When I first played SW:TOR on the huge beta weekend over Thanksgiving I thought the crew skills were handled quite well. I didn't get to max level but for the amount of time I played, to roughly level 25, I thought everything worked quite well together. However, now that I have had time to spend with the crew skill system it is very inadequate in my own personal opinion. To try and keep this short and sweet I'll make a "list" of my issues with it. - The system used to give you missions is extremely frustrating. I am constantly having to choose between four companion gift missions and a fabric mission as a cybertech. This does not help me when I have all of my companions maxed out on affection. - When I am able to send my companions out on a mission I am looking for I am unable to specify which item I want them to get because each grade of materials has multiple items available so I'm unable to even specify for my companions to get one material instead of another. If I receive the "wrong" material then I'm left to hope that I get a mission for it and that I get material X this time around instead of material Y. To add to this problem, the quantities you receive from the missions is extremely small. I have had companions crit a mission and come back with two of one material, the one I really need, and ten of another. - When I reverse engineer things I am only permitted a relatively small chance to get the next tier of that item. Sometimes I make two items and get the next tier and other times I make 20 or more and still don't get the next tier. - If I do get the next tier of that item it is randomly assigned a stat. I started with green earpieces and found out that they have quite a few different blue variations for one green earpiece. Each of those blue earpieces then have multiple variations on them as well making it difficult to get the useful patterns to make and sell or patterns you would like to use for yourself. - There is no reliable way to gather stuff yourself since it is really not much different than the results you see from sending companions out on missions. This is not a terrible way to get materials, it is a much more effective way of getting materials since you can get results much quicker than you could otherwise even if those results are completely random, but it is still dominated by randomness. Sometimes you will get three of material X and sometimes you will get two of material Y from the same creatures of the same level. I really hope Bioware somehow finds a nice middle ground to remove some of the randomness and give the player more control over their crew skills because currently it feels like they really dropped the ball on what could have been a really good part of the game. I'm curious to see what some other people think about this and see if people generally agree with me or if the general consensus is that it is fine the way it is now. I would also like to add that I don't think this should be as high of a priority as a more robust LFG system or reworking the GTN so it is more user-friendly but I do think that this should definitely be pretty high on the list.
