Before patch 2.2 comes out, it would be advisable to think the system of crew skill and gathering missions over for there are several issues.

First of all, is there any statistics on players running any other crew skill missions but the rich and bountiful ones? For slicing, underworld trading, diplomacy, investigation and treasure hunting, there is not much sense in moderate and abundant missions, though I myself would not waste my time and credits on the latters regarding the gathering missions either.

If players do not send their companions on moderate and abundant, there is no point in those missions, those should be removed. Also, there is no reasonable explanation for the following:

1. Only 5 missions show up at the same time of a given type.

2. Gathering missions can not be queued.

It is hard to believe such terrible design failuire is possible. Sadly I am left to think that having to relog to change the available missions and log in every hour to send the companions on missions again is to increase the time spent in the game. This is a very poor solution and a total disrespect towards the players, wasting the time for hundred thousands of players for no reason in unacceptable and looks very bad on Bioware/EA. If the goal was to decrease the ammount of mats a player may get per day, simply put a daily limit on the gathering missions, but there is no reason to deny the queuable missions with a full list avaialbe.

Now, onto the second problem regarding level450 wealthy (artifact) gathering missions (archeology, bioanalysis and scavenging). Patch 2.0 really pissed off players with the low ammount of mats granted and the high ammount of mats required to craft level55 staff for augmentation kits and biochem stuff. There would be no point trying to claim it was a bug, it was simply another attempt to increase the time of gearing up. Luckily the designers were not stubborn enough to act in time, so returns and requirements are balanced now.

Unfortunately level450 wealty (artifact) gathering missions are left inconsistent with rich and bountiful gathering ones. At the moment a maximum of 3 rich or bountiful gathering missions in total provide the same ammount of mats as a wealthy one for a fraction of time and credits (taken the price of a wealty mission into consideration). My inventory is already full of these missions for it is not worth running them. The least I would expect from a wealthy mission is to return twice as many mats cost- and timewise, instead I get a fraction. This is either a design failiure again or players are taken to be fools. Fixing it should be high priority.

My main interest in this game is crafting, so please understand that I am someone who has taken a detailed look at this crafting system. That being said, I disagree with just about every statement and assessment that you give. Instead of trying to counter them point by point, I would simply suggest that if you are not having fun in the game, go spend your time and money in another. If you are unable to find the perfect game for you, then my suggestion would be to learn programming and design your perfect game. Maybe then you can understand the choices that are made to make a game popular yet profitable.

-Joel

Testify muh bruthuh. Testify.

What does this mean in more civilized words ?

Especially that caveman-sound "bruthuh" ?

My main interest in this game is crafting, so please understand that I am someone who has taken a detailed look at this crafting system. That being said, I disagree with just about every statement and assessment that you give. Instead of trying to counter them point by point, I would simply suggest that if you are not having fun in the game, go spend your time and money in another. If you are unable to find the perfect game for you, then my suggestion would be to learn programming and design your perfect game. Maybe then you can understand the choices that are made to make a game popular yet profitable.

 

-Joel

Sorry Joel, but I totally disagree with you and thnk although the OP was limited in his obsrvations (a lot more wrong than he detailed), he was right on. My (and wife's) main interest is not crafting, but it is one of our interests and we did (pre 2.0) a lot of it.

Although there were some redeeming factors such as you could actually craft things of use and value, crafting in swtor has always been poor. It is terrible after 2.0 and not of much use any longer except for a few items.

Having gone through the mass exodous of players early on and the f2p changes that brought the dead somewhat back to life, I cannot support inviting players to leave as a good idea. I am seeing pops start to drop again (just my subjective view) and think that swtor is going to experience a rough ride over the next three or four months.

As far as designing one's own game, if you would make 200M+ dollars available to some of the forum members and give them six years to work on it, I would be interested is seeing what they can do and if they could come up with something better than swtor.

NB: I'm not going to respond to the overly-emotional "disrespect" bits, as I don't think they even meet the smell test. They're prima facie ridiculous.

