Weaponsmith Archive
Thread: Petition To Remove Uber Loot Weapons. *IMPORTANT*
Every other game I've played has made this mistake, the mistake of making loot items better than player crafted items. Usually they make it from the begining and players become used to the high level weapons. Only later do they realise that a player based economy won't work with loot items being better than crafted, by then it is always far too late.
Developers put in items like these to help keep combat classes playing longer, it gives them a new goal to shoot for. I've seen it happen in almost all other online games. It is only a temporary fix to that problem and is not the only option. It is just the easiest.
The side effect for crafters and the economy is disasterous. Even if the items are extremely rare it makes no difference. What it does is knock crafted items down to sub-standard. For online games "standard" does not mean average quality, it means "top shelf". Any thing that a player aquires or uses on the way to obtaining top shelf, it is just a temporary sub-standard item. With the introduction of these weapons the entire inventory of the WS is now in this category.
There is also the issue of why crafters play the game in the first place. Why do you play the game? For me and a lot of others, we play the game to make the best weapons possible, the best in the game. High level loot weapons will make this goal impossible, and if my gaming goal is impossible, why would I play a weaponsmith? I could run a far better weapon trade with a combat class who hunted these uber weapons exclusively. I would be laughing at the real weaponsmiths then.
The way they had it set up before was very smart, it made sense. They had the weapon components as the high lev loot items. This way they still made the entire field of weapons within the skill of a the best weaponsmiths. Now they have removed that ability completely, you are no longer masters, you are now only capable of making second rate weapons. They have introduced NPC gods into the world, and these gods can make weapons twice as good as you. We don't need NPC gods!
Please dont let this one pass silently into regular play, please dont let players become used to having these weapons around. Make yourselves heard. Even if you are not a weapon smith, you can be sure your own classes inventory will be hit somewhere down the road if this one goes through. It is the single worst mistake developers can make in relation to the player based economy and crafters.
Put your name on this petition and keep bumping it back to the top. The inclusion of these loot generated weapons may not kill our class, but it WILL put it in a permanent wheelchair! Make no mistake about that.
Personally I will be taking this cause in game with me and will be refusing to repair any loot generated uber weapon. I really hope other master weaponsmiths will make this same choice too and make our cries more impacting on the community and devs.
To the Devs : You know this is a mistake, you have seen it in other games time and time again. You chose not to make this mistake when you fist released SWG. Why are you making it now?
Right behind you Soar. I was about to start one of these threads too. This is a typical case of trying to sate one side of the game while completely destroying another. No thought was given behind the consequences. Just a typical quick fix to try make all the combat classes happy with something - while potentially eliminating the utility and purpose of crafting.
I understand the need to provide some incentives for high end gamers, but there are other people, you know. I'd be totally cool with a weapon powerup loot that brought a weapon to that stat with lots of charges, or added poison DOTs or what have you.Or rings and necklaces that give bonuses. Not an entire replacement for the end product of an entire profession's purpose.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
dark, read the other posts and look at the screenshots
these are popping up pretty quickly since the last patch. tusken rifle with 700 damage, 3 spd, hams like a pistol and a stat modifier, 600 damage pistol, 500 damage carbine
We need you raising hell about this to the devs. I would hate to know i wasted the last few months since release.
The problem isn't that weapons with non-crap stats are dropping, it's that these thingsare incredibly unbalancing in both PVE and PVP. If they were on par with a high-end krayt weapon, that'd be fine, but it is insane to add weapons to the game that have outrageously high damage (the 570 damage pistol), half the speed of others in their class (the 3.1 tusken), and single-digit HAM costs.
I doubt if this will have a significant effect on the weaponsmith market unless the drop rate is much higher than I expect (other than the constant barrage of tells asking WHY CANT U MAKE 570 DAMAGE PISTOL MY FRIEND LOOTED ONE YESTERDAY), but it will have tremendous impact on PVP and PVE. A decently-skilled rifleman with that Tusken could steal kills from entire groups. A BH with the SR Combat could one-shot everyone with eyeshot (which is overpowered enough already).
I certainly *hope* it's a coding mistake, but personally it seems too pervasive and also too targetted. A coding mistake in my opinion is like showing the power use at double the rate on ALL harvesters. Or adding an extra 1 in a schematic.
This is not a case where weapons are suddenly with an extra 0 on the damage stat. The damages have increased by varying amounts, so far we've seen on a pistol, a rifle, and a carbine. The speeds for the rifle are half the norm, yet the carbine is twice as slow. The rifle has bonuses to stats, the carbine has a poison DOT for pete's sake, the SR has nothing else special about it beyond the fact (and very important fact) it's doing stupidly high damage. And all the HAMs are stupidly low, but again not by a standard degree.
There seems no common demoninator for it to be a simple coding mistake. By the way, I've been a professional commercial software tester for 6 years, so I am not just talking this up.
But programming mistake or not, we have to get this reversed. I love playing a WS in SWG, and I have always loved they way they had the game set up. It is leagues ahead of other games in my opinion. But this is a blow I cannot stand for. It's almost like a developer from AC2 has hi-jacked the SWG offices in a last dying effort to salvage their player base.
Hell I'd go one step further on not repairing the weapon's I'd destroy them and say that the fix didn't work so they can't go on to another WS to fix it. I completly agree with not dropping uber weapons, I mean hell it's taken me 2 months to get to where I am in WS and I'm not even a master yet, I hope that I"m not going to be out done by some smuck who managed to kill something and get a killer gun, I mean that is why they put weaponsmiths in the game right to craft guns. So why are they giving out guns better than we can make? This isn't Diablo II after all.
LLJK_Griz wrote:
I doubt if this will have a significant effect on the weaponsmith market unless the drop rate is much higher than I expect (other than the constant barrage of tells asking WHY CANT U MAKE 570 DAMAGE PISTOL MY FRIEND LOOTED ONE YESTERDAY), but it will have tremendous impact on PVP and PVE. A decently-skilled rifleman with that Tusken could steal kills from entire groups. A BH with the SR Combat could one-shot everyone with eyeshot (which is overpowered enough already).
I agree. This is not a threat in the slightest to the Weaponsmith economy. They're far too rare and they break, just like all other guns. No one is going to stop shopping from Weaponsmiths because of these weapons. Why? They will need to buy weapons from a Weaponsmith in the first placeto even be able to start killing things in hopes of some uber rare gun drop.
The problem enlies when they're brought into PvP, some of these guns can make certain players unkillable, and it's incredibly unbalanced.
Well like stated, if these drops are highly limited then it won't be too big a deal economy wise, but the point is the big selling point of this game has always been that the best items are always player made. Most of us take professional pride in being this part of the community. We make the best guns. Armoursmiths make the best armour. Droid Engineers make the best droids. We all source off one another. These products by players made for players - the combat folks step out and do the combat and with the money earned that we cannot get running missions revolves around supplying them.
I for one do not like the idea of being relegated to merely a stopgap between getting that next 733t weapon. I don't think most of us got into this profession and worked out collective behinds off just to sell 'second rate' weapons so they can go get some stupidly overpowered weapon. I like the idea that my customers are out there relying on things I have made to keep them in the field. Not just as a temporary thing until they get some exceptional drop. And who knows, if the drop rate is significant enough they can just rely exclusively on these weapons.
Sure, bring in loot items to bring in more incentive, but don't make drop the end product of an entire profession's purpose. At least with components, the weaponsmiths still were part of the scene. Entire gun dropsstrip us totally out of the equation.
Yes it is early days, but a lot of us have seen in other games how this type of thing goes. If we wait til the problem becomes prolific it's too late. We should say something now.