Business And Economy Archive
Thread: Ideas to Enhance SWG Crafter Experience
I hear you on crafters getting ignored. Sadly, it's often the crafters who come up with some of the more interesting content suggestions and makes it all the more heartbreaking when none of them get implemented. I know all too well.
So, as a bump and to keep your idea in the spotlight (it is very good) I'll try to go through one of your points.
"NPC Crafting Orders/Quests
Instead of generic artisan missions through a terminal, it would be more immersive and interesting to get profession-specific missions that yield profession-specific loot. My idea is to add missions to NPC trainers, so that you can customize the mission for a specific profession. Imagine a Master Weaponsmith being able to go to a weaponsmith trainer, get a mission to craft something that meets a minimum specification, and receive a mounted laser rifle display to hang in his shop. The possibilities are endless!"
Have you seen the Crafter Contractor missions that you get in NPC Guildhalls? They cater the crafting mission to your abilities - offering you easy, medium and hard missions for the crafting skills/professions that you possess. They then hand you a container for putting your crafted items in and wait for you to 'complete the order'. Admittedly, they get a little disapointing after that point, because the reward is just a little cash and some xp, but it seems like the basis for the code for your idea here.
How they'd demand a particular 'quality' of item remains to be seen, but as a basic system it works well.
The only other problem is that your weaponsmith idea would require new art for the mounted laser rifle item, and if weaponsmiths had it, then everyone else would want something too. That might be a lot of art. However, it would be nice to change the Contractors to the Skill Trainers - if only to give you more of a sense of advancing in your profession.
bizondele wrote:
What really worries me is that our crafting revamp may include NPC crafted items, which again would only cater to the l337 d00dz yet called a revamp.
Someone at SOEprobably has some solid data showing that players want easily obtained NPC items and player crafted economies turn off the player who wants everything now.
Before that happens -- if it ever does -- we get Cybernetics in the "Rage of the Wookiees" expansion.
Here's the relevant bit from the RoTW Friday Feature:
The first kind of cybernetic limbs can be acquired as loot rewards from NPCs and quests on Kashyyyk.
Well. I guess here's yet another nail in the coffin of the original pledge that there'd never be loot items better than what crafters could make. (Although I suppose if crafters can't make it at all, what NPCs drop can't be "better." I guess it depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is....)
Butperhaps these cybernetic limbs will giveall SWGplayers enhanced abilities. Maybe Dancers with cybernetic legs can perform radical new steps! Maybe Bio-engineers can use specially modified cybernetic hands to extract higher-quality tissue samples!
Cybernetics are "artificial limbs" that players can earn for their characters that serve as an asset in combat. ... The implants will have many different kinds of combat-related uses. They will offer unique advantages for both melee and ranged professions. Installing one of these limbs can also offer some statistical enhancements as well as special combat moves.
Hmm. Well,maybe some non-combat players will benefit from the new Cybernetics system -- maybe doctors will gain new abilities to attach cybernetic limbs, or Artisans will be able to tweak cyberlimbs to work better...?
Once a player has a limb it can be attached by NPC cybernetic specialists who have taken up residency in the second floor offices at the larger Medical Centers in the galaxy.
Oh.
Pretty much just phat lewt for the leet, then.
I want to like the upcoming changes. I really do. But while Space Mining is a definite win, why are it and all the other new features only being designed for one type of player each? Why can't all these new features be designed to support both combat and non-combat players? Is that kind of design really so incredibly hard to do?
/puzzled
--Flatfingers