... a more inane crafting system than what we have?

There is no complexity. Randomness isn't complex or hard, it's futile and insulting. Even if you choose a companion with a critical chance and get their affection to 10k, even a 99.9% chance for a crit would mean that you could fail your craft 1000 times (or more) in a row.

And RE ... for the love of God, why do I even have the option of REing a blue item with cunning into a purple item with a shield chance secondary? Who in your brain trust thought that one up?

What is fun about randomness? Is your development team addicted to the slots in Vegas or something? This takes zero skill, far too much time and more money than what it is worth. Even investing in your companions' affection does not improve matters in a commensurate amount with respect to the money/effort to get them to 10k. Boosts in efficiency mean nothing, and when aug slots become craftable the crit chance in crafting will mean nothing as well.

Perhaps I'm spoiled. I'm coming from Star Wars Galaxies, which (pre-NGE) had crafting that was a game unto itself. It had a system where skill mattered, where knowledge of your craft mattered, where time in researching and harvesting resources mattered, where crafted items actually had a market because they made a difference for people, which had crafting quests (like the RIS quest or Mando armor) that were challenging, fun, and worth the effort.

Sorry, /rant off. Just needed to vent while I wait for another 5 implants to cook, so I can fail at REing them at 10% chance even though the comps crafting them all have 10k affection. I know, I know, if I'm this mad, I should probably drop it all for slicing and other skills that pull in stuff that sells. It's just that I spent 7 years in another game crafting wonderful things and my poor mind just can't believe it's so pointless here.

What a joke, and it's on us.

This isn't SWG.

Crafting in SWG was a main play style. Your character was a crafter and did nothing else. If you wanted a combat character (back when you got one character per server per account), you bought a second account. Typically, you needed the lot spaces for your crafter anyway...

Crafting here is a mini-game at best. It isn't meant to be a play focus, but a side line. It isn't meant to take up your gaming time as you concentrate only on crafting.

The crafting system for SWTOR works for SWTOR because it isn't designed for people to do nothing but craft. I suppose you still could, but then you get the type of whine you are giving about the system being inane and boring...

Few people want a complex and time consuming crafting system. Most players want a system like they currently have that gives them a little something extra to do while they are getting on with more important business.

... a more inane crafting system than what we have?

 

There is no complexity. Randomness isn't complex or hard, it's futile and insulting. Even if you choose a companion with a critical chance and get their affection to 10k, even a 99.9% chance for a crit would mean that you could fail your craft 1000 times (or more) in a row.

 

And RE ... for the love of God, why do I even have the option of REing a blue item with cunning into a purple item with a shield chance secondary? Who in your brain trust thought that one up?

 

What is fun about randomness? Is your development team addicted to the slots in Vegas or something? This takes zero skill, far too much time and more money than what it is worth. Even investing in your companions' affection does not improve matters in a commensurate amount with respect to the money/effort to get them to 10k. Boosts in efficiency mean nothing, and when aug slots become craftable the crit chance in crafting will mean nothing as well.

 

Perhaps I'm spoiled. I'm coming from Star Wars Galaxies, which (pre-NGE) had crafting that was a game unto itself. It had a system where skill mattered, where knowledge of your craft mattered, where time in researching and harvesting resources mattered, where crafted items actually had a market because they made a difference for people, which had crafting quests (like the RIS quest or Mando armor) that were challenging, fun, and worth the effort.

 

Sorry, /rant off. Just needed to vent while I wait for another 5 implants to cook, so I can fail at REing them at 10% chance even though the comps crafting them all have 10k affection. I know, I know, if I'm this mad, I should probably drop it all for slicing and other skills that pull in stuff that sells. It's just that I spent 7 years in another game crafting wonderful things and my poor mind just can't believe it's so pointless here.

 

What a joke, and it's on us.

Based on this post, this guys probably has not done much crafting ingame yet. The actural crit craft ratio is something like 1:5 with a toon with 10k affection, without 10K affection its more like 1:10. Out of about 20 items I crafted in a row, 5 were crits with aguments on a level 30 modable item, now a level 50 item its probably a higher ratio.

Based on this post, this guys probably has not done much crafting ingame yet. The actural crit craft ratio is something like 1:5 with a toon with 10k affection, without 10K affection its more like 1:10. Out of about 20 items I crafted in a row, 5 were crits with aguments on a level 30 modable item, now a level 50 item its probably a higher ratio.

400 Armormech, 400 Armstech, 400 Biochem, 400 Cybertech, 400 Synthweaving, 360 Artifice. I think I know a little about crafting, thank you. I also know that 10% is 10%, whether for a level 30 item or a level 50 item. If you think 10% means different things for different levels, I'd advise you to stock up on materials and prepare for disappointment.

When aug slots become craftable, what good will crit be? And they want to give us a Legacy unlock to increase it ... for what?

Add to that that purple mats no longer come from rich missions.

I keep stats. Right now, for Blue items, 10% RE chance, I have 41 new schematics out of my last 461 attempts. That's 8.89%. And that is my point. Just because the tooltip says "10%" doesn't mean you get 1 in 10. Just because your companions all have 10k affection, that doesn't mean you get 1 in 10. Even though my rate is low, it's just as likely to go lower in the near future as it is to go higher ... I haven't crafted anywhere near the number of items required for the Law of Large Numbers to come into play (that's the statistical law most people confuse with the Law of Probability). So my so-called skill in crafting, as capped as it can be, has done nothing to improve my ability to craft worthwhile items. In fact, I'm behind the curve.

Crew Skills are not "skills". They take 0 skill. They're a mechanical process bound by probability, and nothing BioWare can do with the current system will change the fact that you can go forever, no matter what your affection level is or your companion's skills are, and never get a crit.

That's the nature of probability, and skill plays no part.

It's not like this is new ground. MMO's have been around 10+ years. Few have had good crafting systems. Some have failed completely. It's true that some of the crafted items you can learn schematics for are truly worthwhile ... but as with my example in the OP: a purple implant, primary stat cunning, with a secondary of shield? Shield? Who uses cunning? Operatives, snipers, gunslingers, scoundrels. Does one of them use a shield? No. So *** is that particular schematic doing in the table of what is available?

Dangling randomly passed-out goodies is as fun as hitting the slots -- it's pretty cool the first few times you hit, but when you realize how much you are losing overall you move on to a game that requires some skill, if you have any. Anyone with any skill would not craft pointless gear that requires high-end mats, but BioWare's schematics scheme just cost me tens of thousands of credits worth of materials giving me a Tempest build on a level 49 smuggler/agent implant. BioWare's game mechanics force me to craft like a clueless hack. If I get lucky, I get something good.

