Business And Economy Archive
Thread: JTL & Shipwright Here Yesterday, Gone Tomorrow
Jagged-F3l wrote:
Puertoriqueno wrote:
I would like to post what I wrote a while back, from the perspective of a newcomer to JTL...
Ok, first, New in here, so some things may or may not have been covered or mentioned before. I just want to add my two cents from an "SWG veteran but new to JTL" point of view.
First, I wanted to explain why I stopped playing JTL so soon after I started. Now, I love it, dont get me wrong........very fun, exciting, visually pleasing, so this is not a rant. This is the reason I set it down and went back to the planet.
I might also mention that......being I was new........I used the base Scyk. I found the whole customizing idea to confusing for now. Again, not a complaint, it is great, but I wanted into the action.
1) Autopilot. Is there one? Looked through the manual, maybe I missed it. The runs between missions points were WAY too long.
Yes, there is an auto-pilot. I will sympathize with you regarding the manual. However, this game is far too dynamic to depend on hardcopy manuals. You should have asked someone in the Pilot forum.
2) Lock-on. Not fun. Very hard to pick a target, hard to cycle through targets, especially when using the joystick to do so. I would often have to wait for someone to shoot at me to target them, and that did not work when you have three aggressors on you.
Never had a problem with this. You really should spend some time figuring out the commands that yield the most desirable results. Yes, there are a lot of commands, but that gives players the flexibility to suit their own needs. Once you have found the commands that best suit your needs, bind them to the various buttons and controls on your joystick.
By the way, if you were flying around in a Scyk and only had 1/1/1/1 skills, you should probably not have been flying in space that would cause you to be attacked by TIE Aggressors. This represents the equivalent of attacking a Graul Mauler with Novice Brawler skills.
3) Escort or Squadron leader missions early on very irritating.....note I said irritating, I know they should be hard, but to have a situation so early that causes you to spend 30 minutes (perhaps an exaggeration) trying to fend off attackers or kill one single ship only to lose the mission because you took to long is not a good way to start off.
No, you aren't exaggerating. My first escort mission lasted 45 minutes. These missions can be nerve wracking. SOE was going for the X-wing vs. TIE Fighter experience with these missions. Some of them are fun, some of them are intended to teach you patience with the stick. Being a pilot can be best described as long periods of boredom dotted with brief moments of terror and excitement.
4) A huge amount of loot that APPEARED worthless....again, as a new person, especially with the newbie ship, it seemed to have no use. Purchased a base scyk, found out that out of all of my loot, only two pieces could be used in the ship. Again, IMHO, not a good way to start.
Personally I think the whole space loot system and RE'ing runs smack in the face of the devs long standing philosophy that loot should never hurt crafters or the player economy. Initially, the loot was frequently excellent, and this hurt Shipwrights. However, over time I noticed that loot drop frequency fell off, and eventually excellent loot became rare, so I didn't mind so much, as a Shipwright.
5) No big Imp/Reb battles to watch, or Star Destroyers in orbit (was hoping to see this one), etc etc.
No, the fun battles are waiting for you in the sectors that you can't even enter until you have acquired the skills.
6) No way to board or explore stations. This one was a disappointment......dont get me wrong, I know that can take alot of development, but why not use the base station that is used for newbies when they first start the game and just change it up slightly, have a few npcs, and give it a light ground-like content.......mission guys, entertainment areas, hospitals, bazaar just for space. Perhaps some quests can involve people on the stations. Just a thought........
Many were disappointed by this, but when you consider the vastness of what JTL brought to the game, the disappointment shouldgo away. Many hope that this will be something the devs will add in the future. However, I don't think the space game is going to see much love until the ground game gets some first.
Anyway, this is what caused me to stop training in pilot before I had even trained the first set of boxes and go back to the ground game. Now I use the ships to travel from planet to planet. I am sure this is not what was intended.
You should continue your quest to master pilot. You will find some of the more nerve wracking missions easier with a friend. If you hate the grind, fly with a friend with a YT-1300 and man the quads--the XP poors in. And read the Pilot forum, there's a lot of good help in there.
