Shipwright Archive

I usually stay out of these sorts of topics on the forums, as they are usually nothing more than childish pissing contests to see who can flame the other side more. Indeed this is my first post ever to the SWG forums, but I just couldn't take it anymore.

I have read endless posts from shipwrights calling for an end to uber loot drops.

I will preface this by saying that I am a shipwright as well as a master pilot. I had no intention of becoming a shipwright when JTL came out. I was a master pilot for about three weeks, and was desperately trying to outfit my new master level ship with the best stuff I could get my hands on and also fit into my ship. I was looting some nice components but most of them were too huge to fit on my ship or had one good stat and the others sucked. After asking around for days and days and browsing every shipwright vendor I could find on every planet it seemed that not many shipwrights were interested in RE'ing stuff. They just farm level 1 components and RE them in hopes of getting Firespray disks so they can make millions selling them. So I decided to drop master doctor and take up being a shipwright specializing in the RE'ing of components for me and the people of my town.

This started off pretty well. At that time I was able to go to kessel or deep space and kill tons of tier 5 ships. In about 3 hours time I would have a full load of loot about half of which was level 8-10. Now mind you about 90% of that high level loot was good for nothing more than fillers to RE good components with and only about 0.1% of it was actually usable straight out of the box. I was still grinding up shipwright at the time, so I was stockpiling all the high level stuff I could so that I could RE some of it later when I had the skill.

Over the past week I have noticed a significant decline in both the quantity and the quality of loot drops. Even though the only thing I hunt are tier 5 ships, they now drop 95% level 1-7 components which are pure crap 99% of the time. It also takes me about 3 times the amount of time to get the same amount of loot I used to get. Over the past week I have looted a total of 2 level 10 components and both are pretty crappy and good for nothing more than filler for RE'ing components that are actually worth doing something with.

They have already nerfed loot drops in space whether they have told us so or not. I think the problem was not that the loot drops were too good, but that not enough shipwrights saw that RE'ing components could be a viable business. Too many of them started doing it for free just so they could get the Firespray and make a few quick million credits. I don't know for sure if they have already nerfed loot drops or not, this may just be some really back luck on my part. However the way I am going right now, it would take me about 2 months to gather up enough level 10 components to be able to RE a good level 10 final product with good stats in the important categories.

If space loot is going to or has already been nerfed then RE'ing will be dead. It will take so long to collect enough parts to RE something good that they will become the holy grail of ship parts and people will be charging 200k for one level 10 blaster and 2 million for a RE'd component.

I wish more shipwrights would see that RE'ing can be a viable business on it's own or at a minimum a nice addition to your normal shipwright crafting. Even though I have not mastered shipwright yet and can't make money crafting, because as everyone knows the quality of your product is inferior until you have all the experimentation points you can get, I was still able to make some good money selling RE components of level 1-6 or charging people who brought me parts to RE for them.

Let the flaming begin!

Nothing to add.

'-------- COL Gyorgy Csizmazia --------'
Master Creature Handler
Resource Shop -4322 6844, Naboo

First off, I would like to commend you on your post. It's nice to not see "this sucks, it should be my way". I don't fully agree with you, but again, I'm impressed you actually put coheirant sentences together.

However, as someone who make's there business off of selling componants, I'm glad to see that what I can make is on par with loot. I think the amazing loot (in all aspects, not just ships) is out of controll. I mean, when SWG was first coming out, we were promised that player created items would always be better than looted items. It was just tough for me to keep track of all that loot, along with all of the componats and sub-componants I make (not to mention the hundreds of tailor items I make). I was always happy to RE parts for someone who collected them (for a small fee), but I am a firm believer that player created items should be better than looted one.

Maybe a system of using looted componants to make better player crafted componants would be a nice middle ground, but that's for a diffrent discussion on a diffrent day.

Reverse Engineering has a conceptual flaw: it competes directly with the crafting portion of the profession. 'Good' loot suitible for REing often tends to be loot 'adequate' enough for use without REing. So if it's too easy to attain parts for REing an exceptional reactor, chances are extremely high the person will find a reactor more than suitable enough to use for free. Which takes away from the demand for crafted components. Even if SOE found that magical, mythical balance between dropping loot in sufficient enough quantity/quality to make REing viablewhile not taking from the demand of the crafted component market, the final products would still be in direct competition with the crafted components.