So if you like playing roulette, I guess you can call this a neat system. BioWare should stop calling these "skills", however.

This isn't SWG.

True enough.

Crafting here is a mini-game at best. It isn't meant to be a play focus, but a side line. It isn't meant to take up your gaming time as you concentrate only on crafting.

And that's the problem. Just like space is a mini-game. Just like they HAD to put them in because (1) for crafting, all MMOs pretty much have them and so this game would look one-dimensional without it, and (2) for space, this is STAR wars, not ground wars. But relegating them to mini-games makes this a failure long-term. For space. BioWare says they have plans "they can't wait to talk about" ... a funny thing to say; if that's the case, then talk about them. For crafting? They keep making little tweaks that they think will matter, will make some sort of difference, but you're right in that it remains in essence a mini-game.

SWG required people to "main-spec" into crafting and that was fine, even a good thing. Same with entertainers. It made the game so much richer and more social. It created a viable player economy. I gotta give BioWare a bit of credit trying to go beyond that limitation by making your "crew" those "alts" who would have been the crafters, freeing up your own spec for combat. But that's as far as it goes. Crew skill bonuses mean little right now, and will mean even less come 1.3.

If they wanted to give us a mini-game, they should have given us Pazaak.

True enough.

 

 

 

And that's the problem. Just like space is a mini-game. Just like they HAD to put them in because (1) for crafting, all MMOs pretty much have them and so this game would look one-dimensional without it, and (2) for space, this is STAR wars, not ground wars. But relegating them to mini-games makes this a failure long-term. For space. BioWare says they have plans "they can't wait to talk about" ... a funny thing to say; if that's the case, then talk about them. For crafting? They keep making little tweaks that they think will matter, will make some sort of difference, but you're right in that it remains in essence a mini-game.

 

SWG required people to "main-spec" into crafting and that was fine, even a good thing. Same with entertainers. It made the game so much richer and more social. It created a viable player economy. I gotta give BioWare a bit of credit trying to go beyond that limitation by making your "crew" those "alts" who would have been the crafters, freeing up your own spec for combat. But that's as far as it goes. Crew skill bonuses mean little right now, and will mean even less come 1.3.

 

If they wanted to give us a mini-game, they should have given us Pazaak.

Main spec'ing into crafting was not fine. In fact, it was the complete opposite of fine. Unless you are one of the few people who enjoyed boring, inane, work tasks that makes an accountants life look epic...

For a majority of people, the SWG crafting system was "not fun". My main was a crafter from launch (though thankfully through-out Beta I concentrated on Ranger and Rifleman testing) and I got a second account just because I couldn't do anything with my buddies because crafters had little to no combat skills...which also made placing harvesters on planets like Dathomir problematic.

My lots were all taken up by storage houses, factories and harvesters. I spent hours surveying and sampling looking for the best materials. I had spread sheets and dry erase boards and note cards and Word files filled with notes.

It was interesting for about 2 months and then...boring. Mind-numbing. Ridiculous. A complete time wasting system that helped hide the fact that SWG didn't have anything else going for it.

There will most likely never be a crafting system like SWG's in a main-stream MMO because the number of people who think that kind of drudgery is fun is very, very small. Crafting shouldn't take up huge portions of game time and thankfully SWTOR's crafting lets me concentrate on the fun stuff of questing, leveling and playing with friends.

SWG was a social game because for over 5 years there was nothing else to do but be social. Not because of entertainers and crafting (and how many people got buff's from live entertainers after ways to macro the process were discovered?) but because the lack of real content meant people had to make their own. Until 5 or 6 years passed, all we had were base-busting and PvP on either ground or (my fav) in space.

I'm thankful crafting is what it is in this game, and not a rehash of a bad system that made my real job seem exciting.

Let me clarify something, because I mucked it up a bit with imprecise language and I'm sure someone will want to make this argument (someone already has) and you're just proving my point for me ... I'd like to disabuse you of the notion so you might come up with an argument against me that might change my mind.

You have to realize that there is a difference between your success rate and your chance for success.

Your success rate, if you keep track, is a matter of record, of fact, a thing of the past. It has absolutely nothing to do with probability because it already is. So when I say that I had 41 RE successes out of 461 attempts for Blue items with a "Chance to Research a Schematic" of 10%, that means my rate of success is 8.89%. Don't confuse the fact that since it can be stated as a percentage that it has anything to do with chance ... it's a measure of what is.

On the other hand, as the tooltip says, my chance for success is 10%. Chance for success is not a measure of what is. It is not affected by what has happened in the past, since probability is neither fair nor unfair. It is a prediction of future performance and, in this case, it's telling me that

1. no matter what the skill level required, whether it is a Skill 1 schematic or Skill 400 schematic
   
2. no matter what my current skill level is, between 1 and 400
   
3. no matter what my affection is with the companion who crafted the item
   
4. no matter whether the companion who crafted the item has a crit for that skill
   

that my chance to fail to get a new schematic will be 90% of the time, every single time.

And, should I succeed with my RE, I have a random chance at producing something useful or useless, because in the eyes of the Devs having equipment that boosts your shield chance is equally important for smugglers and agents as is something that increases your accuracy, crit, power, surge or alacrity. After all, a "skilled" crafter should know what a customer would need and what would be totally useless.

Capping my skill, and capping my companions' affection for me, would seem to call for an increase in my actual results, not in some random factor that may or may not produce favorable results. Having some "skill" would seem to indicate that a skill 400 crafter REing a skill 1 item should succeed all the time, since the item is "simple" and your so-called skill highly developed.

As it is, though, the way probability and random chance work, I am highly likely to fail at my next RE on a Blue 10% chance item. That will further reduce my rate below 8.89%. The odds are not in my (or your) favor, no matter how developed my "skill" is. You may think that I'd have an even chance of things staying the same ... that's naive. I have a 90% chance to fail and a 10% chance to improve. You may think that since I've had a bit of a losing streak -- not a big one, but definitely worse "than typical" given the chance for success -- that I'm "due" for a winning streak. That's just plain stupid, and ignorant of how probability works. Over the course of the game, if it lasts for years and I continue (stupidly, perhaps) to struggle at doing this, then after several tens of thousands of RE attempts I may have a reasonable expectation of things "evening out."

But evening out to what? A 10% rate of success to reflect my 10% chance of success that is independent of whatever "skill" I may naively think I have developed.

