People in arms about useless crafting...and ignoring (again) feedback from the PTS players

[Corvinius]

Hello, Kestrels!

6.0 has landed and it made a complete shambles off crafting.

In fact some people presume they did this to get the people to want to discard crafting all along.

As it is the changes are so stupid and the crafting prices so unattractive that people are pushed toward an even more infuriating RNG gearing.

The protests started already with PTS players.

And since they totally ignored it and released the version people said is unacceptable shows a severe lack of regard for player feedback all along.

"General Consensus of Crafting in 6.0 as of 9/29/19 (Fix this before launch BW!)"

https://www.google.de/url?sa=t&rct=j&q= ... JHFcinyQjX

A sad fact that finds itself echoed in the sentiments of this thread opened 23rd of October.

"6.0 Crafting is Ludicrously a complete and total piece of Junk"

https://www.google.de/url?sa=t&rct=j&q= ... U4X4RmqKV0

Nothing sums up the state of the crafting as it is like the feedback of a player from PTS:


(Posted by Citrienne)

"Let's talk about the Jawa Junks.

The devs have dug-in so far about the cost of grade 11 mats on the Jawa vendors. This is worrisome, since everyone dealing with crafting on the PTS has specifically called this out as a problem. I have spent somewhere in the range of 50-100 billion credits on the PTS to learn all purple pharmaceuticals and 2 legendary pharmaceuticals plus crafting some stacks of purple pharmaceuticals for my guild to run Dxun, using the RE->Jawa Junks system to short-circuit the absurd mission times. Given the high number of mats I was able to buy for such an exorbitant price from the Jawa vendors, it is sad that I was only able to make so little. And this with infinite money; imagine having to do this by running missions and farming nodes and REing garbage drops on toons with the appropriate crafting discipline (which will yield far less for way more time/effort). This is a painful punishment levied onto crafters for no reason that I can see other than it's easy and convenient to do so. Crafting has only rarely been allowed to produce viable end-game BiS gear (e.g., the 240 augs), so why punish crafters in this way when they're still gonna be crafting less-than-ideal items anyway?"

Sadly I can only agree as crafting is made so unattractive with needed mats for even GREEN gear that you are better off with the new RNG gearing and renown leveling.

So I can only say:

Ignore crafting until some sweeping changes are made!

As of now it is a complete money drain with ridiculuos mats needs from Master FP/OPS/Ranked PvP even for BASIC GREEN gear!

Especially thinking you need to dissassemble for BLUE and PURPLE gear with even again a major chance of getting NO new recipy makes it like blowing million of creds into the wind.

The worsening of re-engineering and a massively lowered chance of getting the higher recipies have also been noted by PTS testers.

Plus - you guess it - the higher gear has an even more ridiculuos amount of mats needed.

Do yourself a favor and do not blow your creds out with something they clearly broke in order to promote their idiotic and still infuriatingly random RNG gearing!

To think someone there invested something in CREATING this mess is depressing.

So while the story content is good (though as always a bit short) this mess has the potential to vastly damage the player base numbers and overshadow an story-wise good expansion.

The fear that they will begin to row back like in Galactic Command and have again a over 1 year period to make the changes bearable sadly is very real.

What's worse the Galactic Command changes did hinder any kind of expansion or new content.

If that is again the case this might well be more than the game can take.

Sincerely hoping for (good) change


Corvinius



P.S.

One good thing:

Any recipies UNTIL the new level 11 mats and crafting pieces is unchanged.

So you can still craft your Decos, War Supplies, Invasion forces and the old equipment with old recipies without inflated mats needs.

For anyone interested in reading Citrienne's and many more detailed feedback posts from PTS testing by players:

Here you go!




"09.29.2019 , 10:10 AM | #1
Quote
To make it simple for Bioware and to assist Eric out in his compilation of critical information regardng 6.0 and the crafting feedback I have condensed what people are saying about 6.0 crafting and changes they are begging for. Many people don't check the PTS forums or have the time to play on the PTS, so for those people who want to know the status of crafting in 6.0 right now as it stands, here you go.



