Even the much-acclaimed SWG crafting system wasn't so much skill-based ...

Perhaps then the question we should be trying to answer is "What are the key ingredients required to make 'a viable, meaningful, skillful crafting system'?"

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

Congrats, I made my first 5 million selling exclusively blue mods and armors under level 28 over a month with little effort.

The ability to profit from selling crafted material does not lend credence to an apparent inability to engage with the mathematically rationalized discussion of the crafting process offered here.

EDIT: Too Slow

Perhaps then the question we should be trying to answer is "What are the key ingredients required to make 'a viable, meaningful, skillful crafting system'?"

ya exactly

What would a skill-based crafting system look like? Or what could it look like?

Well, what is it that makes up "skill" in combat? To some considerable extent, it is the provision of choice as you gain in combat level. Choices that not only determine what you can do, but how well you do it. New skills do more damage or bypass means players have of avoiding your attacks. Picking out boxes in your skill trees may mean increasing stats, ignoring armor, increasing crit chance, providing additional combat advantages if your target has a certain debuff. The bottom line on all of those choices is that combat, like crafting, is founded upon random chance but combat, unlike crafting, has dozens of different ways of modifying or mitigating your base chance for success, and modifying them by meaningfully large amounts.

But that is just one part of combat skill. You can't mash your keyboard like an angry German kid and expect to be skillful. It helps to know what skills you have, how your gear affects your skills and how you can maximize the effects of as many skills as you find useful. If you are a truly skillful player, you also know the skills, the strengths and weaknesses of your enemy's classes and you know how to counter the strengths and take advantage of the weaknesses. There's really no one-to-one correspondence between aspects of combat in game with aspects of crafting in game here, because the point of what I am saying is that you as a player KNOW how to play the game. Class skills provide a variability for people to learn what is effective, what is not, and how to use it.

So, what I am suggesting is that skill in a game means being able to shift what is randomly determined in your favor.

Randomization is a core to any sort of computer game -- even Words With Friends has random elements to it. To be skillful, you need to both choose the right "abilities" (something that is inherent in the game) and know when to use them (something that you, hopefully, develop inside your own head).

Why is crafting in SWTOR so atrocious? It provides you little or no opportunities for either in-game abilities or in-your-head knowledge to mitigate the sadistically low chances for success you have for Crew Skills.

SWG's crafting system was just mentioned as being something "vaunted" but "random" all the same. Like I just said, randomization in games is a given. SWG's crafting system gave you multiple ways to mitigate the randomness, though, which makes it something worthy of comparison, worthy of learning from. Yes, just like SWTOR, SWG let you learn more schematics as you gained "skill", but this is where the two separate because this is where variation in crafting for SWTOR ends and where it began for SWG. SWG Crafters had skill trees that gave them access to abilities that increased their chances for success. They could acquire gear with stats that increased their chances for success. They could craft in locations that provided bonuses that heavily mitigated chances of failure (city specializations). What different crafters produced differed in quality -- in terms of producing game-altering effects -- and so there was true value to be earned in what you could craft. Much of that variance in quality came from your resources and resources varied in quality randomly, but only to an extent and within certain parameters. If you were an SWG crafter and don't know what I am talking about, then you DID not understand resource gates, you DID not understand how schematics relied on certain resource attributes to differing degrees, or you were only a crafter during the NGE when these did not matter so much. Resource quality may have been random, but there were KNOWN constraints to that variation and if you wanted to make the most of resource gathering, you had to KNOW the best fastest and most efficient ways to survey so you could drop 50 harvesters on that new server best spawn of Dathomiran Fiberplast, finding the largest single spawn on Dathomir to harvest it, and resulting in your doc getting the best buff packs the server has seen, resulting in that doc being able to charge more for buffs and preventing some hack crafter from undercutting you. Knowledge of how the system worked mattered because of the variability built into the system and the fact that enough class ability, the right gear, the right location, the right tools and workstations and the brainpower to put it all together meant that you could reduce your chance of failure to zero.

