Making Credits and the Crafting Grind

General Feedback
#1

Different people play for different reasons.

Some people like to hack ‘n’ slash
Some people like to craft and trade
Some people like to make political manuverings
Some people like hatching and getting involved in secret plots
Some people like administering settlements and groups

They are all worthwhile kinds of RP and I woldn’t dream of trying to value one above the other because it all comes down to personal taste.

What I would like, however, is to ask that we think about improving the enjoyment for more types of players. Right now, the module is build so that it favors crafters. Crafters get the best gear, crafters find the most xp and therefore character advancement, and crafters make the most money. In fact when asking how one can make money in this game, you are told one thing consistently. Make blasters.

While Making blaster rifles and other things are indeed a very good way to make gold, that doesn’t do much for those of us who may not like the crafting grind as much as the next person. In fact, if you’re like me, you find crafting boring, tedious, laborious, yawn-inducing, and a painfully huge waste of time that you’d much rather spend doing something more fun, like actually getting out there and RP’ing with people or chopping up some bad guys.

The crafting grind is horribly antithetical to promoting rp, because it requires you stand alone in front of a station for hours on end and it monopolizes your chat log which makes it terribly impractical to rp with others while you craft. Yet this mechanic is forcefed to us as the most important part of the game if you want to make any decent amount of money at all. Either you’re pumping out easy stuff to sell to the game vendors en masse, or you’re crafting all day to get your skill high enough to sell those super valuable rare items that so few others can make.

And like I said, that’s fine if you like grinding and you have a lot of playtime you can devote to it. But what about those of us who dont? It would be nice if there were alternative ways to make good money that didn’t involve crafting.

Two options I can think of right off the top of my head are:
We can make the bad guys we kill actually drop money, or valuable items that can be sold for better money. That one’s probably the easiest. But this can also be bad because it requires you to circle around the same areas accumulating the loot so you can go back and sell. It’s effective, but unimmersive. Because how many times can you massacre mandalorians or kath hounds or cannibals before they should realistically become extinct. I like hack ‘n’ slash, but I don’t really care for the circlegrind.

The other option I can think of are repeatable quests that can reward money. You can get more daggers for Crystal, get more kits for Coxxions, or collect more dog tags for…whatserface

And really, that too might get old…BUT, imagine if we had all three options, how much better would our playtime be if we could vary up our day to day, instead of sticking ourselves in a sweatshop and cranking out blasters for hours on end, day after day.

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#2

So I don’t do a whole lot of crafting,but I loot a lot of mats and sell them, occasionally selling blasters when I get electronics, but overall selling everything else.
I don’t have a lot of gold problems personally. But have you tried selling your loot to other players? Other players need to offer better prices then the shop.

#3

I have occasionally, but they didn’t want to pay any more than what the vendor pays

#4

I love crafting. Is relaxing, fun and time consuming. And give a nice option to interact with other players for business…

About roleplaying, it depends. Anything interesting? One group does not talk to Mandalorians. Other is full of mandalorians… Another is full of jedi. Others are jedis outcasts. We have a group of medics… And other groups or individuals. If a character do not have a decent hook to start a contact, it is difficult to have reason to contact other players icly.

Many players or groups act in their own interests. Do not say they are wrong, but by drawing crafting and trading, there are not many other fields to contact.

The problem would not even be producing something and selling to players. The problem is that a basic blaster has the same value as an IV blaster for npc. The player does not want to pay the actual value of an IV or V item. Does not have a reference value for materials and items produced with quality

#5

Part of the problem with higher level blueprints not being worth it is the lack of skill levels, you don’t need two red slots when one red mod takes you to cap.

#6

While I like the fact that all character types can tinker, build, and repair stuff (which seems to echo the way things work in the actual movies, cartoons, and extended universe), and I do agree that credit production is too heavily weighted towards the various crafting skills, I strongly feel that the real problem here, is one that is found on basically every NWN server (and every online RPG I can think of):

And that is the grind, itself.

Grinding is boring. Grinding is seldom RP inducing, save during combat (though I have RP’ed with people at the engineering bench; it is actually rather distracting and exhausting to multi-task both crafting and RP, IMO, diminishing the pleasure of both). Grinding creates power imbalances that favor people, such as myself, who are stay-at-home parents, or who have desk jobs with a lot of down-time and can grind away all day long.

Those players (again, I am stating openly that I am one of them) swiftly become more powerful and wealthy, and can strong-arm and bully other players, who are only able to log on for an hour or two each day, for example. It then creates an environment where players want to keep grinding to catch up, or remain viable in PVP, either to maintain the power differential or equalize it, as such disparities will inevitably occur on a PVP server.

