My question to you today is:

What if the class you choose affects your crew skills ability?

In past games that I have played I have found that sometimes the class I choose to play affects the potential I have to use the crafting system to its fullest amount.  By using certain mechanics of a class system sometimes you can gain advantage over other aspiring master craftsmen looking to advance to grandmaster craftsman status.

Some examples of this to let you know what I mean would be like one of the characters I used to have in Ultima Online. 

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My question to you today,

What can we do to make crafting more fun in SWTOR?

For some people in MMO’s today crafting can sometimes be looked at as simply more than a utilitarian function, a means to help the overall leveling process.  As something you do as merely a side thought when you need some type of item in-game.  Some people would go so far as to call crafting “boring”, or something they do out of boredom.

To us that thoroughly enjoy these types of systems in MMO’s, we know them to be capable of so much more.

So what can we do to make crafting more fun in SWTOR?

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The question I want to pose to you today is;

What will your worth be as a crafter in Star Wars The Old Republic MMO?

I think on this subject a lot because to me it is very important.  I derive great pleasure from being able to learn all the details about a crafting system in a massively multiplayer online game that I call home away from home.

I then achieve even more pleasure when I am able to take that knowledge and produce the finest items available to me as a master of that craft, in the most efficient manner.  Provided that the game system I am in will allow the crafters to produce top-tier items.  When I do however find a game that allows this, it is a joy to be a crafter because I know the fame that awaits the diligent, the methodical.

I have been called a “min-maxer” before and that’s ok.  To achieve greatness and fame in a crafting arena one must be efficient, and creative.  One must use a crafting and in-game economy to maximum effectiveness to be considered a true master.

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From the last blog post I did we looked at the developer blog “closer look at crew skills” by Patrick Mallot.  It was this piece of it that inspired this blog post and a lot of personal joy from me.

These are my personal opinions anyway.    🙂

“It’s worth noting that players will definitely need to be directly involved in the process when learning rare schematics”

That tells us that there will be such a thing as rare schematics, and that we as a player will have to be directly involved in the learning process.  Learning the schematic won’t be something that the player can pass on to the companion because the schematic will need to inscribe itself into the players learned items database so that the player can access the recipe later when he wants to craft that item from that certain crafting skill.

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With the first blog that I will post about the crew skills system in SWTOR I wanted to reach back into a dev blog from the main site and show you why it was that I decided I was going to partake in this crafting system they are creating.

from the dev blog entitled  ” closer look at crew skills” written by Patrick Malott

You can find what I am referring to there.   I wanted to take just the first part because to me it says enough to let me know I like where this is heading…

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Swtorcrafter Bounty Hunter!

About the author,

Swtorcrafter is a crafter at heart, dating back to the start of the Ultima Online beta.  It was there that he developed his love of massively multiplayer online crafting systems, in game economies and fan site creation.  It was there in that realm that he was first introduced to what it was like to play online with other people instead of just a single player PC game.

It was a grand six years, the longest he has been in any one MMO since.

He has searched countless realms searching for that feeling again, sometimes finding satisfaction, sometimes not.

Now as he grows older he decides it is time to “go all in” one last time to try to find that perfect anvil, the crafting system of his dreams, and the community to share his thoughts and insights with.

*Enter stage right*

The Game:  Star Wars The Old Republic MMO by Bioware.

The Community:  www.swtor-life.com

*fingers crossed*

Let me be honest with you. I looked for and found the beta leaks. I was burning with curiosity. The footage was not spectacular, as it mostly showed things we saw before, but it did reveal some of the things we haven’t seen so far. Let me tell you why we haven’t seen them so far, because THEY ARE NOT FINISHED YET. It was glaringly obvious that some of the things were in beta stages and if they showed an image there saying “PLACEHOLDER” it would have the same effect.

This is what bothers me the most about this leak. Some other MMO player or innocent bystander will not go deep into analyzing the leaked footage and will say how Bioware is doing a poor job and that this game will suck. It feels as if this leak was created for just this purpose, to hurt the image of this game. It doesn’t feel as if it was made available to show us what the game is really about. Let me explain why. The things that look good and finished are the things we already saw previously from official sources. Some of the things we didn’t see so far felt unfinished. You can see great potential in some of them but all in all they were not too impressive from a finished game’s standpoint.

