Crafting and PvP in SWTOR

[Tbone]

Another interview explaining crafting in greater detail:

http://darthhater.com/2010/11/12/daniel-erickson-on-crew-skills/page/1

The "mission skills" part of it is straight out of Mafia Wars (it takes a few minutes to 23 hours). Crafting items also takes hours. Gathering can be done in three ways - you can pick it up yourself, have your companion pick it up, or just tell a companion at the ship to find some of "x stuff" from somewhere.

Companions have bonuses to different "Crew Skills" (the name for the crafting system).

I think what they've done is actually pretty smart. They've made crafting extremely passive and casual, but in the exact same way that all of those addictive casual games are. So like in FarmVille if you don't check on your crops every few hours, they go bad, if you don't login and re-queue up your crew missions/crafting, you'll feel like you are wasting valuable crew time. It's a good incentive to get people steadily logging in. I don't know how "fun" the actual system will be, but I can see it being "addictive".

[Paitryn]

Your right, I can see this being very addictive. even on days I wouldnt be playing I would still log in to give my crew orders so they were still working.

[Paitryn]

Posted by Damion Schubert yesterday:

So just to throw a couple more stray thoughts about our philosophy.

    * No, you the player cannot craft currently - which is to say you cannot choose to watch the progress bar fill up yourself. That being said, to us, watching a progress bar has always been the least interesting part of crafting in other MMOs. The part of being a crafter that is interesting to us is things like finding rare schematics, finding hard-to-find components, and the social game of finding customers and suppliers. We really wanted devoted crafters to be able to focus on these aspects of crafting, and not so much on the 'watch a progress bar go forward' part of things. Crafting should be a social thing - staring at a progress bar is not.
    * No, you don't see companions running missions out 'in the real world'. While I laugh at the idea of a stream of companion characters filing into the palace on Alderaan, it's unfeasible for a lot of reasons.
    * The real test of the value of crafting is less about whether companions or players are swinging the hammer and tongs, and more about how the itemization of crafting is balanced in a way that the gear is useful. Crafting is important to the systems team, and we're devoted to ensuring that crafted gear has a place in the economy, especially at the endgame, and doubly especially for the devoted crafters.
    * It's worth noting that we really want the system to support the casual crafter (the guy who is taking crafting largely to outfit himself while levelling up) and the devoted crafter (the guy who wants to be known as the best Armormech in the galaxy). Supporting the former means making the system accessible and easy. Supporting the latter means ensuring that hard work can allow you to provide goods and services that almost no one in the galaxy can. The systems design team is striving to satisfy both groups of people.
    * My own personal goal is that some crafters can get so good that players all over the server seek them out. My problem being a crafter in most other MMOs is that you tend to become a guild's pet at some point, and you're expected to do all of the work for free. We want those devoted crafters to be exceptional enough that they can actually demand a price, and that people will actually break out of the guild in order to pursue those goods and services. The system isn't there yet, but we have plans...

Think this really addresses some of our concerns about to what extent we want crafting to be and that the Devs share that vision. He admits they aren't 100% there yet, but are working towards it.