This game needs real crafting. The current model is broken.

This game needs real crafting. The current model is broken.

 

or atleast add rolling random stats to resources

This game needs real crafting. The current model is broken.

 

 

 

This is not SWG. It's a bit past the development stage if you want them to change crafting to a SWG style of crafting. It's a pointless request. You're several years too late.

I'm a software engineer. It's never to late to add or remove anything in a program. They may or may not choose to do so based on many factors but one of them is never the inability to do so. They could add many elements to crafting that are currently missing in the game. Crafting should play a vital role in the economy, character progression etc. It currently doesn't. The game would be significantly better if they addressed this.

I'm a software engineer. It's never to late to add or remove anything in a program. They may or may not choose to do so based on many factors but one of them is never the inability to do so. They could add many elements to crafting that are currently missing in the game. Crafting should play a vital role in the economy, character progression etc. It currently doesn't. The game would be significantly better if they addressed this.

 

That is your opinion. I like the crafting in this game. Is it as in depth as SWG was? No! But it's still important. (BTW, I made 4 million last night while I slept) Someone must feel what I'm crafting is important.

That's all I'm saying. They just need to add more depth to it. I have maxed BE, but there doesn't seem to be anything great to do with it. It's not like I can look for the best resources to craft the best stims on the server or that there's a class like Creature Handler to make pets for. Some depth would be really great for the crafting community.

sigh..............

 

another swg fan trying to make this game into his old dead mmo.

 

let swg rest in peace.

 

this game is a wow clone. being such it will never have depth in too many things but rather a little for everyone. anything complicated or challenging doesnt fit this mold. play the game for what it is and if you dont get any entertainment from it then just go elsewhere.

Sorry Uniz, but I have to disagree. The developers are capable of doing far more with this game. They could bring a great deal more depth to it and I really don't see them or LA wanting a WoW clone. The only reason anyone studio would want a WoW clone is if they could reach WoW's numbers. None have to date. Innovation is the only thing that is likely to break WoW's hold on the industry.

 

The Dev's should be looking very hard at the entire SW franchise and working to bring more depth to this game. I find it very funny that many people here believe software is a static thing and once something is done it has to stay that way. If that were the case a bug would never be fixed.

you shoulda went Cybertech or Artifice. i've made over 30 million credits before March. I don't consider this as "broken". Bio has always sucked for making money, way too many people went Bio.

I agree they could do more to help out crafting. As it is now, you don't actually feel like you are crafting. I mean I fire off 5 of my nearly useless companions to do things for me and then just wait with zero interactivity after picking the missions to go on or items to be crafted. It would be nice for those of us that want a more interactive crafting system to be able to do something to modify the outcome of our companions missions/crafting. Now, I'm not sure we need to go all the way to SWG crafting, but something needs to be done or at least considered. The only part that feels even remotely interactive is when I need to do a resource run on things I've run out of to the point where missions won't return the amount of resources I need or want, especially if I don't want to pay ridiculous GTN prices for said resources.

Sorry Uniz, but I have to disagree. The developers are capable of doing far more with this game. They could bring a great deal more depth to it and I really don't see them or LA wanting a WoW clone. The only reason anyone studio would want a WoW clone is if they could reach WoW's numbers. None have to date. Innovation is the only thing that is likely to break WoW's hold on the industry.

 

The Dev's should be looking very hard at the entire SW franchise and working to bring more depth to this game. I find it very funny that many people here believe software is a static thing and once something is done it has to stay that way. If that were the case a bug would never be fixed.

If SWG was so "good" pre-NGE then why were people leaving at a rate where SOE needed to flip the game upside down in a desperate attempt to gain more subscribers?

 

Even if there was more depth like adding quality to resources then the difference between stats would probably be between 1-2 points and even if it was to the point where quality truly mattered then it would lead to only a handful of crafters holding the best resources and adjusting the market to their bidding and crafters who aren't able to score the high quality resources toss up their flags and ragequit. And much like the fate of a similar dead game *cough* the handful of crafters who have the best resources gather together and monopolize the market.

If SWG was so "good" pre-NGE then why were people leaving at a rate where SOE needed to flip the game upside down in a desperate attempt to gain more subscribers? .

 

People didn't bail in large numbers until the CU hit, and that looking like a dusting of snow compared to the blizzard of cancellations with the NGE. And what you say has nothing to do with the crafting system in SWG at all, so what's your point?

