junk missions & forced to use them

[JeriluDejavu]

im new to the game and sorry if this has been addressed but why am i forced to send my companion out on an useless gathering mission i dont need,,,example im armormech and sending my companion out for underworld metals,,but i get one mission for it,,,and tons of companion gifts and luxory fabrics,,if i want to gift my companion that should be my choice. plz dont tell me to gtn the luxory fabrics, my issue is having to be forced to use it just to get my underworld metals to spawn more missions,, very dumb crew skills,,,plz re-vamp

[Sunjammer]

I'm guessing there has been an influx of new crafters as this seems to have been coming up a lot this week:

In my experience there are 3 ways to refresh a list of missions:

 

 

• log out and back in (refreshes all crew skills)
  
• transition, for example, to or from your ship (refreshes all crew skills)
  
• run a level 1 mission for that particular crew skill (refreshes one crew skill)
  

 

Refreshing a list causes the system to select another 5 missions at random from the pool of available missions for each grade of missions. Unfortunately, as you have experienced, if the mission type only has one or two missions in a pool of over a dozen other missions then the chances are it may not show up when you refresh the list.

 

To improve your chances of getting the mission type that you want in the refreshed list, assign some of the undesirable missions of the same grade to your companions before you refresh the list. This removes them from the pool making the pool smaller and improving the odds for your desired mission type. After you have refreshed the list you can replace each of these assigned, but unwanted, missions with a more desirable mission.

Edited September 4, 2012 by Sunjammer

[psandak]

Being able to choose what you want when you want sounds great...for the individual, but when you consider that everyone would have the same ability, it loses some of its luster. You may not care about material and crafted good value but there are a lot who do. The relative randomness of missions to acquire materials gives those materials more value. More valuable materials means more valuable crafted goods.

 

Further, be careful what you wish for. I see a couple of ways that BW could screw over a system of better choice:

 

1 - increase the cost of the missions: sure you can choose whichever material you want but instead of the mission costing 2000 credits it now costs 10,000

 

2 - decrease the return the missions provide: right now you get a certain amount of material from a mission depending on its "quality" (moderate, abundant, etc). Allow people to choose what material they want when they want and I guarantee that return will be cut in half.

 

3 - or worse BOTH of the above.

 

In any MMO, there is no limit on the supply of materials due to respawn of nodes and in the case of SWTOR - missions. The ONLY limiting factors available are time and money, which by the way happen to be interchangeable. If you have the time to be patient you can save money, if you have the money you can get materials more quickly by paying others.

 

So, in answer to your question, the randomness of missions is an attempt to curb supply. You may not like it but at least you do not have to go foraging for EVERY material you need. That is a BIG step in MMOs.

[Rickwala]

^ What he said, imagine if grade 6 mats flooded the gtn, it would dramatically affect players ability to make a host of products with value. Augments, crystals and other profitable items would be garbage.

[Kerensk]

^^ +2 While it's annoying that I can't get as many metal missions as I'd like it all works out in the long run. It's very hard for me to get Promethium, but by making it harder to crank out purple mods there is less competition selling the purples on the market. Sometimes there may only be 1 or 2 in that level (so we can jack the prices and more than recoup the many fabric and gift missions we ran).

 

From the perspective of the material gatherer it may seem unbalanced but in the larger economy that brake keeps purples valuable and keeps blue items from becoming worthless. As it is green items aren't worth making if metals become more common, blue and purples will become just as worthless.

[Quething]

... It's not a "brake" if there's a well-known easily-achieved workaround.

 

Mats are not "less available" because you have to re-zone to re-set the list. They're just more obnoxious to collect. The only difference between the current system and a system where all missions for a given level are available at all times is that instead of taking two minutes and four or five mouse clicks to start the missions you need, it takes five minutes and two dozen mouse clicks. Considering that high-end missions run about an hour in length, this basically reduces the mats-per-hour income of a crafter by 5%. At the cost of a roughly 6000% increase in obnoxiousness.

 

That's some bad game design right there.

[Cleet_Xia]

Companion affection noticably boosts the critiacl mission success rate of your companions. It's worth grinding the affection up with those junk missions & selling the ones you can't use yourself on the GTN.

 

The gifts are generally worth more than the mats.

[Mithros]

... It's not a "brake" if there's a well-known easily-achieved workaround.

 

Mats are not "less available" because you have to re-zone to re-set the list. They're just more obnoxious to collect. The only difference between the current system and a system where all missions for a given level are available at all times is that instead of taking two minutes and four or five mouse clicks to start the missions you need, it takes five minutes and two dozen mouse clicks. Considering that high-end missions run about an hour in length, this basically reduces the mats-per-hour income of a crafter by 5%. At the cost of a roughly 6000% increase in obnoxiousness.

 

That's some bad game design right there.

 

This.

 

They are not restricting the availability of materials, they are just making the players jump through more hoops to get those materials.

