So has anyone else noticed how we have no real economy and crafting is worthless?

[PlayLoud]

While I respect that some of us have real lives, and some might only play 5 hours per week, you can't really expect those who play 5 hours per week to have the kind of gear/credits that a player playing 40 hours per week has. One person just puts more time into it. You can still make credits playing 5 hours/week, though it will involve more crafting. With your companions doing most of the work, it wouldn't affect your combat time very much.

[Oddzball]

That is such a childish response really.. your basing that purely off your own opinion of a game and then using your opinion to question someone elses MMO experience, and all because you dont find the crafting stystem and the game economy viable.. many others disagree I am sure so maybe its your experience that needs to be questioned.. but at the end of the day you are basing this off YOUR opinion... what works for you or shall I say does not work for you.. does for others.

 

My lvl 30 Scoundrel made almost 500k 3 days ago selling augmented gear before 1.3 and without the need to place silly season prices on them... all my alts have augmented gear either on toon or in bank waiting, I stock up on crafting mats, I craft stock of other things that have a market... mods, bio medpacks etc etc and soon ill have a decent stock of aug kits... all of which will sell cos I tend to think selling quanity at lower prices is better than selling 1 or 2 at silly prices... bottom line is as I said before, sometimes an MMO might not suit your game.. so maybe SWTOR isnt for you.. and that's ok

 

I highlighted the above to prove a point. Did you honestly just say "Many" others agree? Really? Cause in this thread alone its about 50/50 in my favor, but if you believe as I do then you know what you hear on the forums doesn't really mean much.

 

I CAN however look at past games, and tell pretty much unequivocal truth, that the majority of folks believe that those other games I listed had great crafting systems. Funny thing is, Its pretty hard to find any review or article "praising" SWTORs crafting.

 

Why? Because of the following,

 

1) Crafted items are unneeded 99% of the time. I could go through the whole game off drops, or gear tokens.

 

2) Its A+B=C crafting. That has been and will always be the cheap cop-out system for crafting. Cant think of a good crafting system? How about we just have the player combine 2 items and they get a lightsaber! Even augments are not unique anymore, making a watered down NOT-unique market even more bland.

 

-Other MMOs that had great crafting systems had variance in item quality that effected stats on the item.

[Oddzball]

Yeah thinking back all those years it was more open! sad truly sad here we are in 2012 with computers that can render an entire universe.

 

MMOs have taken a step backwards to be honest. SWTOR is a HUGE leap backward in innovation "in my opinion"

[GnatB]

That is such a childish response really.. your basing that purely off your own opinion of a game and then using your opinion to question someone elses MMO experience, and all because you dont find the crafting stystem and the game economy viable..

 

To be fair, I find the crafting system/economy in ToR viable, (and quite profitable). But of the listed MMO's I've played, (UO and EQ2) I find their crafting systems to be *far* superior... ToR's is just a modified version of WoW's, and... well... WoW's sucks. In both EQ's (and UO) I felt actively involved in the crafting process.... which is sort of odd, now that I think about it. ToR crafting is *very* similar to UO's. Select the item you want to make from a list of options, wait some time while it gets made, and if you're lucky you'll make an "exceptional" version of it. I guess maybe it was the animation/speed of it in UO that made it feel more involved? It's all so... slow... in ToR. (and, of course, in EQ2 you WERE involved... crafting was practically a form of combat.... and in EQ, there wasn't just a list of schematics. You had to pick/find your mats, and hope they actually made something worthwhile... experiment to possibly find new recipies, not just buy 'em off the merchant, etc.)

[DiLune]

It's just a simple fact that 20 minutes per day in the black hole isn't going to be enough time spent to actually make any money for *most* people.

 

I don't think many people would try to minimize the credit requirement in this game to "20 minutes per day in the black hole". It's much, much more credit intensive than that to play this game if you actually expect to buy anything.

 

Glad you read one thing I wrote and formed a thesis based on it. The OP was complaining about the daily grind required for someone who has 5 hours of playtime a week. I pointed out that 20 minutes a day in the Black Hole gets you more than enough to cover yourself and make headway. Those 20 minutes are the most credit per time efficient credits in the game.

 

Then in later posts I went into detail on how to utilize the GTN to make money, pointing out that trying to make money with "endgame" items is insane and that the SWTOR economy revolves around alts. I pointed out how you can send your 5 companions that you aren't using when you are doing whatever you're doing to get the most bang for your buck on lower level crafting mats that people will buy up for their alts because they can't be bothered themselves and have tons of credits.

