We are coming up on the one-year anniversary of this game and we still do not have a viable, meaningful, skillful crafting system in this game that cost, what?, upwards of $200 million to produce ... and that was pre-launch? Indie games operating on budgets less than 1% of what BioWare has spent on this game have developed more meaningful crafting systems.

So, my current project is REing an Overkill Focus of Devastating Power (lvl49 focus: +48 Endurance, +60 Willpower, +41 Power, +49 Critical Rating, +483 Force Power, +28 Alacrity Rating), one last little toy for my Sage who just hit level 49 turning in my warzone daily a minute ago. To prepare for this, I have been trying to get maybe an Expert Tier 2 RE (add +47 Surge, increase Force Power to +543) or a Vehemence RE (increase Alacrity to a beastly +75, Force Power still up to +543). And +7 more Power for either, btw.

But this is crafting in SWTOR, so that means there are problems and more problems to overcome. Yes, I wanted the Overkill version and not the Critical version because my Crit Chance is already over 35% so I needed power more and, luckily (not skillfully) I got the Overkill after I got the Redoubt and didn't have to RE any more plain Focus of Devastating Power items. Then began the hunt for an Artifact quality item to finish off my <50 days in style. So, what has happened in the last two days of trying to learn one item?

I've spent hours circling the Primal Destroyer on Belsavis getting mats (Upari Crystals and Primeval Artifact Fragments) to grind out REs, as well as running missions non-stop for Cortosis Weave. Did it on my 50 Shadow, btw, so I didn't have to keep aggroing level 50 critters with my level 48 (at the time) Sage. So harvest, mail, switch toons, send out crafts, switch toons, harvest, lather, rinse, repeat ... you know the drill. Thankfully, I've run enough Treasure Hunting missions in the past to have more than enough Lorrdian Gemstones and Corusca Gems for my Prototype RE items and my final Artifact items (yes, I want one for Nadia as well).

Well, I think I have enough Lorrdian Gemstones ... I do have five full stacks, so maybe I'll get a successful RE before the 125 or so crafts I would get in before running out. One always must hope.

Currently, over the last two days, I'm at 29 consecutive failures for a binomial probability of 0.047. What does that mean? Let's say we take 1,000 artificers (let's assume skill 400 to eliminate necessary variables that don't affect the outcome anyway, but some people who don't understand stats might have suspicions) and give them 29 identical Overkill Foci of Devastating Power. Let's put them in the same place (Senate Plaza on Coruscant should be sufficient for that many) and at the same time (both of these to rule out other "variables" people mistakenly think matter when REing) and have them all RE those 29 items one right after another. Odds are that I would be standing in a group with 46 other people, of that 1,000, who scored 29 fails in a row. Double the number of items to RE, and if my streak of "bad luck" continued I would practically be standing alone of that 1,000, with one other person at best.

A streak of failures with a binomial probability of 0.047, and this is Working as Intended, Working as Designed.

Sure, this has nothing on my 56 out of ONE MILLION results a little while ago, but it still sucks. It still is unacceptable given what EA and BioWare care to think of the quality of their game. We deserve better. We are PAYING for better.

Of course, there is still the matter of my complete lack of control over what schematic I might learn should I succeed at an RE. As in my case of 93 consecutive failures, I could get a Rampart build (+47 points of useless Shield Chance) or a Commander build (+47 points of useless Presence on my PvP toon) or even a Hawkeye build (+47 points of accuracy, useless as my accuracy is already at 104%). Odds are 3:2 against me getting something useful. You would think that having a skill level of 400 would MEAN something, perhaps like giving me a 100% chance of choosing what advanced schematic I would learn. It means nothing. The true "story" here, since BioWare vaunts "story" so much, is that as a master of my craft, at the pinnacle of my knowledge and skill, I am still fumbling in the dark, making random decisions, learning nothing from past mistakes.

I'm guessing many of you are bored to tears if you've read this far. If so, you may understand my point: SWTOR Crafting is, at best, a mini-game that serious players should not waste their time over. There have been thread after thread for the last year calling for something to be done about just how terrible the system is. Even though we players know that "Coming Soon©®™" means little from BioWare, it still would be better than what we have received from BioWare about possible changes to crafting. Crafting in SWTOR has all the appearance of someone understanding ninth-grade simple probability, and absolutely nothing about how quickly binomial probabilities become vicious indicators of failure beyond your hope of ever attaining any sort of control.

