6.0 Crafting is Ludicrously a complete and total piece of Junk

[phalczen]

The annoying thing about the "5%" is in fact the lack of RNG protection built into this system, especially when you consider the sheer volume of materials required to have multiple attempts at reverse engineering and the amount of time it takes to collect and then craft the base components even with level 50 companions. (which are not cheap when multiplying by 8 per character).

 

Also. You have to mention medpacs.

 

Spent about about 45 minutes tonight trying to learn the prototype Command Stim. The RE chance from the green premium Command Stim is 20%. I queued up 24 stacks (4 on each of eight influence rank 50 companions), because that's all the green premium Curious Cell Grafts I had, managed to get enough crits to have 27 stacks' worth of the green premium Command Stim. It's gray difficulty, but I guess I should be happy with a 12.5% effective critical rate right? After reverse engineering those 27 stacks, I still have not learned the blue prototype version. The odds on that? 0.8 ^ 27 or 0.2%. There's less than a half-percent probability of that occurring, and yet, it has occurred. The materials used? 480 of each of the green materials. And this is just to discover the blue version.

 

Please tell me, Harold_I, how this is interesting? This is a dumpster fire, Bioware.

[PatT]

It's more like a dumpster fire with Santa Ana winds blowing it into the next block. And the next town.

 

Bioware, this is STUPID. It is madness. You need to dial all the way back to 10.0 Why did you even institute this system? What was your point? To discourage 75% of the people 99% of the time?

[Tsillah]

Spent about about 45 minutes tonight trying to learn the prototype Command Stim. The RE chance from the green premium Command Stim is 20%. I queued up 24 stacks (4 on each of eight influence rank 50 companions), because that's all the green premium Curious Cell Grafts I had, managed to get enough crits to have 27 stacks' worth of the green premium Command Stim. It's gray difficulty, but I guess I should be happy with a 12.5% effective critical rate right? After reverse engineering those 27 stacks, I still have not learned the blue prototype version. The odds on that? 0.8 ^ 27 or 0.2%. There's less than a half-percent probability of that occurring, and yet, it has occurred. The materials used? 480 of each of the green materials. And this is just to discover the blue version.

 

Please tell me, Harold_I, how this is interesting? This is a dumpster fire, Bioware.

 

You cannot base the odds just on your unlucky scenario. Others got it the first time around, you didn't. That's RNG for you. At the same time I do agree that the % change is a bit on the low end, although this does remind me of SWTOR vanilla a lot. Crafting really feels a lot more like it used to be.

[DawnAskham]

You cannot base the odds just on your unlucky scenario. Others got it the first time around, you didn't. That's RNG for you. At the same time I do agree that the % change is a bit on the low end, although this does remind me of SWTOR vanilla a lot. Crafting really feels a lot more like it used to be.

 

What basic blue schematics in vanilla required rare weekly throttled purple mats plus blue mats from group content plus hundreds of greens from harvesting and missions skill along with hundreds of vendor mats and had a 5% RE chance?

 

None.

 

No - this is not like 1.x crafting at all.

 

And yes - it is possible to calculate the probability of RE'ing an item n number of times against a set success rate, and still not succeeding - though it is also true such a probability does not affect the outcome of any future attempts.

Edited November 5, 2019 by DawnAskham

[cyrusramsey]

You cannot base the odds just on your unlucky scenario. Others got it the first time around, you didn't. That's RNG for you.

 

Except that's exactly the sort of thing we should be looking at. People are quick to calculate the odds for an individual and determine the odds are good or bad, but such a heavy reliance on randomness without any kind of protection, the statistics that really matter aren't "how likely is one person to succeed at x tries", but "out of x people, how many are not going to succeed after x amount of tries".

 

For every person getting lucky, another person has a whole lot of their time wasted.

[phalczen]

You cannot base the odds just on your unlucky scenario. Others got it the first time around, you didn't. That's RNG for you. At the same time I do agree that the % change is a bit on the low end, although this does remind me of SWTOR vanilla a lot. Crafting really feels a lot more like it used to be.

 

The RE chance is just as bad, and that really stunk if you decided to go and RE that hilt or barrel from that hm operations and lose that in an unlucky roll. But, things required about 2% of the resources! So as someone who has been around since closed beta, this feels nothing like vanilla SWTOR.