 

But okay, 20 minutes per day in BH will cover all the costs for a hardcore HM/Operation runner. Go with that. If you need help with credits for your needs see my other advice. Crafting/missions aren't for the endgame. Make bank on mid-level sales to alts with rich sugar-mains.

[KimbeFett]

Honestly, I give up on this game ever having a viable economy.

It is funny to me that people that can't make money on the GTN claim the economy is broken. My parents play the game and are both in their mid 60s ( Age not Level ;-) ) they may not be able to level a toon to 50 but my Mom managed to figure out how to make over 10mil credits using the GTN. Now my mother may be a shrewd lady but I would barely even categorize her as a casual gamer and yet she figured out how to make tons of credits in this game; I am sure you probably could do the same.

 

If I remember correctly, it takes around 4 hours to do all the dailies, for a total of ~300k.

 

If it is taking you 4 hours to do the dailies you are doing something wrong; 4 on Ilum worth 40k can be done in like 15 minutes, Black Hole non-group ones can be done in 15 and they are worth another 35-40k. Seems like in 30 minutes you can make 80k...

[Celebrus]

MMOs have taken a step backwards to be honest. SWTOR is a HUGE leap backward in innovation "in my opinion"

 

It really is a step backwards when it comes to the genre.

 

Literally the only unique thing that I see in this game is legacy, but then again, you can't really call a giant credit sink "unique" it's just a unique way of creating a credit treadmill so to speak.

 

As far as everything else goes, it has all been done before, and mostly done to death. If you want innovation, you aren't going to find it here, if blizz wasn't as stagnant as bioware is here, I'd just say wait for Titan, but Titan will simply usher in the next age of microtransactions, cash shops, and RMAHs.

Edited June 27, 2012 by Celebrus

[KimbeFett]

It really is a step backwards when it comes to the genre.

 

Literally the only unique thing that I see in this game is legacy, but then again, you can't really call a giant credit sink "unique" it's just a unique way of creating a credit treadmill so to speak.

 

As far as everything else goes, it has all been done before, and mostly done to death. If you want innovation, you aren't going to find it here, if blizz wasn't as stagnant as bioware is here, I'd just say wait for Titan, but Titan will simply be the next age of microtransactions and cash shops.

 

The "Innovation" of SWTOR is the Voice-Over. The entire game being voice-over is a huge change to the Genre. Some people don't like it, some people Space-Bar through everything. This particular innovation first came out with Age of Conan but they didn't manage to get the entire game done up in that format. This is innovative in that way.

 

Alot of people complain about the game not being open enough but the fact is they want to hit the majority of gamers not a niche market. Sandbox is niche; I love sandbox; its great fun, but sandbox games aren't for everybody and this game was aimed at "everybody"; or at least as many people as possible. I read up there someone complaining about gear not decaying; that was and is a cool feature but I think 90% of people who play MMOs would hate that feature; keeping in mind probably 90% of the 90% would never login to a forum to complain about missing features is likely why you may see a 50/50 split on things like that in this forum.

[PlayLoud]

MMOs have taken a step backwards to be honest. SWTOR is a HUGE leap backward in innovation "in my opinion"

 

I haven't played many MMORPGs since EQ and SWG, but I did try the WoW trial. Those quests were given by an NPC, in a wall of text format, and basically consisted of "Kill 8 of those mobs over there". After doing so, he would have to kill 8 other mobs just past them, then the next set of mobs past them. etc. I was not getting pulled into the game at all. I gave up after a couple hours.

 

Fast Forward to SWTOR launch. I started a Trooper, and landed on Ord Mantell. I'm immediately thrown into a conflict, I am receiving missions from different people (all fully voiced and animated), and I am totally immersed in the story. This was 100x more fun to play than the WoW trial.

 

I can't compare the WoW/SWTOR endgame, as I have not played WoW that far. However, I have to disagree with people who say SWTOR is just a WoW clone. I think WoW is closer to EverQuest than it is to SWTOR.

[Pargon]

Is there something stopping you from doing Black Hole one day, Belsavis the next, Ilum the next?

 

Nothing says you have to knock them all out in one day. And for anyone who does want to do all of them every day, why would you want to limit them?

 

If you want to get enough money to pay for things like legacy perks, you kind of have to do all of the dailies to afford them in a reasonable amount of time.

 

I think you misunderstand what I mean. The reason they don't just add more dailies is because they're trying to limit the amount of credits that can enter the game on a given day (to a certain degree). My suggestion was to have that much money still available each day per player, but quadruple the quests you can choose from to earn that set amount of cash. Once you've done, say, 25 dailies, you're capped and the rest just don't give the quest any longer for that day.

 

In that sense, players can vary where they go to earn their 300k so they don't burn out on Belsavis, the same amount of money is entering the game, etc.