I am not saying we should have SWG crafting here. If I wanted that, I'd play the EMU. I am also not saying that we SHOULD be able to reduce our chance of failure on everything to zero, even though it gets pretty close to that in SWTOR combat. What I am saying is that SWTOR crafting has zero variability and, as such, it requires zero knowledge to be the "best" crafter in the game. And by "best", I do mean wealthiest since there is no difference between the Advanced Overkill Augment 22 I can craft versus what anyone else with that schematic can make. All it takes to be the best crafter in this game is the decision to spend more time on crew skills than on combat, compared to the average player. Time may determine the quality of some wines, but it's hardly a good measure of what should pass for quality in a game.

So much for what's bad. This is getting a bit long so I'm going to put a few concrete suggestions in a separate post.

Recap: a "skillful" system in a game should include variability in actions you can take, in the outcomes they produce, and enough complexity to making knowing how the game works the difference between a crafter and a mastercrafter.

I'll make my first suggestion the easiest one to implement. It would require the addition of two placeholder variables for each character -- I've heard the moans from the devs about how many variables the game has to track, certainly with the number any one of our toons generate by changing locations, proceeding through quest stages, sending out mail, etc, another two will not break the databases. This is also something I've seen suggested at least a dozen times by as many people. It fits in well with the idea that crew skills should have a "story" aspect as well, and it does NOT require that people do crew skills differently. In particular, this has to do with reverse-engineering and the idea of a fail counter.

This is how it works. You click on a crafted item with your RE tool. The RE routines check to see if a counter has already been set for an item crafted by the same schematic. If this item is different than what your last RE was on, then the fail-counter is set to 0 and something like a "work-item" variable is set to match the item you are clicking on. Your base chance for success, as stated in the tooltip, has added to it the value of the fail counter. Since it is 0 on this first attempt, your RE chance is unmodified. If your random roll is successful, the fail-counter and work-item variables are set to no value, resetting them essentially. If your random roll is unsuccessful, your fail-counter is increased by 1. You click on another item in your inventory with your RE tool. Does this item match the one you just failed on? If yes, then apply the fail-counter as a modifier to increase your chance at success. If not, then reset and restart the process. If you choose to work on the same schematic's items and you keep failing, then your fail-counter keeps incrementing up until you do succeed and, again, the variables are reset.

A few more details are needed. First of all, adding "1" literally is not going to improve your chances, so some modifier is also going to be needed. If you want a linear increase in your chance for success, that modifier is equal to the base chance for success. To put it simply, for a 20% chance RE:

• The equation for success is your base chance plus your base times the fail-counter
  
• For your first attempt, this means 20% + (20% x 0) = 20% ... nothing new here
  
• Your second attempt, tho, will be 20% + (20% x 1) = 40%
  
• If you haven't succeeded or switched items, attempt 3 would be 20% + (20% x 2) = 60%
  
• ... and so on.
  

I think it's plain to see that for a linear increase at this rate, you are guaranteed a success on your 5th attempt for a base of 20% or your 10th attempt for a 10% base item. The modifier does not need to be this large (or small). As long as it is a fixed number -- 5%, 8%, 12%, whatever -- you will see a linear increase in the odds of learning new research. If you wanted to get fancy, the modifier could be non-linear, producing something like a diminishing returns curve so that no one ever has a 100% chance on any one RE attempt. And we know the devs know diminishing return curves since most of our combat stats are affected by them and at varying degrees.

How does this play to the idea of story? This is a computational equivalent of LEARNING from your mistakes. If you value something and fail at attempting it, you gain more by studying it and attempting it again right away than you do from jumping around from one idea to another. Furthermore, if it didn't work this way in real life, in real stories, we would not have proverbs like "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." So, SWTOR builds in a crafting ability -- learning from your mistakes. Knowing how you "learn" is where your own brainpower comes in. Particularly if BW was to start throwing curves in at us, and changing the degree of the curve depending on the difference between the item rating and your crew skill rating, this is something that begins to look like a real skill.

Gonna stop again and put the next suggestion in another post. Sorry for being long-winded. Just gonna shut up for a while if people want to react to this suggestion.

To put it simply, for a 20% chance RE:

• The equation for success is your base chance plus your base times the fail-counter
  
• For your first attempt, this means 20% + (20% x 0) = 20% ... nothing new here
  
• Your second attempt, tho, will be 20% + (20% x 1) = 40%
  
• If you haven't succeeded or switched items, attempt 3 would be 20% + (20% x 2) = 60%
  
• ... and so on.
  