For anyone interested, Darev added simple instructions on how you can check out crafting or any other changes 6.0 will be bringing for that matter:


Quote: Originally Posted by Darev View Post

Please get on PTS. Download it overnight while you sleep, log in, play around.

Getting mats for crafting is pretty easy, just buy stacks of 9999 stims from the Odessen vendor and RE them for jawa scrap junk. You get free credits from the terminal on Odessen so you can do that as often as you like.

Make your new toon, transfer your existing one using the PTS transfer option in your account settings here on the forum.

Get your toon to Odessen.

Click the terminal to get to level 75

Go to fleet to learn your crafting to allow you to level up to 700

Go back to Odessen to get more free credits, more stacks of stims to RE...and craft your heart out.




Now for comments regarding the state of crafting according to the players testing it on the PTS:



Quote: Originally Posted by MasterRummy View Post
You are expecting people to sit on PTS 8 to 16 hours a day each day, minus downtime to grind out what ever is needed to purchase, scavenged, or complete an insane amount of conquest just to get the bare minimum of mats each and every week over multiple weeks, allowing them now the ability to craft a couple special items. And how do you perceive that the PvPrs will be able to procure the mats? You gonna force them to run FPs? Come on Eric......This is a HORRIBLE experience and quite frankly needs a high level of concern and a new strategy to ensure that the crafter's do not leave the game when 6.0 is implemented.

Quote: Originally Posted by Darev View Post
Crafting Costs: Both rare/purple mats being in Green grinding items and the dramatic increase for overall resource costs. They're not budging (jawa scrap vendor costs)

Quote: Originally Posted by RikuvonDrake View Post
It took me 6 cargo holds + my normal inventory of materials and jawa junk as well as 2 hours of missions and crafting cell graft to learn the new schematic for 1 reusable attack adrenal I started to wonder how disconnected the developers were from the player base. It seems that there is simply just a lot of new materials just "because" without them actually having a purpose, apart from making crafting more time consuming of course.

Quote: Originally Posted by Balameb View Post
The new system is just not viable. Every green gear mat requirement is just too high, rare blue and purples? That is just insane. Its the same as if in live crafting a green 210 required several isotopes and 20 CMTs!!!!! How come you are ignoring this? You keep saying more mats more junk; STOP THE INFLATION, just LOWER COST. Have you seen the steps and mats requirements to craft even single biochem consumables.

Quote: Originally Posted by TheCardinal View Post
In the past you reduced the amount of mats per tier due they being to MANY, and now you plan to add even more? For what ever reason?

Quote: Originally Posted by Delta_V View Post
First off, the cost to craft the basic green components/cell grafts/etc. are way too high, and need to be reverted to the 2/2/2 cost of every other tier. You can't just increase the cost of the most fundamental crafting item by FIVE TIMES and expect everything else to be fine. When you need three of the premium components to craft a prototype, and three prototypes to craft an artifact, that means you need 90 of each green mat to craft a single artifact component. That is just way, way too high.

Second, the number of rare materials required for everything is also completely impractical. The numbers for artifact and legendary schematics need to come down. More importantly, the correct number of flashpoint, Ops, or Conquest materials needed to craft Premium and Prototype gear is ZERO. Any other number is wrong, and will completely break crafting.

Third, the Reverse Engineering chance needs to be completely re-evaluated. Right now, Prototype Gear is vastly more difficult to make than for any prior tier, but the lower RE chance means you will go through way more Prototype items trying to learn the Artifact schematics. End result is the cost of learning a schematic is going to be astronomical. I'm talking orders of magnitude higher than the cost of learning schematics for Grade 10.

Seriously, we're going to be looking at millions of credits for a stack of artifact Stims, where a similar stack of their Grade 10 counterparts would be <100,000. Considering the hilariously marginal stat improvement, nobody is going to buy the Grade 11s, and nobody is going to waste their time crafting them.