 

If you continue to just add more and more daily quests without limiting their number, you're looking at inflation that only people who are on all day will enjoy. Certainly time spent in game should be rewarded, but not much good will come from creating a few ultra rich people and masses and masses of the poorer.

[Celebrus]

The "Innovation" of SWTOR is the Voice-Over. The entire game being voice-over is a huge change to the Genre. Some people don't like it, some people Space-Bar through everything. This particular innovation first came out with Age of Conan but they didn't manage to get the entire game done up in that format. This is innovative in that way.

 

Alot of people complain about the game not being open enough but the fact is they want to hit the majority of gamers not a niche market. Sandbox is niche; I love sandbox; its great fun, but sandbox games aren't for everybody and this game was aimed at "everybody"; or at least as many people as possible. I read up there someone complaining about gear not decaying; that was and is a cool feature but I think 90% of people who play MMOs would hate that feature; keeping in mind probably 90% of the 90% would never login to a forum to complain about missing features is likely why you may see a 50/50 split on things like that in this forum.

 

I think that 90% of people that play MMOs would love it. I mean seriously. Where the **** are you pulling your statistics from? Because all of that basically amounts to being your opinion, and none of it is backed up by fact in anyway.

 

You say that sandboxes aren't for everyone and that this game was aimed at "everyone", but themeparks also aren't for everyone, so how are you juggling that around in your head in such a way that it seems logical? Because to the rest of the world, that is ridiculous.

 

Personally, I don't think you need to restrict people to farming the same three daily hubs for as long as this game exists in order to keep them entertained, or to be a "themepark" game for that matter, because that sounds really *********** boring, and certainly wouldn't be an idea that appeals to "everyone", wouldn't you agree?

 

Bioware needs to learn to make their themepark rides enjoyable, because as it is, they;re boring, and after I've done something on this game, none of it is memorable enough to have me feeling the urge to go back for more, and I believe that 90% of players would agree with me on that, since we're falsifying figures and all. I'll agree with one thing though, the voice acting is actually innovative *FOR THIS GENRE ALONE* but when you've literally set the genre back by 2+ years in every other category, that isn't saying much.

Edited June 27, 2012 by Celebrus

[DiLune]

What Pargon just described is the reason we have money sinks in game. (I know, that's another explosive topic.) Edited June 27, 2012 by DiLune

[Urael]

If you want to get enough money to pay for things like legacy perks, you kind of have to do all of the dailies to afford them in a reasonable amount of time.

 

I think you misunderstand what I mean. The reason they don't just add more dailies is because they're trying to limit the amount of credits that can enter the game on a given day (to a certain degree). My suggestion was to have that much money still available each day per player, but quadruple the quests you can choose from to earn that set amount of cash. Once you've done, say, 25 dailies, you're capped and the rest just don't give the quest any longer for that day.

 

In that sense, players can vary where they go to earn their 300k so they don't burn out on Belsavis, the same amount of money is entering the game, etc.

 

If you continue to just add more and more daily quests without limiting their number, you're looking at inflation that only people who are on all day will enjoy. Certainly time spent in game should be rewarded, but not much good will come from creating a few ultra rich people and masses and masses of the poorer.

 

Let's see, the current industry giant is going in the exact oposite direction. They are putting in a TON of new dailies AND lifting the limit on how many dailies you can do from 1 per day to ALL per day AND don't have money sinks that are as nearly proportionaly as expensive.

 

Let's see whcih one wins.

[FearghalC]

They need to have unique BoE items that can only be obtained by crafting.

[KimbeFett]

I think that 90% of people that play MMOs would love it. I mean seriously. Where the **** are you pulling your statistics from? Because all of that basically amounts to being your opinion, and none of it is backed up by fact in anyway.

 

You say that sandboxes aren't for everyone and that this game was aimed at "everyone", but themeparks also aren't for everyone, so how are you juggling that around in your head in such a way that it seems logical? Because to the rest of the world, that is ridiculous.

 

Personally, I don't think you need to restrict people to farming the same three daily hubs for as long as this game exists in order to keep them entertained, or to be a "themepark" game for that matter, because that sounds really *********** boring, and certainly wouldn't be an idea that appeals to "everyone", wouldn't you agree?

 

Bioware needs to learn to make their themepark rides enjoyable, because as it is, they;re boring, and after I've done something on this game, none of it is memorable enough to have me feeling the urge to go back for more, and I believe that 90% of players would agree with me on that, since we're falsifying figures and all.

 

I am getting my statistics from a little place called reality; sure the numbers are made up but look at what we have seen

 

Every sandbox game ends up carving out only a small playerbase, SWG at its peak had how many users?