There is no such thing as skill in Crew Skills, particularly crafting. The only true control you have is to not do it.

What have we heard from BioWare concerning improvements to crafting? Phkmg. That's a word I invented with the meaning of "the onomatopoeic representation of the sound of devastating silence", pronunciation guide provided below. And inventing a new word certainly takes more skill than I can hope to invest in any Crew "Skill", because to call them "Skills" is to use a convenient fiction with a wink and a nod from the developers and producers to the advertising team.

So, my question as we come up on the first anniversary of this game is: Is there a producer or developer who has the guts to tell us what is being done to improve the state of crafting or, if as we suspect is true, that nothing is being done to improve the state of crafting in SWTOR?

I double-dog dare the lot of you.

[Pronunciation guide: p as in pneumatic, h as in herb, k as in know, m as the in the first letter of mnemonic, g as in gnome. Yep, all silent consonants. There's even a song about this word. Well, okay, the song came first, but it would have been in the lyrics if the word came first.]

PS: Why not just give up? Why not craft the blue item and use it and forget about trying for the next level of schematic I would use for one (1) level? Because I'm stupid, and stubborn, and I don't give up even when I really should.

AND... because right now I have a Vehemence Immortality Relay (earpiece) that equipped on my companion just fine, but when I tried to equip it on myself I got the You cannot use or equip this item due to your subscription permissions. My subscription, which is something I locked in during Early Game Access and haven't let falter. My permissions, which are "You can use Artifact items because you are a subscriber!" And for the sake of full disclosure, attempt #30 got me the Expert schematic. Would have preferred that Vehemence one, but I said Expert would be suitable.

And I can't equip that either. You cannot use ....

TLDR: Crafting gets crit by math. pls fix.

If you didn't read, how would you know there is anything to fix? The math is in there. If you don't have the attention span to read it, don't say it's wrong.

Could be worse, originally you could get the proc on RE and it would be a schematic you already knew. Then you would of course want the version with an augment slot so you would need to craft a bunch until you got the crit since there were no augment kits.

But (1) you don't get schematics you already have and (2) given the number of REs I did on a wieldable item, I had enough components to craft several augment kits.

Ever wonder why you need 10 aug slot components to craft a single kit? Could it be, in BioWare's simplistic, probabilistic approach to crafting, some developer thought "It takes on average five 20% chance RE tries to get a Prototype schematic, more like eight to get the prefix you want, then at least ten 10% RE tries to get any sort of Artifact schematic and probably more like thirty-five tries to get a schematic you might actually want ... so, if you're lucky, you get 15 components minimum and maybe as much as 40 or so more typically. Yeah, 10 should be enough and then some."

But (1) you don't get schematics you already have and (2) given the number of REs I did on a wieldable item, I had enough components to craft several augment kits...

I was just pointing out that they have improved the crafting system since launch. Because at launch you could learn schematics you already knew and augmentation kits didn't exists at all so at least the 10 provides a safety net of sorts.

Obviously crafting for a specific pre-fixed item is way more difficult than the linear path for mods and such. I think one aspect you're overlooking, however, is that these percentages are very low to try to brute-force through. The truth is there IS a lot of luck involved, because it's a RNG system, that, yes, has been talked about to death but still not changed.

I don't have the game in front of my right now, but if I'm not mistaken, the chance to RE a schematic off a blue-grade item is 10 percent? Or is it only 5 percent when you get to those higher levels? Anyhow, from there, if you're specifically targeting one prefix combo out of five, you're setting yourself up for a lot of frustration.

That means on top of a 1 in 10 chance or 1 in 20 chance to not RE anything, you're adding another 1 in 5 chance to get the one you want. As far as I'm aware, just because you already RE'd one of those last five schematics doesn't take it out of the pool. It's not like, "Oh you already have Expert, here's Vehemence instead!" It's more like, "You got Expert! Oh you already have Expert? OK then you get nothing."

