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SWG (Pre CU) Crafting?
Krelnor
Member Posts: 118
I hear all over the forums that crafting in SWG (Pre CU) was amazing. Could you tell me in depth about that crafting system and how it worked? And if there is/was a better crafting system than SWG (Pre CU) crafting could you also go into details about it? I've watched a few youtube videos but i can't really tell too much from them. Thanks in advance.
Comments
The crafting was pretty standard but it becomes in depth with just everything you can craft and how it was a player driven economy and everything you needed in the game was bought off players. Also because player housing was seamlessly built into the world you could have vendors to sell your goods and guild malls and players would travel across the planets to visit your vendors and purchase your stuff. Each profession needed other professions to play the game and crafters needed scouts and merchants and even combat professions to go to DWB and also Entertainers now to give them buffs. You also had to place down harvesters and survey the land to see where the best resources were.
The SWG crafting system involved the player searching areas for the right resource with the right statistics to make the item(s) the crafter wanted to make. The harvesting process was set up so that the player could place harvesting structures to collect the resourse while the player was doing something else, or even offline.
The resourse stats would determine the stats of the completed item, or item part. The importance of the crafted items was increased by the fact that the original SWG game mechanics were set up so that crafted items were the primary source of equipment. The crafting system included 'premium' equipment that was crafted with resources that were looted from the hardest MOBs in the game. These resource components were sold for a premium price, which made the price of the equipment they were used to craft the most expensive items in the game (and the source of the 'Crafters are greedy' myth that was used to destroy the crafting system).
When actually crafting the item, the crafter would choose which stat to attempt to increase on the finished item. The finised item's stats was dependant on the resource stats, the crafter's skill boxes, and the stat(s) the crafter chose to focus on.
This system was completely replaced with a knock off of WoW's enchaning system (items can now be broken down by a trader to be used to increase the stats of an item).
SWG's original crafting system had both depth and purpose. Outside of EVE Online, no other game comes close to SWG's original crafting system in both depth and usefulness. EVE Online suffers a bit from the fact that it is similar to playing a spreadsheet program when it comes to gameplay.
SWG's current crafting system uses the same mechanics as the old system, but WoW's enchanting system has been added and the usefulness of crafting in general has been eliminated.
The biggest difference with swg crafting back then verses anything out there today, was one could be certain proffessions without ever having to do combat if one did not want to. You could level up your crafting skills without it being dependant on your level as is most games are designed today. You have to be a certain level to do a certain thing.
This game due to the informal and formal party clothes brought folks into the game that would have never normally played mmorpgs before. There were cases of entire families playing together. What was a neat happening before all the changes cu and nge there were family pa groups .
They had an entertainer class that could go out in the wilds or stay in town dance play an insturment and have a party like atomsphere for the cantinas.
The smuggler had the ability to have a line of crafting skills to make spice and equipment but still be a fighter. The beauty was not stuck into one class one role which the game turned into with the onset of nge.
It forced people to socialize with others when they went to town. It was through other players folks got their needed equipment.
So why was NGE introduced then? anyone knows the story? Appart from the fact that it ruined the game, why was it created in the first place?
I think SOE wanted the game to appeal to a larger audience, so they made the game easier. The sad thing is that it didn't work, not more players came to the game, and on top of that they had pissed off too many of the veterans, so most of them left
Like the poster above mentioned, they just wanted the game to appeal to a larger audience, mainly a WoW type crowd. They saw the success of WoW and thought with an IP as famous as Star Wars, they should be selling millions of subscriptions instead of the 250k they had at the time (which was steadly, but slowly, declining).
Many other reasons too, but I'm sure this was the tipping point in the move to the NGE.
I Reject your Reality and Substitute it with My Own!
Like the poster above mentioned, they just wanted the game to appeal to a larger audience, mainly a WoW type crowd. They saw the success of WoW and thought with an IP as famous as Star Wars, they should be selling millions of subscriptions instead of the 250k they had at the time (which was steadly, but slowly, declining).
Many other reasons too, but I'm sure this was the tipping point in the move to the NGE.
The other key reason was that while SWG had some very neat ideas and allowed a ton of choices, a lot of it was shallow and/or broken. A lot of the professions still did not work right by the time of the NGE and others were lacking content to let the player progress further in that area. In order to fix this they would have had to give the game a major, major tune-up which would have been bigger in scale than the NGE. From a programming point of view the NGE might have been the right way to go if SWG had been a business application but games and especially MMORPGs are a different animal.
Darkfall has a crafting system that similarly leads to a player driven economy surrounding these trades
HOwever, darkfall loses against SWG in most every other way.
Torrential: DAOC (Pendragon)
Awned: World of Warcraft (Lothar)
Torren: Warhammer Online (Praag)
So, one other key point to the PRE-cu crafting system was experience. Crafters got little or no experience for crafting the actual item -- you got experience for people USING your items.