Quote: Originally Posted by cibacrome View Post
It feels very much like BW is trying to 'adjust' crafting to compensate for players sitting on huge quantities of materials, but the only thing that's going to do is punish every single 'normal' player out there. Or, like others in this and other threads have posted, no-one at BW has actually bothered to 'organically' craft something in PTS.

Quote: Originally Posted by Flying-Brian View Post
Eric, again it seems the team is missing the point of all the feedback that has been given. Keep the same systems and costs in place that are currently on live, just add the new grade 11 mats. Not 3 versions of each type of grade 11 mat, and not the ridiculous amounts of conquest and ops mats that are needed for basic, entry level gear. Those types of mats should only be required when you get to the highest versions of the craftable items.

It is currently an insult to players that 20 of the new conquest reward mat are needed to craft a single basic level augment. Since no one has even been able to craft or RE one yet on the PTS (with the nice change in lowering the % chance of learning the next tier of an item), how many conquest mats are needed for the legendary (gold) version of the new augments? Somewhere around 60+ is my guess, for a single item, that players need 14 of to set their gear up.

Quote: Originally Posted by TrixxieTriss View Post
You should not be trying to use crafting as another multifaceted time and credit sink, all it is going to do is destroy it.

Quote: Originally Posted by hooty View Post
Agreed (on the "why bother testing"). Adjusting the nodes and crew missions is insignificant. Are there any real meaningful changes in the works? That would be useful to know Eric.

Quote: Originally Posted by Darev View Post
if you're REALLY going to keep those 40 rare mats in the mix for GREEN 270 items, crafting is dead with 6.0

Quote: Originally Posted by Balameb View Post
But just reading Eric response we can see they are completely delusional about this crafting system. Thinking the problem is gathering nodes and mission time is dumb; or at least is dumb thinking we can find that a proper answer. We all have given a lot of feedback (some people have been very detailed) and the core issues has been completely ignored.

Quote: Originally Posted by Estelindis View Post
The costs for grade 11 crafting are absurdly high. I'm sure BW don't want to put work into a system only to break it. But, as it stands, BW's target audience with these changes seems to be people who enjoy suffering, and no one else.

Quote: Originally Posted by JediBoadicea View Post
Given that we also only have a month until 6.0 drops, I don't think a responsible feedback-giver can adopt a wait-and-see approach. I think it's really important that the message be carried very clearly back to the team handling crafting that increasing the amount of mats that drop from gathering or missions is not going to be sufficient to fix this system. The only way to fix this is to lower the materials COST. There is nothing within reason you can do to increase the amount of mats we get that is going to actually achieve any sort of parity with the costs as you've currently designed them. Oh, don't make Grade 11 components required in the cost of war supplies. We did the math on that too. Spoiler alert: it completely breaks things.

Quote: Originally Posted by Hawkebatt View Post
There are just not enough nodes on the map. I stopped farming mats when you moved the level 10 mats to Iokath as it was not worth the time. Roughly one hour got me about 75 crystals per color and various other mats. Not that I can tell since it does not post in chat what I looted. Please make the rank 11 mats and the schematic requirements match all the other ranks. Crafting takes long enough as it is and no green should ever, ever, ever, include a rare purple in its construction. Leave this in and many will just stop crafting making the situation even worse as most things you can craft are not worth the time or the mats to craft for so little gain. Please fix this nightmare and listen to the ones who took the time to see how horrible it truly is.

Quote: Originally Posted by Banthabreeder View Post
I'm starting to wonder if the Devs intention is to keep us at Grade 10 Augs, Stims, healthpacs, ect. Cause no one other then high member guilds will be able to make the Grade 11 stuff. I can guarantee you that if someone is able to make something grade 11, it will be sold on the GTN for hundreds of millions credits, no less. The only people who could afford them are gold farmers who are moving their money around.

Quote: Originally Posted by well View Post
You will drive some players away. I don't know how many or even it really matters to you. It seems like your going out of your way to get rid of people. There is some good QOL but not worth dealing with the rest of what you might implement. It is PTS so it isn't the final product but I've seen what has happened in the past. It is your game so it is up to you.