You mention the odds and yes, it is extremely rare to have a streak of so many failures in a row. But it's not impossible. The probability of REing at all is either 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 (again, can't remember) and then the conditional probability to RE the prefix you want is 1 in 5. So your overall probability of crafting that one specific prefix combo on any try is either 1 in 50 or 1 in 100.

Again, those tries are all independent of one another. You don't gain anything by rolling multiple times. You odds will be 1 in 100 on try No. 1 and they will be the same on try No. 100. Your percentage chance to win isn't increasing with each try. You're not "due" to win eventually. That's the gambler's fallacy. So while the chance of failing 30 times in a row is whatever small percentage, the chance of you failing on each try is 99 percent, period.

Crafting a specific artifact-grade prefixed item is horribly punishing. The numbers back that up. It's not a great crafting system and you're no the first person to experience this frustration (I had it trying to craft a purple-grade enhancement on my Sentinel and that's not even the prefixed kind of RE). But that's the way it goes. Math sucks sometimes.

"Never tell me the odds!"

I don't think there's anything broken with the current implementation. It's just the occasionally unforgiving nature of independent random trials. But here's an alternate idea, anyway:

Instead of independent trials with probability 10% and 20%, keep track of two counters attached invisibly to every character. Initialize the 20% counter with a random number from 1 to 9 inclusive. Initialize the 10% counter with a random number from 1 to 19 inclusive. Now every time you RE a 20% item, you decrease the counter by 1. When it hits zero, you are granted a schematic and the number is re-rolled again from 1 to 9. Similar thing for the 10% counter and its 1-19 value.

Now you're guaranteed a blue schematic with no greater than 9 attempts. On average, you will get one every 5 attempts. One every 10 attempts on average for the purple. Same as it works now, but with far less possible variance.

Anyone see a problem with this? Note that it would not flood the market with items because the average production rate of new schematics would be the same as before. It would just not allow the extreme long bad luck streaks.

Also keep in mind that if you're still going for a specific prefix when there are five available, your worst case for getting that purple schematic could still be 95 total trials. But that is, at least, guaranteed to be the absolute worst case and by then you'd also be guaranteed to have all five of those purple schematics (besides which, the odds against actually having this happen would be about 2.5 million to 1... why did I just hear that in C3PO's voice? )

Thoughts?

I think everyone is missing Finelinebob's point...

There is no skill involved in crew SKILLS. It is 100% luck of the draw. That is what he is griping about.

And I have to be honest, On one level I agree with him. RNG for EVERY crafted item is not a good system. There should be some way for the player to influence the results.

On the other hand, I lived through the WoW Burning Crusade Alchemy flask recipe discovery system where players would craft thousands of elixirs to try to get any flask recipe only to fail. My opinion at the time was that of defending it because it "encouraged trade"; I have a flask recipe you do not have but you want flasks, you have a flask recipe I do not have but I want flasks...let's trade (more simply, I sell what flasks I can make so I can buy what flasks I want). Further, elixirs were nearly equal in quality to flasks with regard to stat buffs. The only difference was that flasks survive death. So, I was of the opinion that flask recipes were a bonus not the desired goal. I simply went about my business of crafting elixirs and if I got a flask recipe....Yippy for me!!!

The system and my mentality radically changed with Wrath of the Lich King - flasks were greatly superior to elixirs, but the recipes were trained. The discovery system was relegated to other aspects of alchemy and the chance of discovery was radically increased.

So, I am used to this RNG type of system. Because of this, I play the SWTOR crafting system with the mindset of, "craft 10 of some blue quality item, RE all but one. If I manage to get ANY purple quality schematics...Yippy for me!!! If I don't then I send the last blue quality (that usually has an augment slot) to the alt I crafted it for."

@Finelinebob, I'm sorry but there is no word of any radical changes to the crafting system an I do not foresee any in the future. You said that the only choice one has is to not craft. I disagree. An additional alternative is to modify your mindset. You can accept the system as it is and do the best with what you have.

 

I'm guessing many of you are bored to tears if you've read this far.

LOL, not at all, great and funny (as in been there) thread.

