large means that small guilds will feel pressure at consuming the SH-produced resources at the same kind of pace that large guilds previously did (often being bottlenecked on anything they could NOT mass-farm via group effort), without having the membership to support that level of hands-on resource micromanaging.

vida44 · April 2017

The funny thing is you can't destroy the temporary structures so you are stuck 1 week with them. And then when you build it next week BAM, same things in the store. Knowing NWO's RNG this is highly probable.

beckylunatic · April 2017

Trololol....

Here is another major problem with the temporary production structures. It is literally impossible for a guild to build the structures if they have not reached a minimum of rank 6 - and all the prerequisite structures to reach rank 6 - without them.

http://neverwinter.gamepedia.com/Coffer#Maximum_Capacity

If you need a Gemcutter at that stage, it's going to drain nearly all of your Wood and Stone every single time you build it. My guild is in slightly better shape as we're rank 9 and have been able to put up two Warehouses, so we do have more storage than that. Anyone who built something on additional production plots besides a Warehouse is going to be punished for that decision.

If these values aren't a mistake or a bug, they're a complete failure at helping struggling guilds.

arcticblitz · April 2017

Every time something that is beneficial and reasonably priced is introduced it either gets nerfed or priced into uselessness prior to hitting live. Can we get a Dev in here please to explain the formula they are using to justify the costs. Please don't give us the same ambiguous lines like " we don't want it to be achieved to fast" SHOW US THE MATH!

beckylunatic · April 2017

arcticblitz said:
Every time something that is beneficial and reasonably priced is introduced it either gets nerfed or priced into uselessness prior to hitting live. Can we get a Dev in here please to explain the formula they are using to justify the costs. Please don't give us the same ambiguous lines like " we don't want it to be achieved to fast" SHOW US THE MATH!

I've been doing my own math, and even with the original costs shown in the video I've linked, a guild would have had to reach GH4 to have the coffer capacity to build a Recruiter. That early in SH development, you're not splitting your Influence between GH and boon buildings, so that doesn't strike me as horribly balanced overall. My small guild reached GH4 within 3 months of Strongholds release, though I still recall how we all drove ourselves to the breaking point to get there (never forget).

A guild has the coffer capacity to build the Gemcutter at GH2 with the original shown costs. Although... I don't entirely recall if you need to hit GH3 or higher to build one of each production structure. You need quite a lot of gems even to get all the production structures up and running, so it makes sense to have the Gemcutter available sooner and for cheaper.

I think the costs from the video, at least for temporary production structures, were balanced correctly to make them have the greatest impact to smaller and less ranked-up guilds, and that balance was completely wrecked by whatever was done to adjust the costs of all structures when making the vendors last a week instead of a day. This has to be an error, but there isn't much time to fix it.

I really can't speak to the pricing of the additional vendors, as they are likely not something I can think about for a long time, at least not with the Apr 20 costs. I might have actually been able to swing one once in awhile pre-adjustment.

@terramak @nitocris83 SOS. Please send help.

ichimaruginx · April 2017

@beckylunatic @asterdahl

The original costs for MW structures were a bit steep, 63k (9k * 7 days) but not as gigantic as it is now at 80k for quite some resources. Initially, I was expecting the changes into 1 week up time to reduce the building cost for MW structures, not to make it even worse. I was expecting maybe 40k a piece (9k * ~5 days) instead of a whooping 80k!
For reference: http://i.imgur.com/cLghlLb.png

As for the storage of the Recruiter - I'll be testing it on preview and will update accordingly. But technically, the description "Can be tended for up to 100 infl per hour for your guild" sounds like it need to be tend hourly.