Concerning travel, I think the devs intended it as a benefit for those that purchased JTL.
I just wanted to start with that. Remember, I love this addition, I just would like to see something to grab new guys and hold them.
Next, I would like to talk about uniforms, specifically the rebel uniforms. I noticed that the X-wing and B-wing helmuts are not available to rebels. Seems to me this is something that should have been in place from day one.
Rebels receive "uniforms" as rewards for high-level quests. Personally, I think this sucks considering the fact that Imperials receive their pressure suit and helmet in first tier quests.
Finally, planets........I know you cant make Hoth and Coruscant playable planets, but can you at least make them ones we can visit in space?
Hoth? Wrong timeframe.
Coruscant? Even in space the lag would be unacceptable. Consider all the traffic in the Coruscant system, not to mention the vast number of stations, satellites, and military emplacements.
I doubt that you have fully explored the sectors the devs have given you (in fact, I know you haven't), but your asking for more. Does this seem reasonable?
Thanks for your time, and feel free to pick this apart.
It was a good addition, but I play it rarely for the reasons listed above.
Its nice to get a fresh perspective on this. We know the mags have not been overly kind to SWG, and lukewarm to JTL. The latest mag I received just last night gave SWG/JTL a scathing review, at 2.5 stars, and that rating doesn't do justice to the verbal ripping it gave our game.
In one screenshot it shows a player standing looking out a window of a yacht, and said something like, "with the JTL expansion you get to stare out windows," and in another portion, the author says, "the ships are as empty as the ground game." Those are examples of the flavor of the reveiw, but if you read the whole article, you can't help but realize that they're right on target. SOE has been trying to change things lately, but at the same time, they are still releasing a ton of bugs, selectively communicating, and reversing their progress with statements like, "we'll change the pearl drops as we see fit," while we're standing around pulling our hair out for lack of loot.
It's a telling article, very bittersweet to this player who's online daily, and wants to love the game they almost hate. That's a generalization, there are things that I absolutely love about the game, but there's so much that makes it nigh on unplayable. Cosby said it best, take your favorite food, a steak? Take your favorite steak, a T-Bone, cooked just the way you like it, and then have it served to you on a dirty garbage pale lid.
My daughter tried to tease me, she quit the game last summer, looking over my shoulder she saw the 2.5 star rating and said, "haha Dad, your game got 2.5 stars." I said frankly, "no, I'm glad. It deserves it, SOE needs to get the feedback. I wouldn't even have given it that high of a rating."
Now aint that a shame.
Mor-Dan wrote:
...SW is broken, and i along with many others continually told the DEV team this during the JTL beta. all they did was create another Architect. it is a profession that dies once everybody buys what they need. there is no reason to go back for anything else because the best things you will get are looted, not crafted....
BleuDestiny wrote:
Anywho, glad your experiences are better.
Stikjok wrote:
BleuDestiny wrote:
Lets look a bit at your points;
- RE'ing is a quagmire - I specialize in stocking RE'd components on my vendors, and actually only craft player made components as ordered. I buy looted components from players and off the bazaar (when I see them priced well). I have a system that I've developed to manage my inventory (from my armorsmith days actually).
- I had a system too, including both purchased and guild-collected loot, so I was passing thru a large-scale quantity of goods, in fact, I probably lost about $15 million from all the parts bought, that once RE'd, would not sell, they just kept recycling through the vendor "auction unsuccessful" a few times till I deleted them, and we're in a highly trafficed vendor zone, different experiences for different players or servers I guess. All in all, lost millions of credits on the venture.
- Not sure what you paid for the loot you bought, but I try not to go over 1500 per level. Sometimes when I see an item with great stats I'll spend a bit more. I do this for 2 reasons; First, to keep my resale price low (I add 10% to the purchase price, then round up to the nearest 500 or 1000 credits). Second, if something doesn't sell (after say 2 or 3 cycles on a vendor) I sell it to the chassis dealer in a starport and recoupe as many credits as I can.
- As for Kuat disks, I RE in batches and when I do a batch I RE 100+ components each time (not all level 1's BTW). Evey time I do this I get at least 1 disk, sometimes more. I think I have gotten 2 just in the last 3 or 4 days.