 

As it was, crafting took a slight hit with the CU because they changed the way that resource gates affected crafting by essentially removing the lower end of gates when those gates became factors in the quality of a crafted item. The introduction of non-decay kits with anniversary gifts and the unbinding of those kits so they could sold to others eventually minimized the role crafting played during the CU. Those changes led to the removal of item decay altogether, and that completely destroyed the player economy that existed up to that point. The NGE killed off crafting altogether in SWG for well over a year by making random loot drops from random mobs better than what could be crafted. It did rebound, the devs did introduce a new system where quality once again mattered and crafted gear outstripped all but the hardest to get gear from instance bosses and the like, but it never again was as central a part of the game as Pre-CU crafting.

 

There are six words in the paragraph above that indicate the primary difference between SWG crafting at its best and SWTOR crafting as it always has been. Those words are "the quality of a crafted item." In Pre-CU SWG crafting, players needed to depend on crafters for the best gear that was readily available. When you found some piece of gear you needed that had excellent stats, you took note of the crafter's tag on the item and found out where that person's vendors were. Players had to keep going back for more because gear wore out, even with repair kits. And because the crafting system was complex and nuanced, it allowed people who wanted to dedicate themselves to crafting to choose abilities, get gear, find stations, tools and server-best resources to create goods BETTER than other players could.

 

That is something that is impossible to do in SWTOR crafting. I hear people moan about how in SWTOR "if everything was easy to get, then the epic gear would be worthless." So, tell me how much people are charging for item mod 27's on your server. Mine? Nothing. You give them the mats, they hope for a crit that will give them a second item they can keep and sell. It took a very short period of time for those spamvertizements to go from "your mats + 500k tip" to "your mats + 50k tip" to "your mats, tip appreciated" to "your mats, no tip required." So, just what is the value of these "epic" schematics? Because the values of the stats of an item made from any given schematic do not vary regardless of the player crafting it, the companion used to craft it, the affection level or the Crew Skills specials that companion has, the faction of the crafter, the server they play on, the location where they did the crafting or the time of the server clock when they started, or even whether the bloody planets are aligned or not ... whatever the insane ideas people have about what affects crafted item quality, NONE of them apply to this game.

 

There is no such thing as quality in SWTOR crafting. Everything has a fixed value. That "failed" game you're so quick to put down that happened to fail apparently for eight years and at a profit, had a crafting system designed a decade before this game went live and it could run circles around SWTOR's system. At it's best, it defined the player economy, it was the primary source of most gear both for combat and for novelty, vanity or social items, and it used randomization and probability not to cripple crafters as SWTOR's system does, but to create variation which lead directly to a sense of value and a sense of quality, which in turn lead to demand for the work of crafters who had the in-game skills and the skills between their ears to know how to maximize quality and value.

 

And the only people who undercut them were the people who could not compete. Their gear did sell ... mostly to the players referred to as non-factors on the forums and their cheap gear, by price and by quality, was certainly one reason they earned their non-factor tags.

I do not want to have to do what I did in SWG ever again. While I wouldn't mind expanding the current crafting system I would hate to see it reach the ridiculous complexity of SWG's crafting system.

 

Crafting in SWG was a full time job. Entire websites were dedicated to spread sheets of resource spawns past and present, not to mention the endless trips from planet to planet looking for spawns, dropping harvesters, getting stuff out of your harvesters, putting stuff back in to your harvesters...it was a nightmare of complexity and time requirements.

 

Add in the requirements of storage warehouses for materials, inter-dependency and multiple characters or accounts just to keep on top of things and you get a system that was bloated and top-heavy.

 

And randomness played a greater part in SWG's crafting system than it does in this one, so complaining about this games random requirements is just silly. On Starsider we went 4 years waiting for certain resources to spawn with stats good enough to max out some items because the RNG apparently hated Starsider.

 

I imagine we'll see additions to this crafting system to make it more involved but I wouldn't hold out hope that they will happen soon. I expect to see the SSSP long before, and that doesn't look close at the moment.

 

A crafting system needs to be involved enough to be an enjoyable challenge without being so overbearing that a majority of a players time is spent doing it. SWG's did not fit the bill as much as this one does not.

And randomness played a greater part in SWG's crafting system than it does in this one, so complaining about this games random requirements is just silly. On Starsider we went 4 years waiting for certain resources to spawn with stats good enough to max out some items because the RNG apparently hated Starsider.

