Pre Order Early Access

I can see both sides of this discussion. I Pvped hard at the start (when you got comms and then traded for a Bag/Box and open the Bag/Box for a CHANCE at getting a Battlemaster Token to get a single BM item) Then they released 1.2 ( I think) and anyone could buy and wear the BM gear without being Valor 60, it was at this point my PvP career ended at Valor 62 and 80ish % (and it is still there 12 months later) I did purchased the BM Schems and have crafted an Orange set that I do wear on my Sorc, just because I like the Dreadmaster look of the BM set (I still have my Purple BM PvP set in my cargo hold). Even though I earned the right to wear my BM gear the hard way, I can see no reason that the crafted orange set needs to have the Valor 60 requirement because update 1.2? screwed any prestige that having a BM set once had. Remove the Valor, and let those that wish to wear it, wear it, it is only a fashion statement now. They still don't have the BM title which is the only thing that that update didn't take away.

Well said, you are 100% correct. HOWEVER That ship is exactly the same as every other ship "owned" by your class, and about as useful as t1ts on a bull. 1. Used to get from planet to planet (in a tedious manner) 2. Used for Space Combat (if u can call it that, like flying down a train track) 3. Used to chat with your companions (annoying to have to run to your ship for a chat imo) Other than those 3 things I can't really find much use for my ship. I too don't feel like I have ownership of any part of this game and as an MMO I think that is sad. Even in the solo game Skyrim you could own multiple houses and almost sort of decorate it a bit if you placed loot in the right places. Come on BW, you must see that there are 1000's of threads/posts about these sorts of issues and imo you guys have "dropped the Huttball" badly. Do yourselves and us a favour and step up and make some changes. I only hope you do something soon because I really want this game to succeed.

IMO you are pretty close to the mark. Everyone should be a materials gatherer and NO material or schem should be BoP, these high end items should be given to Guild Crafters or sold on the GTN. In an old game Lineage II you had 1 specific crafting class, a dwarf, who as it leveled it could learn new recipes that were LOOTED not bought from a trainer and after a certain level these newer higher level recipes were Single Use and most were only 60% sucess rate (yes **** you had a 40% chance to fail your craft and get nothing but a few crystals back). All of the high end gear was player crafted with the exception of Epic Raid Boss Jewels and I will tell you that these Bosses did fight back with multiple debuffs, massive AOE's and other various skills, infact the first time the dragon Antharas was killed on a US server was about a year after launch (14 Oct 05) and it took about 100+ players 2 hours to defeat or something like that. It must have pissed the Dev's off because after that they made him stronger with more skills. My point is that Raids like that dropped Non crafted Epic items, crafting materials and some full items the same as the crafter could make but to kill it was an Epic battle and you needed to involve all the support classes, buffers (because most buffs only lasted 20 minutes and some only 2 minutes) and crafters (because you could'nt carry enough consumables to last you that long because of your inventory wieght limit) so crafters would come along and be crafting consumables during the Raid for the fighters to restock with. Lineage II had 2 types of Raid Boss, Normal that you could take down with 1 or 2 parties of 9 and Epic Raid Boss that you would need a massive amount of people to defeat and the rewards reflexed as such. That to me is Raiding and the rewards from it were worthwhile and useful to the whole community not just the hard core raiders or the hard core crafters but both sides were forced to co-exsist because they NEEDED each other.

I hate to bring this up but I am going to anyway. Even after the CU & NGE changes to SWG the game still offered alot and granted they added extra things to do and achieve over the years (not the month or so this has been going so far.) Four of the biggest time sinks or diversions for me were; 1. Achievement Badges Some were cool, others sucked big time, but it did offer a nice diversion from other things or something to do whilst waiting for friends to log on to run high end content. I guess these could be likened to to SWTOR Codex system. 2. Collections I spent hours of my time hunting different collection pieces all over the galaxy (ground & Space) to complete a collection, Some of these were just fluff, but others once completed rewarded you with a REAL gift or upgrade. Some would give a rare schematic or trophy or storage upgrade. Some were really useful. I don't know of any SWG player that did'nt want to complete the 5 House storage collections or any Shipwright that did'nt want the KSE Firespray schem from the 8 KSE fragments. 3. Heroic Jewelery One of the VERY FEW non player craftable items in SWG. These were awesome and I loved doing them over and over, with guildies and even jumping into PUGs. The Golden Achievement box was where all of your tokens (commendations) were stored but each class had multiple sets of Heroic jewels that were useful for different scenario's in game. so you would need to farm a few of these Heroic Tokens and different jewels cost different amounts of various tokens. ie a Necklace of Dark Fury [4] Axkva Min Token of Heroism [1] Mos Espa Token of Heroism [1] Droid Factory Token of Heroism http://swg.wikia.com/wiki/Jewelry_set link to all the sets So instead of just the same commendation badge gained from every daily you accually had to plan and think about what Heroic you needed to do according to what item you wanted to aquire. 4. Trophies Alot of different encounters (PvE) would drop some form of Trophy loot that you could display in your house/ship etc and I suppose would just be your own private museum that if you wanted to you could show off to your friends if you were that way inclined. I know that in SWTOR we have no form of housing or any way to decorate our ships with achievements but maybe one day in the future, who knows. Even a system that gave out different damage type mods would be ok, (like the Commando's in the Exar Kun Heroic would take 2-3 different heavy weapons with different damage types to use against the different Bosses because they had resistances to certain damage types), at this point I think that far more thought was put into the high end content of SWG than has been put into SWTOR, but it is still early days and I do hold out hope that BW & EA do something because I am quite sure they don't want a $800 kk flop.