Quote: Originally Posted by IoNonSoEVero View Post
I was really hoping that 6.0 would reintroduce more reasonable crafting, but this is more of the same. It's all nice and good to make more nodes on Onderon, but it doesn't mean anything when every crafter will be fighting for them, and when the recipes still require way too many mats, including ones from Conquest. Crafting should be fun. This is not fun. So what is the goal? I feel the same as I did with Ossus; I'm not even going to bother trying to craft anything new.

Quote: Originally Posted by Daasdfg View Post
Let us know when you've made real changes on PTS for us to test. Nothing about crafting on PTS is remotely fun even with unlimited credits.

Quote: Originally Posted by Aberd View Post
It's as if Eric and the devs think all we do is play SWTOR all day. They forget we have jobs too and real life responsibilities. (Not all of us, but most of the community anyway.) We don't have 100+hours a week to be screwing around doing all this crap. It's no wonder players have found third party macro apps to click the screen to automate the crafting, and gathering of materials (sending on missions). I know eric and crew don't like or want this, and since these macros don't manipulate the game directly (they automate mouse movement and clicks) they are skirting EULA. But honestly, what choice are you (Eric) and the devs giving us?

Quote: Originally Posted by TrixxieTriss View Post
I just want them to remove the purple conquest mats from the mundane crafting items. You need 20 to make 1 green 274 item?? That’s either 20 weeks on one character or 1 week on 20 Alts to make one green item you’ll never use because you will have already passed the gear lvl and no one else will be crazy enough to pay the price you would need to sell it for. The whole thing is totally ludicrous. I got on to specifically test crafting and I can’t even make anything because the only way to get those mats is 20 conquest mats. Prefer if they just removed them entirely. Who in there right mind is going to spend 20 weeks or 20 Alts worth of Conquest rewards to make a 274 green item they will never wear and nobody will pay the price for? The development of this crafting system is so disconnected from the reality of how people play swtor, that I have to wonder if anyone on the crafting team actually plays swtor and / or is a dedicated crafter.

Quote: Originally Posted by Sambril View Post
I have crafted in the game since launch. It has seen several overhauls and updates over the years, some good some not so good, but in general it is workable and enjoyable. 6.0 will change all that. Requiring MM FP/Ops and Conquest materials to make basic items which have no use except to be RE'd to get a better schematic is completely insane. I have no idea how any game designer could think that this is a workable system. Tinkering with nodes and missions does absolutely nothing to address this. Those types of materials should only be required when crafted items RE'd from drops in that content, as it is now in other grades. Grade 11 should follow the same pattern as the other grades, just with grade 11 materials.

Quote: Originally Posted by marcofanggg View Post
Summary - They have totally removed crafting from the game.

Quote: Originally Posted by MasterRummy View Post
Well after I finally was at a place 10 hours later where I could actually craft something like an augment I was saddened when I saw that I have to do conquest 5 times.....I am done with PTS as I wont be crafting stims adrenals, and MK11s without having to run conquest.........THIS IS FRACKING PTS ........ not production.....goodbye PTS

As you can see, countless different posters are saying the same thing, it's not just a small group of naysayers.


I am adding Citrienne's detailed feedback post here last, so people can give it a good read in case they missed it buried in the PTS forums section. It's very detailed and long so I added it last.



Citrienne's Feedback Post from PTS 6.0 crafting:


Spoiler
Quote: Originally Posted by Citrienne View Post
These changes are not enough, so I'm going to spend 4 hours typing up an itemized list of suggestions to improve Grade 11 crafting after having spent 50+ hours on the PTS just playing with crafting. Devs please, PLEASE take these suggestions into serious consideration.

The aim of my suggestions are three-fold:

To relieve some of the pressure from crafters (i.e., reduce complaining from when the changes go to live and to prevent people leaving the game over it),
to fix some problems with the implementation and make it more internally consistent, while
still making it harder and more expensive to do than in previous grades (which the devs seem to want).



