All Archive

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EdOWar wrote:

Compared to SWG though, crafting in WoW is a joke. Plug in the pieces, punch the assemble button, wait a few seconds and "voila" out comes your item. No experimentation, no differentiation. Even resource harvesting is much more "loot" oriented than it is in SWG.

Personally, I think the player-based economyis (quickly becoming "was")the best thing about SWG. It definitely set this game apart from the MMORPG crowd. The problem, as I see it, was the game didn't launch with enough real content for combat players. So, as a cheap substitute, the Devs started to add more and more loot, especially looted enhancers for weapons and armor, looted limited-useschematics that required special looted components, etc. This messed with the player-based economy by shifting the emphasis from well-made standard crafted items tohigh-end loot enhanced items (combined with a lucky slice, too).

And contrary to the statement made by someone above, loot enhancers didn't allow crafters to get rich...it's the master looters thatare raking in the real bucks. Look at any server's trade forums and what do you see? Mainly loot whores selling their stuff. Very rarely do you see any auctions, sales or even advertisements for crafted stuff. Man, I remember when almost all you saw on the boards were ads for crafted goods.

Still, crafting in SWG is stillbetter than in any other game out there, as far as I can tell.

Slim Vargo, Corbantis

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Customization is good, but ultimately all anyone wanted was max usability versus min penalties. My major gripe with the crafting system was that, as good as it was, the game dynamics only really allowed certain weapons to reach their fullest potential.

You have a point with the master looters, however, that just furthered the inflated price on a "good" item. But still, that only accounts for a portion of overall income. The rest comes from thoseweaponcrafters whom are known for selling "junk" weapons (non-enhanced, etc) at almost outrageous prices (between 300 and600cpu)simply because they can do it. And these are often the guys that wind up with a few hundred million (if not billions of) credits.

Now for the boring stuff.. from a programming point of view, it's much easier on clients to just have items act as dynamic pointers (linked references) to a particular item structure in a database. SWG, however, lets each item be it's own unique creation (unless crated, in which the items share the same ID). This means that it's a little more stressful on the system to look up the statistics for a particular item. It's handled nicely by the game, though - but the game's performance would be significantly better if queries run actively (when the player runs around and interacts with other players, for example) have less to grab from the database(s) at one time.

Database math in a nutshell: more complicatedis exponentially more time to run. heh.