@finelinebob

One of the major complaints about that "other MMO's" crafting system is that everyone can make everything, all you need is the currency to buy the patterns. You are proposing a similar system in SWTOR just taking a different path.

Further, with the system you are proposing, you might as well make it so that one has to craft and reverse engineer five or ten (for 20% and 10% respectively) of an item to get a schematic. Because if you don't players will still complain because they had to make and RE five while their friend only had to do three. The player population is in fact that petty...I guarantee it.

I think a formulaic increase in reverse engineering chance over time is a viable option, but I think it go up more slowly - along the lines of 3-5% with each attempt - and cap at something significantly less than 100% - along the lines of 67%.

Lastly, I think that an alternative may be a crafting specialization system could be introduced whereby a character can choose to focus on one type of whatever they can craft i.e. a Synthweaver could specialize in crafting heavy armor. This could (within your specialty):

• further increase your chance to crit succeed and get an augment slot or 2x result
  
• increase your base chance of reverse engineering
  
• increase the overall stats on a crafted item
  
• create the potential to reverse engineer artifact quality items into custom quality
  

any or all of the above. All characters could still craft what they do not specialize in, they simply would not get the benefits above.

This would give players a modicum of choice in what they want their characters to learn, and it would diversify the markets so that items have some inherent value.

You are confusing two things: frequency and difficulty.

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.

The guys doing craft for mats only high end mods aren't doing it for free. When they crit they get 2 of the item. One goes to the customer and the other to the GTN. Their margin is the crit chance * GTN value so about 500k a pop on my server at current market values.

Also they don't need a bunch of mates who can clear raids to get the schematics they need money to buy other peoples mods from the GTN. Which they then equip, unequip and then RE hoping for the schematic. So first to market needs friends but once its on the market the other crafters just need to reinvest their money.

Being a skilled crafter in this game is more about knowing the market and the tricks of the trade. You'll notice more and more spamming over the next few weeks as they try to cash grab as much as possible before the market crashes with patch 1.6. Why do I think the market will crash with 1.6? Well that'd be telling.

PS crafting anything higher than a blue pre 50 is a waste of time. People level so fast its just not worth it.

@finelinebob

...

I think a formulaic increase in reverse engineering chance over time is a viable option, but I think it go up more slowly - along the lines of 3-5% with each attempt - and cap at something significantly less than 100% - along the lines of 67%.

Which is why I said there needs to be a modifier. I don't think a linear increase with a base rate the same as the initial chance is a serious proposal at all, but it's an easy one to understand and so a good place to start a discussion. I agree with you that it should be capped lower than 100% but I'd rather see a diminishing returns curve on it. That would give you a little more of a bump for the first few tries, but less and less as you approach the cap.

It's also not the only idea I have for reverse engineering ... it's just that I had said enough for a good long while and other people with other good ideas need the space to chime in, like:

... I think that an alternative may be a crafting specialization system could be introduced whereby a character can choose to focus on one type of whatever they can craft i.e. a Synthweaver could specialize in crafting heavy armor. This could (within your specialty):

 

• further increase your chance to crit succeed and get an augment slot or 2x result
  
• increase your base chance of reverse engineering
  
• increase the overall stats on a crafted item
  
• create the potential to reverse engineer artifact quality items into custom quality
  

any or all of the above. All characters could still craft what they do not specialize in, they simply would not get the benefits above.

 

This would give players a modicum of choice in what they want their characters to learn, and it would diversify the markets so that items have some inherent value.

Which, except for the last bullet point, would be relatively simple changes to the system. Customized, personalized schematics mean storing variables somewhere and it seems that when this game's devs hear of an idea that requires tracking more variables, they run screaming. I have my own ideas on how RE can produce customized items, but I still want to hear from other people first.

PS crafting anything higher than a blue pre 50 is a waste of time. People level so fast its just not worth it.

I don't think I could have come up with a more succinct critique of the current system than this. Other than me believing it SHOULD be worth the time for the crafter, and the cost for the consumer. For me, it is worth the time to the extent I don't have to learn something new for my next toon or their alts. Tier 2 gear should be worth the effort it takes to learn how to craft it. Currently, for most people, it is not.