My record is 79 REs at 20% without a hit.

As far as changing the system is concerned, my theoroy is that the different dev teams are having a contest to see which one can cause the most subs to quit. At this point there is probably a tie between the one working on ability delay and system response, the one working on endgame content, and the crafting team. I do not think that the crafting people will want to forfiet the race just to improve the crafting system and make a few random players happy.

...The truth is there IS a lot of luck involved, because it's a RNG system, that, yes, has been talked about to death but still not changed.

Luck is an epiphenomenon. It doesn't cause things to happen; it's something we see after the fact and only exists in our heads. It's not part of the game.

I don't have the game in front of my right now, but if I'm not mistaken, the chance to RE a schematic off a blue-grade item is 10 percent? Or is it only 5 percent when you get to those higher levels? ...

 

That means on top of a 1 in 10 chance or 1 in 20 chance to not RE anything, you're adding another 1 in 5 chance to get the one you want. As far as I'm aware, just because you already RE'd one of those last five schematics doesn't take it out of the pool. It's not like, "Oh you already have Expert, here's Vehemence instead!" It's more like, "You got Expert! Oh you already have Expert? OK then you get nothing."

On prefixed items, blues are 20% up to around level 23 combat rating, 10% from 24 on up. It may be level 32, can't recall right now. And if selection of what schematic you get occurs "without replacement" as you suggest -- with the game always using all 4 or 5 Tier 2 schematics possible and not removing the ones you already have from the mix -- then the odds of researching a new schematic would drop every time you learn one. For example, when REing a higher level item already with a Critical prefix, you initially have a 10% chance of learning a new schematic. Once you learn one of the five available on a Critical item, if things worked out the way you suggest your odds at learning one of the remaining four would be (Chance for successful RE) x (Chance for getting something other than what you know). If you know one Tier 2 schematic, your chance to learn the second would be (0.1)x(0.8) or 0.08 ... a 2% drop from the stated 10% chance. Similarly, knowing two Tier 2's would drop your chance to learn to 6%, knowing three drops your chance to 4% and finally knowing four Tier 2's would drop your chance of ever learning the final schematic to 2%. That's not what the tooltip says -- it stays at 10% no matter how many you know until you know them all, then it says No Research Available.

You're right that in independent trials, the odds of getting a specific Tier 2 schematic from a Tier 1 with a 10% chance of success -- granted that you do not know any of the Tier 2 schematics for that particular Tier 1 item -- is the product of the probability of succeeding and the probability of being assigned a particular schematic. Initially, that number is 0.1 x 0.2 or 0.02: a 2% chance of any single, independent Tier 1 RE giving you exactly what you want (if you don't already know anything). The assumption that what Tier 2 schematic you are assigned each time you succeed being independent of past success for a given Tier 1 schematic is a fallacy, tho, as I just mentioned above.

Again, those tries are all independent of one another. You don't gain anything by rolling multiple times. You odds will be 1 in 100 on try No. 1 and they will be the same on try No. 100. Your percentage chance to win isn't increasing with each try. You're not "due" to win eventually. That's the gambler's fallacy. So while the chance of failing 30 times in a row is whatever small percentage, the chance of you failing on each try is 99 percent, period.

I'm well aware of the Gambler's Fallacy and I'm not advocating that it is true here. I am, however, pointing out the difference between independent trials and dependent trials. As I have discussed elsewhere, a series of dependent trials relies on binomial probability, not simple probability. A core aspect of understanding large numbers of dependent trials is the Central Limit Theorem. In a way, we're kinda talking about the "quantum mechanics" of Crew Skills. Just like electron spin has a 50% chance of being up or down, once you actually measure it that spin will be up or it will be down: probability in this case talks about possible future outcomes. If you start measuring things, that act of measurement creates a dependency. Calculating a binomial probability of your series of measurements is not a calculation of how probable your particular out was but a comparison of your outcome against all possible outcomes given the same initial conditions.