There are excellent, or at least reasonable, reasons for the noted restrictions on queuing gathering missions. First, it keeps supply somewhat restricted, which naturally raises the market price of the products. It also gives additional incentive to log into the game, which clearly is in Bioware's interest (and, frankly, mine as a player, because it means my friends and guildmates log in). The same reasoning applies to the restrictions on how many missions of a given type and quality are available at any one time.

Also, one little hint: you don't have to relog to change the available missions. Assuming you're docked at your factional fleet station, it's faster for most people to load out of the ship into the hangar (and vice-versa). I will certainly agree that that's suboptimal, but it could well be that they didn't intend for those missions to change even then for the reasons I specified above.

he was right on.

I often run abundant and moderate missions. In fact I run them more than 2 rich/bountiful this & 2 rich/bountiful that. The reason for this is simple. I’m usually gathering mats through missions to balance out my stock due to imbalances created from crafting or gathering in the field. Also for Cybertech, I’m primarily only interested in UWT metals, so when I’m gearing a full set of armor and mods for someone, I’ll send companions out on any that I find, boarding and unboarding the ship to farm for any other UWT metal missions in the grade. With Diplomacy, I’m going on missions primarily for LS or DS points, certainly not both. Gifts are a side benefit, being a cost saver when increasing affection with my companions.

No reasonable explanation?

#1 One can send, at max, five companions out on missions, so barring farming for particular missions, it stands to reason that only five missions would be available at the same time. I’m grateful that at least there are ways to reset the available missions.

#2 Because missions are random, they can not be queued. I’m grateful that crafting allows one to queue up to five on non f2p accounts since most orders are not for a single item.

At launch mission yields were say 50% that of 1.7 and costs were for some things 200%. Two months later things are more or less on par to 1.7. So what possible reason could there be other to alienate the entire player base of a game? Well it’s not uncommon with expansions for “slow downs” like these to be put into the game temporarily to prevent hardcore players burning through the new content too quickly.

As far as wealthy missions not yielding the same as any combination of three rich and bountiful missions for less time and money, that is statistically wrong for mission CSs. The value of wealthy missions is that they never fail and they always bring back artifact quality mats. Even though I haven’t looked after 2.1, the same can be said for gathering CSs as they never fail and always bring back a fixed quality of everything and not sometimes one thing but not the other as with R&Bs.

Although there were some redeeming factors such as you could actually craft things of use and value, crafting in swtor has always been poor. It is terrible after 2.0 and not of much use any longer except for a few items

There are certainly many many quirks to SWTOR crafting, but the “fun” for me in crafting is finding out what is of value to others in the things that I craft. I certainly can understand where people may be disappointed in the crafting in this game and may not be willing or able to explore all the potential of crafting, but the OP is just off base as to the examples that they gave.

As far as designing one's own game, if you would make 200M+ dollars available to some of the forum members and give them six years to work on it, I would be interested is seeing what they can do and if they could come up with something better than swtor.

Kinda my point. Gaming software is a for profit business. For the profits to truly roll in the game must be popular to the masses. I suspect that the OP does not appreciate all the limitations that business puts on the developers.

-Joel

It is hard to believe such terrible design failuire is possible. Sadly I am left to think that having to relog to change the available missions and log in every hour to send the companions on missions again is to increase the time spent in the game. This is a very poor solution and a total disrespect towards the players, wasting the time for hundred thousands of players for no reason in unacceptable and looks very bad on Bioware/EA

This is a harsh criticism of the crafting system in SWToR and is in my opinion not a constructive criticism. The debate aspect comes in that the examples you give to what is wrong with the system are in my humble opinion not wrong to the community.

My first reply is to your criticism. Games are meant to be fun, if you’re not having fun and truly think that the system is a "terrible design failure" unless there is some evil intent of designers, then it might be time to move on. My suggestion of programming and design is simply another way of saying “walk in another man’s shoes…”

My second reply is to asbalana and Mozivicus, because they actually agree with the content of your point of view in how the system is poorly constructed. In a healthy debate, I presented an opposing point of view to every point that you made.