Everyone who knows basic statistics understands why long runs can happen. The problem is that with an RNG system they can happen. The deeper issue is that, as a rule, software RNG implementations suck and are prone to NOT generating random results, which means long runs can and do happen more often than they ought to if outcomes were based on a true random sequence.

The whole basic premise of RNG-based crafting outcomes and "learning" patterns through RNG rolls is just flawed, and it's not fundamental to the design of a "balanced," "challenging," "fun," or "good" crafting system. It's just the way Bioware did it, either because it's what was built into the crappy Hero engine when they picked it up, or because they're lazy and couldn't be bothered to think of another way to do it (which they could have discovered if they had looked at any of the dozens of other games on the market with crafting systems that don't depend on RNG outcomes from top to bottom).

I don't look for crafting to get noticeably better in this game ever, because they have demonstrated by now that they have nobody working on it, and could care less about fixing even atrocious, game breaking bugs like the silent magical disappearance of recipes already learned. With their obvious focus now being churning out cash shop swag to the exclusion of all else, I don't expect them to even consider fixing, let alone overhauling, anything about crafting for at least a year, and probably much longer.

I don't see how your failure modifier is really going to improve the system that much, not to mention it adds no skill or challenge that you have been speaking of. Let's say your trying to RE a dropped mod from an operation, it means that it's in you best interest to not RE anything else for weeks on end so that you don't lose your modifier.

So it's really most useful for items you can already craft the lower version of, and of those items the most frustrating can be the prefix progression items. How about this for a much simpler solution that doesn't involve storing any new fields or modifiers in the db: when you proc a prefix on an RE you get to choose which one you want.

None of that addresses the fact the crafting system only really requires time, and you have a huge advantage if you are part of a solid raid team the is farming the highest level operations. I think one thing that could be taken from the SWG system that I found most interesting is the concept of variable quality materials, and limited availability. One of the greatest things about the SWG system is when the resources changed there was a rush to see what new resources were available and where the best spots to get them were, also the old resource is now gone.

To put it in swtor terms for the people who did not play swg.

Currently we have durasteel, it's all the same. But what if durasteel came with a quality rating, a number between 1 and 1000 and when you used it the number provided a slight increase or decrease the the base stats of an item. Now apply that to all the materials in a recipe and at the end you get a slight variance in stats from one crafter to another depending on which mix of materials they are using. The variance does not have to be much, just enough so that an item made with good materials is a bit better than the stock schematic, and an item made with all garbage is a bit worse.

Now to make it more interesting, the durasteel available at the nodes around the world would change on a regular basis. For example, lets say you find a cluster of nodes in the northern part of belsavis that are providing 950 quality durasteel but they are only available in that specific area and at some point they are going to be gone and replaced with a new quality. Maybe lower, maybe higher. Dedicated crafters are the ones who engage in the barter and trade of collecting different quality materials that there is truly a limited amount of in the world. When they're gone they are gone until something similar comes along. The server might only have garbage durasteel for a month, and the crafters who are holding a supply of the last good stuff available are now in much higher demand.

SWG took this to a whole different level, to the point where if you really wanted to be good at crafting you were probably crap at combat because you shared skill points between all your skills. If you were putting a skill pint in tailoring, you weren't putting it in marksmanship. But the idea of different quality crafting materials and the true scarcity of them I think was the cornerstone of why that crafting system was so interesting.

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 ....

Last night, I similarly was crafting a lv 47 specific ear piece for a toon that is quickly approaching the end of his sub-50 career. In the first 8 earpieces RE'd, I unlocked 4 of the 5 artifact schematics. The system is random; working as intended.

One of the major complaints about that "other MMO's" crafting system is that everyone can make everything, all you need is the currency to buy the patterns. You are proposing a similar system in SWTOR just taking a different path.

This particular suggestion (an incrementing modifier for consecutive RE attempts on the same type of item) isn't intended to do anything more than remove the frustration of excessively long runs of failures. It's a simple "quality of life" fix that BioWare could easily implement without having to change the way crafting and crew skills work. It gives the player a tiny bit of influence over RE which is a small step towards improving the current crafting system. It also makes our crew slightly less stupid since it gives them a limited ability to "learn" from their mistakes.

