Another One Bites the Dust: SWG Edition!

[eldaec]

As I said, it wasn't perfect.  Mind, we had EQ1 as a comparison at the time.  Being able to switch your profession around at all was pretty revolutionary.  (Was UO allowing reskilling at that point?  I never followed it too closely.)

DAOC had respecs, dunno about other same-era games.

Profession was more or less equivalent to class. The only games that didn't lock you in were those that weren't class based.

[Ruvaldt]

As I said, it wasn't perfect.  Mind, we had EQ1 as a comparison at the time.  Being able to switch your profession around at all was pretty revolutionary.  (Was UO allowing reskilling at that point?  I never followed it too closely.)

Yeah, it was.  In UO, once you hit the skill cap, but increased a skill, it would take the increased skill points out of skills that you had marked with a "down" arrow rather than the pool of unspent points.  You could also lock skills in place at pretty much any value so that they wouldn't max ou, and thus take up room in your skill % total.

[DraconianOne]

That doesn't appear to be the case in SWG, it was "How bad do I want to try this other aspect of the game? Enough to abandon all the work I put into the other thing?"

Honestly, dropping a profession to pick up another was, in most cases, relatively painless and quite a few people did it all the time. Crafting was a pain to level if you were poor or just starting out (unless you found a sponsor) but if you'd been playing a while you could probably get hold of a load of cheap resources and power level quite quickly. Combat was even easier - because (pre CU) there were no character levels, you could still join a group of people and go fight stuff even if you weren't as effective in terms of damage. It wasn't like a level 1 joining a group of lvl 85s or whatever. I don't think there was any restriction on what armour you could wear or how much your health could be buffed so survivability wasn't an issue.

Plus, no running back to trainers each time you got a box (level) as anybody who had the skill you wanted could train you. I recall levelling up to Master Rifleman or something over the space of an evening. The idea of "all the work I put in" didn't come into it for the most part.

[eldaec]

The thing where other players could take the place of npc trainers was cool - and easily transferable even to eq clones as well. No reason any random higher level guy from your class can't trigger access to the training dialog (if your design uses trainers at all).

[5150]

How did you pull that out of what I said?  

I was only touching upon how the combat portions of the game and the ability to participate in them directly conflicted with the ability to participate in the crafting/social aspects because they were in the same pool of resources for your character.  

This was a major problem for me and for a lot of people I played with.  You could either be "Star Warsy" or "Sim Beru", but those of us that wanted to do both were fighting a losing battle with an extremely restrictive system.

So you basically want to be able to do everything solo in a multiplayer game?

I can accept that if I want to Hybrid I cant be as good as someone who is dedicated. In your ideal world wouldn't everyone just end up with exactly the same character at the end of the day (i.e. do everything at max level - granted not everyone would bother with it all but thats not the point)?

EVE did this better
 - Add 'stuff' quicker than you can train it all.
 - In industry just have so much esoteric shit going on and keep lathering it on so nobody can realistically do it all.
 - In combat rely on the fact that you can only use one set of gear at a time to define roles.

I can't imagine ever permanently dropping anything that took a genuine grind to get in the first place (fuck weaponsmith).

No, Eve just encourages you to sub a shit ton of alts (Power of 2 offer for example) so CCP make more money.

FWIW In SWG I was Master DE (yes, the lower boxes were a grind but thats another discussion) with enough Merchant to sell my stuff and (even after CU) enough Carbine (RP choice) to be useful (at least if it wasn't inbalanced as hell and more often than not you incapped yourself with the specials).

I had a friend who always goes for the best combat class (he did eventually get Jedi via the village just in time to quit with the NGE). In other MMO's he's had to create new characters when the nerf/balance bat swings, which is a pain in the ass as he than has to power level just so he can team with us again.

In SWG he could just shift his skill points over to the new FOTM profession without it causing a huge problem for everyone.

I think my only complaint about the skill system was when they let you reallocate the points (after the CU hit I believe) since everyone worked out that if you just stuck a merchant vendor down the xp flowed in even when you weren't online and enabled you to level up other professions without actually doing anything.

(I'm not going to complain too loudly though as thats how I got to Master DE in the end since the devs seemed determined to make droids completely bloody useless!)

[Lantyssa]

I took my mouse droid everywhere if it makes you feel any better.

[Morat20]

I took my mouse droid everywhere if it makes you feel any better.

