[/snip]

 

I'm afraid I'll have to settle for semi-saintly, because (for now, at least) my patience is at an end. I have tried eighteen times to RE the 292-rated armour to the next level, to no success. The costs got so high that to provide a list of what it took me, as I promised I would, I had to write a spreadsheet. Yes: it's been suggested that this crafting system was born in spreadsheets, and if Bioware will listen to our feedback, I hope it can die in one. (Or, rather, be reformed to better fit what crafting has looked like historically, as per your suggestions.)

 

[/snip-snip-snip]

 

As a former purchasing director (retired) … I can tell you that you application of the spread sheet is right dead on !

IMO... the truth is there !

Even the Gray Council could not argue what you have provided !

As a total nerd who likes spreadsheets, I appreciate this. I had to build spreadsheets as well (though mine were much messier), and I'm positive that people like Citrienne who did crazy math earlier in the threads did too. Our compiled spreadsheets are probably a scary thing and frankly they surely amount to a lot of work they're lucky they don't have to pay us to do.

 

As a concerned and frustrated player who doesn't understand why the devs didn't run these numbers themselves, I really really hope that they are looking at your spreadsheet, because the numbers are super important.

 

 

 

That is such a good and eye-opening visual. If that doesn't alarm the devs I honestly don't know what will.

 

To tell the truth, when it comes to the Jawa scrap prices I'm starting to feel that they might as well just remove Grade 11 materials from the vendors altogether. The truth is that prior to this point the most recent grade wasn't on vendors anyway. If they think they are doing us a favor by putting them on now, they are mistaken if it's at these prices, because what it comes down to is that they're running up against human psychology.

 

Players don't look at a 200-to-1 price ratio and think "Gee, I'm just lucky grade 11 is on here at all, and now I have something to spend my hoarded scrap on." No. What psychology drives us to, rather, is "WTH, the shiny is in front of me and I want it because it's supposedly available but I am being blocked by an insane price that I can't afford and now that I am aware of this it makes me ANGRY."

 

If they don't want to piss people off, they need to lower the price or just take it off the vendor so that no one's desires are being thwarted and generating the gamer-hate machine. ;-)

 

 

 

This is the part I really wanted to call out, and that I desperately hope the devs are paying attention to. Eric, team, whoever is reading this, whoever carries the message, please make sure you carry this one.

 

Because 400 Solid Resource Matrices used to try to reverse-engineer one single piece of gear is insanity. Please step out of the theory bubble and look at what this number means in reality.

 

Assuming a player is in a guild and actually able to make conquest (which not all your crafters will be). Assume the absolute stingiest possible conquest reward: 1 Solid Resource Matrix per week.

 

At 1 Solid Resource Matrix per week, and 52 weeks in the year, that means it would take almost EIGHT YEARS for a player to acquire enough mats to work toward reverse engineering ONE PIECE OF GEAR, with a chance of not even getting all the way through the chain.

 

At a more generous assumption of 3 Solid Resource Matrices per week, it would take a player TWO AND A HALF YEARS to acquire enough mats for (statistically quite possible) an ultimately unsuccessful journey of REing ONE piece of gear.

 

At a ridiculously generous assumption of 6 Solid Resource Matrices per week (let's assume a player is making conquest on more than one character, and is further in a guild that is also managing to make large yield conquest every single week), it would take a player MORE THAN A YEAR (1.3 to be exact) to acquire enough mats for this attempted RE of ONE piece of gear.

 

Let's assume a player is a crazy person who devotes so much time a week to playing this game that they can gather 12 SRMs every week (I hope BW is aware that this is not true of most of their players). At 12 SRMs per week, it would take a player approximately eight months to get halfway through the RE chain on one single piece of gear.

 

This is complete and utter insanity.

 

I honestly do not know what the thought was behind putting exotic materials, especially conquest ones, on any schematic that wasn't already artifact level in quality and close to BiS. But the end result of this change makes whatever the intention might have been totally moot. It's not feasible, and that's putting it mildly. It wasn't feasible even in testing with infinite mats. In live, it is going to make the system functionally impossible to use, and you are going to make everyone very angry.

 

We've said it ad nauseum, and if we haven't convinced anyone then I don't even know what to do.

 

Green items should never require more than green mats to make. Blue for blues. Purple for purples. Absolutely no exotic conquest mats required to craft anything that isn't artifact/purple in quality.