But that would mean crafting is actually a skill, not a mini-game, not a poor excuse for what should be a robust system in a time where MMOs have become fairly complex.

Main spec'ing into crafting was not fine. In fact, it was the complete opposite of fine.

If so...

For a majority of people, the SWG crafting system was "not fun".

Why make this statement?

If you didn't want to craft, you didn't have to have anything to do with it. If you didn't want to craft, you could still use your lots for harvesters and sell resources to crafters. If you didn't like crafting, no one was twisting your arm to do so. So why kvetch so much?

Besides, your claim is quite a stretch. Say instead that "in your own experience, a majority of the people thought crafting was not fun." In my experience, just about every hard-core player in my guild had a crafter. And they enjoyed it. Some of them were the best on the server, whether it was armor, weapons, food, stims, spice, pets, what have you. We made a LOT of money from it because as a group we were just that good. Crafted items had an impact on the game; they mattered.

Truth be told, an argument can be made that SWG's system was purely mechanical, based on min/max equations. Knowledge of how those equations worked made you good. But that, for crafting, is what counts for skill, just as know when to armor break, when to cc, when to proc your crits, when to trigger your channeled attacks, and how all that fits in your rotation ... all of that counts as skill in combat.

The point is that it took skill.

If you didn't have the stomach for skillful crafting and what it required, then fine. In SWTOR, however, the crafting system has failed in making things challenging. It has failed in producing goods worth keeping outside of leveling a toon, with the exception of high-end biochem goods for non-biochem players. BW makes senseless adjustments to the system, like introducing War Hero schematics for crafting ... so you can fail the majority of the time to produce an augment slot on an item and not even have something you can RE to reclaim the materials you wasted on the attempt. That was 1.2. What's in store for 1.3? Oh? Forget those schematics you just bought, because this mindless system of crafting has become, if possible, more mindless with the addition of "add-an-aug-to-anything!" craftable kits. If end-game crafted gear could get any less valuable, it's about to. And with every crafter of any "skill" being able to make them with the same success rate, will they really be worth anything past the first day they are available?

I'd prefer not to have to compete with someone who's idea of "skill" is having a Chinese Gold Farmer on speed dial and using an auto-clicker program to bot out augment kits.

If BW is going to keep a mini-game mentality about crafting, then they should reduce the costs of it to put it in line with its in-game value, so those of us who find it amusing don't have to pay a fortune to do it. If they want a real crafting system for a real MMO, then they need to toss the entire system out and put in something that requires skill instead of dumb luck.

After all, how happy would you be if your level 50 Merc had a 10% accuracy rating ... no matter what gear you had, no matter what skills you chose, no matter what your expertise, no matter what defense your target has, no matter whether your target was a level 1 gizka or a level 50 Sage? That's the state of crafting as it is today.

What's in store for 1.3? Oh? Forget those schematics you just bought, because this mindless system of crafting has become, if possible, more mindless with the addition of "add-an-aug-to-anything!" craftable kits. If end-game crafted gear could get any less valuable, it's about to.

This is a strong indicator that no one on the development team is in charge of crafting and economy. The "throw things at the wall and see what sticks" method is getting pretty depressing.

My apologies, btw, to the Pazaak players out there, I really didn't think when I compared it to crafting.

After all, Pazaak takes some skill ... knowing when to take a hit, when to stand pat, depending on your opponent's score. That's a ton more skill than crafting requires.

The statement was made because it was true. Initially, the concept seemed pretty awesome. It had a complexity right up to the point that you figured it all out...then it just became a chore.

In all truth, SWG's crafting differs from SWTOR's crafting only in the amount of time it consumed.

Gather. Create sub-components. Craft finished products. Or, in SWTOR's case it becomes "gather, craft, RE until you get the next level of that item, repeat until 400".

Time consumption isn't complex, but you had to spend epic amounts of time just finding the right materials...the best spawned on your server. Whole web-sites were dedicated to what materials spawned on what servers...but that doesn't make the system complex. Gathering the materials just meant slapping a harvester or 10 on a spot and keeping the power fed (unless you had the various "free power" adds) and removing what you gathered.

Spread-sheets were created so you could plug in materials and get an idea of how good your items were...but that isn't complex either.

Basically, SWG's crafting became a huge time sink involving massive amounts of book-keeping and organizational ability...nothing more.

Time consuming menial tasks aren't fun...as many people learned after crafting in SWG for a while. Oh, some people not only liked it but became absolute masters of their respective crafts...and had no social life outside of SWG because they HAD to spend huge amounts of time in game if they wanted to stay on top.

No, thank you, but my days of number-crunching are blessedly behind me. I'll stick to mini-game that lets me do more than just sit and stare at numbers.

Just about anything in an MMO is going to be a time sink. And if you think that the use of time in SWG vs SWTOR is the same, then you really didn't understand crafting in SWG.

Sure, I can send out crew missions and log off, just like I could start factory runs. There are a couple of differences though. "Spending time" in SWG through factory runs meant producing mass quantities of the exact item I wanted, no waste of resources or credits. "Spending time" in SWTOR on crew missions means producing ONE item at a time, if I already have the schematic I want, or taking between an 80% or 90% chance to fail on an item I need to RE ... and even if I successfully RE the item, I have a random chance of producing a schematic that is totally useless (eg., cunning items with shield chance).

And as for resource gathering, most of us were in it for the long haul. If you knew how resource spawns worked, you knew that sooner or later you'd get the resource with the stats you needed. You knew to check SWGCraft.com to keep up on the latest resource spawns for your server. You knew how to use that database to pull resources from the past with a resource deed, if you needed something immediately.

For crafting, knowledge = skill. From what you say, it sounds like you knew very little about resource gates. Hehe, that's about the only way anyone could possibly suggest that crafting in SWG was simple -- that you didn't understand gates. It wasn't just that varying stats on resources produced items of different qualities. Understanding the whole concept of quality-stratified resources and how those gates interacted with subcomponents and main components of a craft made a crafter a master crafter.

If you had to rely on spreadsheets, you obviously didn't understand what was going on. I could eyeball a new resource for my craft and let you know whether you'd hit cap with it ... particularly if it was a Class 1 or 2 resource. Those were the ones people always overlooked because their gates were so low.