First off: the burden of game inflation should NOT be lumped solely on the shoulders of the crafters. This is completely unfair, and a lot of people will be upset enough to leave if some of this stuff isn't addressed. And if they don't leave, we will have to deal with endless whining on the forums until the devs do, grudgingly, change it anyway. And then we'll end up in a "we told you so" situation regardless, which no one really wants.


Things what MUST be fixed:

Reduce companion mission times to be linearly in-line with the other grades
Fix the Synthweaving grade 11 Assembly Component crafting time to be the same as the other grade 11 AC times (~3m for lvl 50 companions)
Reduce all crafting disciplines to have 1 craftable green, 1 blue, and 1 purple Assembly Component
Remove slicing and other unrelated gathering discipline material requirements from Assembly Component crafting
Crafting disciplines that make augments: augments should be crafted using appropriate ACs + x slicing mats, as they always have (do not require slicing mats IN the AC)
Augment kit mat requirements need to fall back in line with other grades from previous expacs. Given the 19 tiers of gear we have to grind through, it's unreasonable to gate augments so hard.
Change the mats required to craft Assembly Components to, at a minimum, the following:
- Green AC = 12 green, 12 green, 12 white standard mats (recombinators/fluxes)
- Blue AC = 6 blue, 6 blue, 6 green standard mats (recombinators/fluxes) + 2 green ACs
- Purp AC = 3 purp, 3 purp, 3 blue standard mats (recombinators/fluxes) + 1 blue AC
Change the recipe for Dark Projects to NOT include purple Iokath Recombinators anymore
Change all conquest crafting grades of mats as follows: (Type A -- grade 3, 5, 7, 9, 10) and (Type B -- grade 4, 6, 8, 9, 10)
At a minimum, add RNG Protection to Reverse Engineering (20% requires max 5 REs, 10% requires max 10 REs, 5% requires max 20 REs, you get the idea)
Jawa Junks should go into the materials inventory
Jawa Junk prices for grade 11 should be reduced (by half at least, IMO)
Green quality items (earpieces/implants/etc) should have AT BEST green quality mat requirements and no higher; change all recipes to reflect this
Blue quality items (earpieces/implants/etc) should have AT BEST blue quality mat requirements and no higher; change all recipes to reflect this
Purple quality items (earpieces/implants/etc) should have AT BEST purple quality mat requirements and no higher; change all recipes to reflect this
Legendary quality items (earpieces/implants/etc) should have AT BEST legendary quality mat requirements and no higher; change all recipes to reflect this
If (ear/implant/etc) crafting needs to be gated, make acquiring the special mat (of appropriate quality) be like acquiring the old magenta crystal components (grinding tat->hoth->ilum)
ALLLL gathering missions should return green mats, with a chance of blue and purple mats too that scales with tier of mission (wealthy > rich > bountiful > abundant > moderate)
Deconstructing ANYTHING of level 75 or at grade 11 should 100% of the time produce MK components to craft aug kits even if not on a toon having that crafting discipline


Things what SHOULD be fixed:

Preferred changes to crafting Assembly Components:
- Green AC = 2 green, 2 green, 2 white recombinators
- Blue AC = 2 blue, 2 blue, 2 green recombinators + 1 green AC
- Purp AC = 2 purp, 2 purp, 2 blue recombinators + 1 blue AC
Reverse Engineering: increase ALL chances to learn all quality of recipes back to 60%
Increase gathering node density on Onderon to be similar to that of Yavin 4
Jawa Junks should stack in single stacks up to 999,999
Jawa Junk prices should be changed to 50 per unit. This needs to be a viable supplementary system but is currently waaaaaaaay too expensive.
Add the purple grade 11 conquest mat and blue grade 11 isotopes to the Jawa vendors at a higher rate than the base green/blue/purp grade 11 mats
All types (w,r,b,a,m) of gathering missions for grade 11 should yield more mats than previous grades due to the more complex and more numerous mat requirements for crafting at grade 11
Please fix the old gear that is non-deconstructable to be deconstructable. I got some drops in Hammer Station VM that couldn't be deconstructed.
12 companions should now be deployable. Given the zillion comps we acquired from KotFE/KotET and insane mat requirements for grade 11, this needs to be increased significantly
Number of available-to-run grade 11 missions of each type (r/b/a/m & supplementary) should be doubled
Specs for the Adrenals and Stims need to be boosted a little bit. These are barely better than grade 10. If they're gonna be so hard/expensive to craft, at least make the stat gain way better.
Add grade 10 and grade 11 grenades to Cybertech