 

I experienced an outcome that only two other people out of 1000, all of us reverse engineering adrenals, would be expected to see. I completely understand that’s RNG for me. I am well versed in the terminology and I know that there is no guarantee after X attempts that I will learn the schematic because each RE is independent of the previous one. My problem is that this dumpster fire of a system is excessively punitive on the unlucky because of the resource requirements, and frankly, the time requirements, because of the nested assembly components.

 

It’s nerf excrement Tsillah and you know that. You can’t have the degree of resource and time investment they put in and have low RE chance and have no RNG protection. One of those things has to go.

[Osoygatitalove]

The RE chance is just as bad, and that really stunk if you decided to go and RE that hilt or barrel from that hm operations and lose that in an unlucky roll. But, things required about 2% of the resources! So as someone who has been around since closed beta, this feels nothing like vanilla SWTOR.

 

I experienced an outcome that only two other people out of 1000, all of us reverse engineering adrenals, would be expected to see. I completely understand that’s RNG for me. I am well versed in the terminology and I know that there is no guarantee after X attempts that I will learn the schematic because each RE is independent of the previous one. My problem is that this dumpster fire of a system is excessively punitive on the unlucky because of the resource requirements, and frankly, the time requirements, because of the nested assembly components.

 

It’s nerf excrement Tsillah and you know that. You can’t have the degree of resource and time investment they put in and have low RE chance and have no RNG protection. One of those things has to go.

 

Everything would be easier if there were more ways to get solid matrix.

 

Currently, bioware is controlling the supply of Solid Matrix so people focus more on achieving conquest goals and forget about new content, but that is obnoxious and eventually won't be sustainable.

 

Also, the bigger problem imho comes from the very same people that are willing to spend millions in solid matrix. Currently in my server we are just a bunch of 10 or less people that craft using solid matrix, if we all agree to pay no more than 1m per solid matrix, all the prices will drop.

 

Sadly, some people don't wanna do that fearing the prices of their own manufactured products will drop too much (especially since some have already stocked 500+ solid matrix at 3-4m each)

[DawnAskham]

Everything would be easier if there were more ways to get solid matrix.

 

Currently, bioware is controlling the supply of Solid Matrix so people focus more on achieving conquest goals and forget about new content, but that is obnoxious and eventually won't be sustainable.

 

Also, the bigger problem imho comes from the very same people that are willing to spend millions in solid matrix. Currently in my server we are just a bunch of 10 or less people that craft using solid matrix, if we all agree to pay no more than 1m per solid matrix, all the prices will drop.

 

Sadly, some people don't wanna do that fearing the prices of their own manufactured products will drop too much (especially since some have already stocked 500+ solid matrix at 3-4m each)

 

They need to remove the conquest material from everything not 306 and / or conquest related (add more ship or guild stuff), reduce the materials requirements across the board and / or significantly increase materials for harvesting and missions (greens especially), and increase the RE chance.

 

Of course the time to do that was before the expansion - now though, there are players who already won the RE lottery and have the credits to buy out materials to in turn charge excessive amounts for basic crafted items.

Edited November 5, 2019 by DawnAskham

[Estelindis]

Of course the time to do that was before the expansion.

Yep. We told them. We absolutely told them. I said in response to Eric's list of crafting changes between PTS and live (which was better than nothing, but not nearly what was needed):

 

I appreciate that devs probably want to take things incrementally rather than making many huge changes all at once (though, if I may be permitted some snark, that doesn't seem to have stopped ye designing a system with many huge changes all at once). However, there is a really good case to be made for making more drastic changes before 6.0 launches. If you still keep time and materials costs relatively high in 6.0 (and they absolutely are still high, by comparison to pre-6.0 crafting, even with these reductions, though of course you haven't given us specific % on every change you made), and then feedback is so anguished that you eventually bring costs down to be much closer to pre-6.0 norms, a lot of early adopters will have wasted a lot of time and materials. And some of those players may be gone from the game by the time you make further changes. You could, instead, believe the severity of the feedback we're giving you now, and make deeper changes that'll make things less painful for everyone when 6.0 launches. Changes that will let crafting actually be fun. We are, I trust, still playing RPGs to have fun, not to work a second job.

 

Like... it's better that they change it now or soon rather than never. But it'll still annoy people who already spent a lot of materials based on current requirements. And it didn't have to, if they would've made requested changes before release. But that boat has sailed. Now, the sooner they make the changes that 6.0 crafting so badly needs, the fewer burned early adopters we will have.

