Bioware: Is Crafting to Win™ intended?

[Brewski]

Nerfing crafting points DOES make it less expensive.

 

Let's say you can only get 35k points per character by crafting. You're going to craft 35 items (assuming bonuses) and STOP.

 

If you are uncapped, you might craft for over a million points, costing you almost 30 times as much in raw materials.

 

Hard caps would do that. Reducing the rewards per item but leaving them uncapped would not.

 

If your guild does both non-stopp PvP and non-stop crafting, your point totals should be 90% from crafting and 10% PvP. By scaling it down you leave open the possibility to craft 24/7 to maximize your guilds point total if you want without making it scale so high that other categories become more or less meaningless in relation.

 

Personally I would like to see them reduce the "Standard" repeatable reward from, say, 500 points per item to 200 points per item and leave them unlimited. Then, on top of that, I would like to see them add more one time missions for each type of craftable item in the list. Right now you get 2k for an Invasion Force. I would like to see 1k rewards added for each sub-type that goes into and invasion force.

 

No one wants crafting removed, but the numbers seem to need tweaking just as some of the PvP/PvE rewards have been tweaked.

[DarthTHC]

Here was mine: http://www.swtor.com/community/showpost.php?p=7703430&postcount=599

 

Fix crafting to not be completely broken

 

That's just a little vague, don't you think?

[Vegihan]

So Someone has been asking for data on how much crafting is over powered. So I decided to calculate how many points could be gained from flashpoints and operations with the Taris bonus last week. Here is the spreadsheet.

 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1piXCSbc7tW88yr9JKYtwvaJVM44lAFs2gBDBfLuh3Dk/edit?usp=sharing

 

As you might see, I calculated the flashpoint and operation points with 100% stronghold bonus and the crafting points with 0% stronghold bonus. What it would take to do in 6 days worth of game play a crafter can do in about a day and a half. I talked to my guildmates who craft close to non-stop, it takes about 5 hours per 25 warsupplies. This means on what I consider to be a slow pace, you could outpace the main objective for the week in 5 logins.

 

If you can craft 2 days and recover mats for 5 days that doesn't seem right. As my previous post states, I don't want crafting to be obsolete I just want the focus of the week to be the biggest point getter. If crafting is always the best way, then less and less people will try to do the other content. The first few weeks of conquest the queues on Shadowlands were popping pretty quickly, as of late, not so much. Is it directly impacted by this I can't say but I know it isn't helping. Many guildmates who got on and ran FP, Ops, WZ, and GSF the first couple weeks just get on to craft and get mats now. Is this really what Bioware wants?

Edited October 2, 2014 by Vegihan

[Nepthen]

So time-wise, when you factor in all that mission running and such, how does that compare on a points-per-hour basis with war zones or flash points or whatever else you've done?

 

You can generate on average more points per hour by crafting. It's compounded if you add in your additional characters who can also send out companions for mats while you run dailies or farm mats manually on your most geared toons. In the beginning of the week, FPs will initially rule (at least using last week's Taris) because of all the one-time objectives. Once those are exhausted, you will be hard pressed to generate more points per hour than crafting.

 

Paragon broke down the numbers on post #1. Granted it's not by time allotment but you can get a picture.

[DarthTHC]

Hard caps would do that. Reducing the rewards per item but leaving them uncapped would not.

 

If your guild does both non-stopp PvP and non-stop crafting, your point totals should be 90% from crafting and 10% PvP. By scaling it down you leave open the possibility to craft 24/7 to maximize your guilds point total if you want without making it scale so high that other categories become more or less meaningless in relation.

 

Personally I would like to see them reduce the "Standard" repeatable reward from, say, 500 points per item to 200 points per item and leave them unlimited. Then, on top of that, I would like to see them add more one time missions for each type of craftable item in the list. Right now you get 2k for an Invasion Force. I would like to see 1k rewards added for each sub-type that goes into and invasion force.

 

No one wants crafting removed, but the numbers seem to need tweaking just as some of the PvP/PvE rewards have been tweaked.

 

Ooh! Real numbers & solutions. Yay!

 

Let's say a win is 10 mil. With today's scoring you're suggesting that's 9 mil crafting + 1 mil other stuff. OK. I'll accept that as a reasonable assumption of the likely range.

 

I think that the 1k rewards for each War Supply would be interesting but probably not impactful to the scoring so I'll ignore it for the moment.