 

I'd have to disagree. Not about the part that randomness played a great part ... it did, even if all you bring in is the variable resource quality. Sure, it took some servers years to hit the theoretical cap for some items, but not being at the theoretical cap hardly make crafted items useless.

 

It's the silliness of complaining where I disagree. SWG crafting always had ways of mitigating random rolls that went the "wrong" way. You had skills in skill trees that provided bonuses to resource quality. You had skills, gear mods, station and tool qualities and city buffs that gave you additional experimentation points as well as modifying your success rolls by 15% in your favor, and a capped-level crafter's chances for success were high enough to rule out failures due to random rolls if you took advantage of those "buffs". In SWG, there were many, many ways to improve the outcomes of random rolls so that as an "expert" in your craft, random failures only occurred when you were careless enough not to prepare properly for a crafting session. In that way, it made crafters as "expert" in what they did as capped-level combat toons, who also had ways to mitigate the randomness of combat rolls to pretty much rule out the chance of missing your target.

 

Here, what do we have for randomness in crafting? A system heavily weighted towards failure that NEVER gets any better no matter how much you improve your skills. The best we can manage towards modifying the randomness of SWTOR crafting is to get a companion like Corso Riggs to 10k affection so you can max his Armstech crit bonus to 10%. Which means that when you craft with Corso, you only have a 70% chance at failing. Yes, the best a SWTOR crafter can manage is lowering your chance to fail to 70%. Thank goodness SWTOR randomness in crafting doesn't extend beyond what it does, because at least we can be 100% certain how "high" an item's stats will be. Of course, it doesn't matter who crafts the item. Every single player with that schematic will produce identical items with identical stats. Which means it doesn't matter who players buy gear from. Which means the mindless hacks can undercut prices to the point where crafting becomes more expensive than it's worth.

 

Then again, because knowing how the simpleminded system in SWTOR works requires an IQ of maybe 60, we all are basically mindless hacks when it comes to crafting. There is no "knowledge" that makes any difference whatsoever.

crafting sux hard in tor and its not worth it, best thing is to gather resources+slicing and sell it to fools who still craft lol

I'd have to disagree. Not about the part that randomness played a great part ... it did, even if all you bring in is the variable resource quality. Sure, it took some servers years to hit the theoretical cap for some items, but not being at the theoretical cap hardly make crafted items useless.

 

It's the silliness of complaining where I disagree. SWG crafting always had ways of mitigating random rolls that went the "wrong" way. You had skills in skill trees that provided bonuses to resource quality. You had skills, gear mods, station and tool qualities and city buffs that gave you additional experimentation points as well as modifying your success rolls by 15% in your favor, and a capped-level crafter's chances for success were high enough to rule out failures due to random rolls if you took advantage of those "buffs". In SWG, there were many, many ways to improve the outcomes of random rolls so that as an "expert" in your craft, random failures only occurred when you were careless enough not to prepare properly for a crafting session. In that way, it made crafters as "expert" in what they did as capped-level combat toons, who also had ways to mitigate the randomness of combat rolls to pretty much rule out the chance of missing your target.

 

Here, what do we have for randomness in crafting? A system heavily weighted towards failure that NEVER gets any better no matter how much you improve your skills. The best we can manage towards modifying the randomness of SWTOR crafting is to get a companion like Corso Riggs to 10k affection so you can max his Armstech crit bonus to 10%. Which means that when you craft with Corso, you only have a 70% chance at failing. Yes, the best a SWTOR crafter can manage is lowering your chance to fail to 70%. Thank goodness SWTOR randomness in crafting doesn't extend beyond what it does, because at least we can be 100% certain how "high" an item's stats will be. Of course, it doesn't matter who crafts the item. Every single player with that schematic will produce identical items with identical stats. Which means it doesn't matter who players buy gear from. Which means the mindless hacks can undercut prices to the point where crafting becomes more expensive than it's worth.

 

Then again, because knowing how the simpleminded system in SWTOR works requires an IQ of maybe 60, we all are basically mindless hacks when it comes to crafting. There is no "knowledge" that makes any difference whatsoever.

 

I remember spending 10's of millions of credits on crafting stations at cap and the like. I remember using spreadsheets and calculators in order to figure out the theoretical maximums based on current available resources and then spending millions of credits more on those resources that had spawned years ago and were now in such finite supply as to demand huge amounts of credits for small lots.