Another simple "quality of life" fix might be to slightly increase the base RE chance for a particular item for each schematic of the next grade you've already discovered for that item. Again this doesn't really change the current crafting system and it doesn't even require any additional data as the modifier can be calculated from the player's list of schematics. Unfortunately it doesn't give the player any more influence over what schematic is produced but makes failing to get the schematic you want a little less painful.

Of course while such "quality of life" fixes would be welcome they don't radically change the current crafting system so the fundamental issues remain but more on that later.

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

Wouldn't say I'm missing it. I get that he wants more complex and meaningful skill-based success and I am not opposed to that. I am just not as passionate about it. I craft when I play this game. I don't play this game to craft. I would be happy with a simple method of preventing long failure streaks. Considering how many far simpler things are NOT getting fixed, I would not waste my time coming up with grandiose plans to overhaul crafting.

It's just not in the cards.

.......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.

 

......

Actually I do not think that this is true. The profit margin (whatever that means in this context) is not 0. People craft for free for the crits which they keep. Other than the amortization cost of the schematic, cost per unit drops the more units that you craft, for zero investment in mats the free crafter is making a ton of credits considering the pricing of the highest level mods, etc.

With reference to the amount of skill that it takes to acquire end game schematics, I refer you to the tear soaked thread about stealing schematics by virtue of the RE exploit that is not really an exploit and ask you to consider how crafting goes forward in raiding guilds.

You are all making the assumption that crafting should need skill in the first place. Honestly I disagree with where you are starting out from.

I hate the totally RNG method we have now (Your analysis of it's flaws is great), but the point of crew skills in SWtoR is accessibility. Everyone is done automatically for you while you are off playing the game and I don't really want to see a way that you can 'play' crafting instead of playing the game in order to improve your results.

I would be happy with the introduction of a crafting tree, where everyone can pick talents in as they level up. Do you want faster crafting? Better crits? More crits? something to improve it over base, but still nothing relying upon what I would call skill.

I would also be happy to see RE'ing changed, maybe doing it backwards, where you know what you want and set the target, then your crewmember goes to work on that and comes back once it is done. The length of time would be random (A few % chance to finish every 10 minutes or whatever) reflecting that they are going out, getting the mats and basically doing what you do now, but automatically.

This way the result is guaranteed, but the RNG is just down to the speed at which you do it, and you will get a small measure of control via the crafting skill tree.

I would also be happy to see RE'ing changed, maybe doing it backwards, where you know what you want and set the target, then your crewmember goes to work on that and comes back once it is done. The length of time would be random (A few % chance to finish every 10 minutes or whatever) reflecting that they are going out, getting the mats and basically doing what you do now, but automatically.

Actually it would be nice if you could send them out and say, "I want 20 Corusca gems!" and then every hour Kira comes back and says "I got (X number) and I need more money." then just click that and auto send her out again. I hate running materials missions that may give you two different metals at the same level and you have to run it and run it and run it to get what you want.

Kind of unrelated but made me think of it.

2 different toons on separate servers RE'ing an implant to get the one I wanted = over 300 RE's each before success.

Is that too many? yeah, should be 100 RE's max before you succeed.

Just purely spitballing here, as I have no confidence that anything like this would ever make it into the game.

But what if crafting became a (partially) twitch or reaction based activity?

When you do PvP, you have to pay attention to your character, the enemy, cooldowns, resolve bar, etc. A good PvPer has skill. When you run ops, you have to know boss strategies, pay attention to environment hazards, interrupt when possible, and optimize your ability priority list.

What if something like that was applied to crafting? A sort of minigame not unlike a quicktime event where certain actions had to be done in response to events that happened in the minigame. The more precise and perfect your execution the more likely you would be to obtain a high-quality result.

So for example, there would only be one schematic for a Cunning earpiece at level 33. You select the specific purple you're going for (Tempest). Do the crafting minigame crappy, get a green. Do it good, get a blue. Do it great, get a purple.

What do you think? Good idea or terrible idea?

Lots of people to respond to, so apologies in advance if I don't mention you all and I'm not going to be using the "Quote" feature of the Forums since it will just get too involved, but...