I think SOE would have done better to use the system found in the ground game or a hybrid of it. Where destroying an NPC yields a subcomponent that could be used in the component creation process to make an 'enhanced' version. That would have been the 'minimum effort' required as that system alredy exists. If they really wanted to get creative, a system where the loot was unusable but a Shipwright could generate a subcomponent with a characteristic from that loot for use in the creation process would have been better. IE, you loot a broken reactor but the shipwright pullsthe reactor corethat would be used to create a reactor with a higher energy generation rate. Or pulls the reactor casing to be used to create a reactor with a lower than normal mass.

With the current implementation I'd plan on a lengthy rollercoaster ride as SOE attempts to find that magical, mythical balance of dropping just enough loot. Speaking honestly, however, I wish they'd not make the attempt and reinvent Reverse Engineering instead. They'll never get it right (hence the repeated use of the word "mythical") and will always have either crafting or reverse engineering inferior to the other. Which is guaranteed to piss someone off, depending on their preference.

Well I do agree that players will be able to find some components that have great qualities that they can use right out of the box. These components are much more rare than most people that post in this forum would have us believe however.

When I was leveling pilot when I got most of those components I had to compromise with them because the mass was usually so high or some other critical stat was outrageously bad. Like I found a great level 8 shield, but I had to take off all my armor and one of my weapons and downgrade both my reactor and boosters just to be able to fit it on my ship. By the way of all of the great components I have looted thus far only one of them (the previously mentioned level 8 shield) was level 8-10. All of the other level 8-10 components I have found are un-usable without being RE'd on anything other than a master level MP ship, which nobody uses because they are bugged to no end and it is hard to get a group together to kill two hours just flying around with no real objective.

In a way space loot already uses the mechanics of the ground game as you suggest. On the ground you can loot some low level items off of meatlumps that are actually useful when you are just starting out as say a pistoleer or something. In space you can loot level 1-3 components to no end to outfit your crappy little level 1 ship that you won't be in for more than a day. On the ground you can loot Janta blood off of mid level NPC's which you can sell to any doctor and make a killing on. In space you can loot some decent components that you can sell to the NPC's and make a fair amount of cash. On the ground you can go do high level lairs and get rare loot drops that you can gather all the peices and have an armorsmith craft the item for you or you can sell it to someone for a couple million credits. In space you can kill high level ships and get some high level loot which you can take to a shipwright and have them RE it to make it actually useful or you could sell it to someone else for a 100k or so, or you could slap that 50k mass weapon right on your ship and bite the bullet on the rest of the components in your ship. The only difference is that for the high level pieces of the ground loot everyone knows exactly where to go and it is much easier to get as long as you have a uber combat character. The difficulty of being able to get enough high level loot to put enough of it together to RE a truly uber component is already a major undertaking. If people on your server are routinely gathering full inventories of level 8-10 components on one duty missioin then I'm on the wrong server.

Sorry I forgot to mention that I still have yet to collect enough other level 8 shields to RE that good level 8 I picked up, let alone one with a low enough mass that would actually make the RE'd final shield more suitable to use on a non MP ship. That's after a full month of doing kessel runs and killing tier 5 imps and rebs just trying to do this, because it's so big I still can't fit armor or boosters on my ship.

I think loot drops have more to do with how many people are actually in space killing npcs than most people may think. There is plenty of content already for all pilots to do something prior to becoming master. Whether it be to do missions from the starports, missions from your trainer, duty missions from your trainer, gaining xp with friends all with the goal of becoming a master pilot of your profession and able to fly the master level ships. But what goals are there to do once you do become master? Gaining prestige points to go into deep space and PvP. Thats a laugh.

I'm a smuggler by trade on the ground and I know full well how much of a pain it is to craft something that is inferior to everything else out there. Spice has more drawbacks and penalties than chef food yet its inferior to it, add doctor buffs into the mix and using spices just becomes a break glass in case of emergency use item. So I don't craft spices anymore theres no point. What money I do get from being a smuggler is through slicing already made items to something a bit more useful with a small fee attached to it....but even that is negated by armoursmiths and weaponsmiths taking up smuggler themselves or hiring a smuggler to slice all their equipment for them so they can sell it already sliced on their vendors at much higher cost.