 

I can trigger every underworld metals mission available for my character. What the list offers when it shows up is irrelevant; I can get every underworld metals mission to appear.

 

If this wasn't possible then maybe the whole 'restricting the supply' arguments might have some weight, but it is possible. It's just not fun to make it happen.

 

 

So rather than me entering and exiting my ship however many times that I need to to get all of the missions, they should just let me pick the missions from a list.

They want to change the particulars of when the missions appear on the list, that's fine, but once a mission appears, they can not stop me from accessing it if I want to.

 

Now they could go back into the game and try to work out a system to limit mission availability (say, restrict the 'Well earned rest' mission to only appearing once every 24 hours, for example), and that would be okay with me if they did, but as long as the game works like it works now, they may as well put every mission on the list and be done with it, because people will get the missions that they want if they want them badly enough.

Edited September 9, 2012 by Mithros

[psandak]

@Quething and Mithros

 

Most likely the relogging/changing areas "workaround" is in fact a bug that was not intended. It is being exploited by players like yourselves, but because it is a low priority and makes a percentage of the crafting playerbase happy (obviously not you), it will most likely never be fixed.

 

Show me proof that BW has stated that the relogging/changing areas thing is in fact a "feature" and I will shut up

Edited September 10, 2012 by psandak

[Metalmac]

Companion affection noticably boosts the critiacl mission success rate of your companions. It's worth grinding the affection up with those junk missions & selling the ones you can't use yourself on the GTN.

 

The gifts are generally worth more than the mats.

 

 

That would be untrue. The market is flooded with Companion Gifts that are selling for less then it cost to get them.

 

Having posted the same ones over and over and over proves this. I have 4 50s and 1 UT character supplied 10K affection for all 24 Companions this indicates a truly broken system at work.

[Metalmac]

^^ +2 While it's annoying that I can't get as many metal missions as I'd like it all works out in the long run. It's very hard for me to get Promethium, but by making it harder to crank out purple mods there is less competition selling the purples on the market. Sometimes there may only be 1 or 2 in that level (so we can jack the prices and more than recoup the many fabric and gift missions we ran).

 

From the perspective of the material gatherer it may seem unbalanced but in the larger economy that brake keeps purples valuable and keeps blue items from becoming worthless. As it is green items aren't worth making if metals become more common, blue and purples will become just as worthless.

 

The economy is broken badly.

 

And proof is you do not EVER SEE ANY HIGH END SCHEMATICS OR MATS FOR SALE!

When you have 300 on fleet on 2 maps all the time and never see high end stuff for sale this means the cost is to high or difficulty to great to create a market at all for these items.

At the same time you see lower middle crap everywhere and no in between items. i.e. level 124 to 140

A glut of level 49 purples flood the market.

No crafted level 50 purples as anything you get in a FP is better by a large margin.

Oranges are almost worthless as they flood the market at costs less then to be produce.

Mats are crazy as easy to get things are going for insane prices just to make money.

 

Over all the economy in game is badly managed and broken.

[psandak]

The economy is broken badly.

 

And proof is you do not EVER SEE ANY HIGH END SCHEMATICS OR MATS FOR SALE!

When you have 300 on fleet on 2 maps all the time and never see high end stuff for sale this means the cost is to high or difficulty to great to create a market at all for these items.

At the same time you see lower middle crap everywhere and no in between items. i.e. level 124 to 140

A glut of level 49 purples flood the market.

No crafted level 50 purples as anything you get in a FP is better by a large margin.

Oranges are almost worthless as they flood the market at costs less then to be produce.

Mats are crazy as easy to get things are going for insane prices just to make money.

 

Over all the economy in game is badly managed and broken.

 

I think you are making a suspect assumption - that the crafting system is intended to be used at the level cap. It seems that in THIS game (other games are different), the overwhelming majority of crafting is used to help with gear during leveling (and even then more so for those who solo the overwhelming majority of the time) and to get you started with end-game gear. Once you get beyond that point, it is all about HM FPs and Ops.

 

Evidence of this is one character can only have one crafting skill and there are two slots left which can be (and probably usually are) used for the one gathering skill and one mission skill that feed that one crafting skill. This means that any player can be 100% self-sufficient VERY easily.

 

Second, through my own experience, I know that if you play this game as intended, as an MMO: following your class story AND doing FPs along the way while leveling, most crafted gear is inferior to the gear available even in SM FPs (for level appropriate characters). The best I've ever seen is side grades (swap one or two stats for another) when I compared max modded orange gear to available purple. And I have played games where the crafting is far inferior to everything else - EQ1 springs to mind (the ONLY reason to do any armor or weapon crafting in that game was to get a quest to get a great ring).

