Development Cycle Archive

I did not see a "purpose of this forum" message, so if this is an inappropriate place to post this, please delete this message.

Another thing which might have been implemented in a crafting revamp would be to give all crafters regardless of skill 10 experimentation points. A major concern of crafting is in most classes, that if you are not a master, you have no market. If you gave everybody the same experimentation points, everybody would have the potential to make the same quality items.

The two determining factors would then be if you *could* make the item, and how hard it is to make it (possibly increase the overall difficulty of experimentation). A lower level might take dozens to hundreds of tries to make that "perfect" scout blaster (thus wasting time and excellent quality resources, as a penality for non-mastery), while a master might only take a few tries. After all, in real life, a person who is average skill on a task can do just as well (or ever better) than a much better than a more qualified person, given he or she gets that burst of inspiration or that lucky break.

This would have the benefit of making many lower to mid level items viable to sell (albeit harder to make for a low level crafter), while high level crafters keep the benefit of exclusive access to the T-21's, enhance D's, and other high end items market (how it was originally intended, as I understand it).

Crafting experiment currently *is* based on the resources used. You can simply create a higher maximum with better resources. The problem is that you can easily reach the cap of experimentation in a track (which the crafting enhancements was supposed to fix... too bad it was reverted).

As for "what is the advantage of mastering a class", it does not have to simply be experimentation points. If it was "difficult" to experiment, and it took you 200 tries to get a "perfect" scout blaster at a low lever weaponsmith, that is a very large expense if you are paying 50 credits per resource for the best resources. (Wasn't that the original intent of "practicing" mode, keep playing with crafting until you find something which works, and gain experience while doing so.)

So mastery will allow you to basically save 30 minutes of crafting time and thousands of resources to making an item. (The exact difficulty of experimenting would need to be examined, of course.) Not to mention that if you want a higher end good, you will still need to talk to a master crafter, as only they can make the good.

The fundamental problem right now is there is no market for non-mastery level items. Even if you can save 1000 or 2000 credits (20 minutes of missions for even a low level combat class), who is going to buy a non-master weapon or armor which is 10% weaker (or worse)? This is just an idea to fix that problem, and let non-masters have a market.

And, as a side note, I think they should keep the +2 experimenting points, or something else. Otherwise, what is the distinction between somebody who made master yesterday (and has some rich friends to buy resources), and somebody who is a 4 month master. It doesn't have to necessarily have to be the +2 from skill tapes, but there should be some way for somebody to lift himself or herself from the crowd by doing something a little extra (as honestly, everybody is using the same high quality resources, within 5% of each other).