 

I remember, and not fondly I might add, doing so much research and spending so much time crafting that I had little time for anything else. That is fun for a small but dedicated percentage of people but for the average gamer it is simply too time consuming to be considered fun.

 

And ultimately playing a game should be fun. Could SWTOR's crafting system be better? Sure...but not at the expense of fun. So the question then becomes "How can SWTOR's crafting system be modified in order to add to it without becoming burdensome and un-fun?".

 

You can't completely remove the RNG from any crafting system and at first glance mitigating the RNG through modifiers would seem to be the way to go but then you simply add another "gear race" to the game by having people searching out or making crafting gear much in the same way end-game gear is acquired. This doesn't really make the crafting game any better as it would quickly become boring for people once the gear had been acquired. There is no failure chance for actual crafting, just in the RE grind to learn those new schematics but if it becomes easy to learn new schematics why bother having a system in place to learn them at all?

 

While I don't mind the schematic rewards from Mission skills it would be nice to see another way to achieve these schematics that involved a mini-game of sorts for crafting. Some form of experimentation system that involved loot drops coupled with items looted or acquired from missions would be nice, as would some quest lines that allowed for the acquisition of schematics. Again, failure should never be mitigated to a zero chance. Instead a system should be in placed to allow progress towards a goal.

 

Some way to work towards a goal rather than hoping that "X" number of iterations through reverse engineering might proc a new schematic would do wonders for the current system but, again, I do not want to have to build spreadsheets and databases in order to refine my crafting as I had to do in SWG.

 

When creating the current system the developers stated that crafting was a secondary system that should not take away from a players ability to go out and actually play the game. Just how secondary they saw it is reflected in the simplicity and randomness of the current system. Any modifications to the system should continue to consider crafting as secondary but not so much as to make it something you do just because you have those freeloading companions sitting around the ship eating your munchies while you and your favorite companion are out "doing things".

crafting sux hard in tor and its not worth it, best thing is to gather resources+slicing and sell it to fools who still craft lol

 

Except that doesn't work as us 'tools', as you call us, have our own gatherers so don't need to pay your over inflated prices.

swg crafting in this game won't work for several reasons.

 

1. most planets are not open environments so no way to do the swg style mining on most of planets in the game.

2. most craftables parts can be had easily by removing specific parts from end game loot or barter rewards.

3. They would need to overhaul completely their database and code as the data structures for the current system will be completely incompatible with a dynamic output crafting system.

4. They are too busy expanding the game vertically to put resources to expanding the game in a horizontal direction.

 

now for those who don't remember let me list the problem with swg's crafting system.

1. high entry requirements it could take a new player years just to find decent resources let alone great ones. They did not have a system were at least 1 high stat material spawned somewhere for us to find. It was truly random.

2. Spawns were random and had to be hand scanned and the only decent amount of it on the planet could be in a no build zone and often was.

3. critical sections of a planet could become littered with mines because some high quality material spawned. Frankly alot of the habitable planets were littered with ghost towns.

Edited December 26, 2012 by david_watt

swg crafting in this game won't work for several reasons.

 

1. most planets are not open environments so no way to do the swg style mining on most of planets in the game.

2. most craftables parts can be had easily by removing specific parts from end game loot or barter rewards.

3. They would need to overhaul completely their database and code as the data structures for the current system will be completely incompatible with a dynamic output crafting system.

4. They are too busy expanding the game vertically to put resources to expanding the game in a horizontal direction.

 

now for those who don't remember let me list the problem with swg's crafting system.

1. high entry requirements it could take a new player years just to find decent resources let alone great ones. They did not have a system were at least 1 high stat material spawned somewhere for us to find. It was truly random.

2. Spawns were random and had to be hand scanned and the only decent amount of it on the planet could be in a no build zone and often was.

3. critical sections of a planet could become littered with mines because some high quality material spawned. Frankly alot of the habitable planets were littered with ghost towns.

 

So to mitigate some of the issues outlined above:

 

1. Make a system where lower grade materials could be combined to make higher grade materials based on some form of customization stat system where a crafter could enhance their crafting ability.

2. Add space based spawns where users could go out and mine. (On rails space is not an argument against this. It only takes their time and our money to make changes to anything in the game.)

3. Add additional craftable objects at each level that decay to give crafters more reason to participate.

 

Things that I always had fun crafting.

Creatures! - Nothing currently like this in the game. Would be a fun enhancement.

Buff packs - We have these but more could be done to and with them.

