Resources with stats

The news on Star Wars Galaxies are bad: While completely changing your game system from virtual world to twitchy shooter game is already a bad idea, the developers in addition managed to botch the implementation. SWG at release was a bug-infested mess. SWG after the NGE changes is said to be worse. Ouch! Far from reviving the game, it seems SWG is headed for a fall of a cliff.

So thinking back to the time when I played it, I wondered what exactly I liked in SWG. And the answer curiously is "resources with stats". Let me explain that with a comparison with World of Warcraft:

If in World of Warcraft you mine copper, you get copper ore, plus rough stones and the occasional low-level gem. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, which you could do to alter the result. Your level, your mining skill, nothing has any effect on mining, everybody in the game will get exactly the same quantity and quality of copper ore. If you move to tin, iron, mithril, and so on, the story is the same. You will need to be of higher level to mine them, because of the more dangerous monsters around the ore spots, but as long as you have the minimum skill and make it to the ore spot alive, your level and skill make no difference to the quality and quantity of the ore mined.

In Star Wars Galaxies, every week the location of all resources would change, and you would use your surveying skill while traveling over large areas to find locations for resources with high stats. Finding a mediocre spot with mediocre quality resources is easy, finding a spot with a high yield of some rare resource with good stats is hard, and requires both player and avatar skills. Finding resources in SWG was a game, in WoW it is just work.

That has a profound influence on crafting and the player economy. In SWG resources sold at different prices, according to quality. You bought or collected low quality stuff for items where quality didn't matter, and used high quality stuff for crafting the best possible armor and weapons, which would sell for high amounts of money. In WoW the market price of copper is only depending on supply and demand, and is easy to manipulate. Some people buy cheap resources and resell them at higher price. And regular crafters who want to buy resources don't get any choice: If your recipe says you need copper, then there is nothing else in the game that you could use. You can't make your crafted item cheaper by using lower quality resources, or craft a high-quality master piece.

The crafting system in SWG had lots of flaws, I remember grinding 1,650 Mabari chest plates to achieve Master Armorsmith status. But collecting good resources and making master armor was fun. The WoW resource gathering and crafting system is downright primitive in comparison. I do hope that one day another MMORPG will make resources have stats. I really would like to play a master crafter again, who's quality of goods depend on his skills, and not on having found rare recipes and rare resources on a dungeon crawl.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:01 AM Permanent Link