This is exactly where the crafting system breaks down ... and it's not broken mechanics -- it works as designed. It is the design itself that is "broken". Consider combat for a second. Your chance to hit your opponent is also based on RNG. Would you put up with a failure rate for your attacks that was as bad as what you get for crafting? Of course you wouldn't, and you don't have to because of the design of the combat system. Every class starts off with an extremely high chance to succeed, relative to your chance to succeed at crafting. As you level up, your "skill", your accuracy, improves. Furthermore, you can choose skills in your skill tree that provide additional mitigation against your own chance to fail to hit, or mitigation that lowers an opponent's chance to hit you. You can even get gear that will improve your accuracy to the point that, expressed as a probability, your chance to hit is greater than 1.0. As a simple probability, that makes no sense. But it's there all the same, to give you a chance to out-mitigate your opponent.

What mitigation of chance is there for crafting? Very little. A few companions start with an increased chance to crit on a craft or mission. Increasing your affection also increases crafting mitigation by a small amount. At best, you have something like a 17% chance to get an augment slot on the hardest items you can craft with the right companion and the right affection level. Reverse-engineering, however, is sadistically free of any chance to mitigate your chance to fail. Companion affection does not alter it. Companion specials do not alter it. Even your SKILL level does not alter it. A level 49 Premium item, with a difficulty rating of 108, has precisely the same chance of researching a new schematic as a level 9 Premium item with a difficulty rating of 28. Does that make any sense? Does it make sense that an item with a rating of 28, something you can craft at skill level 1, has precisely the same RE failure rate when your skill level is 400? What does that extra 399 points of "skill" count for?

Because there is no way to mitigate your chance to fail at REing, the distribution of player failure rates will remain pretty much fixed in a normal distribution, as the Central Limit Theorem points out for a significantly large number of measurements. That means that almost HALF of the players in the game who have tried to RE Premium items currently have a failure rate GREATER THAN what the tooltip says it should be. Equally, almost half of the crafters out there have a failure rate LESS THAN what the tooltip says. What makes this broken by design is that the tooltip says for Premium items you have an 80% chance to fail. For combat, we start off with somewhere around a 20% chance to fail to hit your target and by the time you hit level 50, your chance to fail to hit has become negligible. For reverse-engineering, the number of crafters out there who have a history of failure that is negligible is, well, probably non-existent. Given the distribution in a normal curve, by far the majority of the "lucky" people out there who fall on the high side of the curve for RE success still do not reach that 20% chance to fail that combat level 1's have, let alone a 50% failure rate.

Quoting the simple probability of your chance to fail on your very next attempt to RE a particular item is a simple thing: look at the tooltip. Considering your HISTORY of failures in REing, on the other hand is not quite so clear. We see the tooltip and think it should be the same, but the Law of Large Numbers says "talk to me after an infinite amount of trials; maybe I'll give you an estimate after a few thousand." And what are we hoping for? A failure rate of either 80% or, for the more important gear, a failure rate of 90%. That's something to hope for? That's what our skill buys us?

If people cared as much about crafting success as they do about combat success, there would be no way we would be saddled with the failure of a system we currently have. Yes, it is working exactly as designed given the latitude RNG requires. That is exactly the problem.

As far as changing the system is concerned, my theoroy is that the different dev teams are having a contest to see which one can cause the most subs to quit. At this point there is probably a tie between the one working on ability delay and system response, the one working on endgame content, and the crafting team. I do not think that the crafting people will want to forfiet the race just to improve the crafting system and make a few random players happy.

This is the most probably true post I have read on these forums in a month.

I don't think there's anything broken with the current implementation. It's just the occasionally unforgiving nature of independent random trials. But here's an alternate idea, anyway:

 

Instead of independent trials with probability 10% and 20%, keep track of two counters attached invisibly to every character. Initialize the 20% counter with a random number from 1 to 9 inclusive. Initialize the 10% counter with a random number from 1 to 19 inclusive. Now every time you RE a 20% item, you decrease the counter by 1. When it hits zero, you are granted a schematic and the number is re-rolled again from 1 to 9. Similar thing for the 10% counter and its 1-19 value.

 

Now you're guaranteed a blue schematic with no greater than 9 attempts. On average, you will get one every 5 attempts. One every 10 attempts on average for the purple. Same as it works now, but with far less possible variance.