Let's talk about the Jawa Junks.

The devs have dug-in so far about the cost of grade 11 mats on the Jawa vendors. This is worrisome, since everyone dealing with crafting on the PTS has specifically called this out as a problem. I have spent somewhere in the range of 50-100 billion credits on the PTS to learn all purple pharmaceuticals and 2 legendary pharmaceuticals plus crafting some stacks of purple pharmaceuticals for my guild to run Dxun, using the RE->Jawa Junks system to short-circuit the absurd mission times. Given the high number of mats I was able to buy for such an exorbitant price from the Jawa vendors, it is sad that I was only able to make so little. And this with infinite money; imagine having to do this by running missions and farming nodes and REing garbage drops on toons with the appropriate crafting discipline (which will yield far less for way more time/effort). This is a painful punishment levied onto crafters for no reason that I can see other than it's easy and convenient to do so. Crafting has only rarely been allowed to produce viable end-game BiS gear (e.g., the 240 augs), so why punish crafters in this way when they're still gonna be crafting less-than-ideal items anyway?


Some crafting philosophies that must be adhered to going into the future:

Cost and time for missions should scale linearly with previous grades
Assembly Components should be cheap and easy to make (in terms of mat requirements)
Assembly Components should be restricted to 1 green type of AC per crafting discipline and possibly 1 special blue one used to make end-game items
If Assembly Components must have common green/blue/purple quality versions, limit it to 1 type of each using ONLY mats acquired from the associated gathering disciplines
Green gathering mats should be very easy to come by in large numbers (with blue less, purple even less, and legendary requiring special missions and tasks and such)
Craftable gear and components should not have a mat requirement of higher quality (green/blue/purp/legendary) than the quality of the item you're crafting
Flux (and the like) missions should always be the shortest and cheapest mission, and should produce more mats than any other but the wealthy missions
Reverse Engineering should be a straight-forward and relatively easy way to learn recipes - forcing people to waste tons of mats and credits and and time trying to RE something is going to cause people to complain endlessly again (as they should). IF you must gate the production of higher quality items, gate it with mat requirements to craft the item they just learned.
Learning recipes via schematic drops in content is also a totally fine way of gaining recipes. Let these be unbound so they can be sold on the GTN for profit.
Biochem in particular should not have onerous crafting requirements for the drugz because raid teams go through drugs quickly - I have crafted all of the drugs for my PvP guild and its progression raid team since 4.0 and I won't be able to do that anymore in 6.0 if the cost/time/effort of doing so isn't reduced significantly (this is just too expensive for me and I have in excess of 1 billion credits in my primary server legacy in live now)


Devs, please do not nickel-and-dime us with crafting changes. Make an across-the-board set of real changes to crafting, and put it up on the PTS for us to test. Add vendors on the PTS that sell the blue isotopes and purple conquest mats, and other rare mats (maybe the Legendary Ember), so we can actually test the progression of learning the higher level recipes finally.

I have spent a lot of time on the PTS playing with this stuff. Please do not trivialize the time and effort I and others have spent testing this for you for free. My biggest concern is with the game dying rather than my own in-game finances or other factors. Please read my post. Please address these problems. I don't want people to riot and leave in a rage; I want people to stick around in this game long into the future. Seriously consider everything here. Please.

TRUE

Quote: Originally Posted by DarthSpuds View Post
RNG is counterproductive because it massively increases player dissatisfaction."