I loved me my harvesting droid. :)

I'd move onto the next kill while my droid was off deboning my last one. :)

[Count Nerfedalot]

What part of wanting to be a top-notch crafter in a single craft out of what, 10? AND a top-notch combatant in a single combat role out of another 10? simultaneously equates to wanting to do everything solo in a multiplayer game?  That is a stupid strawman argument that invalidates everything else anyone using it has to say.  It is NOTHING like wanting to be some uber tank-mage-healer-master-of-all-crafts-plus-resource-gathering monster.  Nothing.  So stop using that stupid argument.

[5150]

What part of wanting to be a top-notch crafter in a single craft out of what, 10? AND a top-notch combatant in a single combat role out of another 10? simultaneously equates to wanting to do everything solo in a multiplayer game?  That is a stupid strawman argument that invalidates everything else anyone using it has to say.  It is NOTHING like wanting to be some uber tank-mage-healer-master-of-all-crafts-plus-resource-gathering monster.  Nothing.  So stop using that stupid argument.

If that was directed at me, I don't believe, prior to this point, anyone had discussed how many professions a character should have been able to master at the same time (bearing in mind there were two tiers) although Raph did touch on it briefly and therefore 'everything' was used.

It would appear your issue wasn't therefore with the single character slot but actually with the costs of the skill boxes and/or the max. skill points a character could have?

[Surlyboi]

But that was the thing. Even with the limitation of skill boxes, you could still make yourself one badass perpetrator that still had a soft side. My girlfriend at the time was a bounty hunter and a dancer. One of the only people I knew on our server that had a firespray, fer chrissakes, yet you could still find her shaking that ass in cantinas every now and then, waiting for someone she had a bounty on to walk in.

Me, I was happy with my smuggler/TKM/jedi and my TKM/BE combo was pretty damned funny too.

[Sky]

I'm known for my alt-itis.  It wasn't an issue in SWG because I could be whatever I wanted.

It's like making multiple of any class in Rift.  Unless you're trying to see the Guardian/Defiant side, why would you?  There's no point nor need.

1. You can't be a Trandoshan AND a wily old black lady who is just down on her luck and needs to shake her moneymaker.

2. Agree with that one. I have four characters and no desire to make another one. It was a bit tough to get my visuals narrowed to only four avatards, though. A lack of diverse and interesting races "helps" 

[Morat20]

What part of wanting to be a top-notch crafter in a single craft out of what, 10? AND a top-notch combatant in a single combat role out of another 10? simultaneously equates to wanting to do everything solo in a multiplayer game?  That is a stupid strawman argument that invalidates everything else anyone using it has to say.  It is NOTHING like wanting to be some uber tank-mage-healer-master-of-all-crafts-plus-resource-gathering monster.  Nothing.  So stop using that stupid argument.

Skill points were, IIRC, set to two and a half 'mastered' professions. You could be a Master Weaponsmith, a Master Rifleman and I think still have enough points to have top-line vendors.

If ALL your skill points were in crafter you generally got eaten by womp rats. Which was an issue.

I think the crafting interdepency was a seperate issue, as well as the problem with Master Boxes. The former I think was a solid game mechanic (note: WoW also uses this. It's pretty common), but the latter --

*shrug*. I can see what the original goal probably was -- and that I think was worthwhile. The idea of being able to take enough weaponsmith to make, say, top-quality scopes or power paks whereas the guys making top-end guns had to purchase those schematics or components because they were too specialized was an interesting one. And in the places where it worked, it worked well -- the interlocking economy between resouce vendors, scouts, and crafters worked really well.

The related interlocks between various weaponsmiths of various skills, for instance, did not. Because of the huge Master bonuses.

[Samwise]

Skill points were, IIRC, set to two and a half 'mastered' professions. You could be a Master Weaponsmith, a Master Rifleman and I think still have enough points to have top-line vendors.

That was about my exact build, except that it wasn't possible to get all the vendors that way (you needed Master Merchant and Master Artisan for that).

[5150]

Skill points were, IIRC, set to two and a half 'mastered' professions. You could be a Master Weaponsmith, a Master Rifleman and I think still have enough points to have top-line vendors.

That was about my exact build, except that it wasn't possible to get all the vendors that way (you needed Master Merchant and Master Artisan for that).

I seem to remember that you could however get master merchant, stick down then vendors and the drop the unneeded skills that were only required to place vendors, not maintain them

[Morat20]

I seem to remember that you could however get master merchant, stick down then vendors and the drop the unneeded skills that were only required to place vendors, not maintain them

Yep. I think Master Merchant was needed for like global visilibity or something, which is why I hit the box. I was dropping Merchant and picking up Creature Handler when the CU hit and I left the game.