"Time consuming menial tasks aren't fun." Do you enjoy crafting in this game? Do you enjoy having absolutely no control over what you craft? Let me work out the numbers for you as an example. Level 33 Expert Spec Ops Blaster pistol ... purple schematic, secondaries of accuracy, power and surge, a very nice weapon for a gunslinger. It's derived from the Overkill Spec Ops Blaster. On average, you will need 17.5 minutes minimum to craft enough greens to get an RE to Overkill, if you are lucky enough to get that as your first blue schematic. If you are lucky enough to get the Expert model on your first successful RE of your blues, then add another 3 hours. In that time, you've spent about 18,000 credits on materials.

Now, let's say you have a run of bad luck, because with SWTOR's "skill-based" crafting system bad luck is a factor.

We'll assume that it takes you twice as long as average to get a successful RE, and that you don't get the RE you want until it's the last possible one available. That means you need to grind 3 blues from greens, then 5 purples from that Overkill blue. You'll spend 35 minutes to get a single blue schematic; 2.5 hours to get the one you need. You'll then spend 6 hours to get a purple schematic, but 30 hours to get the one you need.

You've just spent a minimum of a day and a half worth of game time to produce a pistol that, personally, you may use for a few levels. But maybe people will buy it. Once you have the schematic, you can make as many as you want. I don't know about you, but mid-level purple blasters on my server don't sell that often.

There's an even greater cost, though, and you may find this surprising. That string of bad luck that had you craft a total of 160 items to learn 1 schematic? It cost you about 1.5 million credits in materials. Of course, that's if you have to run crew missions to get your basic mats, but then hand harvesting requires some knowledge of where to look (oh my God, you may actually need to KNOW something to craft successfully) and is a time sink in itself, particularly since it takes away from questing, warzones, whatever.

Do you really want a crafting system that will cost you 1.5 million credit and a day and a half of time to produce one single mid-level item that may be usable for 4 levels and probably will not sell on the GTN?

Don't you want to be able to quickly obtain schematics not just for you, not just for your companions, but for players who could become customers?

The fact of the matter is this: lack of a skill-based crafting system will mean that we will NEVER get items to craft that cannot be beat by quest rewards. Why is that? Because when randomization rules crafting results, autoclickers and bots win the day. Anyone who can record a macro in an overlay program just needs time to be the "best" crafter around. You think the Devs don't know that? You wonder why end-game craftables are crap compared to quest rewards from Hard Modes, Operations, and what you can buy with warzone comms? It's because if craftable gear was worthwhile at endgame, then any bot could produce it.

If you really want some mini-game that's fun and a bit challenging, join the hordes demanding Pazaak. If you want gently mind-numbing crafting with no variations in stats to worry about and some long-term value, choose Biochem. If you want, however, gear that matters and the ability to craft with skill what you know is valuable -- instead of being ruled by random fluctuations that produce as much pure crap as gold -- then stop arguing for a system based on probability. The system as is does not just consume time and credits, it WASTES time and credits. When I figure on spending years playing a game, I have no problem spending time at it.

It's the clear, purposeful WASTE of my time by BioWare with this current system that insults me.

I'm going to tell a story about what a good crafting system can do for a game. While this isn't specifically about a gated resource, since I've been talking about them I'll explain what they are in the spoiler below ... the basic concept still applies.

This all happened because of a crafting system that required some measure of skill.

Our med buffs crafter recognized that the stats on the current spawn of Rancor meat would produce med buffs about 400 points higher than the current server max. (Yeah, med buffs ... old school SWG) Not only would this give us a leg up in PVP, it would help with questing and make our docs tons of credits in the buff lines. So, as a guild event we organized a Rancor hunt. We found a city with an entertainer specialization for our Ent buffs, then a medical specialization for our doc buffs, then went as two groups of 20 to hunt Rancors. We had slicers slicing mission terminals to boost our credit rewards on Rancor missions and to boost the levels of the missions since, at the time, the higher the level of the mob, the more you could harvest from it.

Of course, a few Imp guilds knew about the spawn, too, and there was quite a bit of open-world PVP going on on Dathomir that week or so when that meat spawn was in shift.

We got enough meat for our buff crafter to make thousands of buff packs, literally several years worth of goods. He made tons of credits selling spare packs, and our docs made tons of credits because our buffs hit for 400 points more than anyone else's.

Him being able to craft these depended on having architects to make factories and harvesters for power and chemical resources. It depended on the entertainers to buff the harvesting groups. It depended on the rangers to buff the amount the groups could harvest. It generated a great deal of social activity in the running of the groups, in the open-world PVP, in the buff lines for months after that.

All of that happened because of a "tedious" crafting system in which knowing and skill played a part, in which randomness played no part. And in the tedium of crafting those buff packs, our crafter made THOUSANDS of top-quality items that people paid a lot of credits for in the time it takes, in this game, to produce a few items ruled by random choice and of questionable, fixed quality.

The crafting in SWG improved all aspects of the game. The fact that I have even one story about crafting says something. You have any good stories to share about the time you finally RE'd the level 17 item you wanted, or about how you critted a craft of a grade 18 augment and got 2 instead of 1? Please share.

True enough.

 

 

 

And that's the problem. Just like space is a mini-game. Just like they HAD to put them in because (1) for crafting, all MMOs pretty much have them and so this game would look one-dimensional without it, and (2) for space, this is STAR wars, not ground wars. But relegating them to mini-games makes this a failure long-term. For space. BioWare says they have plans "they can't wait to talk about" ... a funny thing to say; if that's the case, then talk about them. For crafting? They keep making little tweaks that they think will matter, will make some sort of difference, but you're right in that it remains in essence a mini-game.

 

SWG required people to "main-spec" into crafting and that was fine, even a good thing. Same with entertainers. It made the game so much richer and more social. It created a viable player economy. I gotta give BioWare a bit of credit trying to go beyond that limitation by making your "crew" those "alts" who would have been the crafters, freeing up your own spec for combat. But that's as far as it goes. Crew skill bonuses mean little right now, and will mean even less come 1.3.

 

If they wanted to give us a mini-game, they should have given us Pazaak.

At the same time I like being able to have my crew members do the resources and crafting, I would also like to be able to do it myself. And my one problem with non-dedicated crafting toons is that no one has trouble making themselves things so there's no reason to buy and sell things. Kills in-game economy.

I have a great many craftng stories from SWG as well, but that doesn't make it a good system. I have memorable stories about really bad days at work, and that doesn't make those bad days any better.

Crafting was a focus of SWG. It isn't a focus of SWTOR. Trying to make SWTOR's crafting a focus won't work because SWTOR focused on something else: Story.

