Author Topic: Crafting Info  (Read 2182 times)

Offline Mangala

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Crafting Info
« on: November 13, 2010, 09:47:16 PM »
Bit of info on how crafting will work

http://www.swtor.com/info/systems/crew-skills

looks like they borrowed liberally from both WoW and EvE, and I mean that in the most awesome way possible
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Offline Caradir

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Re: Crafting Info
« Reply #1 on: November 13, 2010, 09:56:25 PM »
That seems cool as fuck !!

seriously.
"Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again. However, take away from them the power to create money and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But, if you wish to remain the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create money." Josiah Stamp (Governor Bank of England 1928-41)

Offline Warcold

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Re: Crafting Info
« Reply #2 on: November 14, 2010, 08:36:00 AM »
I almost regret that I won't play this game.
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Offline Kurtt

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Re: Crafting Info
« Reply #3 on: November 14, 2010, 09:28:02 AM »
Watched the video last night, does look very cool.

Hopefully, I will of had my fill of cata by the time this gets released so I can give it the attention it'll deserve.

Offline Mangala

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Re: Crafting Info
« Reply #4 on: November 14, 2010, 08:44:09 PM »
http://darthhater.com/forum/topic/569/page/4  Has more info on crafting, and so much more.

Quote
Originally Posted by CornbreadChrist mostly quoting Damion Schubert
If you take a look at biometrics, they include implants as part of that crafting profession as well as consumables.

Also check out this snippet of awesomeness from Damion Schubert describing how some companions are better but they aren't noticeably better if you prefer to have them travel with you. It's on page one of this thread.

To be more precise, players can have up to three crew skills but only one of those can be a crafting skill. The fictional reason is that you only can have room for one crafting table on your ship, but the real reason is that we don't want all players to be self-sufficient.

We call the system Crew Skills because they are skills possessed by your amorphous crew as a whole. If your crew can go treasure hunting, you can order any of your crew members to run treasure hunting missions. Vette may have a bonus to treasure hunting (being a native treasure hunter and all), but to be honest we currently have these bonuses set to be relatively mild - we don't want people to choose NOT to take their favorite companion out on the field with them because the economic bonus to keeping them on the ship is that much greater.


HE ALSO CONFIRMS RESPEC of Crew Skills! On page 4 of the same thread.

You can unlearn skills. If you relearn it later, you must progress it up again. (You will not lose your schematics for crafting skills, but they are inaccesssible until you reach the proper skill level).

Damion Schubert is my fucking HERO right now!

More yellow text just for good measure. He really out did himself. This is awesome to see a dev actually interacting with the community!

So just to throw a couple more stray thoughts about our philosophy.

* No, you the player cannot craft currently - which is to say you cannot choose to watch the progress bar fill up yourself. That being said, to us, watching a progress bar has always been the least interesting part of crafting in other MMOs. The part of being a crafter that is interesting to us is things like finding rare schematics, finding hard-to-find components, and the social game of finding customers and suppliers. We really wanted devoted crafters to be able to focus on these aspects of crafting, and not so much on the 'watch a progress bar go forward' part of things. Crafting should be a social thing - staring at a progress bar is not.
* No, you don't see companions running missions out 'in the real world'. While I laugh at the idea of a stream of companion characters filing into the palace on Alderaan, it's unfeasible for a lot of reasons.
* The real test of the value of crafting is less about whether companions or players are swinging the hammer and tongs, and more about how the itemization of crafting is balanced in a way that the gear is useful. Crafting is important to the systems team, and we're devoted to ensuring that crafted gear has a place in the economy, especially at the endgame, and doubly especially for the devoted crafters.
* It's worth noting that we really want the system to support the casual crafter (the guy who is taking crafting largely to outfit himself while levelling up) and the devoted crafter (the guy who wants to be known as the best Armormech in the galaxy). Supporting the former means making the system accessible and easy. Supporting the latter means ensuring that hard work can allow you to provide goods and services that almost no one in the galaxy can. The systems design team is striving to satisfy both groups of people.
* My own personal goal is that some crafters can get so good that players all over the server seek them out. My problem being a crafter in most other MMOs is that you tend to become a guild's pet at some point, and you're expected to do all of the work for free. We want those devoted crafters to be exceptional enough that they can actually demand a price, and that people will actually break out of the guild in order to pursue those goods and services. The system isn't there yet, but we have plans...


This time, Damion Schubert. . . tells a joke! This was in response to Damion saying that you can't stare at loading bars and DE saying that you could. EPIC Friday update!

Yes, if you want to, you can stare at a progress bar, on the crew skills page. In fact, you can stare at FIVE of them. That's, like, five times as good, right?

Thought I'd just include this last bit of yellow text for good measure, even though it was stated in word form on the crew skills page. It just goes to show again how much Damion Schubert was being proactive in addressing player's misconceptions about the crafting system today. Good show, in fact THE BEST developer explanation we have gotten on any game system to date. This was a great breath of fresh air for all of us I'm sure. It's the bottom post if you're looking for the direct quote.

You can have three gathering skills, or three mission skills, or one of each. Or two gathering and a craft. The only limit (right now) is you can only have one crafting skill, and you can only have three as a whole.
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Offline Mangala

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Re: Crafting Info
« Reply #5 on: November 18, 2010, 11:42:08 AM »
2nd part of the above interview:

Quote
Originally Posted by Daniel Erickson interview
Can the companions of two players from the opposite faction fight over a node?

Daniel Erickson: Your companions are actually controlled by your own aggro stuff. So if you weren't aggroed to another player, they would not. It would be first come, first serve... obviously, if you sent your companion to go grab something and then you saw that thing was no longer available.