 

Anyone see a problem with this? Note that it would not flood the market with items because the average production rate of new schematics would be the same as before. It would just not allow the extreme long bad luck streaks.

 

Also keep in mind that if you're still going for a specific prefix when there are five available, your worst case for getting that purple schematic could still be 95 total trials. But that is, at least, guaranteed to be the absolute worst case and by then you'd also be guaranteed to have all five of those purple schematics (besides which, the odds against actually having this happen would be about 2.5 million to 1... why did I just hear that in C3PO's voice? )

 

Thoughts?

A number of people (including me) have proposed something similar -- a kind of "failure counter." What you are suggesting is a linear increase in your chance to succeed. That's one possibility. It would be simple to put a curve on that chance as well in case someone "upstairs" demands that there cannot be a 100% chance for success -- our combat stats have diminishing returns curves put on them of various degrees, so the devs already know the math to do this.

And I agree that there would not be any flooding of the market. Quite frankly, item modifications sell better than fixed-stat gear, even though (1) fixed stat gear is superior in terms of how high you can get the secondary stats as well as the number of substantial secondary stats they can have at high levels, and (2) given market prices, going with item mods instead of fixed-stat items can be considerably more expensive, whether you buy your gear or craft it yourself. I can sell a single mod or armoring or enhancement on the GTN for as much or more than an equivalent level fixed-stat item. Considering that you have two pieces of gear that take 4 item mods (mainhand, offhand), five pieces of gear that take 3 item mods (head, chest, hands, legs, feet) and two that take 2 item mods (wrists, waist), that's a total of 27 item mods for 9 pieces of gear. Not counting augments, to make it simpler. To make matters crazier, item mods (crystals, hilts, barrels, mods, armoring, enhancements) all follow a Linear RE path: at all levels, you have a 20% chance of success to get a Prototype from a Premium, and a 20% chance to get an Artifact from a Prototype ... and there is only one Prototype and one Artifact per Premium schematic, not the three Prototypes and fourteen Artifacts you get from a Prefix Premium schematic. Given people's general preference for custom gear and all the item mods they entail, add to that the ease of learning the better schematics for those item mods, wouldn't you expect the market to be flooded with at least Prototype mods if not Artifact mods? Wouldn't you expect the undercutters to have hit this part of the market pretty hard by now? It's just not happening. The easiest things to RE to maximum bang are still making the maximum buck.

@Finelinebob, I'm sorry but there is no word of any radical changes to the crafting system an I do not foresee any in the future. You said that the only choice one has is to not craft. I disagree. An additional alternative is to modify your mindset. You can accept the system as it is and do the best with what you have.

Or, you can try pointing out how bad the system is in a polite and courteous manner. Been there, done that.

Or, you can try your best to shame the developers into seeing how awful their system is and provide statistics and logic to back up the shaming ... which is what I try these days. Maybe if more people told BW how pathetically their system WORKS, rather than wrongfully cry that it is broken, maybe they'll listen.

But as you said, there has never been any hint at a true improvement to the crafting system. The best they've been able to manage is the Legacy of Crafting Character Perk which, for the price of 350k credits per character or (guessing here) 300 Cartel Coins, you can increase your companion's chances of getting an augment slot on a piece of crafted gear by 3%. That means that, at best, you can increase your chance on a Premium item from a least-dismal 30% to a slightly less dismal chance of 33% (given the item is rated relatively low to your skill level, that you use a companion with a +5% crafting crit, and that your affection with that companion is 10k). Maybe you'll remember what else they launched at the exact same time: augmentation kits. In other words, a 100% chance to get an augmentation slot.

I think anyone who got suckered into buying the Legacy of Crafting should get a refund.

Really, BioWare, is that the best you can do?

I don't do all this screaming because I like to hear/read myself screaming or because I hate SWTOR/BW/EA, I do it because I love this game and I have loved crafting in other games (SWG, EVE, Vanguard, Tabula Rasa to name a few) and I would like to have my cake and eat it too, since supposedly I am paying for it. Or, maybe the crafting developer team got fired ... in which case, yes, I do hate EA.

I have no problems with the system. It can be done It has been done. You realy want it easy to have the best epic recp in game whats the point then if every one can do it...