I have, many times, on many different servers, shouted to the heavens my dislike of the grind. I’ve advocated many times for the desire for a system that would simply give all players the same amount of xp/skill points and the freedom to build their online personae any way they wish. Then play could focus primarily on RP (though, certainly, there would be some grinding to gain credits. But if we’re honest here, I think we could agree that most grinding is done out of the desire to stay competitive with both the environment- but also mainly other players pursuing various power schemes in the play environment (of which, their is certainly nothing wrong, in and of itself- this is an RP server, after all. Goals and schemes are to be expected. We would just like to have a relatively even playing field, is all).

Perhaps I should start a separate topic for this suggestion, but I feel it’s directly related to the issues CragOrion has brought up, and this topic has already received some views, and so perhaps is more likely to be read. But the long and short of it, is that I would like to suggest (albeit, probably a futile gesture- as most people seem to agree, for some reason- that grinding is an essential and intrinsic part of RPG’s, and must be part of play) that rather than gaining skill points for using each individual skill, over time, players simply be given 500 skill points to distribute how they wish. And, if one wishes to retrain, the skill book system that is currently in place, certainly works admirably to accommodate this.

I fully expect this suggestion to be dismissed by most, having suggested it before on many other servers. People are just too trained to expect grinding, and the idea of it is so ingrained in the genre, that for some reason it is hard for people to divorce it from the idea of RPG’s. But I would ask that you consider the advantages of a more egalitarian, free-form system, before rejecting it entirely.

I truly do think it could enhance play and focus things more towards RP-oriented gaming.

#7

So as someone who grinds nothing but combat skills, I would like to chime in.

  1. I do not hurt for credits, selling materials to a vendor or player is super lucrative and there are not very many gold sinks in the module currently.
  2. People with crafting skills are my favorite people because they can make me the best gear that I will probably be the only one who is able to use because I am getting more armor xp than anyone else on the server by farming literally every weapon in the module.

I think crafters SHOULD be influential, and I think they should attract strong people or lots of people. You can help gear people, you can employ people to get materials for you, and you can generally shake and move by virtue of your skills in a trade that people need. I think crafting is a pretty cool system but I don’t touch it because my goals for my character are a little different. I think crafters have the potential to be the change they want to see by using their skills and ability to influence people by making them better equipment to also be as inclusive as possible and help people on their grind by getting them better gear if they can provide basic materials and things like that.

I think it’s an ecosystem really. Crafters get some more xp and higher stats in certain areas but if they aren’t focused on farming weapons their combat stats will be sort of sub par and ripe for exploitation by people who do once they manage to get decent gear from someone else. It’s not nearly as one sided as it sounds, and I’ve only been playing for two days and feel as though I’m on a level of power equivalent to a lot of the current player base who does do crafting just because I have so many stat increases from different skills and have the ability to wear much better armor than most of them because I get so much more xp for it than they do.

What I am saying is it takes all sorts of people to fill an ecosystem of players and crafters, especially people who really enjoy crafting, are perfectly good to accommodate and I think the influence they get for their craft is something that is well warranted, but tempered by the fact that there are people out there who also craft for other factions and even still further other people who focus almost exclusively on combat experience as a form of progression so that they can get some of the most dangerous stat increases possible. Every role is interesting and I think the system currently accommodates all of them existing together in an ecosystem that allows them to be viable, or even powerful.

On the RP side of things? I think that might just come from a lack of extra things to do in the module this early in to facilitate that, and the intrigues and plots that will probably be built on by members of the DM team and player base are probably just going to progress as things go. So far as I know this module hs only been up for less than a month so it will take time.

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#8

One thing I would like to suggest for the benefit of crafters and everyone on the server though! Make the text from the crafting window and rest window menus such that they do not appear in the chat log so that you can actually see tells, comms chat, and local chat and role play during crafting!

#9

Thanks for your input. It’s helpful. Also, you can turn different kinds of chat/text/feedback on and off by right clicking the top of your chat window, and using the radial menu

#10

Another option would be to volunteer to hop in tool set and fix prices for items that seem off in value.

#11

Values for items still need to be added, it is on my huge list of things to add. Right now the best way out of crafting to obtain money is by selling component type items. They all have adjusted item values, in fact move crafting finished products don’t have a changed GP value at this time. We can look into the drop tables for certain mobs to see how they are on credit drops (Looters and Mando Facility really are the only ones that make sense to drop credits) and we could work from there.

The principle is Combat should sell to Vendors/Crafters Then Crafters make gear which then they sell back to the Combat people. That was the plan of the economy and that is still where we want to take it, but with so many people self crafting their gear, or doing in house (with your group) not much trade is being done on the outside for the random person. We hope to have player shops in the future that could help with this as well.