Edited November 5, 2019 by Estelindis

[phalczen]

Everything would be easier if there were more ways to get solid matrix.

 

No, the system is just as bad without the solid resource matrices, as TerraStomper and myself have shown with biochemical consumables. SRM requirements are definitely bad for crafters wanting to enter the market though. I have 7, I think, from two weeks of conquest. I had some downtime yesterday so I made four green versatile hilt 77s twice (with crits I think it was ten hilts total) before I learned the blue prototype Hilt 74 ... which was a roadblock because I don’t want to waste the SRMs on throwaway stuff. Or anymore of my PIS’s either, to be frank. My understanding from tracking the reports on PTS, and extrapolating from Citrienne’s synthweaving Data, is that there are a few different blues I have to go through before an artifact hilt which also has several iterations. All with progressively lower RE chances. But that’s fun and exciting right? That’s interesting according to some people.

 

Why would I spend my most precious resource, SRMs, on throwaway hilts, when I need to save up 18 of them to craft the medicine Op/sawbones Scoundrel tactical made by Armstech that Mr. Zykken was kind enough to have this past weekend?

[Osoygatitalove]

No, the system is just as bad without the solid resource matrices, as TerraStomper and myself have shown with biochemical consumables. SRM requirements are definitely bad for crafters wanting to enter the market though. I have 7, I think, from two weeks of conquest. I had some downtime yesterday so I made four green versatile hilt 77s twice (with crits I think it was ten hilts total) before I learned the blue prototype Hilt 74 ... which was a roadblock because I don’t want to waste the SRMs on throwaway stuff. Or anymore of my PIS’s either, to be frank. My understanding from tracking the reports on PTS, and extrapolating from Citrienne’s synthweaving Data, is that there are a few different blues I have to go through before an artifact hilt which also has several iterations. All with progressively lower RE chances. But that’s fun and exciting right? That’s interesting according to some people.

 

Why would I spend my most precious resource, SRMs, on throwaway hilts, when I need to save up 18 of them to craft the medicine Op/sawbones Scoundrel tactical made by Armstech that Mr. Zykken was kind enough to have this past weekend?

 

zykken opens on weekends?

[Tsillah]

What basic blue schematics in vanilla required rare weekly throttled purple mats plus blue mats from group content plus hundreds of greens from harvesting and missions skill along with hundreds of vendor mats and had a 5% RE chance?

 

None.

 

No - this is not like 1.x crafting at all.

 

And yes - it is possible to calculate the probability of RE'ing an item n number of times against a set success rate, and still not succeeding - though it is also true such a probability does not affect the outcome of any future attempts.

I guess reading is difficult. Let me explain. When I say it feels a lot more like the old crafting this does NOT mean it's exactly the same. I hope that makes it clearer.

[Tsillah]

Except that's exactly the sort of thing we should be looking at. People are quick to calculate the odds for an individual and determine the odds are good or bad, but such a heavy reliance on randomness without any kind of protection, the statistics that really matter aren't "how likely is one person to succeed at x tries", but "out of x people, how many are not going to succeed after x amount of tries".

 

For every person getting lucky, another person has a whole lot of their time wasted.

I didn't say we shouldn't look at it. In fact I mentioned that I felt that the chance of schems is rather low. So not sure why you think it shouldn't be looked at but there does seem to be a general misunderstanding about how RNG works and what that means. A personal experience, good or bad cannot be used for a calculation of the chance. It's still 5% every time. The calculation from his personal experience doesn't change the 5% chance in any shape or form. It just means he's been unlucky. But these sort of experiences will happen and therefore I find it better to increase the % chance so that people do not end up in such situations.

[phalczen]

zykken opens on weekends?

 

Yes he does. Not sure what time on Friday he opens and when on Monday morning he closes though

[Estelindis]

(Edit: deleting comment, person it was said to doesn't seem offended, so no reason I should be.) Edited November 5, 2019 by Estelindis

[DawnAskham]

I guess reading is difficult. Let me explain. When I say it feels a lot more like the old crafting this does NOT mean it's exactly the same. I hope that makes it clearer.

 

Snark with snark - well played (it's my own dawn fault posting in the early AM West Coast while stuck on a useless conference call with my East Coast colleagues and still needing a bit more caffeine to be fully functional).

 

Anyways I imagine our opinions on crafting are not all that dissimilar - I certainly don't mind certain aspects of the changes nor do I mind a bit of randomness nor do I mind some items requiring more in the way of effort (like completing harder content, not random luck or running a dozen alts in a mega guild).