 

If we reduce the crafting reward from 500 per item to 200, that would mean the 9 million points we used to get via crafting is reduced to 3.6 million. So we've earned 4.6 million conquest points (because we did the same 1 mil worth of other stuff) instead of 10 and now 78% of our points have come from crafting.

 

We've spent just as much money and time crafting as we did before, we just got less points for it.

 

What improved?

[JediUmbra]

I think this small guild vs big guild debate is astro-turfing. The truth behind it is rich guilds vs poor guilds.

 

Wook had 12 people generate 75% of our points last week. In other words, we could have kicked out 51 of our 63 contributing players, and still made 27 million points last week. So are we a big guild, or a small guild? The number of accounts we had is not predictive of our point total. Our war chest was.

 

The same individual arguing large vs small has also mentioned that saying crafting is overpowered neglects the time it takes to gather mats, while simultaneously arguing the benefit of crafting for "small guilds". Large guilds use their larger membership to gather more mats, and then aggregate them to their (relatively few) 100% GSH bonus crafters. Large guilds will gather more mats, get more crafting done, and benefit more from crafting than smaller guilds.

 

Crafting is more sustainable for larger guilds.

[Domatron]

So Domatron has been asking for data on how much crafting is over powered. So I decided to calculate how many points could be gained from flashpoints and operations with the Taris bonus last week. Here is the spreadsheet.

 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1piXCSbc7tW88yr9JKYtwvaJVM44lAFs2gBDBfLuh3Dk/edit?usp=sharing

 

As you might see, I calculated the flashpoint and operation points with 100% stronghold bonus and the crafting points with 0% stronghold bonus. What it would take to do in 6 days worth of game play a crafter can do in about a day and a half. I talked to my guildmates who craft close to non-stop, it takes about 5 hours per 25 warsupplies. This means on what I consider to be a slow pace, you could outpace the main objective for the week in 5 logins.

 

If you can craft 2 days and recover mats for 5 days that doesn't seem right. As my previous post states, I don't want crafting to be obsolete I just want the focus of the week to be the biggest point getter. If crafting is always the best way, then less and less people will try to do the other content. The first few weeks of conquest the queues on Shadowlands were popping pretty quickly, as of late, not so much. Is it directly impacted by this I can't say but I know it isn't helping. Many guildmates who got on and ran FP, Ops, WZ, and GSF the first couple weeks just get on to craft and get mats now. Is this really what Bioware wants?

 

I have?

I think you grabbed the wrong name but thanks for the data anyways!

 

A little off topic but personally I think killing the planetary commanders should be massively buffed in terms of conquest points, to the point were completely ignoring them isn't an option.

[DarthTHC]

You can generate on average more points per hour by crafting. It's compounded if you add in your additional characters who can also send out companions for mats while you run dailies or farm mats manually on your most geared toons. In the beginning of the week, FPs will initially rule (at least using last week's Taris) because of all the one-time objectives. Once those are exhausted, you will be hard pressed to generate more points per hour than crafting.

 

Paragon broke down the numbers on post #1. Granted it's not by time allotment but you can get a picture.

 

I wonder in reading that if it might be worth considering making some of the one-time bonuses repeatable at the legacy level. For example, we've done Makeb a couple times and Toborro's has a bonus, but it's once per legacy. That means I only cared about Toborro's (for purposes of Conquest) once that week.

 

If the bonus were once per character, I would have cared about Toborro's (for purposes of Conquest) at least 3 times.

[oofalong]

That's just a little vague, don't you think?

 

Since ParagonAX said s/he wasn't responding to you anymore, I will take the bait.

 

No, it is not a little vague; it is overwhelmingly and completely vague. But that is OK for now...

 

Unfortunately, I do not believe we as a community will be able to solve this problem as we are not privy to all of the data. For instance, I would hope BioWare would backtest any likely changes, which we can not do; all we can do is make wild assumptions. Still, I believe we as a community can quickly identify problems and ensure they are brought to the Devs attention. Which is what this whole thread started as. Unfortunately, some feel crafting is the only equalizer available to large guilds, see my last post for why I feel this is flawed. So now do you agree that crafting provide disproportionate rewards compared to other Conquest activities? Once we agree on this we can start talking about solutions

[DarthTHC]

I think this small guild vs big guild debate is astro-turfing. The truth behind it is rich guilds vs poor guilds.