 

Compare to WoW, "The Themepark" game. WoW was successful because they aimed the game at the common denominator.

 

Lets look at some sandbox games

SWG--> Cool game; never really made it to mainstream (in its day; it was mainstream of the "gamers of its day" but wow brought MMO gaming to the masses; if sandbox was for everyone SWG would have done this OR the WoW people would have said, "This themepark is great but what I really need is a Sandbox, I've heard of this game called SWG let me try it"

Darkfall--> Cool game; loved it; first time you take over a city; amazing, first time you lose your city, you probably quit; thats the problem with having actual consequences, it sucks. This sort of thing only appeals to hardcore people

Wurm--> Great sandbox game, again I loved playing it; but when you lose everything, again it sucks and the majority of gamers aren't into that sort of thing.

 

Don't misunderstand me; I am a sandbox gamer; I just happen to also realize where the majority of the MMO gamers sit, you need only to look at the number of subscribers for a given game genre.

 

Add up all the themeparks, WoW, SWTOR, Tera, Rift, All the EQs,

 

Then add up all the Sandbox's that exist today

 

What do you honestly think the percentage is?

[Anastasius]

I noticed back in December.

[DarthJopeous]

Honestly, I give up on this game ever having a viable economy.

 

Other than augments, I cant think of a single thing that is crafted that I would buy or need.

 

How did crafting turn out to be so useless in this game?

 

I see how they tried to make the economy a little more viable by allowing cross faction GTN, but even that is worthless because for some stupid reason when I buy a republic piece of armor on my IMP, it turns into the damn IMP version!

 

Meidcal or stimpacks? Oh maybe if you are a min-maxer that has to have the best and be buffed all the time, but frankly i run PvP, HM FPs, and never once have I used a stim unless I happen to get one for free out of loot, and I have beat every single FP in the game.

 

And I'm not even hard core.

 

But to make things worse, there are so many damn gold sinks in this game its ridiculous.

 

If I remember correctly, it takes around 4 hours to do all the dailies, for a total of ~300k.

 

Well lets figure out operating costs, repair bills, swapping mods, those f-ing expensive legacy perks, augment costs, oh great, all that money I spent the whole day making? Gone.

 

Seriously, some of us only play ~5 hours a week, I dont want to spend my whole damn time grinding dailies.

 

IT IS NOT FUN TO GRIND DAILIES.

 

I play this game to have fun.

 

The irony, is for example, by the time I grind all the credits and Legacy experience to get my "XP bonus stuff" unlocked for an alt to "Customize my playstyle" I could have just leveled the damn alt up.

 

All that time you "save" not having to grind boring planet missions you have done 10 times already is spent grinding credits to get the stuff that is suppose to save you time.

 

SO the economy is completely dead. Huge gold sinks, to "keep inflation down" on the items nobody is buying anyway.

 

Thank the implementation of augment kits. It basically made the purpose of every crew skill for the process of making augment kits while destroying the key functions of each particular crew skills.

 

Gone are the days we can make our own augmented gear. Now its operations and gathering skills for every freaking piece of gear in the game. Now everyone will be required with augments in game for high end groups spending all their credits on garbage. Here is the return of a horrible economy like Star Wars Galaxies.

[Pargon]

Let's see, the current industry giant is going in the exact oposite direction. They are putting in a TON of new dailies AND lifting the limit on how many dailies you can do from 1 per day to ALL per day AND don't have money sinks that are as nearly proportionaly as expensive.

 

Let's see whcih one wins.

 

It's a good thing I'm not playing that game anymore!

 

Honestly though, I don't much care what WoW does (I assume you mean WoW). We gotta keep this on SWTOR. BioWare will deal with it in their own way. There are too many credits in the game so they're putting money sinks everywhere in an attempt to remove them, but people who are poorer can't afford the perks and the rich aren't buying enough of them to reduce their credits. What do you suggest they do?

 

It's not like I know everything, I'm just trying to offer suggestions on what they could do and they (and you all) can take it or leave it as you like.

[JeramieCrowe]

I like this approach to the economy much better than other games' approaches, which usually becomes a fiasco merely weeks after launch. Rift's, for example, is a complete joke, and WoW's has been for years.

 

In this game, it's a much more steady approach, and is getting better all the time. I like that I actually have to decide on what I'm going to spend and where, and that I can't have everything I want in a matter of merely weeks. That's the sign of a good economy.

 

As for things not on the GTN, my experience isn't that nothing sells, but that there is very little there to actually buy every time I look, forcing me to level a crafter myself. That said, I'm gearing up to fill those gaps in the GTN, which is the ultimate goal of the system, don't you think?