For every minute the SWG Dev Team spent on crafting, the SWTOR team spent it on story. Everyone reaps the benefit of that time.

I've no doubt that we will see changes to crafting, just as we will see changes to everything else, but making crafting complex and time consuming won't work here. Crafting is a minor, secondary mini-game that allows an extra avenue to players to get gear and make a few credits. It still requires dedication and effort but what it doesn't require is single minded focus on just crafting.

Few games could succeed in crafting the way SWG did, but SWG did it by skimping elsewhere. There are enough grind-fests in MMOs without adding to the mess by over-complicating crafting here.

Oh, and as far as your story goes...yeah, that is how I made most of my money in SWG. Early in Starsider's existence came a spawn of a specific resource required for armor and weapons (and later, for starship chassis). I really wish I could remember the name of it, because I somehow lucked on to a huge amount of this stuff. No other spawn of this material every came close to the stats of this one spawn (at least while I was still playing) and whenever I needed ready cash I'd throw a couple thousand units up on the trade forum to the highest bidder. While nice, I always hated the fact that crafting in that game was even more a slave to the RNG than any other game I've ever played.

I'm not saying that BW should replicate SWG's crafting system here (and yes, you're not saying that I am, either) but do you really want chance to determine if you are a "good" crafter? Maybe a crafting mini-game is all some people want but, as I said, it will never generate a player economy as such. BW will have to keep crafted items that can be ground out by botters to substandard quality. No one will want to buy them. It's a shame, too, because SOME item builds actually produce quality goods. A purple weapon, while having lower endurance and aim/cunning than a custom/orange item with same level mods in it, will have far superior secondary stats. What you gain in accuracy, power, crit, surge and/or alacrity will beat what that aim/cunning would have done for you, and you can pop an aug in to boost your endurance a bit and whatever other stat you want. But people generally don't know what's available because crafting for anyone beyond yourself and/or your friends simply isn't viable.

Who wants to spend the time to grind out 3 blue schematics and 14 purple schematics for every single green that you have, just so you can have the different builds? Just because, given the current system, you cannot guarantee that you'll have the shortest path to the purple build you want? Because the current system is absent of any skill and based completely upon chance, you have as good of a shot of getting the purple item you want in as little as 2 crafts (successful green RE to the blue you want, successful blue RE to the purple you want) or 130 crafts (RE fail rate double expected, never getting the RE you need until the last available). And that number of 130 is not the worst case scenario. Worst case is that you never get it, no matter how many years you work at it. It's not likely, but it's possible. That's the Law of Probability for you.

Most crafters I know want to be the best they can be. Since you cannot change the quality of items in this game, that leaves you with variety instead ... different items, different builds. Using my Armstech as an example -- discounting any custom item (can't RE) or mission schematic item (only 3 REs) and item mods (augs or barrels) -- I have 172 green weapon schematics. Those RE into 516 blue schematics, which further RE into 7,224 purple schematics. On average, it takes 5 green crafts to get 1 blue, then 10 blue crafts to get 1 purple. On average, you need 15 green crafts for all 3 blue schematics and 140 blue crafts to get 14 purple schematics. That's per item. Over all, if fate favors you, you will craft around 2,600 green items and 72,000 blue items to get all of your schematics.

72,000 blue items. On average. By hand. If you're not unlucky (not that skill or companion affection has anything to do with it).

And you said SWG crafting was a tedious grind? Compared to what?

At the end of all that crafting, you have nothing but schematics. You have no products to use or sell. I haven't even factored in crafting those item mods or REing out the mission-reward schematics that can still generate the critical/overkill/redoubt combos.

The one good thing about that number, 72,000? Correct me if I'm wrong, stats people, but that should be large enough that the Law of Large Numbers has a reasonable chance of coming into play. Interpretation: your success rate may actually stick close to your chance for success. That is, if being capped on skill and still having a 10% chance to RE a level 8 Overkill Techblade of Embattled Vigor is a "good thing".

So much for the notion that crafting is not a ridiculous, mind-numbing grind in SWTOR. Those numbers are solid estimates based on the assumption that your rate for RE success approaches your chance for RE success. I'm still running crew missions and I've got the time, so I'll do the calculations on how much time and credits grinding out that many schematics takes ... it's not a simple calculation, but I have the time.

You have a minute? How about 5 million.

Okay, I promised some numbers for those not convinced that the mini-game of crafting is far more costly than it is worth. Here's a breakdown for Armstech. The following is what it would take to grind out all purple schematics for all weapons; excluding augments and barrels, excluding custom weapons and schematics that start as blues. This is for the 172 green weapon schematics.

As I said above, on average you will need to craft 2,600 green and 72,000 blue items to get all your purple schematics.

Let's put time into "crew" terms. Crew-minutes, crew-hours, crew-days. Time doesn't move the same for them, because you can be ticking down up to 5 different crew clocks at once. If you really want to speed things up, then (1) get to level 48, (2) advance your class story until you have 5 companions, (3) get their affection up to 10k, (4) NOW start your crafting grind. You can cut 15% off the times, right?

From the base rate (no affection or skill bonus) crafting green weapons ranges from 1 minute to 5 minutes 02 seconds. Crafting those 2600 weapons will take you 168,000 crew-seconds of time, or approximately 47 crew-hours of time. 47 hours isn't that bad, is it?

Let's talk about the blues. Crafting times run from 3 minutes to 25 minutes, 10 seconds: triple to quintuple the time. Add to that the enormous additional number of crafts needed. Your blue item crafts will take your crew 4,809,000 crew-minutes to complete. Put that together with the greens, and you basically have your 5 million minutes worth of crafting.

That's roughly 1.5 crew-YEARS.

Or, if you try to max your time savings, more than 3.5 real months of sending companions on missions, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, no time for anything else except for maybe doing your REs ... which, at 4 seconds a piece, will have you clicking the RE button for a day and a half solid.

It doesn't end there, though. You need materials.

I have three skill 400 crafters that use scavenging, so I know where to go to farm. I know the best routes, the best methods. In 30 minutes, I can have a minimum of a full stack of each metal and compound (4 items) for any particular grade (2 for grade 6). I think that's doing well, so I'll use it as a measuring stick. 100 items of any mat in 30 minutes.