 

Wook had 12 people generate 75% of our points last week. In other words, we could have kicked out 51 of our 63 contributing players, and still made 27 million points last week. So are we a big guild, or a small guild? The number of accounts we had is not predictive of our point total. Our war chest was.

 

The same individual arguing large vs small has also mentioned that saying crafting is overpowered neglects the time it takes to gather mats, while simultaneously arguing the benefit of crafting for "small guilds". Large guilds use their larger membership to gather more mats, and then aggregate them to their (relatively few) 100% GSH bonus crafters. Large guilds will gather more mats, get more crafting done, and benefit more from crafting than smaller guilds.

 

Crafting is more sustainable for larger guilds.

 

Large guilds tend to try to win every week, and thus have an ongoing flow of materials in and out.

 

Smaller guilds that want to make a win once in a while gather and stockpile to prepare for that win for a number of weeks. Once they have the stockpile they think they can win with, then they craft.

 

So, yeah, what I said, holds.

[Vegihan]

I have?

I think you grabbed the wrong name but thanks for the data anyways!

 

A little off topic but personally I think killing the planetary commanders should be massively buffed in terms of conquest points, to the point were completely ignoring them isn't an option.

 

Sorry I was going to quote something you said as well but didn't in the end. I have fixed it.

[DarthTHC]

Since ParagonAX said s/he wasn't responding to you anymore, I will take the bait.

 

No, it is not a little vague; it is overwhelmingly and completely vague. But that is OK for now...

 

Unfortunately, I do not believe we as a community will be able to solve this problem as we are not privy to all of the data. For instance, I would hope BioWare would backtest any likely changes, which we can not do; all we can do is make wild assumptions. Still, I believe we as a community can quickly identify problems and ensure they are brought to the Devs attention. Which is what this whole thread started as. Unfortunately, some feel crafting is the only equalizer available to large guilds, see my last post for why I feel this is flawed. So now do you agree that crafting provide disproportionate rewards compared to other Conquest activities? Once we agree on this we can start talking about solutions

 

When taking all factors into account:

 

1) The time required to acquire the raw materials regardless how you get them

2) The total lack of value of the things you craft

3) The real value in the other activities, aside from conquest points

 

I'm not so sure it's that huge a disparity.

 

If all of a sudden War Zones and Operations and Flash Points and GSF started awarding nothing but Conquest Points, I might be right there with ya.

[MasterRev]

If 3 through 10 are anything like the other guilds I'm familiar with that can consistently place and win once in a while, they probably saw they were up against the 2 juggernauts and decided placing would be fine this week. Guilds actively deciding to limit their point totals because the bigger guild is going to win anyway doesn't mean crafting should be nerfed. It means those guilds know they can't compete.

 

So it still really boils down to credits. Nerfing crafting takes 1st and 2nd from crafting to the tune of many tens of millions of credits worth of materials because they wanted to fight with each other, down to a much smaller number of millions.

 

As you said earlier, they're going to win anyway. The only variable in play is how much they have to craft to do it. The only impact that has on them is how many credits they spend on materials. That's the motivation. Credits.

 

First off, gratz to Wook and Triumph for putting up enormous numbers last week. Finishing in 3rd behind those 2 juggernauts is our plan pretty much every week. We know that we don't have the sheer volume to keep up, whether it is crafting ,fps,ops etc. We decided not to go crazy crafting this week because no matter how much we crafted and how many credits we blew, our efforts would be futile. Our goal is to finish in the top ten each week, not getting burnt out and keeping the guild bank sound. IMO, it really doesn't make a difference if they nerf crating or not. The only benefit that I see is that it won't put as much of a strain on those guilds wallets who craft for the conquest points.. The guilds with the most active members who know what they are doing will more than likely win each week. The way the system is now definitely favors the big guilds and I don't have a problem with that.

[Domatron]

When taking all factors into account:

 

1) The time required to acquire the raw materials regardless how you get them

2) The total lack of value of the things you craft

3) The real value in the other activities, aside from conquest points

 

I'm not so sure it's that huge a disparity.

 

If all of a sudden War Zones and Operations and Flash Points and GSF started awarding nothing but Conquest Points, I might be right there with ya.

 

In your opinion should our shouldn't the theme of the week determine the best point generating activity?