[Oddzball]

The "Innovation" of SWTOR is the Voice-Over. The entire game being voice-over is a huge change to the Genre. Some people don't like it, some people Space-Bar through everything. This particular innovation first came out with Age of Conan but they didn't manage to get the entire game done up in that format. This is innovative in that way.

 

Alot of people complain about the game not being open enough but the fact is they want to hit the majority of gamers not a niche market. Sandbox is niche; I love sandbox; its great fun, but sandbox games aren't for everybody and this game was aimed at "everybody"; or at least as many people as possible. I read up there someone complaining about gear not decaying; that was and is a cool feature but I think 90% of people who play MMOs would hate that feature; keeping in mind probably 90% of the 90% would never login to a forum to complain about missing features is likely why you may see a 50/50 split on things like that in this forum.

 

But voice over isn't innovative(Opinion of course). Its been around since forever. Just because they did it in an MMO doesnt mean much, it just means they had a huge budget/loads of time.

[Oddzball]

It's a good thing I'm not playing that game anymore!

 

Honestly though, I don't much care what WoW does (I assume you mean WoW). We gotta keep this on SWTOR. BioWare will deal with it in their own way. There are too many credits in the game so they're putting money sinks everywhere in an attempt to remove them, but people who are poorer can't afford the perks and the rich aren't buying enough of them to reduce their credits. What do you suggest they do?

 

It's not like I know everything, I'm just trying to offer suggestions on what they could do and they (and you all) can take it or leave it as you like.

 

Funny how folks claim to have all this money but BioWare came out and said;

 

%84 of players have less than a million credits.

[Celebrus]

As for things not on the GTN, my experience isn't that nothing sells, but that there is very little there to actually buy every time I look, forcing me to level a crafter myself. That said, I'm gearing up to fill those gaps in the GTN, which is the ultimate goal of the system, don't you think?

 

Have you actually looked at the GTN since the server merges and GTN merges?

 

The GTN is absolutely FLOODED with ****, but that is the problem, it is all ****, and none of it is worth buying.

 

The sign of a healthy economy is money flowing from the hands of one player to another, and vice versa, with a few sinks dispersed strategically throughout the game to reduce inflation.

 

That is basically the opposite of what we have here, most credits earned by players are directly consumed by the game itself, meaning money rarely changes hands before being eaten back up by the game, if ever.

 

Wow hit the nail on the head when it came to gold sinks in their game. Gold was just hard enough to earn to keep you working to get it, and just easy enough to earn that you didn't mind blowing 30k gold on the alchemy mount potion, for example. I definitely wouldn't try to compare this game's economy to WoW's with a straight face, not sure why you would.

Edited June 27, 2012 by Celebrus

[PlayLoud]

Funny how folks claim to have all this money but BioWare came out and said;

 

%84 of players have less than a million credits.

 

If they have 1.3 million subscribers, even if you assumed only 1 character per account, that still leaves 208,000 characters with over 1 million credits.

 

When I was leveling up, I was concerned I wouldn't have 40k to spend on a speeder license. It wasn't until I had to take a break from leveling (due to friends lagging behind), that I really started to grind out the purple armor schematics. THEN I started making money. I had no trouble buying my license. I reached about 9 million credits when I stopped playing (when ME3 launched). I'm down to about 6 million credits now (buying expensive armor components for my new orange armor off the GTN, and gearing up my companions better).

Edited June 27, 2012 by PlayLoud

[JeramieCrowe]

Funny how folks claim to have all this money but BioWare came out and said;

 

%84 of players have less than a million credits.

 

Yep, I'm one of those. At no time whatsoever do I have over a million credits just lying around.

 

However, just within the last two weeks, I've bought two complete sets of Legacy 20 gear, farmed (through missions) and bought mats for all purple crafting mods, including greens, blues, and purple mats, and donated to the guild bank, all totalling a little over 8 million credits.

 

How? Playing the GTN and doing dailies when I need the money. When I don't need the money, I do other things. I raise it when I need it, and it only takes 3 days to raise 1.2 million credits.

 

But hey, I'm still part of that 84% that has less than a million credits.

[WLpride]

Yes, but now at least all those lvl 50 custom items have good reason to be purchased to be broken down, unlike before when you would just vendor them.

 

But yea, it's a bit silly how the Custom Items and top PvP gera just rules, there is no purpose to the rest of it now, especially at endgame...

 

Well the Augement Kits are cool, and should provide a steady demand for a time to come (to enhance existing gear).

 

If they introduce new tier of gear, everything will probably become irrelevant in 1 patch, which could be disastrous.