Develop discussion

Alright, so this needs to be brought up. I know we started it with the espionage discussion, but I believe it has some seriously good ideas with it.

Develop. We all know what it is, and how terrible it can be(and how it usually is). The RP behind it is fun, the command portion, not so much. The percentage idea is a valid thought, just so you are aware of how your development is going. It’s better than mindlessly chopping away at it, throwing millions of credits at it, and still not going anywhere.

I’d say that nearly every development this TL has not repaid for itself. This amount of failure can lead to less developments, less RP, etc.

Fire away with your critiques, criticisms, etc.

Here’s a rant that I’ve been on for a while. Don’t want to read a rant, just skip my post.

Every time this subject is brought up, a player, or usually an IMM, will state that developments should be done for the RP and you shouldn’t base it on the idea of being able to make your credits back and should base it on enhancing RP. I just can’t fathom this concept for anything other than non-engineering clans, otherwise it just makes no sense at all to me. That’d be like saying “That 1.5 million credit ship? You should sell it for about 25,000 instead because it enhances people’s RP and just eat the credit and time difference.” Their RP is that they are a business, businesses are around to make money to reinvest in their business to make more money. Dropping 50-150 million on a development that might net you about 10 million in return, just does not make any sense. There’s no ifs ands or butts about it. There’s no amount of “for the greater good of RP” that makes it logical either.

Depending on the development and skills of the clan leader/person in charge of developments, you can make your credits back easy on your development. Let’s not even get into the fact that most (not all) of the time, you’ll have cargo runners supporting your development funds since cargo is still the most efficient way to gather a mass amount of credits in a short time.

Personally I like the idea of making development a percentage system rather than this random pass-fail thing. I’ve seen developments range from 500k credits to 150million — that’s a crazy difference, and the fact that it’s essentially random can be enraging at times.

I’ll be starting another topic to talk about the necessity of cargo running, as it is something that has been discussed IG with high frequency.

As for developments, let’s find a way to change it.

I am all for:
Development being a percentage system.
Individuals being able to develop at great cost/time consumption individually outside clans.
Improvements not just being universal: IE, not just a new metal that makes all weapons better, but specialization in specific fields like a master of producing vibro-blades.
Possibly setting a cap for maximum cost for a single development at imm discretion for utility. (spending 200 million on making a piece of jewelry that boosts your strength by 1 would be silly.)

What if it worked like this:

1) Developer submits an application. If it’s not viable, it gets rejected with a reason appended. If it is viable, the developer and the Imm that would work on it arrange to chat ingame.

2) Developer and Imm agree upon a completion value denoted in some kind of points depending on the size of the development, e.g. if you wanted a new-model ISD, that’s many points, if you wanted that +1 STR bracelet, that’s much fewer points.

3) Developer can then set out to reach the completion value in a combination of two ways:
3a) Develop command, which has a slightly higher success rate and generates points every time it procs.
3b) Submit logs of the development RP which can count for some value towards the completion total depending on their quality.

4) Profit.

Basically, the idea is to make it so RP can compare so that you’re not 100% dependent on the random number generator, and that you feel like you’re making progress rather than waiting for a jackpot. My biggest pain point as a developer was always never knowing if I was “close.” This should help that because you would be able to RP your face off and get a development done, the work needed would be sized by the magnitude of the development project, and some of the power would be taken away from the RNG.

I really like that idea, Coreceren.

Already developers have to stay pretty close with IMMs through the development process. I would love for there to be an optional way to RP the whole [or at least more of the] development. I also realize for some clans/people that’s the part they dread the most. Letting the one run the command and the others RP would provide options in how to achieve the goal. I like more options.

Also what happened with solo character developments? I still support that.