… inform developers on suspected inconsistency on wealthy gathering missions and to suggest an alternate way (daily restriction rather then logging in/off for a given mission) if they wanted to decrease the ammounts of mats one may gather per day.

Sorry, I do not believe your suspicions are correct, therefore disagree that a solution, especially a non fully fleshed out one, is needed.

I hope that Darkdust’s suggestion of boarding/unboarding your ship to reset the available missions relieves some of your frustrations with the game.

-Joel

No point starting a debate on the topic,

I agree.

None of us knows EA/BW's vision of crafting and concept of place in game and none of us have access to the metrics necessary to measure the degree of success of their vision or concept. We have no measure of the extent of crafting and impact on the game economy pre and post 2.0. I am not aware of any surveys or attempts to measure players reaction to the crafting system. No one can say then how many players find crafting fun or enjoyable. No one can say how many people find crafting of value.

Clearly a f2p game with CM cannot have a pure crafting system. By that I mean that the design of crafting must be done in the context of sales of CM stuff. It is also clear that to sell CM fluff, such should be more appealing to that which can be crafted. We do not know EA/BW's concept of balancing crafting aganst the CM.

It has been generally identified that a small segment of mmo players do so because they enjoy craftng and playing the game economy. Does swtor "crafters" mirror other games in percentage of players that are crafters? Have "crafters" left the game after 2.0 or conversly has the crafting system in swtor attracted players to the game? Who knows? If EA/BW has information, numbers and analysis, they are not sharing it.

We have stated our subjective opinions, but there is no basis for debate.

Here is my take on crafting in this game. Starting out I began playing this game back in March of last year and played it off and on. My previous MMOs where Aion, Rift, Tera, EQ2, COH/COV and Lineage II. So that gives me a pretty good idea on how its supposed to be done in an MMO. There is a clear disconnect how the players see the game and the devs see the game in terms of crafting.

First off its way harder than it should be at least for the lower levels when there are fewer companions. Believe me this is not a case of "I want it NOA!!!" because I have crafted epic weapons in Aion and anyone who has played that game knows how time consuming that can be. As it stands there is absolutely no reason to craft except for personal enjoyment and the infinite reuse consumables. There is little if any benefit stat wise to craft. The stats need to be significantly higher for epic gear to be, you know, epic.

Why is it broken? You can get comparable equipment while leveling from the commendations, at end game the best stuff is from raids and flash points which leaves crafters out in the cold. It takes companions too long to bring back mats and they arent even worth the time in most cases. Recipes are in all the wrong places. Everything related to a craft should stay with that craft. Yeah I get we need to trade stuff but with stuff being all over the place trade rarely happens. For instance it wasnt until yesterday that I realized that there were blue recipes for Artifice for crystals that give the power stat. I didnt see this recipe at all from treasure hunting. It was from investigation. Why is it there when the primary way to get the mats and recipes are in Treasure Hunting? It makes no freaking sense. Same goes with the augment recipes and mats being in slicing. I could go with the mats being a slicing only thing but the recipes need to stick to missions which match the craft better.

What else needs to be fixed is how you need mods for lightsabers and weapons. Mods should be craftable by the craft they go to, as well as enhancements. All of the weapons for arms tech that are wisdom/strength items need to be moved to artifice. Lower the minimum level for all orange/purple moddable gear. Make the armoring/hilt/barrel determine the level. Meaning we should be able to delevel all gear if we wanted. This would be great for HK-51 since if you get him is practically naked at lower levels.

Lastly what I would fix is the freaking gathering missions with the whole too many gift missions and not enough metals thing. Its highly annoying to have to switch zones/log off just to refresh the list. We are already facing a time penalty with waiting on the companion to come back but its even worse for once you add all the zone loading just to get the mission. Thats my $0.02 on crafting in this game.