I have agree here, I still remember the joy and pride in my achievement when I finally got all 8 disks to get my KSE Firespray schematic and then crafted it. I spent months scouring the planets for the best possible resources so that when that great day came I could eat my food, drink my drinks, dress up in my best crit crafting PJ's, get a good buff from a friendly Entertainer, turn on my favourite Starship crafting station in my crafting house located in a research city, grab my best Starship crafting tool in both hands, pray to the Crafting Gods to be kind to me and make my new ship. My butt didn't do a PvE run for days cause I was having to much fun doing Space combat. Even if SW:TOR took just a FEW aspects of the SWG crafting model (being able to sell anything that u actually make to others would be a good start) this game would be alot better IMO.

I posted this in the PTS section before I read this thread These are just some of my thoughts in regards to Crafting and the some what lack of need for it in SWTOR and in general this is speaking from a PVE view point. 1. In any MMO crafting needs to play a major part in the game design. It creates a whole new side game apart from the daily Tank & Spank mob kill and quest/story line sequence. To achieve this Crafting needs to be a worth while endevour for any one that wishes to pursue it and a another way to create wealth. The game designers did a great job in regards to the Crew Skill concept (needs some fine tuning) but in general I think the sytem is sound as it allows you to play while your minions grind away for you. 2. Generate an effective in game economy. All crafters SHOULD be able to sell anything that they can produce. Prime Example: Cyber Techs should be able to craft and sell their Speeders. I don't understand the point behind any crafter NOT being able to sell top line gear as that goes against any basic crafting principle and it would also allow those not into crafting to be able to purchase items from those that enjoy it. As it stands we have our own GFC (Galactic Financial Crisis) and this is due to the fact that commendation gear is better than crafted gear. 3. What this will cause is in a month or two once you have bought your skills, speeders, cargo hold and inventory upgrades, credits will be worthless because I can't think of anything left to spend credits on (not that I have completed all of those yet myself, but I know a couple that have) 4. Crafted gear should be the absolute best gear available in game, apart from maybe a very rare item from a Raid drop. This system of PVP commendation gear is fine I guess for the hardcore PVP servers, but it goes against the the concept of game play in a PVE server. To that end I play on a PVE server but I do enjoy PVP as well. My thoughts (PVE wise) are that the commendations should only provide either a schem or materials that can be used to CRAFT top line gear (ie the base item and any mods for items). 5. Failure. Item crafts should have a chance of failure when crafting or the very best schems should be Single Use. This would ensure that people need to continue to hunt for them and those items would actually have in game value, yet again creating an economy and the item would mean that much more to the individual if they put in the effort to get the schem and the craft was a success, conversely if it failed to craft and say 25% of the materails were returned instead it would give that person something to aim for again. I am really enjoying SWTOR so far, but I fail to see the worth in crafting anything higher than a "Green" item whilst leveling cause in 2-3 levels you can craft a better one. So why waste time and effort REing to get the "Blues" and "Purples" because once you hit 50 and start grinding Daily PVP missions soon enough your gear is going to get replaced by the commendation rewards any way. I know it's to late to do anything about it now, but hopefully in a future expansion when they raise the level cap they will change things around and give crafting the the importance it deserves as there is so much that could be done to make crafting an enjoyable part of this game. I apologise for the post length.

These are just some of my thoughts in regards to Crafting and the some what lack of need for it in SWTOR and in general this is speaking from a PVE view point. 1. In any MMO crafting needs to play a major part in the game design. It creates a whole new side game apart from the daily Tank & Spank mob kill and quest/story line sequence. To achieve this Crafting needs to be a worth while endevour for any one that wishes to pursue it and a another way to create wealth. The game designers did a great job in regards to the Crew Skill concept (needs some fine tuning) but in general I think the sytem is sound as it allows you to play while your minions grind away for you. 2. Generate an effective in game economy. All crafters SHOULD be able to sell anything that they can produce. Prime Example: Cyber Techs should be able to craft and sell their Speeders. I don't understand the point behind any crafter NOT being able to sell top line gear as that goes against any basic crafting principle and it would also allow those not into crafting to be able to purchase items from those that enjoy it. As it stands we have our own GFC (Galactic Financial Crisis) and this is due to the fact that commendation gear is better than crafted gear. 3. What this will cause is in a month or two once you have bought your skills, speeders, cargo hold and inventory upgrades, credits will be worthless because I can't think of anything left to spend credits on (not that I have completed all of those yet myself, but I know a couple that have) 4. Crafted gear should be the absolute best gear available in game, apart from maybe a very rare item from a Raid drop. This system of PVP commendation gear is fine I guess for the hardcore PVP servers, but it goes against the the concept of game play in a PVE server. To that end I play on a PVE server but I do enjoy PVP as well. My thoughts (PVE wise) are that the commendations should only provide either a schem or materials that can be used to CRAFT top line gear (ie the base item and any mods for items). 5. Failure. Item crafts should have a chance of failure when crafting or the very best schems should be Single Use. This would ensure that people need to continue to hunt for them and those items would actually have in game value, yet again creating an economy and the item would mean that much more to the individual if they put in the effort to get the schem and the craft was a success, conversely if it failed to craft and say 25% of the materails were returned instead it would give that person something to aim for again. I am really enjoying SWTOR so far, but I fail to see the worth in crafting anything higher than a "Green" item whilst leveling cause in 2-3 levels you can craft a better one. So why waste time and effort REing to get the "Blues" and "Purples" because once you hit 50 and start grinding Daily PVP missions soon enough your gear is going to get replaced by the commendation rewards any way. I know it's to late to do anything about it now, but hopefully in a future expansion when they raise the level cap they will change things around and give crafting the the importance it deserves as there is so much that could be done to make crafting an enjoyable part of this game. I apologise for the post length.