 

Last, the game is not even 10 months old. It takes time for MMO economies to mature. I remember playing WoW in the early days (I started about a year after release) and just about everything you've said about SWTOR could have been said about the economy in WoW back then. However, after a few years and two full expansions (the first helped and hurt), the WoW economy stabilized and started its ascent. Seven years after I started that game, with new professions and a lot of changes over time that economy is now stable and booming.

 

In short, you may want to reassess your assumptions; This is NOT SWG where the best gear for end-game is available through crafting. And time is required no matter how much you do not want it to be.

[Metalmac]

I think you are making a suspect assumption - that the crafting system is intended to be used at the level cap. It seems that in THIS game (other games are different), the overwhelming majority of crafting is used to help with gear during leveling (and even then more so for those who solo the overwhelming majority of the time) and to get you started with end-game gear. Once you get beyond that point, it is all about HM FPs and Ops.

 

Evidence of this is one character can only have one crafting skill and there are two slots left which can be (and probably usually are) used for the one gathering skill and one mission skill that feed that one crafting skill. This means that any player can be 100% self-sufficient VERY easily.

 

Second, through my own experience, I know that if you play this game as intended, as an MMO: following your class story AND doing FPs along the way while leveling, most crafted gear is inferior to the gear available even in SM FPs (for level appropriate characters). The best I've ever seen is side grades (swap one or two stats for another) when I compared max modded orange gear to available purple. And I have played games where the crafting is far inferior to everything else - EQ1 springs to mind (the ONLY reason to do any armor or weapon crafting in that game was to get a quest to get a great ring).

 

Last, the game is not even 10 months old. It takes time for MMO economies to mature. I remember playing WoW in the early days (I started about a year after release) and just about everything you've said about SWTOR could have been said about the economy in WoW back then. However, after a few years and two full expansions (the first helped and hurt), the WoW economy stabilized and started its ascent. Seven years after I started that game, with new professions and a lot of changes over time that economy is now stable and booming.

 

In short, you may want to reassess your assumptions; This is NOT SWG where the best gear for end-game is available through crafting. And time is required no matter how much you do not want it to be.

 

I am not going to play this game for 2 more years like I did WoW, it got old and this one is aging faster.

 

I do not expect to see high end mats on the market everyday but 1 time a month proves you got a broken system.

[Kerensk]

You must be on a low traffic server. I've seen purple mats sell out on occasion but if they sell out you can guarantee there will be a ton of them the next day at hugely inflated prices as crafters fill the gap and make some quick money from the high demand (most commonly krayt dragon scales). But most of the time the purple metal mats are so plentiful I can actually shop some prices and save 200-300 credits by purchasing from one vendor rather than another.

 

If you're only seeing purple mats once a month I think it's your crafters that are broken, not the system (transfer your character, you'll make money hand over fist on the main servers).

[Metalmac]

You must be on a low traffic server. I've seen purple mats sell out on occasion but if they sell out you can guarantee there will be a ton of them the next day at hugely inflated prices as crafters fill the gap and make some quick money from the high demand (most commonly krayt dragon scales). But most of the time the purple metal mats are so plentiful I can actually shop some prices and save 200-300 credits by purchasing from one vendor rather than another.

 

If you're only seeing purple mats once a month I think it's your crafters that are broken, not the system (transfer your character, you'll make money hand over fist on the main servers).

 

I am on The Harbriner and that is a main server.

 

Fan boys are in good form lately. This game is dying slowly for good reasons and crafting is one of them.

 

Crafting hits a dead end wall unless you are a member of a Guild that is doing Campaign runs all the time.

 

Those in Guilds between Denova HM and Campaign runs are pretty much stuck with few options.

[psandak]

I am on The Harbriner and that is a main server.

 

Fan boys are in good form lately. This game is dying slowly for good reasons and crafting is one of them.

 

Crafting hits a dead end wall unless you are a member of a Guild that is doing Campaign runs all the time.

 

Those in Guilds between Denova HM and Campaign runs are pretty much stuck with few options.

 

I agree that crafting hits a wall at end-game, but this is as intended. This is not SWG where the best gear at end-game is available through crafting. This is SWTOR where if you want the best gear you have to participate in NiM Ops. Sorry you do not like it, but the system is not broken because you do not like it.

 

As to the game dying, we'll see in a month or two (F2P is on the horizon).

[Metalmac]

I agree that crafting hits a wall at end-game, but this is as intended. This is not SWG where the best gear at end-game is available through crafting. This is SWTOR where if you want the best gear you have to participate in NiM Ops. Sorry you do not like it, but the system is not broken because you do not like it.

 

As to the game dying, we'll see in a month or two (F2P is on the horizon).

 

Free to Play will most likely make me quit the game if Server Lag goes back to 4 second freeze for a Operations.

 

You know I am healing then bang frozen for 4 seconds then suddenly half the people are at 1/3rd health or dead.

 

Everyone in the Operations on Vent says at same time, "What happend? Did you see that?"