Development Cycle Archive

Q-3PO,

There's a small problem with the "crafter centered" economy on Shadowfire. Every single known master armorsmith has quit, because they have so much money, they'll never need to runa missions or craft another item. Before the production of composite there was so much good armor available that no new armorsmiths were comming up, so now, there's no good armor available on shadowfire at all. It's all been bought up by the imps with ATSTs that use them to run lvl 50 misisons and make themselves a few milllion credits for a few days faction missions to buy the ATST. The problem is that there's no incentive to keep the crafters working, they have total control over the prices s once they make enough money they just quit, and the rest of us are left out in the cold.

There's one other problem on Shadowfire too. This is the youngest server running and already there are people quitting because they've run out of things to do. I dont want to imagine what it's like for people playing on the older servers, once people finally finish all the end-game quests whats left? Yall wont give anyone a clue as to how close they are to unlocking the FS? The rebel theme park is busted once you go looking for Lt. Lance on dantooine, the second Dark Jedi misison is a bust unless you'v got a pet and a lot of luck. Krayt hunting is getting to be too much of a pain in the bum because of all the ninja looters trying to steal drops. (me and 5 buddies went Krayt hunting, by the time the night was over there were 12 more following us everywhere begging to get in our group).

So the rewards I'd like to see......

A huge epic quest, crossing all 5 elite planets multiple times, that will tell the person completing the quest how close they are to unlocking their FS and what they need to do to unlock it. The long quest would just be lots of fun on it's own, a reward itself for getting to end-game status, but the reward for finishing the quest would be equally nice.

Stryke Err

Commando/Doctor I cotterize your wounds with my flamethrower.

I forgot to add this. If you make badges for quests/ and themeparks. Make them retroactive to all who have already completed the quest. Same goes for rewards.

Another interesting idea would be to add "Broken Legendaries" that would require crafters to fix them. For instance, you could have an "ancient beam repeater" that, when used, brings up a crafting window and requests specific components to fix it. In my beam repeater's case, I would say it would need 5 Advanced Blaster Power Handlers, a new advblaster rifle barrel andadv projectile feed mech to repair general admage, and a few units of a rare resource to finish the weapon off. This would require players to have crafters around if they wanted working rare weapons. The system could be made more general(which would lead back to the schematic idea) or much more specific(one key part is missing from the otherwise functional E-Web blaster turret).

New draft schematics to add to the number of items a crafter could make. You'd still require a certain skill to make them, or maybe they'd run out after some time. So like a new recipe for a different type of food, for a chef, or a new style of clothes, for a tailor. These would be a use only once, so one a chef learned the recipe you'd have to get a new recipe to teach another chef the same.

Cute decorations like the bantha statue and paintings

Extra nice crafting components, like the armor and weapon stuff

Skill enhancers (if they actually worked)

Armor, weapons, droids, clothes. All broken or Disassembled

Broken items will be repaired by crafters or Assembled by crafters. All items will have different ways to combine into differentitems of the same type ( a blaster becomes a blaster ), or repaired with different parts to make different items. These items will not replace what is crafted by crafters already, except for very few, which are more powerful then the current items, but not by much.

With the different parts or different assemblies you can make 1 weapon, but with X amount of configurations, none of each overpowering, just so not everybody is running around with the same item.

The best part about this, is that it builds on what crafters do already, crafters can purchase these parts from players, or put them together for players at a cost. And these items will degrade just like everything else, so crafters will still be in constant flow of the game.

Also just another idea to throw around, the quests that must be done, may have a door, or a broken droid that opens a door, or a statue that requires armor and a shield to be added to it ( kind of like a resident evil puzzle ) before that certain part of the dungeon opens, and those items are obviously from crafters, that way if someone wants to do the quest they need crafters to craft an item for them to even perform this, and maybe that item that needs to be crafted is a drop off of one of the earlier mobs in the quest is a special item that has to be put into one of these items for it to work, so crafters are still in the loop.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=619684&view=by_date_ascending&page=1

that was the original thread with my idea

I like the idea of High Quality Resources as a Reward.

Hey here's a thought how about dropping armor powerups? How about dropping skilling enhancers for clothes and armor that has to be crafted into them? How about powerups for harvesters? How about drop items that can be used in crafting that actualy do some good?

If you want to support the crafter drop items that the crafters can use to make their crafted items better. A lot of the stuff out there thats being dropped that the crafters can use is junk.

AND PLEASE STOP DROPPING CDEF WEAPONS! Its just plain junk and takes up space everywhere.

Please drop more useable skill enhancers, +5 or higher.

RIght now how the loot is working really really sucks. There is no other way to say it.

A little message that says in broad/general terms (i.e. BLAZING/Hot/Warm/Cold/FREEZING) how close you are to unlocking FS...


I'd spend a week doing pointless quests just to know.

You are Warm (okay, it can sound more star warsy)

You have ALMOST grasped a key secret to the universe!

Hope this hasn't already been mentioned. 7 pages. whew.

Drop special armor and guns and clothes and whatever that is broken. Only way to get it special again s to take it to a crafter or armorsmith or whatever to repair. or drop normal unique items that are only special when modified by a PC. solves both problems.

I got the super crimson red composite helmet. can't wait to take it to fish the armorsmithto make it wearable, and to rob the smuggler to slice it to have better stats and to flite the tailor to color it for me.

Problem = Want to maintain the integrity of the crafting system. Dropped Uber Loot will take the crafters out of the loop.

Solution = Have quests drop SCHEMATICS or components for weapons / armor / equipment that can only be put together by a crafter of certain ability. Crafters can then craft the items from the components and charge as they want for these items.

YOU ALSO should place a certification in place for these weapons. So only certain profession types can use this equipment. This diversifies the professions AND has the side effect of making sure that the crafting market still has room to sell weapons/armor/equipment that is not of this "higher" level. This is somewhat similar to an "EPIC" quest, but relies on the crafters ability to put the items together.

High quality materials, weapons enhancers, superior grade weapon powerups, skill enhancers, stuff like that. When I say high quality materials I mean set statistics, like 1000 shock resistance steel, or 1000 conductivity/overall quality copper, and decent amounts of it, say a stack of 1000 rather than 2 units you get as loot now.

I like the idea of drop that are.. Old UO term "Rares". People love to collect stuff. Its just our nature.

Like the items in Nym's Stronghold, Nightsister Spider cave, Fountains in the courtyards, list goes on and on.

Brilliant ideas on this thread. No pandering, just brief sincerity: responses like these make me proud to be a fellow geek.

In addendum to what I posted earlier:

1) Get rid of "broken" whatever. I would rather just have a monetary reward than a broken flux capacitor, or whatever.

2) Tell how many credits you have earned for your mission reward. A quick system message accomplishes this goal. I am not good at math, nor do I want to be. Tell me what is x for 12342 + x = 12392. Thank you.

3) The schematics idea is great. Worried about being exploited? Sell your schematic for hard credits. Let the crafter build the item. Hell, add some risk to the mix: Give the schematic a mysterious name. Only the crafter will know what it will create when it's done. What exactly is a "Quaternarian X-4 Blaster Augmentator?" Does it add +50 to damage, or just make your E-11 a nice shade of mauve? Only YOU will know!

4) The "broken but fixable by a master crafter" item idea is great.

5) If I get one more resource dropped by a mob that has a quantity of one, I will kill Bill. Honestly. Go into the code and add a quick for-next loop that says, "where resource quantity less than 50, quantity++, else Bill | /dev/null". Thank you.