 

Also please keep in mind that exotic materials for SINGLE-USE items like medpacs and stims and adrenals is also total insanity. That has never ever been the case before. These have previously required only artifact mats and that is enough.

 

 

 

And this is so much the point. The majority of the system will actually be functionally unusable, but even for those who might be willing to make it their primary grind in the game, you have now taken a supplementary game system that was a low-key way for many players to have FUN and turned it into "a mindless, boring treadmill." Why? Why??? What purpose does this serve?????

 

Do you honestly think that crafting will ever, ever, ever prove a "threat" to the gearing system? I had 150 pieces of unwanted gear to deconstruct after two evenings of PVE play (which didn't net me enough Jawa scrap to make even a single basic component under this current system).

 

Two evenings, for 150 items... versus eight months to eight years without a guarantee of achieving the one single item you are trying for.

 

 

 

Yes, RIP crafting for purposes of Space Barbie. Yet another needless casualty of this bizarrely punishing system. Which is a special shame because the team did an amazing job designing new outfit looks for this expansion, and I am beginning to realize that I might in fact never be able to collect them all for reasons like this one.

Yet even more proof.

I can't remember when I've ever seen such a clear demonstration of facts presented to any development team !

The Crafting System is just not Working to the extent that despite still being able to get mats relatively easily compared to when it goes live, I can't face creating even the new Augs the work load is so onerous.

[...]

So to make 1 Blue Crit Augment I need: 252 Various Green Items, 84 Blue Items & 15 Premium Items.

 

In Mission Times on a level 50 Comp a Medium Mission Takes 9.5 mins and yields 20 ish Items so 13 missions assuming some crits to get Blues as well so a mere 2 hours on a level 50 comp doing missions.

 

To try and get the Purple Schematic on a 10% RE Chance 2520 Greens, 840 Blues & 150 Premium.

 

If people can’t be bothered doing crafting on the PTS when stuff is easy to get just think what it will be like on the Live server

I agree. 6.0 Live is going to be painful.

To your last point, the chance of getting the Purple Schematic on a 10% RE chance does not mean you will have to try up to 10 times. The RE chance is Binomial, meaning it has two outcomes with each trial: success and failure. A 10% RE chance is a 10% chance of succeeding and a 90% chance of failing to learn the schematic with each trial. Trying 10 times would reach a 65.1% cumulative chance. Crafting 10 times is not a bad estimate, but that still means a 34.9% chance of failing.

To reach a 99% cumulative chance of success (and 1% chance of failure), requires crafting and reverse engineering up to 44 times. 1 in 100 players will still fail to learn the Purple Schematic after having wasted 44 crafts worth of supplies. That is 11088 greens, 3696 blues, and 6600 other premiums.

This is why the 20% -> 10% -> 5% RE chance becomes so punitive. It requires punishing amounts of materials, time, and effort to overcome unless the player is lucky. Some of us will remain unlucky.

Now, if the devs implemented insurance into the RE chance (making the next trial chance go up when prior trials failed) then we might need to make 10 to reach a solid guarantee, or some other number entirely.

To your last point, the chance of getting the Purple Schematic on a 10% RE chance does not mean you will have to try up to 10 times. The RE chance is Binomial, meaning it has two outcomes with each trial: success and failure. A 10% RE chance is a 10% chance of succeeding and a 90% chance of failing to learn the schematic with each trial. Trying 10 times would reach a 65.1% cumulative chance. Crafting 10 times is not a bad estimate, but that still means a 34.9% chance of failing.

 

To reach a 99% cumulative chance of success (and 1% chance of failure), requires crafting and reverse engineering up to 44 times. 1 in 100 players will still fail to learn the Purple Schematic after having wasted 44 crafts worth of supplies. That is 11088 greens, 3696 blues, and 6600 other premiums.

 

This is why the 20% -> 10% -> 5% RE chance becomes so punitive. It requires punishing amounts of materials, time, and effort to overcome unless the player is lucky. Some of us will remain unlucky.

 

Now, if the devs implemented insurance into the RE chance (making the next trial chance go up when prior trials failed) then we might need to make 10 to reach a solid guarantee, or some other number entirely.

Thank you so much for this, TerraStomper. I don't remember if it was you, but at some point in the previous thread someone also tried to demonstrate this math.