- I would do 500-1,000 in a batch, large scale, all in all, millions invested, got about 9 disks, only 5 of which were not redundant, never got a full schematic, total loss of millions, again.
- Just in this last week and a half I have RE'd about 300 to 400 loots (50 to 100 each time I logged in), and I have had 4 disks show up in that time. Maybe logging and doing them in small batches resets the timer for random drops.
- Sales non-existant - I disagree, my sales have gone up. In the last month I've had to add a second location.
- Not around here, glad your experience is better
- Could be location, server population, and other factors have hurt you and/or helped me. Such is the life of a merchant trying to get visibility of his wares to the customer. With planned vendor/bazaar changes the "visibility" issues to the customers may change things.
- Dev issues- This is not limited to SW, and I have seen many improvements to the game in the last month, so I feel confident that they will some issues for SW's.
- In all things, loot issues should be balanced with minimums and maybe maximums, such that if you RE thousands of items, some measure kicks in and delivers a freaking disc, or if you kill billions of black suns, some measure kicks in and delivers a good loot; the variability of loot drop that rains heavens on some players and desimates others in terms of time, repairs, and cost, is unbalanced.
- I can't say for sure if it is balanced or not, that is a question for the Devs to answer. I can say that the loot (space and ground loot alike)I buy from guild mates and other players for resale comes in batches. The contents of thesebatches change based on what each player was "hunting", how long they "hunted". (this info is based on asking questions of the players I buy fromlike "ooh what dropped that?")
EdOWar wrote:
Stikjok wrote:
SW xpconvertion to FS xp - This is a complaint I've heard a lot, usually from people who see "grinding" chassis as a quick way to jedi. I hope they don't do this, because then we will see even bigger resource farms, worse quality chassis flooding the market, and even more people "grinding" there way to jedi.
Sorry, I know this is off topic, but I couldn't help myself.
This is one area where I disagree. There is no reason why shipwrights shouldn't get FS conversion. Shipwright is a ground based crafting profession that uses skill points, so why shouldn't it get FS conversion like any other ground based crafting profession?
If shipwright even had the same 35:1 conversion rate as Architect, it would take 660,000,000 resources to finish all four FS crafting branches grinding master level ships. At 2 cpu that would be 1.32 billion credits. Anyone who tried to use shipwright as the fast road to Jedi would be an idiot, especially considering that it a) gives you no combat abilities and b) only completes four branches anyways. Grenades are a much better alternative: faster, cheaper and more useful.
Slim Vargo, Corbantis
My opinion is based on other (non-SW) players asking me what kinds of XP I get per chassis, which are usually followed with something like "WOW, I could grind to Jedi quick if I could earn that kind of XP", and havingseen what the "grinding" shipwright did when JTL went live. Granteda trade in ratio such as the one you refered to might limit the problems I fear might happen, but there are players out there that will try ANY route to Jedi (or any other grindable prof) theysee as "quick", even if it isn't. As was seen in the early days of JTL, grinders sellingtheir productsto recoupe the credits they spend can have a market impact.
IMO when they "fixed" Jedi they replaced a Prof grind with an XP grind....when they should have focused more on the quests and made those the "grind" to get Jedi and at the same time the could have made it more of an adventure. But that is an issue for another thread.
With grenades being a grinders tool of choice to farm XP, this would be the most logical market for crafting XP grinders to get into because they will sell like hotcakes and give XP, but as we should all know by now not everyone playing this game is that wise.
JTGAlpha wrote:
Nah. I like being a smuggler/merchant. I can shoot a pistol and make a heck of deal. I just don't make anything exceptionally well, nor am I Chow Yun Fat.
Maybe weought to havea thread for those of us who have characters with a broad mix of skills instead of monomaniacally focusing on nothing-but-combat or nothing-but-crafting. Where are the game rewards for being reasonably capable in a wide range of abilities?
Generalists, unite!