Interestingly enough -- one of the reasons I've had a hard time picking WoW back up with the new expansion is they redid the mechanics so much (Hunters especially with the new focus stuff) that I've just not felt it was worth it to relearn. It's a surprisingly small thing that didn't so much sour the expansion on me -- it just was enough of a hump that I've yet to really deal with it and explore the new content.

Instead it's just waiting for me to get the WoW bug again. I suspect that's universal to MMORPGs. You need change and growth, but too much and it discourages players from continuing. If they're going to learn something new, why not the newest shiny MMORPG that came out, rather than relearning to play?

[Samwise]

Skill points were, IIRC, set to two and a half 'mastered' professions. You could be a Master Weaponsmith, a Master Rifleman and I think still have enough points to have top-line vendors.

That was about my exact build, except that it wasn't possible to get all the vendors that way (you needed Master Merchant and Master Artisan for that).

I seem to remember that you could however get master merchant, stick down then vendors and the drop the unneeded skills that were only required to place vendors, not maintain them

Ah yes, I remember that now.  I also remember the forum community frothing at the mouth about this rampant "cheating" and requesting that the dev team make closing that loophole their top priority.  Which they eventually did, since it was a hell of a lot easier than doing something that might make the game BETTER.    And then shortly thereafter, the CU came along and the merchant profession was gutted/removed anyway, or something.  I'd unsubbed by that point.  God, I'd blocked all of that out.

[Morat20]

Ah yes, I remember that now.  I also remember the forum community frothing at the mouth about this rampant "cheating" and requesting that the dev team make closing that loophole their top priority.  Which they eventually did, since it was a hell of a lot easier than doing something that might make the game BETTER.    And then shortly thereafter, the CU came along and the merchant profession was gutted/removed anyway, or something.  I'd unsubbed by that point.  God, I'd blocked all of that out.

In real game design, Merchant would have either been heavily revamped or eliminated. The lack of soul-bounds and the looting and crafting stuff meant that lots of people needed vendors, the AH was deliberately price-limited, which meant there wasn't a potential for a true 'Merchant class'.

It was a solid idea, another social tie, but it just wasn't working in practice. Which meant it needed to be removed or eliminated. Everyone that wanted loot, resource, or goods vendors just took some merchant and nobody got squat out of keeping more Merchant than enough for the vendors. Should have been roled into an artisan line, at most.

[5150]

Ah yes, I remember that now.  I also remember the forum community frothing at the mouth about this rampant "cheating" and requesting that the dev team make closing that loophole their top priority.  Which they eventually did, since it was a hell of a lot easier than doing something that might make the game BETTER.    And then shortly thereafter, the CU came along and the merchant profession was gutted/removed anyway, or something.  I'd unsubbed by that point.  God, I'd blocked all of that out.

IIRC Merchant survived the CU because thats when they added the ability to directly respec skill boxes for other skill boxes (without having to re-grind the xp) and everyone just used merchant xp (which flowed in freely once you placed a vendor) to respec to other professions

Should have been roled into an artisan line, at most.

I think you got the base level 'coke machine' vendor during artisan (and maybe a splattering or other merchant bits), but yes in hindsight it would probably have been better to integrate the merchant tree with the artisan tree (although merchant was tier 2 and artisan tier 1).....

[Samwise]

For some reason all of this is making me feel more motivated to work on my zombie MMO.    Maybe it's the idea of getting to implement a cool branching skill tree like SWG's that isn't stupid.   

[Raph]

In real game design, Merchant would have either been heavily revamped or eliminated. The lack of soul-bounds and the looting and crafting stuff meant that lots of people needed vendors, the AH was deliberately price-limited, which meant there wasn't a potential for a true 'Merchant class'.

It was a solid idea, another social tie, but it just wasn't working in practice. Which meant it needed to be removed or eliminated. Everyone that wanted loot, resource, or goods vendors just took some merchant and nobody got squat out of keeping more Merchant than enough for the vendors. Should have been roled into an artisan line, at most.

I don't follow your logic. Without a price-limited AH, there would no vendors at all (perfect info economy eliminates shopkeeper gameplay). And there were quite a lot of Master Merchants.

I *think* you're saying "people needed to buy and sell lots of stuff so everyone should have been able to run a shop." The point of the merchant tree was to enable those who wished to do the shopkeeper gameplay to do so. There's a specific audience target for that. The fact that if you were outside that target you could pick up just a little skill and get by would be "as designed."

[eldaec]

Were merchants really a positive gameplay mechanic? The *real* mechant profession traded in the market for profit (and provides liquidity in the process).

