Star Wars Galaxies

Hey guys, I unfortunatly never had the opertunity to experience the crafting system of Pre-CU SWG although from fans of tradeskilling it's been revered as an amazing design model for crafters.

I was hoping you guys could share a brief outline of:

1) How the crafting (both harvesting/production) worked.

2) What aspects of it did you enjoy most?

3) What did you feel were it's shortcomings?

4) A memmorable experience or story related to harvesting/production

Note: If aspects of harvesting had multi-tiers such as a tier 1 grass harvester yeilded some grass but through x task I could enhance it to a tier 2 grass harvester, please include those details so I can gain a strong understanding of why Pre-CU was such a crafters delight.

I'm greatful for any information you can share with me and am all ears. I only ask that we keep the ranting and SOE bashing down a bit as I'm looking for information not venting, just to keep the discussion on topic. Thanks!!

-Arioc

I'll give it a try, but I might have forgotten some of the stuff.

To begin with, each crafter unlocked schematics as they gained xp and trained up a new skill box.  Some of these schematics were for components while others for finished items.  The schematic would list the ingredients required to make it and the quantity needed.  The crafter would assemble the various items and then "craft" the item using a crafting tool.  The crafter could also choose to have the item delivered as a blueprint which could be used to craft multiple items using a factory all identical to on another.

The raw materials were collected via harvesting hide/bone/meat from dead creatures or utilizing a machine you placed over a concentration of a mineral.  You could scan a area to determine if there were any minerals there and what their concentration was, with higher concentrations giving up higher harvesting rates.

All the raw materials had several characteristics that changed with each new spawn.  These values were used to determine how effective they were for crafting.  As an example, a particular type of copper might have a value of 800 for conductivity one week and then respawn the following with a value of 300 in that area.  The higher the number, the better the mineral might be for a particular item when crafting.

So crafters would try and find the best materials for whatever they wanted to craft, and then would start a crafting session using the crafting tool and most likely a crafting station which was required for higher level items.  You would select the schematic you wished to use, then the materials.  Indicators would show how different stats on two materials would make the item better or worse so you could choose the best.  Once the items were selected you moved on to the next part of the crafting process which was the experimentation part.

Crafters earned experiment points as they increased their skills, with a master crafter getting 10 exp points.  This value could be increased to 12 points using looted clothing which the best crafters usually had.  In essense, the experimenting part allowed you to increase a particular trait of an item by using up your experiment points until you ran out of points or maxed out that particular trait.  As an example, if you were making a gun, you could experiment on 3 things, speed, damage or durability.  You could spend 7 points on damage, 3 on speed and then hope you got a successful experiment dice roll.  If you did, you could then craft the item or make it into the blueprint.  If your experiment went bad, you most likely started over and hoped for a better result next time.

It was this mixture of ever changing material quality, increased stats from experimenting and just general knowledge of what was better to spend your time on that made crafting so deep.

If that helps clear up your questions, great.  If not ask for clarifications and I'll do what i can to answer them.

The crafting itself was pretty straightforward.  Combine the necessary materials in the schmatic into the finished good.

The detail was gathering the right mats for the good, with the correct qualities, to craft the best finished good, using the experimentation system to get the most out of the materials used in crafting.

To that end, there still is a minigame of resource gathering that involves finding the right resources when they spawn.  There were problems early on because some items, say a flame thrower, required a specific resource type (some odd flavor of copper or iron or something) that didn't spawn often, so some servers took quite a while for flame throwers to appear at all, let alone high end flame throwers.

The right materials could enable you to have some amazing finished goods, like high resistance armor that had a direct impact on how the combat aspect of the game played out.

Then there was the entire pharmaceutical crafting game that affected combat trhough buffs, debuffs, and DOT attacks.

It was very deep and very complex, and very database resource intensive, which is one of the reasons it was nerfed into nothingness in the CU.

Im gonna answer question three, what i felt was the shortcoming of crafting. I only had two problems with it. The first was the 3 month veteran reward. It was a 30k unit  resource deed. With this you could choose a crate of any resource you wanted one time and get a crate of 30k of that resource. The result was that there was to much of the great resources and competition between crafters suffored.

The other one was the 1 year veteran reward, the infamous ADK(Anti Decay Kit). You could apply this to a piece of equipment and it would never decay. This meant that prices for top equipment went up.

Accept for that i found crafting one of the best features of the game. Running a successfull business was great fun and so was supplying my guild with top wares.

The ADK was a serious game imbalance mistake.  Without it, even the best players were forced to eventually replace their weapons.  One of the things about decay was that it not only created a reason for crafters to continue on, it became a leveler of the playing field for combat players.

With a lightsaber with an ADK attached, Jedi never had to worry about replacing the decayable components of their lightsabers, which would eventually become useless as they used them  They'd have to go out and find more of those flawless pearls and so forth.  Even the color crystals decayed!

A friend of mine used to go through a pistol a week, so he spent a lot of time searching for good weapons.  This created a new form of "down time" that made for actual relationships between combat players and armor and weaponsmiths.

