Daniel-Magulado
commented
3 years ago Hi, thank you for making a report about this. I'll be forwarding this to our development team so they can look further into this. Thank you.
Open ThePiachu opened 3 years ago
Daniel-Magulado
commented
3 years ago Hi, thank you for making a report about this. I'll be forwarding this to our development team so they can look further into this. Thank you.
I recently had a conversation with a Glassworker from White Tiger that was disappointed his profession can be easily undercut by one person deciding to do Work Parties for some rich players on the server.
So the situation is like this - we have like 10 Glassworkers and one rich tech person. Up until now Glassworkers would make and sell their own glass being able to secure a reasonable profit. However, the rich tech person ended up getting Skids and then outsourcing like a million repetitions of "crush rock, turn silica into sand" from miners as you do. Then, they turned around to one of the Glassworkers that didn't care as much about selling themselves short and did a giant work party to make like a million glass and a few hundred AU2s. Because they could afford to do the processing in bulk, get essentially free resources from the Skid mining and they can turn the AU2s into AU4s themselves, they out-competed the Glassworkers by just having one Work Party button pusher act against their self interest.
The Glassworking skill is also fairly unique among other skills for how vulnerable it is to such Work Party undercutting since it has de-facto only two products you might need in bulk (Glass and AU2s), as well as not benefiting as much from the double-speed / parallel processing perk.
Pottery has a range of bathroom decorations, carpentry has a lot of furniture, logging is needed for logging, miners can do WPs all day and there still will be more mining work. Smelting and advanced smelting use a Blast Furnace which produces a lot of pollution, which on White Tiger is a limitation that REALLY makes that double-speed shine.
To address this issue, you probably would want to expand Glassworking to cover at least a handful of more crafting options. Glass vases for flowers, making light bulbs, scientific instruments for a lab, bottles for some drinks, reinforced glass for Trucks and modern vehicles, stained glass for decoration, maybe some sort of silicon wafers for advanced circuits, etc. Kilns should probably also produce a little bit of pollution to make the production speed more important.
With these kind of changes Glassworking will be less vulnerable to being completely outsourced to one Work Party "scab" ;).