Merchants in SWG were in fact vending machine attendants.

[Mrbloodworth]

I was a merchant, it was indeed useful.

[Paelos]

I was a miner! It was glorious.

[Nyght]

As a practical matter, my recollection is that a 'little' bit of merchant skill was useless. Perhaps prior to the auction house showing vendors globally sure. But after that, you needed enough to get the global exposure. Folks doing high end like Krayt (sp) pearls or taking harvesting requests generally did so by direct contact and had no vendors.

[Mrbloodworth]

I believe thats where "interdependence" kicked in.

[Morat20]

I don't follow your logic. Without a price-limited AH, there would no vendors at all (perfect info economy eliminates shopkeeper gameplay). And there were quite a lot of Master Merchants.

On rereading that, I realized I skipped a few important bits. :) I blame fatigue.

The idea was solid (and the limited AH played into it) which was:
1) Crafters, gatheres, and combat types find a merchant, sell goods (loot, crafted items, resources, etc)  to merchant.
2) Merchant puts them on vendor. Full merchant tree gives global vsibility and enough vendors to run a 'shop' so that goods can be easily found by going to the correct vendor.
3) Sellers get rid of inventory items immediately, merchant marks up goods a bit and makes profit.

In practice, however, it just didn't happen. You didn't have a lot of full merchants doing -- those that existed were basically doing the equivilant of trying to buy up as much of a commodity and resale it at a higher price, basically like scouring auction houses to find under-priced goods. Except with vendors scattered over a dozen worlds, they really couldn't do so effectively.

What you HAD was generally either you or  a friend who bit the bullet and took enough Merchant to have three or four vendors and global visibility. (And then exploited to drop as much as possible of the tree). Even in PA's there was rarely a dedicated merchant, unless it was someone's alt who was basically there AS a merchant and generally side-crafter (furniture, paintings -- the sort of thing that didn't need experimentation points but could provide solid vendor items).

It was a skill tree and a class that someone had to suck it up and take, for the most part., which is a sign that it really needed to be removed or revamped.

I know I really begrudged the skill points -- and I loved having vendors -- because I was my friend's loot vendor. I'd put their stuff up on my vendor, and when it solld I'd give them the money.

I understand the theory. The reality? People two-boxed to get an alt who had a vendor, or lost a ton of needed skill points in order to sell their crafted goods. The *best* you could hope for was a PA with a full-time merchant alt or two, and even then you had to trust them to give you the money.

The ability to allow others to place goods on your vendor directly (IE: I give my friend permission to put stuff on a specific vendor, when it sells the money goes to him -- less a specific % I set and he agrees to when he places it) would have helped. It was a nightmare going through my mail trying to figure out what sold and who I owed money to, and I only did this for like three people (myself and two others).

Also, I think if Merchant boxes had given you more and more ability to remotely view, sort, analyze, and acquire goods you might have seen dedicated merchants. It was freakin' Star Wars, for Pete's sake. Why can't I buy goods from a vendor on another planet without leaving my home? There are guys in Eve, WoW and any other MMORPG who LIVE for basically playing an economics game. If going up the Merchant tree basically gave you the same tools someone playing the AH on WoW gave you, it would have formed a much better niche.

Especially if a basic artisan, or hell just a basic house, gave you the ability to put up a vendor -- even if one that could only sell to Merchants remotely.

That would allow anyone with a house to sell to Merchants, anyone with artisan to put up a merchant or two that could sell to anyone who saw them (so really good for player cities), and merchants themselves to look at an entire galaxy of goods and buy and sell, getting goods for their own shops/malls.

[Ingmar]

This all sounds incredibly inconvenient for the person who will buy and use the items in the end.

[Samwise]

As with a number of SWG professions, the idea was interesting, but the actual utility/gameplay you got wasn't a good return on your SP investment because there just wasn't enough stuff for a dedicated merchant to do on a day-to-day basis.  IIRC half of the skill boxes in the Merchant tree were basically placeholders; that maybe should have been a clue that there wasn't enough gameplay there to justify all those skill points.   

[Nyght]

Later in the game, I had an architect that was kind of a hybrid. She had full master Arch and Merchant. She specialized in interior decorator items like rugs, paintings, rare interior items. She would fly around and buy up rug parts, blueprints of rarer items, and anything that fit that was below the potential sales price. She really did little of actual building construction, there was little demand after the game was settled. She made a ton of cash though.