Right now it does not because crafting is always superior.

[DarthTHC]

In your opinion should our shouldn't the theme of the week determine the best point generating activity?

Right now it does not because crafting is always superior.

 

For some weeks, the "theme" of the week isn't even a conquest objective, let alone a bonused one. If that's what we're going for, crafting is the least onerous offender.

[Brewski]

Ooh! Real numbers & solutions. Yay!

 

Let's say a win is 10 mil. With today's scoring you're suggesting that's 9 mil crafting + 1 mil other stuff. OK. I'll accept that as a reasonable assumption of the likely range.

 

I think that the 1k rewards for each War Supply would be interesting but probably not impactful to the scoring so I'll ignore it for the moment.

 

If we reduce the crafting reward from 500 per item to 200, that would mean the 9 million points we used to get via crafting is reduced to 3.6 million. So we've earned 4.6 million conquest points (because we did the same 1 mil worth of other stuff) instead of 10 and now 78% of our points have come from crafting.

 

We've spent just as much money and time crafting as we did before, we just got less points for it.

 

What improved?

 

What improved? The ratio is now closer.

 

Is it close enough? Still too much? Too far? These are the behaviors you can measure as you continue to adjust the totals to make everything more balanced over time.

 

If everyone is doing one type of content to the exclusion of all others, it's a good indication you need to make some adjustments. Maybe it will never be perfect, but it can be better.

 

For a while is was possible to farm conquest points incredibly fast by speed running certain flashpoints. It was so much more efficient that it completely drown out the totals one could earn PvPing or running operations that it made those categories useless if your guild was trying to be competitive. Bioware made some adjustments to try to bring flashpoints into better balance.

 

We've seen similar tweaks to the way PvP objectives have been rewarded to make sure peope are reward for participating in PvP, not just queuing and idling.

 

Bioware has stated that Conquest Points are a work in progress, I don't think suggesting tweaks is out of line. Don't like my numbers? Put up some of your own. I'd be interested in seeing what others have to offer.

[Brewski]

I wonder in reading that if it might be worth considering making some of the one-time bonuses repeatable at the legacy level. For example, we've done Makeb a couple times and Toborro's has a bonus, but it's once per legacy. That means I only cared about Toborro's (for purposes of Conquest) once that week.

 

If the bonus were once per character, I would have cared about Toborro's (for purposes of Conquest) at least 3 times.

Slightly off topic, but I agree it would be cool if the one time objectives were per character not per legacy. Right now, the only things that fall into that are Weekly quests (Oricon, etc.), because they make them repeatable, but you are limited to once a week per character. If things like Operations, Flashpoints and and even Rampage rewards were per character I think that would be better.

[DarthTHC]

What improved? The ratio is now closer.

 

Is it close enough? Still too much? Too far? These are the behaviors you can measure as you continue to adjust the totals to make everything more balanced over time.

 

If everyone is doing one type of content to the exclusion of all others, it's a good indication you need to make some adjustments. Maybe it will never be perfect, but it can be better.

 

For a while is was possible to farm conquest points incredibly fast by speed running certain flashpoints. It was so much more efficient that it completely drown out the totals one could earn PvPing or running operations that it made those categories useless if your guild was trying to be competitive. Bioware made some adjustments to try to bring flashpoints into better balance.

 

We've seen similar tweaks to the way PvP objectives have been rewarded to make sure peope are reward for participating in PvP, not just queuing and idling.

 

Bioware has stated that Conquest Points are a work in progress, I don't think suggesting tweaks is out of line. Don't like my numbers? Put up some of your own. I'd be interested in seeing what others have to offer.

 

A closer ratio has absolutely no impact on anything real. It didn't change what the guild did at all. It didn't change their focus. It didn't change their planning. It didn't change their strategy. The guild still crafted exactly as many items as they did before. Still ran exactly as many war zones or flash points or GSF events it always did.

 

It only changed their total score. That's irrelevant.

 

It would be like changing soccer scoring to 2 points per goal. Whee! Now games have higher scores! So what? Nothing else changed. The players still play exactly the same way.

[TUXs]

Are we done feeding the troll yet?