 

My issue is with the totality of changes that all combine in multiplicative fashion to make crafting much more time consuming, frustrating, and less compelling.

 

Negative changes I find with crafting include:

 

• Increased complexity and added time (more materials and assemblies to manage - not complex game play).
  
• Significantly Increased materials requirements across the board.
  
• Poor alignment of material returns with material needs (e.g. greens far rarer than blues yet needed far more).
  
• Changes to mission returns (higher skill, higher time, higher cost missions returning fewer / no needed materials).
  
• Addition of conquest material for basic crafting.
  
• Significantly lowered success chance with reverse engineering.
  
• Many items significantly inferior to random drops in easy content.
  

 

Any one of the above would have caused complaints, but taken all together, instead of leaving me a bit frustrated or disappointed, I am angry at the developers for ruining an aspect of the game I have enjoyed for years.

Edited November 5, 2019 by DawnAskham

[Tsillah]

Snark with snark - well played (it's my own dawn fault posting in the early AM West Coast while stuck on a useless conference call with my East Coast colleagues and still needing a bit more caffeine to be fully functional).

 

Anyways I imagine our opinions on crafting are not all that dissimilar - I certainly don't mind certain aspects of the changes nor do I mind a bit of randomness nor do I mind some items requiring more in the way of effort (like completing harder content, not random luck or running a dozen alts in a mega guild).

 

Negative changes I find with crafting include:

 

Increased complexity and added time (more materials and assemblies to manage - not complex game play).

Significantly Increased materials requirements across the board.

Poor alignment of material returns with material needs (e.g. greens far rarer than blues yet needed far more).

Changes to mission returns (higher skill, higher time, higher cost missions returning fewer / no needed materials).

Addition of conquest material for basic crafting.

Significantly lowered success chance with reverse engineering.

 

Any one of the above would have caused complaints, but taken all together, instead of leaving me a bit frustrated or disappointed, I am angry at the developers for ruining an aspect of the game I have enjoyed for years.

Hehe, no worries. I know what caffeine shortages can do

 

Let's look at your points:

The complexity is not tha bad for me because I've played GW2 and that's much worse. I do think though that the interface for crafting could've used an overhaul as well because it is rather clunky. I do like a little complexity myself because it means I have to figure stuff out, which I do like. To give you an idea of GW2 crafting there are more layers than here and for legendary items you need for example amounts of mats that go over 30,000, yes I said thirty thousand.

 

I am not so concerned about the increased costs of materials. We do get more from gathering and gathering missions as it is. However, I do share the concern with the gathering missions because what is causing problems mostly for me is that higher rated missions drop no green mats or very few. When you have archeology on 700 only the grey and green missions give you green mats. My suggestion is that yellow and orange missions should drop a good amount of green mats. I have hundreds of blues sitting in my storage and barely any greens because of that. I think if we got more green mats from gathering (missions) this could solve two issues at once. It's also a problem because you can only send 4 missions at a time that yield green mats rather than 8.

 

The missions is one of the things that is much like 1.0 crafting. The idea of having for example yellow and orange missions at 700 is a miss change for the missions. Also the use of special wealthy missions was a thing back then. I'm on the fence on this one but the duration is based mostly on r50 companions and then it's not nearly as bad but there is a cost before you can get there. I am working on getting my crafters at 4 r50 comps each to facilitate that.

 

The conquest mat is something that is annoying to me as well. With the low % chance of re'ing for schems the requirement for conquest mats is rather high, especially cause you can't trade them. Definitely needs attention I think.

 

The re chance is more like it was in 1.0 as well and also there I think it needs to be higher in my view as well at least 10% and maybe up to 20% would be a lot fairer.

 

Conclusion: Yes we both have concerns and share some directly or partially. I think with increased re chances, more green mats dropping from higher level missions and adaptations to the conquest materials (like fewer of them for example or higher yields from conquest) crafting can be improved dramatically.

[Transcendent]

Yep. We told them. We absolutely told them. I said in response to Eric's list of crafting changes between PTS and live (which was better than nothing, but not nearly what was needed):

 

Like... it's better that they change it now or soon rather than never. But it'll still annoy people who already spent a lot of materials based on current requirements. And it didn't have to, if they would've made requested changes before release. But that boat has sailed. Now, the sooner they make the changes that 6.0 crafting so badly needs, the fewer burned early adopters we will have.