I don't care if people call me a White Knight, but I love this game, and I am grateful to the devs for making it. Without their hard work, this game that has brought me a lot of joy over the last seven years would not exist. So I don't say this to diss them as people or to invalidate their effort in any way... but it's a valid observation to say that we have seen a lot of demonstrations over those seven years about fundamental misunderstandings of math from the dev team, despite their best intentions.

I am not good at math. But I can work a spreadsheet. I can extrapolate logically. And I understand that moving a decimal point from .1 to .01 doesn't mean you've moved it one increment, it means if you've moved it one hundred increments, and moving it to .001 means moving it one thousand increments not two. When I think back to what happened to the Contraband Slot Machine, the evidence seemed to point to someone having made just such a change to drop rates based on this fundamental misunderstanding, and it's not the only place we've seen that sort of trouble. (It's not a sin. I had to be taught the above too, and it's quite possible I still don't fully understand. But once it's pointed out, change needs to happen.)

I can easily believe that someone setting a RE % chance of 10% thinks they are setting it up for a player to have to RE something a max of ten times before they succeed. That feels logical to a lay person thinking about counting dimes on their dollar. A max of ten tries is a reasonable (difficult but reasonable) expectation to set for something that is supposed to be rare, so it's very possibly well-intentioned. But that's just not what the math amounts to, and people like TerraStomper have done the work of explaining why.

And it's important to note that even if one's intention was to say a player would only have to craft something a max of ten times before they succeeded, and even if you altered the math to correctly reflect that, if you otherwise leave the mats cost at their current values you are still talking about months before a player has enough mats to attempt those ten tries.

In an earlier post I listed out how the devs could have made any one of the changes that were implemented in 6.0 and succeeded in making crafting more difficult, but that under no circumstances should all of them have been implemented together. By the same token, you can't fix just one of the issues and assume that it will fix the overall problem; your problem is cumulative, and your solution must also be.

Pick one means of making things harder, and remove all the rest. If we had more time before 6.0 drops we could get more nuanced, but there isn't that time. There are way more important things to worry about than crafting. The devs could make almost no tweaks to crafting at all, and it would go mostly unnoticed in 6.0, generating no rage, raising no furor, sucking up none of their time. Let it be mostly unremarkable and focus on the other stuff that is bigger and will have a more positive impact.

Conversely, if you completely break crafting in this way, you generate all that rage for very little in the way of net return. We still don't have any idea what your (the devs') intentions were, but I'm willing to bet that in the grand scheme of the game, whatever you think you were trying to "fix" with these crafting changes is going to seem insignificant if left "unfixed" compared to the player you're going to create. Gamers are crazy and unreasonably volatile people. Don't give them fuel to make your lives more miserable, you'll already get enough of that from everyone mad about the RNG on their gear.

I agree. 6.0 Live is going to be painful.

 

To your last point, the chance of getting the Purple Schematic on a 10% RE chance does not mean you will have to try up to 10 times. The RE chance is Binomial, meaning it has two outcomes with each trial: success and failure. A 10% RE chance is a 10% chance of succeeding and a 90% chance of failing to learn the schematic with each trial. Trying 10 times would reach a 65.1% cumulative chance. Crafting 10 times is not a bad estimate, but that still means a 34.9% chance of failing.

 

To reach a 99% cumulative chance of success (and 1% chance of failure), requires crafting and reverse engineering up to 44 times. 1 in 100 players will still fail to learn the Purple Schematic after having wasted 44 crafts worth of supplies. That is 11088 greens, 3696 blues, and 6600 other premiums.

 

This is why the 20% -> 10% -> 5% RE chance becomes so punitive. It requires punishing amounts of materials, time, and effort to overcome unless the player is lucky. Some of us will remain unlucky.

 

Now, if the devs implemented insurance into the RE chance (making the next trial chance go up when prior trials failed) then we might need to make 10 to reach a solid guarantee, or some other number entirely.

This is a fair and reasonable suggestion that keeps the odds against the player without a truly horrendous worst case scenario. It will of course be ignored as bioware austin steamroll ahead to ensure 6.0 is even more of a disaster for us than cataclysm was for anthem.

Dont you get tons of stuff from braking down gear? This system is allot like SWGs RE system it seems where you RE junk to get certain items and then RE high stat gear to make power Bits.

What tons of stuff exactly are you thinking you get from deconstructing a chest piece? Enough to make another chestpiece? No. I never did the math, but the 3-6 (RNG factor there) tech fragments you get for deconstructing gear, and the tiny amount of mats you get, doesn't come close to replacing what you use up crafting a single item.