--Flatfingers
you have 1 character. He can progress in combat skills or crafting skill. Each has its own experiance. That way you can do both without having to get a alt account or something. And you only have to worry about 1 character. this does 2 things
Lets the player focus on his 1 character
Keeps active crafters in game.
ShakariPsy wrote:
its not a presumptuous viewpoint at all, when SW 1st can out ppl did it to make fast money as ppl would want the ships, comps etc asap to try out the new features in space... any profs point is to make money one way or another and new profs will make cash very quickly at the start, then slow down as SW is doing, and a lot of the Shipwrights are jumping ship now, I know of 3 myself
BleuDestiny wrote:
That's a pretty presumptuous viewpoint. First of all, why would anyone think they'd make a quick fortune?
Message Edited by BleuDestiny on 02-22-2005 01:27 PM
While I was struggling with acquiring the millions of units of resources to grind SW, at significant effort, time, and cost, the heavy "ouch" factor, I was selling the ships as I was grinding them. I had no illusion to the ability to sell a lot of ships, the sales were poor while I did the grind, and they stayed poor after the grind. As a matter of fact, I still have over half the ships in my vendor, in a town that has a shopping traffic, that I did from my original grind, still unsold. There was never an illusion that this prof was a money maker on the crafting side.
RE'ing is another matter, but that was a flop with a lot of money spent for parts, and no successful schematics.
Message Edited by Crizis on 03-08-2005 01:30 PM
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6) No way to board or explore stations. This one was a disappointment......dont get me wrong, I know that can take alot of development, but why not use the base station that is used for newbies when they first start the game and just change it up slightly, have a few npcs, and give it a light ground-like content.......mission guys, entertainment areas, hospitals, bazaar just for space. Perhaps some quests can involve people on the stations. Just a thought........
Many were disappointed by this, but when you consider the vastness of what JTL brought to the game, the disappointment should go away. Many hope that this will be something the devs will add in the future. However, I don't think the space game is going to see much love until the ground game gets some first.
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Haha, this one issue with the release was absurd.
I don't care if EVERY single station in the game looks EXACTLY the same with only ONE room.
Instance the dern thing.
While I was gaining the first set of boxes for Privateer doing the missions I had to run to ground and slog through the THEED spaceport EVERY SINGLE MISSION.
The first mission or two I thought, "This is kind of cool, using the NPC's this way!"
After the 5th, or 10th, or 20th mission I couldn't even stand to go to ground and wait out the load times and the lag and the pain of running between the starport and the palace one more time.
I just JTL with my starter craft and run around killing anything in range.
So basically, I'm still killing gnorts right outside town because it takes too friggin long to climb over that first hill right at the edge of town......
DERRRRR!!!
progman63 wrote:
BleuDestiny:
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6) No way to board or explore stations. This one was a disappointment......dont get me wrong, I know that can take alot of development, but why not use the base station that is used for newbies when they first start the game and just change it up slightly, have a few npcs, and give it a light ground-like content.......mission guys, entertainment areas, hospitals, bazaar just for space. Perhaps some quests can involve people on the stations. Just a thought........
Many were disappointed by this, but when you consider the vastness of what JTL brought to the game, the disappointment should go away. Many hope that this will be something the devs will add in the future. However, I don't think the space game is going to see much love until the ground game gets some first.
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Haha, this one issue with the release was absurd.
I don't care if EVERY single station in the game looks EXACTLY the same with only ONE room.
Instance the dern thing.
While I was gaining the first set of boxes for Privateer doing the missions I had to run to ground and slog through the THEED spaceport EVERY SINGLE MISSION.
The first mission or two I thought, "This is kind of cool, using the NPC's this way!"
After the 5th, or 10th, or 20th mission I couldn't even stand to go to ground and wait out the load times and the lag and the pain of running between the starport and the palace one more time.
I just JTL with my starter craft and run around killing anything in range.
So basically, I'm still killing gnorts right outside town because it takes too friggin long to climb over that first hill right at the edge of town......
DERRRRR!!!
/bravo!
I want to get into JTL more, really I do. But grinding 110 million resources to get the crafting FS XP is taking just a little of my time. Thanks SOE! 
Fivo Asia