In light of all this, we here at Swtor Life, have decided to join the rest of the fansites and declare our resentment with the unapproved leaking of material from the game. We will not be posting, endorsing or supporting sites that post unauthorized materials in any way. We here declare that we will honor the Fansite agreement we’ve signed by creating this site.

To lighten the mood a bit, here’s a girl in a pink Darth Vader costume:

Image via babiesmakingfaces.com

Yesterday was highlighted by two things for me, the World Cup finale (gratz Spain!) and release of more leaked beta footage from SWTOR. None of which I’ll talk about here! World cup is for some other news site and leakz will get you perma-banned.

Instead, I want to tell you about a couple of articles I came across on another fan site – swtorstrategies.com. They wrote an excellent and fun article to commemorate the World Cup finale by humoring the idea of playing football (its called football not soccer) in SWTOR. As a result of the mix they created some images of Star Wars characters playing soccer. Make sure you check out the full article here.

While we’re on a topic of mixing – there is a fan made audio-visual mix posted on Youtube that combines a lot of previously released videos into one cohesive entity. You can watch the video here. News spotted @ SwtorStrategies.

TOROcast has released its 60th episode (!) named “This is NOT a Demo”, which you can listen to just below:

That’s it for now. May you have a great week.

Not a day went by since the announcement of the beta testing being underway and already leaked footage from the game hit the net. VG247 reported about this and provided a link to the video. They labeled it as rumor but seeing the video already being pulled from Youtube under a copyright claim by EA we can only imagine it was some real footage.

FOTOR reports that it was “16 minutes of nothing we haven’t already seen”.

It is a rather worrying development because Bioware is sure going to make further beta invitation even more scarce. On the other hand with a game as anticipated as SWTOR is things like this are bound to happen.

Sean Dahlberg updated his thread about Game Testing with the following:

Being able to have the community help us test The Old Republic is very important and valuable to the development process. The Game Testing Program allows community members to give us quality feedback so we can make adjustments and have a highly effective service and entertaining experience when we do launch. Since we have some time until the game is complete, some of the information testers have access to has not been released and may actually drastically change based on tester feedback before we go public with it.

This is why we take violations of any of our user agreements very seriously. Our expectation is that players of The Old Republic will follow the terms of the Game Testing Agreement and ensure that the confidential pre-release information we’re sharing with community members remains confidential. We will take action if that is not the case.

Anyone caught promoting confidential information (such as linking to, reposting, quoting, etc) will be contacted and such information removed from our community. Actions that can occur due to this can be simply removing the post to being suspended to being completely and indefinitely suspended from the entire service (including after we launch).

He also mentioned that you can report leaks to the Bioware community team:

If you find one on these forums, definitely Flag (report) the post so the Community Team can quickly react to it. If you find them off-site, you can always send them to bwacommunitysupport at bioware DOT com

UPDATE: I saw one of the videos and it shows some 7 minutes of smuggler gameplay. It is the starting area and very low level quests. The video shows some combat that really isn’t anything we haven’t seen before. Makes me more psyched for the game than anything, but I can imagine it could be hurtful to game promotion because it is obvious this is a not finished product and may leave an impression to the casual crowd as something that is broken instead of awesome. That is why such leaks are just wrong.

Following the announcement about the game testing ongoing a lot of questions have been raised by the community and Sean Dahlberg was quick to respond. Here are a few of the more interesting facts he brought forward, while you can read the whole post in this thread on the official forums.

• If you participate in one of the testing stages you might not participate in a follow up
• Tests are focused on a certain area of the game
• Game Testing Program is all about us validating the features and design of the game
• Testing is only in North America (for) now
• We definitely plan on opening up phases of Game Testing to other countries before we launch (and not as a last minute “Open” test).
• We didn’t announce that Game Testing Began today, we announced that it is underway… subtle difference but there is one.
• Post count does not weigh any in the decision of who gets into testing

First thing, what we announced is “Game Testing”. This is currently underway and will end near the release of the game and happen in a variety of stages. We will be inviting people to different stages and just because you get invited to one stage doesn’t mean you’ll be invited back to another one. Unlike testing that many of you may have participated in with other games, we aren’t looking for people to test “everything”. Each of our tests are focused on a certain or a set of goals and areas. We want people to have clear direction on what we’d like help evaluating.