This system is NOTHING like the powerbit system that SWG had.

As far as reverse engineering anything I always had problems learning everything even at the 60% chance which was a subscriber perk which I do not like losing.

I did find that if something critted than the chance to reverse engineer the item was much higher.

I reverse engineer at least two stacks of 4 or 6 items with the sixty percent chance and got the next level nearly every time.

With the new 20 percent I would use at least five stacks at once for the 20% and it worked half the time. ten stacks worked at least once, but I was out of mats by the time I got a purple stim. That is as far as I got and I tried 18 /268 items and did not learn a single upgrade.

MK 11 crafting is dead useless and will never work unless it is bought closer in line with the other ranks of crafting.

Dont you get tons of stuff from braking down gear? This system is allot like SWGs RE system it seems where you RE junk to get certain items and then RE high stat gear to make power Bits.

No, that's not the case. I'm going to quote myself from earlier in this thread:

And since Jawa Junk as a "supplementary" system has been discussed, I should add the following test I conducted that is very relevant here. I had saved up all the unused gear drops I got from multiple runs of Hammer Station, and deconstructed them all tonight to see what that netted me in terms of scrap with an eye to crafting.

 

Results of Deconstructing 150 pieces of gear:

• 150 pieces of gear broke down to:
  
  • 1,275 green jawa scrap = 6 green mats
    
  • 829 blue jawa scrap = 4 blue mats
    
  • 259 purple jawa scrap = 1 purple mat
    

 

Deconstructing 150 pieces of gear ranging from rating 270-280 is not sufficient to create ONE SINGLE GREEN CELL GRAFT.

As a total nerd who likes spreadsheets, I appreciate this. I had to build spreadsheets as well (though mine were much messier), and I'm positive that people like Citrienne who did crazy math earlier in the threads did too. Our compiled spreadsheets are probably a scary thing and frankly they surely amount to a lot of work they're lucky they don't have to pay us to do.

 

As a concerned and frustrated player who doesn't understand why the devs didn't run these numbers themselves, I really really hope that they are looking at your spreadsheet, because the numbers are super important.

Sorry for the delay in answering this. Thanks, and hooray for spreadsheets! I do hope that this feedback helps them to make further changes before 6.0 goes lives. I'm sure a lot of work has gone into this expansion, so we all want it to be a success.

To tell the truth, when it comes to the Jawa scrap prices I'm starting to feel that they might as well just remove Grade 11 materials from the vendors altogether. The truth is that prior to this point the most recent grade wasn't on vendors anyway. If they think they are doing us a favor by putting them on now, they are mistaken if it's at these prices, because what it comes down to is that they're running up against human psychology.

Maybe I'm losing my mind, but I thought grade 10 materials were on the jawa vendors for a higher price than lower grades? I'd better actually check... *checks* Yes, it's 12 green scrap, 6 blue scrap, or 3 purple scrap for grade ten materials of these qualities. In any case, as I said in a post responding to Eric's announced changes, I have actually never bought grade 10 materials for scrap. They're just not good value. (Maybe the purple isn't too bad, but definitely not the rest.) And I can't imagine many people will buy grade 11 materials at 200 scrap, or even at 100 or 50. It's just terrible value. Rich players are generally not noted for simply throwing their credits away. They didn't become rich in the first place by taking that path.

This is complete and utter insanity.

Agreed! Thank heavens they've removed the conquest material requirement from a lot of things. I hope our feedback helped with that. What I also hope is that they've additionally removed the requirement for the blue materials from ops / MM FP / ranked PvP. I did one ranked PvP weekly to get a monumental crystal for an Ossus decoration and it was a nightmare. Never again. And I'm not all that interested in grouping for operations or MM FPs either. I'm predominantly a solo player. If this expansion really is "play your way," then hopefully solo players will be just as able to craft as people who like to group.

Do you honestly think that crafting will ever, ever, ever prove a "threat" to the gearing system? I had 150 pieces of unwanted gear to deconstruct after two evenings of PVE play (which didn't net me enough Jawa scrap to make even a single basic component under this current system).

 

Two evenings, for 150 items... versus eight months to eight years without a guarantee of achieving the one single item you are trying for.

