Crafting and PTS

Hey folks,

One of the things we have seen a lot of questions and feedback on is crafting. Fear not as you (crafters) have not been forgotten and there are changes coming. Here are the things we were hearing, and what we are doing about them.

Crafting Material Gathering and Costs
These two tracks run directly in parallel. If you are not receiving enough materials for the current cost, it will very much feel too expensive and we agree, that is what is happening right now on PTS. The two primary places you receive crafting materials, gathering, and Crew Skill Missions are not awarding nearly enough materials for the cost. Look for the following changes:

• Currently, the only place on PTS to gather materials directly is Ossus. This created an unforeseen issue where you were receiving far less materials than we intended from gathering. We will want you to head to Onderon to gather crafting materials where you will find you are receiving quite a bit more than you were previously. Ultimately, we expect you to get more materials from gathering than you are now on PTS.
• Crew Skill Missions have had a different issue corrected, their time. We think the quantity of materials earned is in the right place but it is definitely taking too long. We will be reducing these timers.

Jawa Junk Prices
We hear your concerns that in general Jawa Junk prices are too high. They definitely are higher on PTS than they are on live, but remember that players will be receiving far more Jawa Junk than they do today due to deconstruction. We are not ready to make changes here just yet but we are keeping an eye on your feedback and data around Jawa Junk gains. We will absolutely make changes if it is an issue so keep playing and keep sharing feedback.

TLDR – Increasing your material gains and shortening mission times to start, will keep monitoring for more changes.

Keep the feedback coming! These changes are not live yet on PTS but I will let you know when we release a patch where they are available. Thanks!

-eric

Looking forward to hearing more about the changes, when it took me 6 cargo holds + my normal inventory of materials and jawa junk as well as 2 hours of missions and crafting cell graft to learn the new schematic for and craft 1 reusable attack adrenal I started to wonder how disconnected the developers were from the player base.

Could you perhaps shed some light on the total material cost that you guys are intending for learning/crafting the new purple and the legendary/reusable variants of the consumables currently on PTS? Cause looking at how much time as well as materials it took for me to craft the new ones I am a bit confused how these will become mainstream.

Additionally, it would be great to hear some of the thoughts behind the changes to the crafting system (green, blue and purple materials as well as different "tiers" of cell grafts) and why those changes were made along with how you think that improves crafting in general. Cause it seems that there is simply just a lot of new materials just "because" without them actually having a purpose, apart from making crafting more time consuming of course.

Some of these changes have been implemented on the PTS. Onderon now has all grade 11 nodes. Ossus is back to only yielding grade 10 materials.

Grade 11 slicing nodes still have the bug where yielded credit caches contain nothing. Bioanalysis and slicing nodes (at least) also still have the bug where materials are silently added to the materials inventory if the companion performs the gathering. I haven't tested archaeology or scavenging yet.

The minimap has also changed. It is now in color instead of the classic blue contoured map. Interesting, but less useful I think. Landmarks and roads I would use to orient are now gone or obscured by a gray fog, which I guess is supposed to represent different ground elevations.

Appreciate the heads up! I know the changes were in process but I didn't believe they were implemented fully yet. Onderon may have the nodes now as intended but if you see any weird behavior let me know as they may still be in process.

-eric

Fear not?
I'm more afraid after reading your post than before This is the same as previous comments from weeks ago, nothing new at all. Most of this are minor problems (like gathering, is just a matter of new nodes not ready). Of those, real problem is jawa junk cost, and you even said you are not considering changing that. But the problem here is not the increase of cost for grade 1 to 10; considereing we get a lot more junk that is fine. The problem is grade 11 cost.

Now, what you seem to be missing entirely is that the new system is just not viable. Every green gear mat requirement is just too high, rare blue and purples? That is just insane. Its the same as if in live crafting a green 210 required several isotopes and 20 CMTs!!!!!
How come you are ignoring this?

You keep saying more mats more junk; STOP THE INFLATION, just LOWER COST. Have you seen the steps and mats requirements to craft even single biochem consumables? There are very detailed post on that, it clearly shows that no matter how much more we get from gathering or shorter mission times ar: its just a BAD system.

Please Eric, take a loot at this:
https://www.swtor.com/community/show...3&postcount=59


And not to be an smarta**, but you all need to read a basic economy book before trying to change currency balance. Lots of things in 6.0 is trying to address the credit inflation by puting several artificial credit sinks. All this big numbers in mats and alternative currencies go in the opposite direction and will make everything worst. If you have an inflation problem the worst thing you can do is print more money. Unlike real economies or already implemented systems, 6.0 is not operative yet; so you can address problem in its root issues: Costs and complexity. If you publish this and then start patching it won't be the same and you may never catch up with the mess it will make.

Eric, we both have been around for the same amount of time in this game.

You should remember that once there was no crafting planned for this game.
Me and a lot of others made that happen, and now you are about to ruin it yet again.......

In the past you reduced the amount of mats per tier due they being to MANY, and now you plan to add even more ??
For what ever reason?,

The old Dev team did ruin crafting to the point that doing nothing but a extremely few items was even worth making.