With this in mind right now the only real goal of a master pilot right now is to collect looted items in space and hope to find something worth getting reverse engineered. I was lucky in the fact that I started playing JTL before all the nerfs when there was a better chance of getting some decent loot. So I have an edge over most pilots out there because of my equipment on my ship...that is pre nerf. Right now there isn't any real goals for master pilots other than to collect loot to get reverse engineered by a shipwright. The fun part of space is that when you loot equipment in space its actually useful...unlike on the ground where all you get is cdef weapons or other weapons with downright pitiful damage and completely worthless even to a junk dealer where I generally just delete the loot instead of taking it to a junk dealer cause 32 credits to sell it just isn't worth my inventory space. And here we are now with shipwrights trying to make space loot just as useless as ground loot is now. Why punish your customers and destroying their fun so you can make a buck? That will only lead to more master pilots to stop playing jtl and start working on their jedi alts again where they won't need any craftable loot at all and the economy of swg is dead....and its already happening.

Players do buy some of your products like chassis, reactors, armor, missle launchers, missles, countermeasure launchers and countermeares. And you get a steady stream of customers wanting to get their space loot reverse engineered to make the items better...yet you don't charge fees because you have dollar signs in your eyes for more kuat fragments that could let you sell firesprays for millions. But if you kill off what little fun there is in JTL for master pilots you will have a much smaller customer base because the only content for masters after attaining master is to gain prestige and enter deep space for PvP. PvP in space right now is a joke, one shot kills aren't fun. In order for it to be fun PvP damage would need to be reduced to at least 70 -75% in order to have a fight last as long as it does against a tier 5 ship....right now at 25% its more like fighting tier 1 npcs. Add on to the fact that in order to pacify the master pilot crowd to make it worth their time to risk pvp in deep space the devs made leaving deep space fully repair your ship with no decay. That is hurting your business more than space loot ever could. But at least its keeping pilots the core of JTL and your customer base to continue playing after attaining master.

The beauty of reverse engineering is that it allows space loot to be good and worth using but in order to make it better you have to go to a shipwright to make the loot even better. So in a sense at least in the devs eyes, eventhough you don't like to see it that way, player made (reverse engineered items) are better than loot you get off npcs. If space loot is better than player crafted whats keeping you as a shipwright from collecting space loot yourself, reverse engineering it and selling it for a price on your vendor higher than your own craftedequipment for sheer profit? Absolutely nothing. So I don't understand why you'd want to hurt your customer base, dwindling it down to nothing when its already declining, by trying to continually nerf the things that make space actually fun to play. If all we had was player crafted junk I probably would try to become jedi like everybody else in game and then the game would be dead. After all your player crafted stuff is a level lower than space loot.

An idea that i've tried to convey in other posts is that since player crafted equipment is inferior due to lack of experiment points or that experiment points don't increase stats enough,what if it was possible for player cafted equipment to be made reverse engineerable...either with space loot of the same level and/or other player crafted reverse engineerable components. That way you could bypass the drawbacks of player crafted equipment by making specialized components that players would want to spend the money to buy in order to get the component reverse engineerable by a master smuggler( with the added tag of this item has been altered by a smuggler) or for you to have made yourself with space loot and your own player crafted reverse engineerable components reverse engineer it yourself and charge a lot more money for it being a player crafted/space loot hybrid equipment with the tag of ( this item has been altered by a master smuggler). That would help you compete with space loot much more effectively without nerfing what is already out there. It would also follow the same type of guidelines as player crafted items on the ground where a smuggler (in this case master smuggler) could slice player crafted items to make them better or more usable.

Graxul Starweaver-Starsider
Grax Oblivion-Starsider

Further, it's the feasibility of a single person collecting enough loot to build an RE business. As a Master Pilot, I collect enough loot to RE components...for myself. It took some time to find 3 lvl 6 engines with 3 individual YPR values over 70 to RE with my .79 Reward engine. That's one engine down, and while I have another 79 speed reward engine un REed (someone was selling it on the bazaar for 5k) it'll take a similiar amount of time to repeat the process. Time during which I'd have absolutely nothing of that caliber to offer on my vendor.

Making a business out of offering reverse engineered components requires a wide sampling of loot. That means either spending 100% of your time in space doing nothing but farming (ooo...that's appealing). Or having several people (your PA, groups of friends, ect) providing tons of loot for potential REing. And this will eat vast amounts of storage space, hampering your resource harvesting efforts as you use more structure lots for storage space. An RE business isn't as feasible as people try to make it appear. Not if people are going for quality as well as quantity.

Quantity is easy to do. But it'll yield junk.