- Buff stats

- Give an ability

- many more just throwing out ideas.

Armor - RIS was fun and time consuming.

Houses - Of course they have to create new planets to allow it. But it's not like the tech isn't there.

Weapons/Lightsabers - No clue why this isn't a base part of the game. But trying to create a maxed saber was always entertaining.

I miss SWG crafting. Cookie cutter crafting sucks as there is no real minigame. Just acquire and click. I just use my crafting to make kits for augments. Anything else I need I buy through the store b/c thats where all the cool stuff comes from anyway.

This game needs real crafting. The current model is broken.

 

What does this even mean? You are making a big assumption that people know what SWG crafting is.

 

How does it work? How would it integrate with crew skills?

 

I'm not at all opposed to doing something different with crafting, in fact I think the crew skill system currently is holding the rest of the game back from being better because they are afraid of making crew skills too obsolete. Moddable gear is the biggest area. All gear should be moddable, but they are afraid of hurting cybertech/artifice. But those aren't that great anyhow if you aren't able to run OPS. I'd rather have awesome character customization and then fix crew skills later.

I suspect the OPs enjoyment of this game will increase exponentially once he realizes this game is closer to "WoW in space" then "SWG 2.0"

What does this even mean? You are making a big assumption that people know what SWG crafting is.

 

How does it work? How would it integrate with crew skills?

 

I'm not at all opposed to doing something different with crafting, in fact I think the crew skill system currently is holding the rest of the game back from being better because they are afraid of making crew skills too obsolete. Moddable gear is the biggest area. All gear should be moddable, but they are afraid of hurting cybertech/artifice. But those aren't that great anyhow if you aren't able to run OPS. I'd rather have awesome character customization and then fix crew skills later.

 

Well it wasn't really an assumption. I know there are people here who played SWG for the same 6 years I did. So I have no doubt they understood what I was talking about. As to the other post, I'm not saying I don't enjoy the current game. I would just like to see a more in depth implementation added to crafting.

Well, so much for my first response. I must have used some "key words" that SWTOR's forums don't like because when I hit Submit Reply, it all got erased. Anyway...

 

As much as I defend SWG's crafting system on these boards, you might think I want it back here. I don't. If I wanted SWG crafting, I'd go play the EMU.

 

I generally see two types of defenses of SWTOR's crafting system. The first, which I can't take as a serious response no matter how true it is, is this: "I make millions of credits at crafting in SWTOR so I don't see what's wrong with it." If that's the best defense someone can come up with, it shows a big part of the problem: there is nothing that separates people who know something about the system from mindless hacks. The second defense, though, is one that anyone calling for changes needs to take to heart: "I like crafting in SWTOR because I can send my crew off to do it and it leaves me free to do other things I think are more fun." If BioWare ever makes any substantial changes to the crafting/Crew Skills system, that is one thing that should never change.

 

It's probably the chief reason why variable value resources should never be added to this game -- it turns players into accountants as much as crafters. Yeah, I found it a fun part of the SWG system, but putting it in would ruin the idea of having your companions do the work, not you. All the same, there are aspects of SWG's system, particularly SWG's ways of altering, modifying and mitigating the RNG involved with crafting, that BioWare needs to look at and think about how our current system can use some of the same principles, not the same methods. It really isn't that hard to do -- a number of players over the last year have made suggestions that are refinements or modifications of the current system that would mitigate the RNG without replacing what is best in the system ... but BioWare has shown absolutely no signs that they have paid attention. Sadly, it's nothing new. There are some objections that remain pretty much in tact since early in Beta. What's a Beta period for anyway? Conditioning their staff to the sorts of complaints they will hear when it goes live so that they're already numb by then? That's apparently what BioWare did.

Edited December 27, 2012 by finelinebob

i can understand your desire to want more depth in this game. i really do. but what i was trying to say is that the approach or rather design of this game was a little bit of everything made really simple to bring in almost everyone. it did bring them in but did not hold many for long. we can debate later why this was so as it was a multifaceted issue. sadly it is still not being resolved either.

 

would a complex crafting system like swg succeed in this game. i would answer no as it is too complex and involved for the average player this game has attracted. this is the problem. it succeed in a soe product as soe games are more difficult, in depth and challenging. soe attracted that type of player who desires this.

 

personally i would like some areas already in the game to be expanded upon or perhaps more depth added. but you cant add the difficulty and level of complexity you desire as this player base wont sustain it.