Now you increase the amount of mats needed, with the poor excuse that we gain more, it's the SAME thing.....

This what you are doing are NOT play it your way, it's play it OUR way yet again.

I can only speak for my self, I've been on forums since mid 2009 in an attempt to get among other things crafting when we where told it was not planned back then.
I've been playing since Beta, and I'm still here.

But you will only accept so many mistakes before enough is enough.
Not that one more or less matters in the end.
But should you mess this up or not you, the ones that work on crafting, there will be one less around.

I've tried over the years to accept what's been going on an work with it.
I worked hard on the old forums to have crafting added in the first place.
Now, at times it feels like that was a huge mistake on my part.

Revise what you are doing again, make sure crafting is useful in 6.0.
or do us all a favor and kill it, end the pain.

When something ain't fun anymore and a chore with no reason in the end, that's the end.

With the history of the PTS versions for 6.0 so far and yes I've tried them, you utterly missed the ball park.
Oddly, one would have thought the others did learn something, al tho you have some but it's FAR FAR from good.

For me personally I will give you ONE last chance to get the act together.

Do or Do not, there is NO try!

Has anyone from BioWare actually tried crafting *anything* with the system on the PTS? Because it seems like 5 minutes of just looking at the numbers should tell you that the system is completely broken, and will remain broken even with these changes.

First off, the cost to craft the basic green components/cell grafts/etc. are way too high, and need to be reverted to the 2/2/2 cost of every other tier. You can't just increase the cost of the most fundamental crafting item by FIVE TIMES and expect everything else to be fine. When you need three of the premium components to craft a prototype, and three prototypes to craft an artifact, that means you need 90 of each green mat to craft a single artifact component. That is just way, way too high.

Second, the number of rare materials required for everything is also completely impractical. The numbers for artifact and legendary schematics need to come down. More importantly, the correct number of flashpoint, Ops, or Conquest materials needed to craft Premium and Prototype gear is ZERO. Any other number is wrong, and will completely break crafting.

Third, the Reverse Engineering chance needs to be completely re-evaluated. Right now, Prototype Gear is vastly more difficult to make than for any prior tier, but the lower RE chance means you will go through way more Prototype items trying to learn the Artifact schematics. End result is the cost of learning a schematic is going to be astronomical. I'm talking orders of magnitude higher than the cost of learning schematics for Grade 10.

The combination of these issues isn't just going to make crafting inconvenient, it will be completely broken. Nobody is going to bother crafting when the time and credits required to gather enough materials to craft even basic items makes their cost so extraordinarily high that nobody will being to pay for them.

Seriously, we're going to be looking at millions of credits for a stack of artifact Stims, where a similar stack of their Grade 10 counterparts would be <100,000. Considering the hilariously marginal stat improvement, nobody is going to buy the Grade 11s, and nobody is going to waste their time crafting them.

It feels very much like BW is trying to 'adjust' crafting to compensate for players sitting on huge quantities of materials, but the only thing that's going to do is punish every single 'normal' player out there.

Or, like others in this and other threads have posted, no-one at BW has actually bothered to 'organically' craft something in PTS.

Crafting better not be BW's idea of how to keep players logging in, because right now the threshold, based purely in the number and types of items needed to be gathered, and the cycles of crafting, is completely unmanageable, and nodes dropping greater quantities is not going to fix this.

I tend to craft things I need for my main & alts - biochem, augments. In 5.x this has been a manageable process, i.e. i can expect to gather and craft in a reasonable amount of time for the item I'm crafting. I can't say how much time that is because I do have materials stashed, but basically I can gather and craft BiS augs in a day or two max per, and I can gather and craft disposable biochem stims and adrenals in less than a day. I don't have mk-II schematics, so no idea how long that would take, I just buy those off others, you can see how dedicated I am to crafting lol.

Eric, again it seems the team is missing the point of all the feedback that has been given.

Keep the same systems and costs in place that are currenly on live, just add the new grade 11 mats. Not 3 versions of each type of grade 11 mat, and not the ridiculous amounts of conquest and ops mats that are needed for basic, entry level gear. Those types of mats should only be required when you get to the highest versions of the craftable items.

It is currently an insult to players that 20 of the new conquest reward mat are needed to craft a single basic level augment. Since no one has even been able to craft or RE one yet on the PTS (with the nice change in lowering the % chance of learning the next tier of an item), how many conquest mats are needed for the legendary (gold) version of the new augments? Somewhere around 60+ is my guess, for a single item, that players need 14 of to set their gear up.

The EA license for Star Wars will expire before an average player is able to grind out even a fraction of the mats needed to fully augment 1 character.

I start wondering why we bother to test or provide feed back when it seems we are ignored or you plan to go ahead no matter what we say.
I’m not alone in feeling like this whole pts experience is a waste because the feed back is largely ignored or seen as wrong by you guys.
People have spent time to test and listed very detailed and thought out feed back and suggestions and not much of anything has changed on your end.
There is more that needs fixing than just tweaking the system because the system is fundamentally flawed or broken as it’s currently set out.
You should not be trying to use crafting as another multifaceted time and credit sink, all it is going to do is destroy it,