How can a guild best support their crafters in SWTOR, part 2

 

With the small amount of material available on the crew skills system it is really hard to speculate on what I think will be important for a guild to focus on when trying to support their crafting efforts.  I am going to speculate anyway though because it can’t hurt to guess at this stage.

Read on!

 

Protection and backup- One of the ways that is SWTOR focused that might present itself in-game is the possibility that  (or at least I hope so)  certain zones that crafters will need to gather from, might be contested.  Meaning that to gather specific resources, they might just need back up, maybe even a lot of it.

The way they have presented the planets of Ilum and Quesh make me think this might be possible.  It’s almost as if when they talk about the force crystals and the stim components, the exclusivity of the resources, and the contested nature of Quesh, that they are foreshadowing a system where we might actually see some PVP action at these sites.  Will we have to go in with a strike team and have to secure the site to be able to gather those components?

I sure hope so, that would be a breath of fresh air to me to have contested resource locations.  What that also does is give the guild a sure-fire way that they can contribute to the overall crafting effort for the guild, and have fun doing it.  How much fun would it be for the guild as a whole to have a certain night of the week where they assembled a strike team to go and extricate certain stim components to be made into stims or adrenals for the guild, it would be awesome in my opinion.  Of course you could probably just buy them off of the auction house but the guild outing sounds way more fun and involving.

Give the guild crafters “dibs”- Another crucial way that I foresee the guild members being able to support their crafters is by saving all their unwanted schematic drops that they might get as loot for the crafters to have first shot at buying from them.

If they are just going to sell them on the auction house because they either don’t have a crafter character specialized in that schematics field (biochem, armsman, artifice, etc) or because they do not personally participate in crafting, then why not pass the ability to make items for the guild from that schematic to a guild crafter that specializes in that crafting skill?  Why wouldn’t you do this first before an item of true value is sold to just who ever?

The need to make coin in a MMO is an ever-present and real necessity for a character to be successful in a MMO, but why kill the potential of a particular schematic to profit the guild as a whole just to make a quick sale?  Isn’t it better to communicate with the guild crafters and find out if anyone needs it, then offer it to the crafter for a reasonable price?

This in the long run helps all the guild members be able to have more top-tier items when the crafters have more options open to them.  If the person just looking to make a quick sale gets rid of it before the crafters have had a chance to buy it then he has effectively cheated all his guild mates of the chance of owning that item.  If some of the schematics are truly as rare as they are saying, then that may be the only time a particular group of people even see a certain schematic, and then when it is sold to an outsider, that is too late.

Of course this idea assumes that we will even be able to sell or trade schematics from one character to another, heaven forbid they would be bind on pickup, that would suck and suck hard, lets hope Bioware is smart enough not to go that route.  The way that I think Bioware is designing the crafting schematic system with the chance that you could be able to produce an item that only few people know how to make really drives home the point of just how important this idea of “crafter dibs” could truly be.

There are many other systems that we could speculate on how a guild can support its crafters, the companion system, the offline skill queue usage, the auction house features, companion affection ratings, and many others.  There should be many ways that a guild can support its crafters with features like these to choose from.  If a guild will explore the games mechanics and see what is available they will come up with what I hope to see is, many creative ways to maximize the efficiency of its crafters for a more successful and equipment optimized guild.

 

Thanks for reading, and thank you to Daelda for giving me the idea for this blog entry!

 

(if anyone has good topic ideas that they would like to suggest for me to blog about that are SWTOR crafting focused please don’t be shy I will take all suggestions!)

Tags: auction house, beta, bioware, classes, companions, crafting, crew skills, Gathering, group, mats, PvP, resources, speculation, star wars, swtor