Here are the normal mats required for all those crafted items:

• 8100 Desh
  
• 6200 Silica
  
• 9300 Aluminum
  
• 8400 Laminoid
  
• 6200 Bronzium
  
• 9000 Plastoid
  
• 18600 Chanlon
  
• 16800 Plasteel
  
• 9300 Phobium
  
• 8400 Laqerous
  
• 17000 Bondite
  
• 14000 Fibermesh
  
• 15200 Diatium
  
• 15800 Resinite
  
• 34100 Electrum
  
• 27900 Polyplast
  
• 18000 Durasteel
  
• 14570 Zal Alloy
  

(Yes, it's true. for green Armstech weapon schematics and their RE'd counterparts, none use Neutronium or Amorphous Carbonite ... too bad, because you'll harvest it anyway.)

All told, you will need to harvest 23,460 or so scavenging nodes. And that's not crew time, that's real, at-the-keyboard, know-your-node-maps, drive-right-click-mount-drive harvesting. It'll take you at least 540 hours, if you go as fast as I do. If you stop to fight or harvest droids, up the time because (1) nodes take 4 seconds (regardless of companion efficiency) and fighting droids takes longer, plus (2) droids drop on average 1.5 items per kill, nodes will give you on average 6 items per harvest. Oh, by the way, don't sweat the time investment. 540 hours only comes out to 3 weeks of actual time, and you'll be spending a lot more just sending out missions.

Two more things for the Armstech crafter: fluxes and blue mission materials. For fluxes, sending out missions is the most cost-effective means of getting particularly Brazing Flux and Thermoplast Flux, but sending missions means occupying your crew with other matters than crafting. Lets go to the Crew Skills Vendor.

Here are the amounts of the different fluxes you will need and their cost from the vendor:

• 750 Conductive Flux @ 10 ea. = 7500 credits
  
• 690 Insulating Flux @ 50 ea. = 34,500 credits
  
• 1200 Brazing Flux @ 200 ea. = 240,000 credits
  
• 1830 Thermoplast Flux @ 400 ea. = 732,000 credits
  

or a little over 1 million credits for just your fluxes. Chump change, when it gets down to it.

For mission materials, you will need:

• 13,440 Carbo-plas
  
• 13,440 Plastifiber
  
• 13,440 Flexiglass
  
• 22,400 Phrik
  
• 22,400 Plexoid
  
• 11,200 Dallorian Alloy
  

Problem here is not just that it will cost you money, but crew time. So much for that estimate on how long it will take to craft those items! I won't go into the details here: crew missions are, again, governed to some extent by random chance. You can't be certain that any particular mission with a particular yield and, therefore, cost effectiveness, will be available at any given time. So, based on yield of abundant missions and their costs, how much will all this mission crafting materials set you back?

Try 13.7 million credits. You see why I called the flux cost chump change? And the estimated time to run all those missions? Well, to be perfectly honest, my estimate is a bit rough. If you can manage to get a Rich Yield mission for every one of the thousands of missions you will have to run, you can probably take 50% off of this estimate. You'll need it. Abundant Yield missions will take you 61 crew-years.

Yes, you read that right. 61 years of active crew missions.

Will this game last that long?

BioWare, did you bother doing the calculations before you made up this system ... or even after?

Even at 5 companions with 10k affection running around the clock, day in day out, that's about 10 years of your life without eating, sleeping, partying, breathing, having a family, whatever.

Now, please tell me again that SWG crafting was a tedious grind compared to this.

Here's the punch line. After:

• harvesting 23,000 nodes to get 257,000 resources taking 3 actual weeks,
  
• clicking the Crew Skills Vendor 4500 times to buy 1 million credits worth of fluxes,
  
• sending out around 16,000 Investigation missions taking 61 crew-years and 13.7 million credits, and
  
• finally crafting 74,600 items, taking 1.5 crew-years (thank goodness you can RE while you wait!)
  

do you know how many actual weapons you will have left for you to use, give to friends, put on the GTN?

Zero.

But you have your schematics. Just call this system, "Dr. Strangecraft, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Random Crafting Bomb".

swg is DEAD. SOE killed it twice so get over it.

many people in this game need to realize this isnt going to be thier swg remake. people like the op just need to move on and remember the good times in thier dead mmo.

the crafting system here isnt perfect and neither were the two soe products in which i played, reached max level and max level crafters in. i have no wish to go back to them either.

every new mmo that comes out people want to remake into the one they left. the op here is no different. sadly there will be more people here posting simuliar topics; trying to make this new mmo into thier old dead stale one.

You have a minute? How about 5 million.

 

Okay, I promised some numbers for those not convinced that the mini-game of crafting is far more costly than it is worth. Here's a breakdown for Armstech. The following is what it would take to grind out all purple schematics for all weapons; excluding augments and barrels, excluding custom weapons and schematics that start as blues. This is for the 172 green weapon schematics.

 

As I said above, on average you will need to craft 2,600 green and 72,000 blue items to get all your purple schematics.

 

Let's put time into "crew" terms. Crew-minutes, crew-hours, crew-days. Time doesn't move the same for them, because you can be ticking down up to 5 different crew clocks at once. If you really want to speed things up, then (1) get to level 48, (2) advance your class story until you have 5 companions, (3) get their affection up to 10k, (4) NOW start your crafting grind. You can cut 15% off the times, right?

 

From the base rate (no affection or skill bonus) crafting green weapons ranges from 1 minute to 5 minutes 02 seconds. Crafting those 2600 weapons will take you 168,000 crew-seconds of time, or approximately 47 crew-hours of time. 47 hours isn't that bad, is it?

 

Let's talk about the blues. Crafting times run from 3 minutes to 25 minutes, 10 seconds: triple to quintuple the time. Add to that the enormous additional number of crafts needed. Your blue item crafts will take your crew 4,809,000 crew-minutes to complete. Put that together with the greens, and you basically have your 5 million minutes worth of crafting.

 

That's roughly 1.5 crew-YEARS.

 

Or, if you try to max your time savings, more than 3.5 real months of sending companions on missions, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, no time for anything else except for maybe doing your REs ... which, at 4 seconds a piece, will have you clicking the RE button for a day and a half solid.

 

It doesn't end there, though. You need materials.

 

I have three skill 400 crafters that use scavenging, so I know where to go to farm. I know the best routes, the best methods. In 30 minutes, I can have a minimum of a full stack of each metal and compound (4 items) for any particular grade (2 for grade 6). I think that's doing well, so I'll use it as a measuring stick. 100 items of any mat in 30 minutes.

