#SWTOR - Thought on crew skills and crafting

First of all I should mention that most of the guys I’ve played with in recent years would giggle at this, since I’m known to most of them as a fairly full-on PvP sort of guy. The truth is though, that what first got me in to MMORPGs was a combination of Star Wars and a player economy. As I’ve mentioned before, I played Star Wars Galaxies for a long time and although I PvPed plenty as various professions and hybrid builds, had a Jedi back in the days of holocron unlocking etc etc… I’m still best known to those who played on my server as a supplier of quality armour and weapons!

So what do I think of crafting and the economy in SWTOR? Well… on the whole I have to say the word that sums it up is… ‘meh’

By that I mean that I’m not at all surprised by how they have built it and I’m not surprised that it doesn’t even come close to being anywhere near matching up to what SWG provided for crafting/economy players… That was a given. But does it work?

Well here’s my problem… and this is a discussion I’ve had many, many times before relating to MMOs. How can player-crafted items create a viable game economy when there is no loss? You can’t build an economic system which is completely reliant on player turn-over and alt-levelling… Even in a game this size, that’s not going to work long-term. You have to have some kind of mechanism to generate repeat business.

In both SWG and SWTOR, weapons and armour have a ‘condition’ stat that reduces and once at zero, the item is ‘broken’. In SWG, if an item reached 0/100 then it was lost forever. You could repair items at any time but each time you did, the maximum condition of the item reduced e.g. a brand new item might be 100/100, then when it got to 20/100 you would repair it and it would become 80/80. Eventually, everything would break and need replaced. People who had rare and exceptional items would be very careful about when and how they were used so as to prolong their life… This helped to keep gear fairly balanced over the population too.

In SWTOR, one the condition reaches 0/100 you just pay a vendor to set it back to 100/100. Nothing ever actually breaks. So aside from selling stuff to people levelling up, where’s the market for crafted goods once you are max level and wearing nothing but PvP/PvE reward equipment?

The truth is that crafting doesn’t have the same place in SWTOR as it did in SWG. In SWG the Merchant/Crafter was a viable and separate career choice. You could play the game for 5 years and never fire a blaster if that was your desire, yet still have a fun time. In SWTOR, crafting is a mini-game within the game. All careers are combat careers and you do a little crafting on the side.

What I would love to see is SWTOR introduce actual gear loss when it breaks. Sure, people don’t want to lose the epic chest piece they grinded that Operation repeatedly for… or the Battlemaster helmet they did 50,000 runs of Huttball to get! There’s ways around that… Like have white and green items set at fairly low condition levels i.e. they can break fairly quickly but have the top end gear have much larger condition stats and so they take an age to decay. What you would ideally end up with is a situation where people have their “good armour” that is saved for the big raids or the group PvP mash ups on Ilum, while the rest of the time they have a set of disposable gear for doing whatever… warzones, flashpoints, helping guildies level etc. Replacing this stuff at low cost but regular repeat business is where you could create a viable economy.

In SWG item condition didn’t just decay on death, it decayed through use of skills… A Rifleman might have a great Krayt-enhanced T21 rifle for PvP and raiding but when he wanted to go farm Krayt Dragons for tissues to make a replacement, he’d take a standard T21 and set of composite armour. As he spammed overloaded rifle shots and took a beating from the dragon, his stuff would get torn up… but it was just standard gear so he’d maybe go to the ‘smiths and buy 10 T21s and 5 sets of cheap composite at a time. The rewards of his farming would more than pay for the broken equipment but it meant the crafter could continue to make factory runs of T21s in the knowledge he’d have regular customers coming back for more.

Lastly, just to touch on the age-old crafters vs power - gamer battle (of which I am actually both!): No, I don’t think players should be forced to rely on crafters for their gear… but I also don’t think that – in a game with a supposed player economy – players should be fully self-sufficient. PvP/PvE-ers should be somewhat reliant on crafters and vice versa. It’s arrogant anyone to expect their choice of play style to take clear precedence over someone else’s.