Of all the statistics that have come from our various inquiries, this is one that I really hope they notice and take to heart. The idea that gear drops super-frequently from normal play, but should be super-hard to craft, is just punishing to crafters. And we don't play to feel punished. We play to have fun.

Yes, RIP crafting for purposes of Space Barbie. Yet another needless casualty of this bizarrely punishing system. Which is a special shame because the team did an amazing job designing new outfit looks for this expansion, and I am beginning to realize that I might in fact never be able to collect them all for reasons like this one.

Yeah, I actually feel super-bad for the gear person (or people) making the pretty new outfits. I really like their idea of incrementing several variant looks as rating rises from 268 to 306. This is genuinely genius. I too hope that by the time 6.0 hits we'll be in a position to actually see this work in our played experience.

As far as reverse engineering anything I always had problems learning everything even at the 60% chance which was a subscriber perk which I do not like losing.

 

I did find that if something critted than the chance to reverse engineer the item was much higher.

I reverse engineer at least two stacks of 4 or 6 items with the sixty percent chance and got the next level nearly every time.

 

With the new 20 percent I would use at least five stacks at once for the 20% and it worked half the time. ten stacks worked at least once, but I was out of mats by the time I got a purple stim. That is as far as I got and I tried 18 /268 items and did not learn a single upgrade.

 

MK 11 crafting is dead useless and will never work unless it is bought closer in line with the other ranks of crafting.

What were you REing if you don't mind me asking? Stims? Green random gear pieces?

i just wanna know

After 8 years

where are my new crew skills, cooking and fishing?

i just wanna know

 

After 8 years

 

where are my new crew skills, cooking and fishing?

Fishing ?? Say what ??

(easy does it … don't want to derail this thread !! )

Or how about First aid? Oh wait they gave that to tailors in WoW.

I would just like to swim and climb in Star Wars. Fly my ship or myself freely around even if it was in an instance area a little bit bigger than a space station.

All I can say is like I told some of my guildies who did not want to go on PTS and just asked me how Onslaught was, it might be a serious natural disaster.

I personally would tell the genuis(es) who thought up the idea of 200 pieces of Jawa junk for 1 piece of crafting mat, to go hump a water buffalo.

At the moment, 12 pieces for some stuff LIVE now, is painful enough for a lot of players.

Whoever said you get a ton of JJ from RE ing (deconstruction my lost lower right leg I had amputated in Dec 2017) junk must be a pretty good hacker.

I do know one thing, I will DESTROY ONSLAUGHT'S BS crafting changes if it becomes reality.

And let's see if MK-11s and augs don't run for at least a couple million for a Mk-11 kit and the augs about 5 million minimum.

JUST DO IT and take the damn Choppa!!!

ONSLAUGHT = HELL will FREEZE over!

been crafting on PTS....with Armorings, Mods & enhancements...after deconstructing 4,5 and 6 items all asudden get the message...."you already have that schematic"....so go to recheck for the next lvl up schematics for that item....and....nope....not there....

so I reboot the game....thinking...."rebooting usually fixes things"....I try again....nope....still the same thing again and again....

trying to get the 75, 77 & 80 s gold (epic) schematics

at first when I started crafting on PTS....it was acting weird....instead of getting in order of numbers the green, blue, purple then gold/epic....it's been jumping around....not just the numerical order of schematics but also the color of the schematics.

at first was working correctly numerical & color order....then all a sudden....the system went bonkers with the numerical & color order..../shrug

might want to take a look & see why....

well ATM....it seems like things are starting to straightening out....for the moment anyway...we'll see if it continues or if things go bonkers again....

could have been a short lived glitch..../shrug...will post if it turns south again....

I see that a vendor has been added with all the shells that used to be available from Command Crates, as well as (thankfully) the random legacy-bound 75 greens and blues that will no longer be available.

However, the Command Crates also dropped schematics for various Synthweaving and Armormech appearances that are also unavailable now, including unique texture combinations of still-available meshes as well as unique meshes we can no longer get. I've been poking around in all the obvious places and found no evidence that those schematics have been similarly added back in.

While those appearances are still available through players who got the schematics at the time, that availability will inevitably shrink as those people log off and move on to other games, unthinkingly delete characters with discontinued schematics, or simply stop crafting them if they seem unprofitable. Are there any plans to mitigate this by reintroducing the schematics, either for direct sale or perhaps in lockbox drops through gathering missions, or making those shells available by other means?