@adinosii

Interesting insight with the Marauder's Event. The 600 infl participation per week is certainly better than a Recruiter. Due to lack of manpower too, I have not yet been able to test the vouchers drop either. Some theorycrafting here, let's say we get the Green 90 Gems voucher on a successful multirun, we'll need 269 of those to replace the Gemcutter and 889 to cover the cost of Mysterious Merchant. That's hella lot

But I am having problems seeing how smaller guilds can do the event unless they do it alliance-wide. Assuming at least 5 people need per side (East, North, South) and 1 group to hunt the catapults (If it work like siege, there are cliffs on all 3 sides for catapult placement. I have not seen Waves 2+ so I have only experienced the East door catapult which comes on Wave 1). That is at least 15+ people we are talking about, depending on the player's strength, with some organization.

On MW structures - A rotation of 2-3 MW merch per week every 1st and 3rd week only seems possible for a GH20 guild. If a constant uptime is needed, the guild would need to have extra Supporting Structures at a decent rank (100% production bonus) to support it.

rgutscheradev · April 2017

Lots of good points here. We'll be taking a look and making some changes (we have a back-of-napkin plan already).

Big picture, we definitely want to make the economic structures viable for smaller guilds (maybe not rank 1, since you're just starting to learn how things work, but by rank 2 or 3 for sure), and we don't want people to have to tend the buildings 24/7.

More detailed info early next week.

adinosii · April 2017

rgutscheradev said:
Lots of good points here. We'll be taking a look and making some changes (we have a back-of-napkin plan already).

Good to hear. I think the general consensus here is that the Assayer (Gold) and Recruiter (Influence) are the ones that primarily need rethinking. Fix those, and I think we could live with the rest.

However....

I wouldn't mind seeing the gemcutter cost brought down as well, but that depends on whether it is meant for fairly high-level guilds (GH16-20) or lower-level ones as well. As for the Mysterious merchant, I can understand why you might want to leave that as it is but the high Gems cost basically means that only the top GH20 guilds will build it - if that is the intention, sure...we can work around that.

Regarding the Profession structures - they are feasible for high-end guilds with the current cost - not, maybe, for building them non-stop, but at least building them every now and then. I wouldn't mind seeing, say, a 30% reduction in the cost, but I'll take what I get.

ichimaruginx · April 2017

rgutscheradev said:
Lots of good points here. We'll be taking a look and making some changes (we have a back-of-napkin plan already).

I'm glad to heard that. Looking forward to the changes!

The economic structures will definitely need a review, gemcutter's cost can be toned down since it's also meant to help out smaller guilds. And cost reduction on the MW structures would be very very welcomed while mysterious merchant's gem cost can be adjusted a bit.

@beckylunatic
Update on the capacity of Recruiter (I have no space to build the Gemcutter on preview yet), seems like I'm wrong. My bad. So far the Recruiter in my preview guild is holding 900+ infl. Will keep looking an eye out and what's the cap. That's at least 9hrs capacity for now.
http://i.imgur.com/xddm1Eg.png

beckylunatic · April 2017

Judging by the progress bar for the resource filling, it might have the capacity to only require tending daily. Which would be fine by me.

scarphe · April 2017

Hi - may have been mentioned but rather than cost - what about coffer capacity ? Small guilds DO NOT even have the capacity to hold the required resources to build any of these so called temp vendors. The cost of these vendors now only help the mid-high level guilds to use up resources that are easily maxed out. No benefit for low level guilds. I hope this is seriously looked at pre-going live as currently quite frankly whoever made the decisions on current volume didn't even take into consideration coffer capacity.........

vida44 · April 2017

If you ask me the Gem and Influence temporary structure have to generate around 100k for the whole week to have a meaning.

beckylunatic · April 2017

scarphe said:
Hi - may have been mentioned but rather than cost - what about coffer capacity ? Small guilds DO NOT even have the capacity to hold the required resources to build any of these so called temp vendors. The cost of these vendors now only help the mid-high level guilds to use up resources that are easily maxed out. No benefit for low level guilds. I hope this is seriously looked at pre-going live as currently quite frankly whoever made the decisions on current volume didn't even take into consideration coffer capacity.........

It did eventually get brought up and one of the devs has replied that they are re-evaluating and we should hear more this week. (Not much time until launch.)

Temporary Structure New Costs Sky-High!

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