@Heezdedjim: If you're going to write off computerized RNG as unsuitable for crafting, then let's be consistent and remove it from loot drop tables, remove it from combat rolls, remove it from who gets assigned to what GF or WZ group ... hell, we have a looming world financial crisis on our hands: could it be because Monte Carlo methods are used in finance for forecasting investment performance, derivative outcomes, real estate values? If computer-generated randomness is so god-awful, would people really risk their money on predictions that utilize it? But getting back to our situation, again, combat rolls are also randomized. I doubt BW uses one randomization method for combat and a significantly different core generator for loot tables, group placement, or anything to do with crew skills. I could be wrong, but having separate code for each means a greater expense on their part and a reduction to their profits because of it. If the RNG in crafting is unreliable, then its unreliable everywhere in the game.

Btw.. I saw what you did there with that name ... to me, looks extremely Dutch or something, but it ain't

@nbayer: Yeah, not much of what I call skill in what I started with, but it's just the start. SWTOR can do a lot more interesting and skillful things through the RE system, but as other people have mentioned what I suggested is a means of removing the sadistically long runs of RE failures that the unmitigated randomness of RE and its ridiculously high bar for success create. Some other people have jumped ahead with further suggestions for change, some similar to things I've suggested before, some different and better than anything I've thought of. You, in particular, mentioned something I forgot to put into my first suggestion on changing RE -- being able to select the schematic you want if you get a successful roll. That's something I agree with 100%. I'd take that choice in trade for a significantly lower cap to the maximum chance for RE success. The whole point of reverse-engineering is to work towards some goal, not randomly fiddling with something as if you didn't know how it works just to see what your poking and prodding, twisting and pulling might get you. IRL, doing that sort of thing with weapons will get you killed faster than it will get you an improvement to the weapon you're tweaking. One of the other sadistic parts of the current system lies in how you can not only have an improbably long string of failures, but when you finally succeed you get something like a Cunning item with Shield Chance (no class or companion with Cunning as a main stat uses a shield for off-hand, so why is it in the game? It makes the developers' jobs easier, that's why). I'm glad you brought that up; it's another simple fix that does not significantly change the process of how things are currently done but adds a whole new dimension to the idea of being "skillful" in crafting. It means you have to know what combinations make sense, what stats work best together. It reflects on that part of being skillful in a game that rests between your ears, not in the software. Thanks.

As for the idea of variable quality of resources: yeah, I loved that part of SWG crafting but there are problems. Resource quality variability in SWG relied upon and influenced a broad range of aspects of crafting. Resources had multiple attributes that were important to differing degrees for different items. Resource variability relied on "gates" which limited variability in different ranges for the types of materials that had seven different classes (like the 7 types of steel, the 7 types of iron, the 7 types of liquid petrochem, the 7 types of radioactive ... pretty much every inorganic resource). Depending on whether a schematic called for "low-grade ore", "silicastic ore", or "Crism silicastic ore", those stat values could be modified. Low-grade ores were gated, and Crism was one of the low-quality ores with a Shock Resistance that never got above something like 290 out of 1000. As a noob armorsmith, I could never understand how people made Composite Armor with stats so high (this is pre-CU) when there NEVER was a good "shift" of Crism. As a noob, I knew nothing about gates and so I had not idea that an SR of 289 for Crism meant that when a schematic required Crism specifically, not just any low-grade or silicastic ore, that 1-1000 quality scale was thrown out and the range of the gate became the measure ... 289 gated was equivalent to 999 out of 1000.

Why discuss all this about a dead game (with a clone on life-support)? A number of reasons. First, people keep saying "SWG crafting was random, too" as if that means it was equally as worthless as SWTOR's system. I'll repeat myself again here because people don't seem to understand it: RNG is the core of any computer gaming experience, even for something like Words With Friends. How you modify, mitigate, adjust, ameliorate those random rolls is what makes all the difference. SWG had a system for spawning and utilizing resources that, particularly in pre-CU days, was quite intricate, nuanced and required you to have some skill between your ears as well as skillful choices in game-generated abilities in order to be the best crafter you could be. SWG crafting had RNG, sure, but it was not solely RNG, not even close -- SWTOR crafting is at least 99% RNG and nothing more.