It was really an interesting and fun dynamic -- crafters would experiment and grind out alot of items, some with really poor bonuses but then just dump them in the bazaar. But, as your quality improved, you really could earn a name for yourself, in particular since your name (the crafter's) literally was attached to the item. People could advertise their wares and other players would travel to different planets just to buy your stuff if it was worth it. As a weapon-crafter, that worked well. As a droid engineer, droids were busted at launch and onward which really bummed me out, contributing to my departure.
Edit: contributing to that more, resource gathering was a basic profession that anyone could train up. As a result, crafters could simply send customers or outsource acquisition of materials to other players, thus focusing on actually crafting. When people talking about a player-run economy, it's that kind of symbiotic relationship (resources, experience, item degradation) that really made it wonderful. *sigh* I miss that.
Vanguard has one of the better crafting systems and economies that I've seen. It's an actual process instead of just making a few clicks and calling it good.
That being said, SWG had much more variety and options in what you could make and how, but I always found it a little cumbersome and unintuitive.
Some of the key (good) points from the SWG crafting system that I remember:
1. Shifting resources.
Iron wasn't "Iron" and wasn't found in an "Iron Mine". There were several different types of iron, dozens if not hundreds of resources in total, and many of them were uniquely needed in the crafting of powerful items. This was complicated by the fact that every few days the resources changed. A place that was rich in high-grade polonium-iron one day could be barren the next, or have a nice new source of ferrous-copper or something.
Being a "miner" was full of exploration. People even made money selling waypoints to the resource sites they'd found.
2. Offline gathering.
Quite a bit of resource gathering in SWG could be done offline. You placed an "ore harvester", set it going and pump some cash into it then log off. When you come back it will still be there and will have mined you up a considerable amout of ore.
3. Specialisation.
This is, for me, the defining aspect of the pre-NGE crafting experience.
In SWG you got one character per account (two if you unlocked a jedi) and it wasn't a level based game; you could pick and choose what paths you wanted to put your "points" in, and some of those revolved around crafting. Naturally, this meant that in order to be a skilled crafter you would have to sacrifice some (a significant amount) of your other abilities.
This was a great thing because the vast majority of people didn't want to nerf their damage, healing, survivability/etc just to craft things that they could easily just buy; meaning that dedicated crafters were rather uncommon and those who were skilled and dedicated were often amongst the most recognizable people on the server.
Playing: EVE, Final Fantasy 13, Uncharted 2, Need for Speed: Shift
The crafting process really hasn't changed much to this day. I'd recommend the trial and see it for yourself.
But regretably crafters now feel like second class citizens IMO. Things like lack of decay really detracts from the crafter's experience.
SWG was two years old at that point and it was becoming a bit stale (the updates to that point had been relatively lackluster), so a lot of customers jumped ship for wow. Therefore, SWG felt it needed to compete with the wow style of gameplay and reshaped the game into a "wow clone". Unfortunately, they did not have the foresight to see that wow would also become stale, and people at that point started looking to get the SWG sandbox back. But at that point the SWG sandbox was gone.
Hindsight is always 20/20 and it's easy to blame SWG for making a bad decision, which it is clear they did. But I think at the time they took the direction based on market signals, and did what they felt was right for the game. I don't blame them for that. I still miss pre-cu swg though.
SWG was two years old at that point and it was becoming a bit stale (the updates to that point had been relatively lackluster), so a lot of customers jumped ship for wow. Therefore, SWG felt it needed to compete with the wow style of gameplay and reshaped the game into a "wow clone". Unfortunately, they did not have the foresight to see that wow would also become stale, and people at that point started looking to get the SWG sandbox back. But at that point the SWG sandbox was gone.
Hindsight is always 20/20 and it's easy to blame SWG for making a bad decision, which it is clear they did. But I think at the time they took the direction based on market signals, and did what they felt was right for the game. I don't blame them for that. I still miss pre-cu swg though.
Their market signals was a focus group. They dumped their current playerbase at the time for one that never materialized. They then failed to provide the version of the game people liked. They wanted WoW numbers but failed to do the one thing that WoW does right and that is polish.
So do I blame them? You bet. They earned their tarnished reputation and then some.
As far as crafting goes Suvroc stated it correct. It works pretty similar today but the interdependency is now gone. Removal of decay to a certain extent, global vendor search added to it where as before you had to go to the shops and search yourself or word of mouth.
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"SOE has probably united more gamers in hatred than Blizzard has subs"...daelnor
here you go:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/224106/Can-someone-please-explain-preCU-crafting-to-me.html
http://swg.allakhazam.com/db/guides.html?guide=27
Yeah, the crafting system today is only a shell of its former self.
Experimentation doesn't matter like it used to, crafted items are no longer the best in the game as items have all gone wow loot style, items now have capped stats so everything is the same and all crafters are the same, no need to replace anything as there is no more decay/repair, global search ruined the smaller shops and vendors, you can't produce really desirable items without using the piece of crap idiot reverse engineering system... the crafting system now is terrible just like the combat system and the rest of NGE and its playerbase.
<Mod Edit>
Its harder to get into now, good resources will cost the new player millions, high end resources spawn infrequent now days, if yoiu miss the month it does spawn your going to be waiting a while. Low end crafting is pretty useless. Its all RE and some food. And again its tuff to get into that since you need megga credits to buy the RE modds it takes to make high end food, armor, or weapons.
