Shrinnan said:
I just found a post by a developer, Damion Schubert, who gives his philosophy of a crafting system (that will hopefully transfer over to TOR):
http://swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=4678566#edit4678566
My favorite thing about SWG's crafting system was that there could be server wide famous crafters that were exceptionally good at crafting certain items. I am glad that this type of crafting is being thought about in TOR and it looks like it will be realized in a very different, and seemingly more intuitive, way.
Yeah. I saw this. This is one of the most amazing things I have ever seen in all my years of gaming. The launch of SWG sucked for many reasons, one being that the economy was not there yet. There was nothing. People had not build anything, and since basically everything had/and/could be build, the economy was slow.
This dude on Eclipse... While he was just levelling up, I used all my Credits to buy one of his Carbine rifles and a Polearm. He had made deals with scouts and rangers and Artisians to supply him with HIGH QUALITY resources.
Here is the kicker that a lot of other crafting games dont have, but SWG had - A randomized Resource system.
When you take a resource node in most games, say, mine a bit of copper ore in World of Warcraft, it's just that. You get the node and get the resource, and there is nothing else to it. Getting a copper node is not better in the mountains than in the low lands. that means, that there is no reason to go go to hard-to-reach-places for the highest quality resource nodes.
same thing with skin, bone, hide, different sorts of irons and metals. you want the 90%+ quality stuff. thats the shit that makes a great piece of armor/house/droid/weapon/food(buff)/vehicle/bio-engineered pet.
The breathe and genius to this system was amazing. Everything was randomized. so you didnt know where a high quality resource would pop up.
You had general guidelines.. you knew a rancor wouldnt have nice meat, to give to chefs, so rancor meat was not the best resource for jawa meat pies - But womp rats. holy shit. those goddam roddents that were nestled around Tattooine had excellent meat in general, but the bigger ones had better.
so gathering people had their own depth and variation in quality. it also made it hard to farm like some auto-pilot idiot gold farmer, because you had to use your brain to get high quality resources.
And of course gathering people had to earn from the crafters, who had to borrow them from the combat classes, who in turn killed the hard as fuck creatures with good resources for the gathering - thus creating a symbiotic ecosystem. fucking genius, and brilliant.
It had flaws. many flaws, but its the best I have ever seen in practice. A player run economy? nothng wow has ever done, has been remotely as complicated as trying to do a player run economy! I am absolutely convinced that doing that is such an insane task, to try and predict social player patterns, that.. a staged linear quest line with controlled inflation MMOs like WoW and EQ are doing babysteps, while SWGs original idea was shooting for the goddam center of the universe.
To highlight some bad stuff about SWG crafting; it was a chore and a grind to get to the good stuff. like most other crafting systems you started just making ten thousand useless pistols that nobody wanted. it was not all good. credits inflation went through the roof fast too. when they started Holocrons, it created a player pattern where people started afk grinding every fucking class if they had too, to unlock jedi. this killed a lot of the activity in the social areas of entertainers and crafters, because they could in-game macro afk.
and SOE had made lots of claims about how they wouldnt take macros out. they where an important part of the rest of the game, and to remove it(though would have been better for the game) would have been the contradiction of the forever.
Holocrons was the beginning of the end. Mostly for entertainers, but crafters suffered too. It's incredible how player behavior changed so fast due to wanting jedi.
the CTRL+ALT+Delete comic posted several posts above with everyone wanting to be neo in matrix online is a good example. it fucks it up for everyone. plenty of people wants to not be jedis, but the amount of fan service involved for those who do, just fucks it up for everyone. Its like chasing the american dream, only to find out that being a jedi aint so cool when your not ungoldy and that your just one in a million. suddenly the over saturated feel of force powers and lightsabers everywhere diminish their coolness, and the shadowy and amazing warriors are turned into meh's-of-glowstick.
It fucks us up too. Because TOR jedis are just normal jedis. even players getting jedi master ranks, are not as strong as the legends like obi-wan, yoda, luke and so on. those are like gods. but it fucks us up, because so many of our jedis from the films where strong.
and nobody wants to be some lame generic cgi jedi like those that got killed by clones. uninteresting as fuck. no, some people expect to be steamrolling everyone. And while it makes sense, that a bounty hunter like Jango fett can show obi-wan a thing or two is cool - But still. Even so, with an okay logic, I still think that many of us, deep down expect even a randomly competent jedi to deflect any blaster.
and then how the fuck do you make it look legit with melee versus ranged? I can just see stormtropper-looking troppers kiting jedis running like benny hill across some pvp map. It wont look like star wars at all.
But thats what I expect. This is where each and every one of us need to suspend our disbelief, and fucking stop being bothered by shit like that. It's just not how I would have done it, if we should have learned from the lessons of SWG.
IMO the lesson was that, Jedis/Siths where not needed as a playable class. To many, force is the epitome of star wars, and the only thing making it more interesting than say Star Trek - Valid concern, and I have to agree. But I personally think that a well realised, more true-to-the-old-films universe would be better than a jedi infested chaos, that wont give that powerful-i-kill-hundreds-of-non-jedis-instantly feeling.
The universe is actually fantastic.
melee and ranged would still have a place. particularly in the old republic setting.
what would jedis and siths be then? NPCs? bioware-admins running and controlling the game? just story characters advancing the plot?
I am not sure. I just see jedi as the ultimate fan service. It's the poster child. it's the seal-the-deal thing, that just makes it paw. even in TUF2, a single player game, much easier to deal with, its amazing how far they came off the mark at making a interesting jedi experience.
Ralph Koaster had the right idea. I wonder if it was SOE or LucasArts that finally gave in, allowed jedis to fuck up SWG. The original plan back in 2000, was that nobody should be jedis. they acknwoledged that between episode 4 and 5 there was no jedi. the jedi in hiding bullshit, didnt turn up until after episode 2 came out, and episode 3 was in the making. after a while, they changed stance to "a very few people" would be able to retain jedi, but be very powerful and they would have perma death to ensure nobody would go crazy and grief the fuck out of everyone.
and then holocrons came, and... fuck.