 

It's a shame BioWare didn't listen to the PTS feedback from players, in which case why even bother having it on the PTS build if they're only going to pay minimal lip service to the feedback given? I know the PTS only reflects a small amount of the community, however it tends to be the most vested in the game part of the community who can provide valuable insight.

 

Much like the feedback given since, there is certainly no acknowledgement since launch from BioWare on the issues raised by the community has been noted or that they intend to act upon that feedback. Even if they decide to make changes to the quantity of materials required along with the plethora of other suggestions, many players are going to feel pretty annoyed at having been "beta testing" crafting changes that should have been ironed out during the PTS phase.

 

It's fine for BioWare to say that they want to see how things pan out on live servers, but in it's current form it shouldn't have even got to the live servers.

 

• Premium material requirements too high.
  
• Crew Skill missions not returning enough premium materials.
  
• Gathering nodes not returning enough premium materials.
  
• Crew Skill missions not available in sufficient quantities (Bio has an example of this with Rich Yield missions not being balanced between the two main materials).
  
• Failure rate of Crew Skill missions too high for Rank 50 companions.
  
• Basic Supplementary material requirements being too high.
  
• Reverse engineering chances too low in latter stages.
  
• Requirements in crafting for conquest and exotic materials for basic items isn't reasonable for schematics.
  
• Entry requirements of 500k per crew skill upgrade too high.
  

 

And that list isn't even exhaustive of the complaints aimed at 6.0 crafting.

[phalczen]

I knew I shouldn’t have tried to learn the gold schem from purple biochem consumables. I deconstructed eight stacks of the versatile and Fortitude stims and nine of the Medpacks and no luck. But what adds insult to injury is that deconstruction used to only give items actually used in the crafting process. Why am I getting luxury fabrics and sliced tech parts from Biochem consumables? I don’t get anything I really need back, like the greens!

 

It’s definitely my fault for REing the stims but is the fact that I’m getting unrelated materials back intentional or a bug?

[DawnAskham]

I knew I shouldn’t have tried to learn the gold schem from purple biochem consumables. I deconstructed eight stacks of the versatile and Fortitude stims and nine of the Medpacks and no luck. But what adds insult to injury is that deconstruction used to only give items actually used in the crafting process. Why am I getting luxury fabrics and sliced tech parts from Biochem consumables? I don’t get anything I really need back, like the greens!

 

It’s definitely my fault for REing the stims but is the fact that I’m getting unrelated materials back intentional or a bug?

 

It's a suckers bet - just like the amplifiers.

 

If you have hours of time to waste and billions to burn and enjoy being played in this fashion - it's a great system.

 

If you'd rather have agency and control over your outputs (results) based on your inputs (e.g. time, effort, skill), this system is insulting, infuriating, and leaves you with a bitter aftertaste.

Edited November 7, 2019 by DawnAskham

[Transcendent]

It’s definitely my fault for REing the stims but is the fact that I’m getting unrelated materials back intentional or a bug?

 

I'd assume nothing. It may or may not be a bug.

 

On a side note, you don't even want to know how many purple alacrity adrenals I've RE'd so far with no luck. Given up for now, no mats

[phalczen]

I'd assume nothing. It may or may not be a bug.

 

On a side note, you don't even want to know how many purple alacrity adrenals I've RE'd so far with no luck. Given up for now, no mats

 

Posted it in the bug forum.

[Sarova]

Lots of us PTS testers said exactly the same as you're saying now. Unfortunately BW did not make the changes we most requested. The more voices like yours are added to ours, the more pressure it'll put on BW to actually change what's necessary, so thanks for also speaking up.

^^Agreed

Due to the high cost, hard to get materials needed to make even the lowest value items, I've decided crafting is pointless right now and will not be bothering (and I have all the crafting skills). The only good thing about crafting which I did not realise when I saw it on the PTS is the new crafting inventory is legacy wide. How on earth did I miss this?! I had so much enjoyment moving virtual tonnes of horded crafting crap from my legacy bank & various character banks to my crafting tab last night. I keep finding small, nice things like this that make me want to re-sub. Guess I need to wait for the first big-fix-and-adjustment-patch. Hurry up with that Devs!

[shippper]

new craft system is total BS. Just BS

[Goemoe]

new craft system is total BS. Just BS

Just sell related stuff and hope for a cure. I quit 600+ crafting, it's useless.