 

Here are the normal mats required for all those crafted items:

• 8100 Desh
  
• 6200 Silica
  
• 9300 Aluminum
  
• 8400 Laminoid
  
• 6200 Bronzium
  
• 9000 Plastoid
  
• 18600 Chanlon
  
• 16800 Plasteel
  
• 9300 Phobium
  
• 8400 Laqerous
  
• 17000 Bondite
  
• 14000 Fibermesh
  
• 15200 Diatium
  
• 15800 Resinite
  
• 34100 Electrum
  
• 27900 Polyplast
  
• 18000 Durasteel
  
• 14570 Zal Alloy
  

(Yes, it's true. for green Armstech weapon schematics and their RE'd counterparts, none use Neutronium or Amorphous Carbonite ... too bad, because you'll harvest it anyway.)

 

All told, you will need to harvest 23,460 or so scavenging nodes. And that's not crew time, that's real, at-the-keyboard, know-your-node-maps, drive-right-click-mount-drive harvesting. It'll take you at least 540 hours, if you go as fast as I do. If you stop to fight or harvest droids, up the time because (1) nodes take 4 seconds (regardless of companion efficiency) and fighting droids takes longer, plus (2) droids drop on average 1.5 items per kill, nodes will give you on average 6 items per harvest. Oh, by the way, don't sweat the time investment. 540 hours only comes out to 3 weeks of actual time, and you'll be spending a lot more just sending out missions.

 

Two more things for the Armstech crafter: fluxes and blue mission materials. For fluxes, sending out missions is the most cost-effective means of getting particularly Brazing Flux and Thermoplast Flux, but sending missions means occupying your crew with other matters than crafting. Lets go to the Crew Skills Vendor.

 

Here are the amounts of the different fluxes you will need and their cost from the vendor:

• 750 Conductive Flux @ 10 ea. = 7500 credits
  
• 690 Insulating Flux @ 50 ea. = 34,500 credits
  
• 1200 Brazing Flux @ 200 ea. = 240,000 credits
  
• 1830 Thermoplast Flux @ 400 ea. = 732,000 credits
  

or a little over 1 million credits for just your fluxes. Chump change, when it gets down to it.

 

For mission materials, you will need:

• 13,440 Carbo-plas
  
• 13,440 Plastifiber
  
• 13,440 Flexiglass
  
• 22,400 Phrik
  
• 22,400 Plexoid
  
• 11,200 Dallorian Alloy
  

Problem here is not just that it will cost you money, but crew time. So much for that estimate on how long it will take to craft those items! I won't go into the details here: crew missions are, again, governed to some extent by random chance. You can't be certain that any particular mission with a particular yield and, therefore, cost effectiveness, will be available at any given time. So, based on yield of abundant missions and their costs, how much will all this mission crafting materials set you back?

 

Try 13.7 million credits. You see why I called the flux cost chump change? And the estimated time to run all those missions? Well, to be perfectly honest, my estimate is a bit rough. If you can manage to get a Rich Yield mission for every one of the thousands of missions you will have to run, you can probably take 50% off of this estimate. You'll need it. Abundant Yield missions will take you 61 crew-years.

 

Yes, you read that right. 61 years of active crew missions.

 

Will this game last that long?

 

BioWare, did you bother doing the calculations before you made up this system ... or even after?

 

Even at 5 companions with 10k affection running around the clock, day in day out, that's about 10 years of your life without eating, sleeping, partying, breathing, having a family, whatever.

 

Now, please tell me again that SWG crafting was a tedious grind compared to this.

 

Here's the punch line. After:

• harvesting 23,000 nodes to get 257,000 resources taking 3 actual weeks,
  
• clicking the Crew Skills Vendor 4500 times to buy 1 million credits worth of fluxes,
  
• sending out around 16,000 Investigation missions taking 61 crew-years and 13.7 million credits, and
  
• finally crafting 74,600 items, taking 1.5 crew-years (thank goodness you can RE while you wait!)
  

do you know how many actual weapons you will have left for you to use, give to friends, put on the GTN?

 

Zero.

 

But you have your schematics. Just call this system, "Dr. Strangecraft, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Random Crafting Bomb".

Holy **** I hope the devs see this.

swg is DEAD. SOE killed it twice so get over it.

 

many people in this game need to realize this isnt going to be thier swg remake. people like the op just need to move on and remember the good times in thier dead mmo.

 

the crafting system here isnt perfect and neither were the two soe products in which i played, reached max level and max level crafters in. i have no wish to go back to them either.

 

every new mmo that comes out people want to remake into the one they left. the op here is no different. sadly there will be more people here posting simuliar topics; trying to make this new mmo into thier old dead stale one.

Perhaps you missed my comment about how I didn't want this to be a remake of the SWG crafting system. Your comment demonstrates that you perhaps read one or two paragraphs, skimmed the rest after making up your mind, and decided to open your mouth without thinking that much. Comparing this system to SWG's doesn't mean it should be the same. Comparing this system to ANY other system doesn't mean it should be the same. To think that comparison implies one is right and one is wrong is just simple-minded.

The numbers don't lie. If you want to "master" Armstech, you need to spend 61 crew-years worth of time preparing for a 1.5 crew-year grind. Tell me, how is that a good system? 61 years, unless you're lucky. Not skillful, not knowledgeable about how things work -- skill and knowledge have nothing to do with crafting in this game. Unlike other aspects of the game, the more you work at it, the more things stay exactly the same in terms of what you can accomplish.

Forget about any other MMO, focus on this one. How is that a good thing? Think about it before you type.

The difference in the SWG grind and the SWTOR grind is that the SWTOR grind doesn't interfere with me playing the rest of the game.

I don't have to chose between gathering materials and running flashpoints or ops. I don't have to decide whether I want to use my storage space to decorate or to craft. I don't have to spend hours of time outside of the game checking websites for spawn information and more hours in game looking for places to drop harvesters.

And, if you are a person who has to have every schematic then yes, you will spend some time and credits...but isn't that what you are asking for anyway?

On my main server I have 6 characters who cover all crafting professions except Armstech (that's next). In no profession do I have even close to every schematic required. I do have a lot of different schematics but only because I learned that REing to a purple let me skip a few levels before I was forced to do it again to keep my stats above average.

I could have very easily just crafted greens for each leveling toon and associated companions and would have been just fine, but I also had all these materials just sitting around so I wanted to craft for others on my server who didn't have a lot of toons or crafters. Since prototype sold better than regular old green, I'd at least gun for those...but again, not for everything.

So, instead of a system that requires an excess of out of game time being spent on it, I can send my companions off on missions where my biggest enemy is the RNG. Where my greatness at crafting is determined not by concentrated effort but by how lucky I am in getting schematics and in REing. Time and credits are still spent, but once again that time doesn't prevent me from enjoying the game.