Best place for a new player to get a good handle on crafting is go to Test Center server, you can see how things work for free before you decide on what you want to make in live servers. It will also teach new players how combat works and what you need to make a good template Jedi, or other combat proffesion work.
Its harder to get into now, good resources will cost the new player millions, high end resources spawn infrequent now days, if yoiu miss the month it does spawn your going to be waiting a while. Low end crafting is pretty useless. Its all RE and some food. And again its tuff to get into that since you need megga credits to buy the RE modds it takes to make high end food, armor, or weapons.
Best place for a new player to get a good handle on crafting is go to Test Center server, you can see how things work for free before you decide on what you want to make in live servers. It will also teach new players how combat works and what you need to make a good template Jedi, or other combat proffesion work.
Nothing has changed except the removing of decay which rendered one experiment line useless. Apart from that Weapon Smithing has changed for the good (way more options now) and Beast Master Equipment/Consumables have been added.
Gathering resources is the same as ever. For a new trader itll take time to gather all the needed named resources in good quality. This is the same for every new player, no matter when he starts/started. Gradually improving the quality of your resource stock is part of the metagame in crafting.
Low end is meaningless, because even if you are new you can grind your crafter to max lvl in a week or two if you are completely independant. If you join a guild that hands you the grind resources (any decent trader wont bother giving resources for grind purpose), itll take one day.
Weapons (because of Biolinking and the way you can customize any skin for any lvl now), Beast Master equipment/crafting consumables, resources and Ship crafted / RE components, food is still good for repeatable business.
For a crafter its mainly the exotic attachments that count. Even if you are not planning to RE yourself, this is relatively cheap compared to a complete combatsuit full of attachments. You dont need 35's for exotics.
Most ppl pay too much for being fooled by overpriced traders.
It all ended for me soon after I finished the awful grind to Master Weaponsmith. Before the CU I was able to wear some armor and carry a carbine for basic protection while surveying/placing extractors. After the CU I was limited to Bone armor and a C-Def - the lowest of the low, even for newbies.
The day I quit for good, I was attacked by a low level Fynock - a mere bird - outside my house. Unable to prevail, I fled into my house for safety. It followed me inside (thru my door) and incapacitated me next to my crafting station.
I had a combat alt, but after this I simply no longer had the will to train him up in surveying. Like many others who had so much of their valuable time wasted, I logged off for good. Sometimes I wonder if my house is still there, sealed up like some tomb..
It might be, depending on how much maintenance you had in it. I logged back in after a couple years when they were giving out vet trials, and my 4 houses are still there along with some of my factories since I had deposited enough into them to last for years. (However I didn't stay logged in to look at much of anything else since the character animations were still running at Benny Hill speed and making me sick to my stomach.) If your house maintenance runs out, then some monkey--ERRRRRRR current subscriber could come along and pack your house to your datapad, but in my eyes it doesn't make a difference since the game will never be worth returning to anyways.
I feel for you as far as not being able to fight back or anything as a trader. "Thank you womprat, may I have another?" It sucked they made crafters so helpless.
I had master Armorsmithing and Slicing IV for a long time, it gave me a nice mix of combat abilities and crafting. But... since they nerfed the game none of these mix-and-match cool things are possible. *sigh*
I've heard this line from the SOE apologists for years, and it is the same steaming pile now that it was the first time it was trotted out. "Decay only ever affected weapons and armor; eliminating it affects nothing else." Oddly enough, though, the economy started falling apart and trending into hyperinflation as soon as it went away. And of course, we also had the bog-standard "greedy crafter" mud-slinging.
Log in to SWG to see it, it's still pretty much the same core crafting system that all SWG players past and present know and love with a few improvements.
With the removal of decay, some of the stats on some craftables were not updated and this is why many veterans claim that crafting has been "dumbed down", when all it really means is that one stat, the condition of the craftable item, is missing.
This has been addressed for many craftable schematics and work is ongoing to clean up the rest.
Still, the crafting system is basic, as in 'any' other mmorpg really.
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Crafting have been in mmorpg's for what, how long? prob since the beginning of mmo's. Yet still most companies dont even bother doing a good crafting system, they probably think its just a little addition to the game, no. It's a big thing, when you've played the game and/or dont like the PvE/PvP standards most mmorpgs have these days people would end up crafting, but with all these shitty one click one item crafted systems, for more than 10+ years, some company needs to stand-off and make a decent crafting system!
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I played SWG Pre-NGE and didnt have much time to actually craft stuff, but i could literally stay in someone's house full of vendors just standing there for 1 hour looking at all the items and buy the stuff i wanted before i went to my own place, good times, good times.
for me, together with eq2 crafting system,. is the best crafting i ever seen in a game
resource search was really inmersive, plus harvesting deployment, research points, factories,, ahhh nice memories missing it a lot
We're getting a bunch of new craftable structures in the next update. Apparently you can put windows in them and make other customisations. Should be pretty cool.