One of the things you probably noticed about the companions is that they are directly controllable as well. You don't have to directly control them. You could say, "Attack their companion." You could get a pretty good drop on their companion if they were down scrabbling in the dirt and you used your companion's big nasty attack ability -- his big cooldown -- against them. You could assume that yeah, you could keep somebody busy, knock off their companion, and then go for the node if you're battle crafting.

Will players also have the option to gather materials from nodes without using their active companion?

Absolutely. You can always do it yourself. In fact, if there are multiple nodes you are trying to hit, then that could be a really disciplined way of doing it. Anything you have a gathering skill for, you can do yourself or you can send your companion to do it.

You referred to Treasure Hunting rewards as a "random number generator" result. What would you say to those that are discouraged by the random number generator usage?

There are lots of things in the game that are not that way, but our loot system is always working in that way. Drops are random by their very nature, and Treasure Hunting is an extension of that.

You mentioned Vette excels at Treasure Hunting. Are companions restricted in what they are able to do regardless of what they excel at, or will they be able to do everything?

All companions can do all skills that you know. You're the one who has the Crew Skills on your character, so you say, "I learned these Crew Skills." You can assign anyone to it. Companions have bonuses to them, but those bonuses aren't so large that they would ever restrict you. The balance is... we don't ever want you to say, "I don't want to take Vette out today" because that would be too much of a blow to my Crew Skills game.

We need to make sure the bonuses are enough to be impactful but not enough to make it nonviable to use somebody else for the same thing. Just because you have Vette on your team doing Treasure Hunting doesn't mean you will feel like "oh, I have to leave her home because I wouldn't want to send Companion B out to Treasure Hunt."

Is every passive companion at your disposal able to do crafting all at the same time or are restricted to a maximum number?

To be clear, you can have up to five companions working on a crafting table. You can have up to five companions working on different crafts, and have other companions out on mission skills or doing something else like missions for gathering. Crafting limits at five, but Crew Skills you could have everyone going at once because crafting for us is one third of Crew Skills. But you can have one companion out who will trail around and follow you in the world.

By including an offline component to crafting, will new players six plus months out be at a disadvantage or will there be a system in place to deflate the time values of old content like in other MMOs?

I don't think the parallels really make sense because it is the same thing for any crafting system you have in any game -- crafting takes time. In ours, crafting an individual item takes even more time than in most games so you can do it offline. At the same time, you can be online and ignoring it. But you have to remember your companion is doing it and you're not doing it. So there really is not a difference in the person who shows up day one as a new player, who obviously can't craft what you can craft because you were doing it for six months. You are going to know far more recipes and far more skills -- you are going to be way down the line. They are going to be at the very first beginning levels of it.

How do you the player craft in Star Wars: The Old Republic? Are there recipes you loot or you learn from other people in the galaxy?

Daniel Erickson: The beginning stuff you do when you learn a crafting skill... you get a number of recipes. There are also recipes that you can discover out in the world. There are recipes that are very rare. One of the important overall goals that we haven't talked about Crew Skills is that there will be "go to" people. You will be able to craft items that are the top tier of things in the game. It is going to be very possible that there are only one or two people on the server who know how to craft specific things. There is a whole lot of discovery involved.

The Crew Skills system is a place for everyone -- whoever wants to play can come play. The missions system is super accessible, and even if you aren't into crafting, you can play with those. People who want to be a master at crafting -- and really want to be those who are the go to people on the servers -- they are going to put a ton of work into it. We're not going to talk quite yet about how you get some of these recipes but suffice to say, they will be in demand as crafters and it will not be something you can casually do.

Does your character learn recipes for multiple uses, or do you consume them each time?

The general approach is that once you learn a recipe, you know it. There may be exceptions.

Are crafting items relative to the environment you are in, such as a difference of items between Korriban and Hoth?

Crafting for an environmentally specific location I think is going to be more about the resources available. You aren't going to look for some boots that are particularly sand-resistant for Korriban. But there are going to resources that are going to be available to you because you are on Korriban that might not be available elsewhere. You might end up tailoring what you are exploring and learning to craft based on what is readily available so that you can do it faster.

Is there still some personalization you can do to the items you create?

The items you create are by their very nature personalized, so we definitely maker's mark everything. As crafters go further and further into their art, they will start to learn things that other crafters do not know. Eventually, the hope is that you develop sort of a specialization and a concept of the things that you craft. And that is probably going to adjust very much by which skill pairings you decided to grab. To give sort of a hint, there are mission skills that may help out crafters more because you have more of a chance going and getting specific things or specific recipes -- they are going to help the whole piece. At the top level, for the people who are really, really pushing the Crew Skills... everyone is going to get fairly unique with it.

What do the question marks beneath each Crew Skills grouping represent?

Obviously, we can't tell you all of them but they do break down into far more discrete chunks than just Armor and Weapons.

You mentioned discovery before in relation to how sometimes it is going to take longer to get something and only one or two people on the server will have it. What was the challenge in creating such a system without turning it into a big grind?

One of the things is really having the system just have depth. There are two ways you can do exclusivity, and one is with variety. I'll give you a total random example: if you have a thousand versions of something that all have different concepts behind them; when you get to a certain place, people are only getting one and you create exclusivity.

The other way is to say you only have two of these and it takes 40 hours of monotonous, horrific work to do them. I hope people see at this point that is never our philosophy. We never go down the route of "well, let's just make sure the only people who get to do it are people who hate fun." That is never going to be the way that we take to become the best of something.

http://darthhater.com/2010/11/17/daniel-erickson-on-crew-skills-continued/page/1

It's worth going over there for the videos, especially the super secret crafting reveal video on page 2
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