Originally posted by Arioc

I was hoping you guys could share a brief outline of:

1) How the crafting (both harvesting/production) worked.

2) What aspects of it did you enjoy most?

Harvesters rock. I liked finding resources and setting up a harvester much better than the endless harvesting of other games.

Resources had stats, such as Conductivity. Item quality depended on certain stats. So, if you wanted to craft an item that depended on Conductivity, you had to harvest not just metal, for instance, but metal with high Conductivity to make the best quality item. Each item usually required multiple types of resources. It wasn't good enough to run out and slap down harvesters just anywhere. You had to keep current on which planet had the resources with the stats you needed. Another way to way to say it. The system had depth. I liked the depth.

3) What did you feel were it's shortcomings?

One of the problems with pre-CU was it had, as one article phrased it, everything but a soul. IMO the main reason for this was the entire game was centered on crafting! I kid you not. This meant that all monsters from kreetles to krayts dropped worthless newbie loot or crafting components. Kill a krayt, get a cdef was a joke and not a funny one. This was one of the biggest failings of the game. There was no reward for adventurers other than crafting components. Even the coveted krayt pearl was just a crafting component. You could be in a thrilling, titanic struggle, emerge victorious by the skin of your teeth and get...nothing. WIth no rewards adventurers drifted to other games that did reward their efforts. I loved that the economy was so real, but the restraints it put on loot was one of the things that killed the game and led to the the NGE.

4) A memmorable experience or story related to harvesting/production

I played on Kettemoor. In the beginning of the game there was a resource named Ipima. I still remember it! hehe Most stats were 900+. It was awesome. I harvested a bunch of it and kept it. The devs jerked around with resource stats and lowered them after the economy got going. I still had my Ipima. I was able to use it in lightsabers and special items later on. It wasn't the greatest resource in the galaxy, but it was really nice having it around and giving some to good friends to make lightsabers with.

I want to go straight to #2  as that is what is important to this discussion (IMHO)
 

The most important elements of the crafting system implemented by SWG comes in two parts - one was that it was dynamic and two for 99.5% of everything in game, the crafted item was better than what could be looted (exception was exceptional items, which I remember reading accounted for less than 0.5% of in-game items) - which had the effect of creating a real player driven economy.  In pretty much every other cookie cutter mmo out there the crafting system itself is static.  You gather x resource and build y component/end product.  You can't change the stats of the component/end product, no matter what you do, you are only capable of building y component/end product.  Your only way to distinguish yourself in game is cost of production and scale of production.  In SWG the final output was based off a dynamic resource spawning system and a dynamic loot drop system.  Thus, through diligence and effort, you could gather the best resources, with the best stats.  Get a great group of friends together or build relationships with loot drop guys and you put together the best crafted stuff.  Not only that, but in most mmo's loot drop items surpass anything craftable in terms of performance stats and thus at a certain point, the game is dominated by loot farming.  In SWG the economy and player gear was dominated by crafters and crafters continually competed against each other to craft the best items.

Just my two cents and what I miss most about not having SWG since November 2005

Kind Regards

Thank you for your informative replies. From what I understand the perks of the system were that not only was there the goal of aquiring rare recipies but also rare resources which were more then just low/med/high quality but offered a variety of levels per component which affected the product.

While this system deffinitly offers a greater variety of combinations and product varients, to simplify it would be to create a smaller pallet of each component. So Copper ore (per your example) might exist in Low/Med/High/Perfect qualities and harvesting them may depend on the node quality as well as your skill and tool quality. The recipe for the copper pipe/sword/rifle whatever, that you're making would produce a Copper Pipe with attributes affected by the quality of the input resource.

So lets use the fantasy genre as a template:

The Player has a high mining skill and a high quality mining pick. While in a dungeon he discovers a Pefect Quality Copper node. And is able to harvest several perfect coppers and a few High Quality coppers.

Returning to town he goes to a forge and opens his copper shortsword recipe. The statistics of the product shortsword will be displayed and alter depending on the resources he places in the required slot. While the copper shortsword requires five copper ingots to produce the player only has three Perfect and two High Quality. The effect is a sword with a high top damage but poor low-end damage. Perhaps the crafter is able to add infusions to the ore to enhance the swords speed or durability. These would be you're experimentation (to a diminished degree of diversity).

In a system such as this the database would need to contain the varients of player crafted shortsword depending on the combination of quality resources and infusions as well as an overall product quality.

Now the downside is that the market might have 200 shortswords on the auction broker of various quality and speed and durability with only a handfull being high on all three. Would players even buy the shortswords which aren't maxed? Does this produce a monopoly for the top end crafters who can produce these max quality swords over a crafter of that level who can't sell his sword because his product is only 90% top quality?

In a system with predefined products, which is the case of most MMO's. The players who have the same resources produce the same item. There is in some games a chance for a high quality product vs a low quality but the diversity in selection is far less. Players know they can buy a standard sword or pay more for a top quality one, but they will outgrow i