[Samwise]

Later in the game, I had an architect that was kind of a hybrid. She had full master Arch and Merchant. She specialized in interior decorator items like rugs, paintings, rare interior items.

Yeah, I think that was the last thing my character was doing before I unsubbed.  I realized that the most fun thing about being a weaponsmith had been decorating my shop, but it was a pain in the ass to actually find someone who sold all the different kinds of furniture, so I opened an IKEA.    Levelling architect was a hell of a lot easier than levelling weaponsmith, partly because you could grind items that used large amounts of cheap resources and gave lots of XP, and partly because furniture quality didn't matter so you could assemble things by hand (and get the grind XP) that you could then actually sell.

[Morat20]

This all sounds incredibly inconvenient for the person who will buy and use the items in the end.

Not really. The way it ended up, every player city had a massive mall of vendors. The problem wasn't finding something to buy (unless it was quite rare, which is  always a problem) -- anyone taking a shuttle into a player city could see all the vendors. The problem was selling stuff.

Yours, or loot, or resources. You either needed a vendor of your own, or to catch a merchant actually in. I think there was some crappy-ass way to sell directly to a vendor, but it was more like a "I give you this, you okay whether to spend X" system. (And the inventory system SUCKED).

It wouldn't have changed a thing for the end-user, which was pretty easy. Not as easy as an auction house, but it was REALLY hard not to notice player cities full of crafting vendors and loot vendors.

Merchants in SWG either needed to be removed, or turned into something that could work like in Eve -- basically a class with full access to the entire playerbase public transactions, and the ability to winnow through it so you could actually 'play the market' or create the equivilant of an economic consortium.

The problem was that merchants were just like everyone else when it came to buying -- they had to fly from planet to planet, drive out to each vendor and look at the inventory. If you were going to make a merchant class, why on earth didn't that include getting the ability to, you know, NOT do that? Any businessmen has peons to fetch and collate that sort of thing for him.

Nyght: Since I had the vendors, I bought painting schematics. I always had TONS of excess hide and cheap components, so making giant painting lots for factories was easy. I think I did rug parts and a few others. I had the skill points tied up in vendor anyways.

[Ingmar]

So you're saying you had to browse each vendor separately, in-person, to see what was for sale there, but that wasn't inconvenient for the buyer? Even DAOC had a global search for player vendor contents.

[Amaron]

So you're saying you had to browse each vendor separately, in-person, to see what was for sale there, but that wasn't inconvenient for the buyer? Even DAOC had a global search for player vendor contents.

I remember some sort of vendor search at one point at least.   You still had to actually go and buy it manually in the middle of nowhere though.

[Tale]

So you're saying you had to browse each vendor separately, in-person, to see what was for sale there, but that wasn't inconvenient for the buyer? Even DAOC had a global search for player vendor contents.

How might it work in a grimy fictional galaxy, plagued by civil war and a domineering empire, where much is illicit and spoken in hushed tones? There was a busy official market with global search, but it was price-capped. Your own NPC vendors were not price-capped. So the really good stuff was on private vendors.

Stockpile worthwhile stuff, build a shop, put a sign outside saying what you're selling. If you were any good, people shared waypoints to Ingmar's Weapons on Tatooine. Most things had decay or charges, so you got return customers unless they found better product.

You were listed on the planetary map under vendors. You could add a note to items on the public market, giving people your shop location, and set up a droid that advertised for you in cities.

But the co-operative malls in player cities worked best. Well-known traders would often have a mall outlet in addition to their own shop. People knew it was your outlet because you named the NPC "Ingmar's Guns".

[WindupAtheist]

So you're saying you had to browse each vendor separately, in-person, to see what was for sale there, but that wasn't inconvenient for the buyer? Even DAOC had a global search for player vendor contents.

UO still works like this. It's mitigated a little bit in comparison to SWG by the fact that at least you can instantly teleport between shops, but nevertheless it's a giant cockstab. All I've been hearing from ex-SWG people in this thread is "No no the kicks in the nuts felt kinda good once you got used to them!"

Look, guys, I know what it is to be irrationally in love with a clusterfucked old sandbox MMO, but come on. Some of you haven't come anywhere near completely to terms with just how much stupid bullshit you were overlooking even when the game was "good".

How might it work in a grimy fictional galaxy...

Weapons would be manufactured by a handful of massive corporations, not individual artisans like it's the goddamn middle ages. If I want to buy a handgun I go buy a Glock or something, I don't google up a gunsmith and then go out into the mountains with him to mine for ore like a 19th century prospector. Jesus Christ. Don't even try to appeal to "realism" with this shit.