In other words, as much as I or anyone else loved it, it just ain't gonna happen here and trying to make it do so here will not work. It's too great a change to the system, it would be too close to SWG to be distinctive, and the variability in the items you produce can be introduced in other ways that do not change the way crafting is played in SWTOR significantly. Some people have mentioned a few ideas. I share some of those ideas and have others as well, and I'll bring them up soon. As I said, my post about "learning" curves in RE was just a start.

@ucsimplyme: Yes, your "win" streak of 4 out of 5 is working as intended, or working as designed. I never claimed my run of 93 10% failures in a row, with a binomial probability of basically 56 in 1 million, was NOT working as intended/designed. I stated rather strenuously that it IS working, and that is the problem. Would you be happy with a string of 93 missed attacks in a row in a Warzone? SWTOR combat has RNG at its core. Do you think it is reasonable for a combat level 50 toon in Elite War Hero gear to have a streak of 93 misses in a row? or even 10 misses in a row? or even 5? 2? How common should it be for a combat level 50 toon in even Recruit gear to completely whiff twice in a row? If we expect heroic martial performance from our toons at the pinnacle of their abilities, why should we settle for the crap we are being force-fed in Crew Skills when we are at the pinnacle of our abilities there?

@SteveGarbage: no, what you are talking about is not unrelated. Resource gathering is a huge problem for Crew Skills and crafting, as illustrated by the numerous threads about Underworld Trading and Diplomacy being "broken" or skewed or biased towards failure. They are biased towards failure and provide no means for improving, for showing that your crew learns to do its work better as your skill level increases. This is just as much of a problem as RE is, so thank you for bringing it up. What you suggest is a good starting point for a conversation about how missions for crafting materials can be changed that show a learning curve or an increase in virtual skill for your crew. If people don't lose interest in this thread, I'll make sure it comes up again. Thanks again for some good input.

@_Darkstar: Just bringing up one of your ideas here, because it had a lot in common with what psandak said a little earlier and in a little more detail: the idea of being able to specialize in crafting, within your particular skill. For any specific GAIN in abilities in games, you usually have to give something up in return. I don't want to mention anything in particular that will start flame wars here that don't belong, but there is at least one issue in the combat sphere of this game that goes against this principle, saying "I want this advantage, and I want this other advantage I had to give up to get the first, and I want to be able to toggle between them faster than it takes me to mount my speeder." (If you want to guess at it and flame me for sounding critical if you want it, take it somewhere else ... we're talking Crew Skills here. Combat issues are here just for points of comparison.) But as presented ... if my Gunslinger/Armstech toon wanted to make better pistols than anyone who didn't care about specializing, then having to give up learning advanced schematics for some other categories of my craft (maybe just the melee weapons) or even all other categories of weapons (but leave me my barrels, augments and kits) seems a fair bargain. Because...

@_Darkstar and @Zem_:... having your crew craft while you do other things you value more -- like operatons, warzones, trolling too hard on fleet to pay attention to your crew -- that is a great strength of the current system ... maybe it's only strength. In any event, this aspect of the system should not change. In anything I have suggested, or anything I will suggest, I think it is important that the core experience of Crew Skills remains. I think there are things that can be tweaked -- like a learning curve on RE -- that really do not change the process from what it is now (with the exception of one guy on a different thread who thought that having to RE the same item to get the learning curve bonus was too restrictive). Some of the other suggestions I haven't mentioned yet, including things very close to what other people have suggested (such as specialization) are additions to the system that can be completely optional. In combat, you have a choice between two advanced classes early on. This is a type of specialization that is NOT optional. People who decide not to pick an advanced class and try to level to 50 without one seriously screw themselves over. But the choice made is a win-win. Advanced classes get you access not only to specialized abilities but to skill trees as well. You may not like the "winnings" of one choice, but both have advantages over not choosing. Wellllllll, okay, maybe not for commandos and mercenaries who PvP right now. But with the idea of specialization within a crafting skill that gives you bonuses in one place at the cost of doing no advanced crafting for other parts of your skill -- that trade off is what would allow Crew Skills to continue on the way they are right now, for those who enjoy it as is -- and also allow for people to focus more on crafting and gain the ability to distinguish their crafted items from the run of the mill.