Amazing thread.

Unfortunate that the OP has to deal with individuals such as this that apparently do not understand the math, as quantitatively that is not what the OP described at any point.

Nice to see an intellectual engagement with the deficiencies of this game.

The problem is when the individuals playing have greater expertise on the subject matter than the developers.

The funny part is once you get to lvl 50 none of that really matters because all the BIS gear comes from loot drops or vendors.

Also, these days you would be better off getting a custom, modifiable offhand and putting modifications in it to suit your build. Cybertech, Artifice and Armstech baby! So much easier to make purple item modifications.

I'm not sure where I saw it, but i seem to remember a BW reply to one of the crafting complaints saying that the system isn't based at all on an individuals change but it randoms based on the entire population RE ing at the time you do the work.

Which means your 20% isn't really a 20% each time.. because its modified somehow by how many other people are doing RE s

I have no problems with the system. It can be done It has been done. You realy want it easy to have the best epic recp in game whats the point then if every one can do it...

You are confusing two things: frequency and difficulty.

Making crafting a purely RNG exercise and setting the probability of success exceedingly low makes things improbable, not challenging. In fact, it makes things improbable for you, not for the community. The brute-force statistics of probability spread across hundreds of thousands of accounts with multiple characters per account times the number of crew missions or crafts they do per day means that NOTHING is rare within the community.

I've said this before; apparently, I still need to say it. There is nothing HARD about probability. There is also nothing EASY about probability. In a system based on randomization, there is simply the frequent and infrequent, the more likely or less likely. Making "success" something that is improbable for an individual does very little to make it rare for the community, and has absolutely no bearing on whether that success was easy or difficult to achieve.

I would more than welcome a system with schematics that were hard to get. That would mean I would have to display some level of skill and that if I was more skillful than others, my skills would be in greater demand. It would mean that people who had no idea what they were doing would not be able to get the same schematics that I have and it would stop them from undercutting my prices because they have no sense of the value of something. When RNG rules a system, "value" is meaningless.

The only crafted items that require any type of skill are the end-game item mods you get from high-end operations. What type of skill does it take to get these? Combat skill. If you have a group of people who can beat the bosses and get the drops on a regular basis, again it's a matter of brute-force probability. Do it often enough, and it won't be rare. Or have you not noticed the spamming on fleet saying, essentially, "I'll craft you an end-game mod for free as long as you give me your mats." I don't even see people asking for tips half the time.

In other words, the crafted items of greatest value have a profit margin of 0. People now expect to get them "at cost". Don't try to suggest that "supply and demand" works in virtual economies like that in SWTOR when compared to real-world economies. I will believe that the day you can walk into Tiffany's with some gold ore and some lumps of coal and say, "Make me one of those rings, please, and I don't expect to have to pay you anything because I'm providing the raw materials." It wouldn't even happen if you had 24 carat gold and the Hope diamond for a jewel.

Now, are the people crafting these rarely-acquired items doing so because they are more skillful crafters, or because they have a set of friends that are more skilled in combat? Yes, not everyone can "do it", but there are still enough crafters with no sense of the value of what they can craft -- because it took no measure of crafting skill to achieve it -- that the results are essentially the same ... it doesn't take "everybody" having the schematic to make it worthless, it only takes "enough". Your argument has zero validity.

Calling the system we have Crew "Skills" is a convenient fiction for BW/EA. There is no skill to it at all.

Wait a sec... first you say

I have no problems with the system. It can be done It has been done. You realy want it easy to have the best epic recp in game whats the point then if every one can do it...

then you say

As some one with 50+mil from crafting I think I get it. O and yes that's from Recp lvl 33 and lower.

I misunderstood you. I thought that the level 62 or whatever were what you meant by epic. The stuff you can only get from successful REs of drops from ops. But you're talking about making millions from stuff anyone can buy from their crew skills trainer. If that's the case then, yeah, everyone CAN do it. What's your point?

We are coming up on the one-year anniversary of this game and we still do not have a viable, meaningful, skillful crafting system in this game ...

Awesome post as always. Here's hoping someone somewhere in BioWare is paying attention.