[ikinai]

It seems to me that the only one working properly is crafting. Instead of asking for it to be nerfed why not ask for the others to be fixed? Edited October 2, 2014 by ikinai

[oofalong]

When taking all factors into account:

 

1) The time required to acquire the raw materials regardless how you get them

 

I am not sure how to properly account for the mats, but I agree they have value although not necessarily time. In many cases, I believe players have been sitting on some of their mats since the game's launch. After all, Conquest crafting draws on previously underutilized mats.

 

For instance, I personally am sitting on several hundred Rakata Energy Nodes, Self Perpetuating Power Cells, Biometric Alloys and Alien Data Cubes. I earned these via Cartel Packs (when fixed mats were given out), countless runs through EV & KP long before GSH was ever announced, and even more runs through the same ops to get decorations. At no time, did I ever consider the time I spent was to acquire mats; the mats were a byproduct of my other actions. That is, even if no mats were awarded my behavior wouldn't have changed. The same is true for all of the greens mats harvested or earned via crew skills. In other words, I can make a case that I spent 0 time acquiring mats.

 

2) The total lack of value of the things you craft

 

I don't understand this point. Are you saying the opportunity cost of the mats should be considered? As far as I can tell the only opportunity cost is in the form of in-game credits; it's not like I could use the mats to get back the time I sunk in a flashpoint. How do we compare potential credits to conquest points?

 

3) The real value in the other activities, aside from conquest points

 

Again, I don't understand this point. Are you talking about the loot/comms/credits that come from Ops/FPs/PvP? Or are you talking about the player's real world utility gain by not having to craft?

[oofalong]

Here was mine: http://www.swtor.com/community/showpost.php?p=7703430&postcount=599

 

Yeah, I just saw that post; it is interesting and step in the right direction.

 

Fundamentally, I believe Conquests are meant to reward participation and engagement with SWTOR. And, each week different objectives will reward varying amount of points to ensure that all in-game activities - PvP (ranked & unranked), GSF, crafting, Ops, Flashpoints, etc - offer a path to success. Everyone basically agrees with this - I hope. Unfortunately, I do not believe it will be possible to have a perfectly balanced rubric here as there are just too many variables. Still, the goal should be to pick the least worst option.

 

In the quest for the least worst option, there will be many more examples of imbalance. We can only hope these get corrected quickly. As to your specific points, they aren't really specific enough to take action. I am not really suggesting we try to outline actionable steps in this thread; it is hard enough getting people to recognize the problem.

[Brewski]

A closer ratio has absolutely no impact on anything real. It didn't change what the guild did at all. It didn't change their focus. It didn't change their planning. It didn't change their strategy. The guild still crafted exactly as many items as they did before. Still ran exactly as many war zones or flash points or GSF events it always did.

 

It only changed their total score. That's irrelevant.

 

It would be like changing soccer scoring to 2 points per goal. Whee! Now games have higher scores! So what? Nothing else changed. The players still play exactly the same way.

 

No, it would be more akin to American football scoring both field goals and touchdowns as 1 point each. (They are 3 and 7 now for those who don't follow it.) Since field goals are so much easier to make, every team would switch to scoring field goals only. Why bother with the more difficult scoring path when you can get much better rewards by sticking with the easier one?

 

Irrelevant sports analogies aside, I'm not pretending to have absolute numbers, and really neither do you. My suggested values were offered as my gut feeling on what would make the paths more equivalent without limiting crafting as a way for individuals or guilds to a hard cap. If you don't like them, offer up some of your own.

 

At some point, whether it's my numbers, higher or lower, is a balance point at which most competitive guilds will use it in combination with the other methods rather than to the exclusion of those methods. That's the sweat spot we should be aiming for.

Edited October 2, 2014 by Brewski

[DarthTHC]

Are we done feeding the troll yet?

 

Only if your appetite has been sated.

[JasonNH]

I don't understand this point. Are you saying the opportunity cost of the mats should be considered? As far as I can tell the only opportunity cost is in the form of in-game credits; it's not like I could use the mats to get back the time I sunk in a flashpoint. How do we compare potential credits to conquest points?

...

Again, I don't understand this point. Are you talking about the loot/comms/credits that come from Ops/FPs/PvP? Or are you talking about the player's real world utility gain by not having to craft?

 

Yes, he has been arguing that crafting war supplies should be OP because unlike the other conquest activities it doesn't have an intrinsic worth outside of conquests. While he has exaggerated the claim, it's an interesting point, but does not justify the degree of the disparity that currently exists IMO.

Edited October 2, 2014 by JasonNH