Any long-time SWG player knows what happens when systems that have been in place for as long as SWTOR crafting has been around get stood on their heads or thrown out completely. Everyone gets pissed, whether you thought change was needed or not. For the people who have said "It's just not gonna happen" (yes, I may be wrong about no variation in resource quality) ... big things have happened in the big MMOs. I mean, for those of you that play or played EVE, how long did it take to actually get a body? An "avatar"? All the same, change is most likely when the core of the system being changed remains. I'm not for throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If you enjoy blowing bubbles, playing peekaboo, filling your diaper and eating mashed, strained peas all the time, I think you should have that option. I'd like this baby to learn how to walk, though. If it means crawling for a while, that's fine, but it's better than lying on your back in a crib, flailing your arms and legs randomly for the simple joy of being able to. That is about the level of SWTOR's crafting system as it is right now.

Gonna shut up again for a while.

Sry, you posted while I was writing that big one above, so I missed you.

Just purely spitballing here...

Aren't we all? BioWare has shown ZERO interest in what the player base thinks about crafting, going back even to mid-late beta. After all, what's a beta period for?

...But what if crafting became a (partially) twitch or reaction based activity?

...

What if something like that was applied to crafting? A sort of minigame not unlike a quicktime event where certain actions had to be done in response to events that happened in the minigame. The more precise and perfect your execution the more likely you would be to obtain a high-quality result.

 

So for example, there would only be one schematic for a Cunning earpiece at level 33. You select the specific purple you're going for (Tempest). Do the crafting minigame crappy, get a green. Do it good, get a blue. Do it great, get a purple.

 

What do you think? Good idea or terrible idea?

You mean "striking while the iron is hot"?

Personally, I think it would be fun, but it has two disadvantages. (1) I think it would be too great of a shift away from the core mechanics of crafting to be implemented. Yes, it has some of it conceptually; it even builds on it conceptually. But it seems to me the "twitch" aspect would be a fundamental programming change for the system, and that spells disaster. (2) Crafting IS a minigame right now. Lots of people like the crafting minigame as is. Rather than swapping minigames, I'd like to see something that optionally lets people make a game, not a minigame, out of it. But yeah, it's a cool idea.

True, a shift as great as that is more likely to engender anger and hatred than happiness.

For me personally, crafting is merely a means to an end. In and of itself, it isn't particularly fun.

I use it to make money (sorta, as I'm a really crappy GTN'er), I use it to gear up alts, I use it to make stuff for guildies and friends. But the only thing that I consider fun about it, is that once I've unlocked a purple I can be "that guy" for others I know. "Hey if I send you ANAs can you make me Might Augments? Thanks man!!"

Since the "doingness" of crafting holds no particular charm, anything that made the activity of crafting more enjoyable I would be 100% in favor of.

If you're going to write off computerized RNG . . . blah blah blah.

That's nice. Someone should inform all the game designers that didn't manage to work the RNG into their crafting systems how much those systems suck.

What if something like that was applied to crafting? A sort of minigame not unlike a quicktime event where certain actions had to be done in response to events that happened in the minigame. The more precise and perfect your execution the more likely you would be to obtain a high-quality result.

STO has several twitch-y minigames for farming mats. For the most part they're annoying as hell, and it's never been clear that "winning" the game actually has any effect at all on the results. The point of having different things to do in the game is that they're different, and they don't all involve the same kinds of game play. Thus people who like to do different sorts of things . . . can.

We could do lots of things. We could just have all crafting mats drop off of player corpses only in PvP matches. Or we could do away with crafting altogether and have ALL gear come from random world drops off mobs that you have to farm in the game world. Or we could have a crafting system that doesn't suck, doesn't rely on a lot of wacky math and RNGs, and lets crafters do what they like to do, which is to spend their time crafting.

The "problem" with crafting isn't that it lacks "skill" or "twitch" or needs to be more of a time and money sink than it already is. The problem is that it's annoying, tedious, and un-fun in the extreme, which has everything to do with the abysmally bad UI, crappy mechanics, and absolute neglect that Bioware has lavished it with since the start. It could easily be a nice aspect that would make dedicated crafters want to stay with the game. But it's not.