And for the others out there...yes, SWG died, but it died because of lack of foresight by SOE and LucasArts and by breaking the covenant with the players that, while unofficial, did more to kill SWG than any other action by the powers that be. (I am of course talking about cheating and lying to the player base. I think every MMO has learned from the huge mistake SOE and LucasArts made with SWG). Because there was nothing else for players to do, they had to amuse themselves and striving to corner resource markets and craft the best items was one of those things. In a sandbox, that works, but in a theme park it just takes away from the main sources of fun.

Based on this post, this guys probably has not done much crafting ingame yet. The actural crit craft ratio is something like 1:5 with a toon with 10k affection, without 10K affection its more like 1:10. Out of about 20 items I crafted in a row, 5 were crits with aguments on a level 30 modable item, now a level 50 item its probably a higher ratio.

Actually, much of what he is saying is correct. Seems he has tested much of it, as I have done. I concur with his findings. There is no 1 in 5, or 1 in 10 regardless of your percentages. There is only a random number generator.

As I've said many times, the matrix is excellent, it is the implementation that needs work.

The difference in the SWG grind and the SWTOR grind is that the SWTOR grind doesn't interfere with me playing the rest of the game.

True, that's one difference.

Another difference was that the SWG grind ended. Theoretically, and probabilistically, the SWTOR grind never ends. If you knew what you wanted to craft in SWG, you could figure out exactly what it would take and how long it would take to achieve that. You knew how much resource you needed and how many credits that would take. In a system based on randomness, you have a chance to NEVER get the schematic you want. It doesn't matter how well you know the system. It doesn't matter what your in-game stats that measure "skill" are up to. You may never reach your goal on even one piece of gear.

In SWG and other MMOs, it is/was possible to be a "good" crafter. In SWTOR, there is no such thing. There is no variation in item quality based on how skillful you are. Randomness does not know what "good" is. You can be a diligent crafter, if you grind things out. You can be a lucky crafter, if fortune favors you and you manage to RE at a higher rate than what your chance is. Crit for an aug slot? Does that make you good? BW is taking even that away when 1.3 comes, because you can craft an aug slot intentionally. Does that mean you will be a "good" crafter? If so, then your Orokeet will be just as good as you, because anyone who can craft will be that "good". Nobody thinks a toon is good at combat if all they manage is to hit 50 and buy all their skills. Why should you be good at crafting if all that entails is having a schematic?

Having a dedicated crafter got you something. It got you a true skill with in-game value. It created a player economy. It allowed you to find out what it took to excel, because you could actually excel, and being an excellent crafter gained you a reputation and a customer base. Is there someone out there right now who has a customer base of dozens of people? One dozen? 5 regulars? Someone is bound to speak up, I'm sure, but every skillful crafter should be able to stand and be counted here. But they can't, because the only end-game craftables better than quest rewards or comm purchases are from Biochem, and the Biochem crafters price their goods well outside the budgets of the typical player. Exotic craftables? Prices are even more out-of-reach. Even then, who has the best stims and medpacks? Any 400 Biochem with the patience and luck to grind out top-end blue schematics. It takes no skill, just money, time and luck.

True, that's one difference.

 

Another difference was that the SWG grind ended. Theoretically, and probabilistically, the SWTOR grind never ends. If you knew what you wanted to craft in SWG, you could figure out exactly what it would take and how long it would take to achieve that. You knew how much resource you needed and how many credits that would take. In a system based on randomness, you have a chance to NEVER get the schematic you want. It doesn't matter how well you know the system. It doesn't matter what your in-game stats that measure "skill" are up to. You may never reach your goal on even one piece of gear.

 

In SWG and other MMOs, it is/was possible to be a "good" crafter. In SWTOR, there is no such thing. There is no variation in item quality based on how skillful you are. Randomness does not know what "good" is. You can be a diligent crafter, if you grind things out. You can be a lucky crafter, if fortune favors you and you manage to RE at a higher rate than what your chance is. Crit for an aug slot? Does that make you good? BW is taking even that away when 1.3 comes, because you can craft an aug slot intentionally. Does that mean you will be a "good" crafter? If so, then your Orokeet will be just as good as you, because anyone who can craft will be that "good". Nobody thinks a toon is good at combat if all they manage is to hit 50 and buy all their skills. Why should you be good at crafting if all that entails is having a schematic?

 

Having a dedicated crafter got you something. It got you a true skill with in-game value. It created a player economy. It allowed you to find out what it took to excel, because you could actually excel, and being an excellent crafter gained you a reputation and a customer base. Is there someone out there right now who has a customer base of dozens of people? One dozen? 5 regulars? Someone is bound to speak up, I'm sure, but every skillful crafter should be able to stand and be counted here. But they can't, because the only end-game craftables better than quest rewards or comm purchases are from Biochem, and the Biochem crafters price their goods well outside the budgets of the typical player. Exotic craftables? Prices are even more out-of-reach. Even then, who has the best stims and medpacks? Any 400 Biochem with the patience and luck to grind out top-end blue schematics. It takes no skill, just money, time and luck.

To be fair, those "high priced" Biochem consumables are high priced because they cost a ridiculous number of mats and time to make just one blue stim or adrenal. The price would come down if Bioware would make it that one combine produced 5 stims/adrenals.

Also, the exotech Biochem schematics are PvE drops - they aren't even researched. How crappy is that? Let's put in a Reverse Engineering mechanic that could have so much promise and potential and then not use it! Let's make people run Operations and Flashpoints and make them hope that a schematic that is even useful to them drops.

The primary issue with crafting in SWTOR is that Bioware wants to continue to lean heavily on RNG. Having product quality increased via a crit mechanic is not a good idea - it devalues all of the items that do not crit. Having schematics learned on a RE mechanics based on a low percentage change is not necessarily a bad idea if all of the potential schematics are useful - as you say, cunning gear with tanking stats is not a useful schematic. Yes, making 40 or 50 blue items and then RE'ing them for no schematics learned or useless schematics just makes the system infuriating.

On top of all that, 1.2 made insinuations that crafting was going to be infused with tons of PvE schematics. I was so disappointed. I built an armormech just to make my desired gear set in pretty shiny augmented gear - except, the only full set of moddables that showed up straightaway were PvP gear schematic boxes.

It's also a terrible problem that nearly all crafting gear (including mods) are outdated with what can be purchased by daily commendations.