Toiling Away for Your Guild

Peons hard at work.

SWTORCrafter asks today, "How can a guild best support their crafters in SWTOR?"  While this largely depends on the game, I feel that much of the onus is actually on the Crafter in this scenario.  The Crafter and their crew must first explain why it is in the best interest in the guild as a whole to assist you in your endeavors.

Let's take EVE Online, for example. In EVE, my corporation and I would regularly sponsor “Mining Operations” for the benefit of the entire Corp. In EVE, almost 95% of every item or ship that you see floating around in space was originally made by a player. It was a lot easier for people in EVE to understand how the raw minerals that we were gathering could directly benefit them because the same raw materials that we were extracting from space rocks, could then be used to craft any number of things.  As a Tailor or a Leatherworker for example, how would you convince the plate-wearing Tank that he really needs to give you a hand?  The answer hopefully is that the Tank is an awesome person and would gladly help you regardless, but not everyone is so lucky.

Much of it depends on what all we'll be able to craft using our Crew Skills.  With three of the skills still locked away in the depths of BioWare mountain, it's unclear for example, if the Armormech Crafter will be able to craft all wearable armor or not.  The skill is defined on the Official SWTOR site as having "the ability to work with hard metals and electronic shielding to construct all types of personal armor."  If they do indeed craft armor for everyone, convincing others to assist you will be much easier.

The Scavenging Missions UI

Another great feature of the Crew Skills system is that not everyone even wants to craft, or even gather for that matter.  As a Crafter, you'll want to quickly identify those people in your guild and work out some sort of exchange.  Some of them may be more than willing to hire out their own Companions' services, running Scavenging missions for you while they're offline.  This could end up working to everyone's advantage, as long as your guildmates have a free Companion.

While you can still go out and Gather resources yourself, it sounds like the bulk of this can be offloaded to your companions.  We may not need to organize a "Guild Crafting Night" per se, but I think that it'd still be a great idea to do so.  Some of my most enjoyable MMO moments have come out of random events like these, because of the people I was with at the time.

"Sell All Grays"

Georg Zoeller stopped by the main SWTOR forums today, as he has been doing fairly frequently lately, and dropped this tidbit regarding Companions:

In TOR, you indeed have the option to command your faithful (or scornful) companion to make a trip to the nearest market to lighten your backpack and fatten your wallet by selling objects of purely monetary value.

As you command your (possibly hateful or even loving) companion to do so, which they will only agree to if you are not engaged in hostile activities and they are convinced your life is not in immediate danger, they will arrange for quick transport to the closest market and return after a short while (roughly a minute, subject to tuning) with your hard earned money.

It is assumed you trust your (trustworthy) companion in so far as to accept whatever they tell you in regards to the prices they negotiated and will not undermine your (purely professional) working relationship with them with potentially insulting questions about taxes, fees, union dues and other applicable fees.

In other words, yes you can do that.

I can get on board with that.  It's clear that BioWare wants the Companion to be something more than just a mobile DoT effect.  I don't want to read too far into Daniel Erickson's comments regarding "setting up shop," or "opening your own business," but it seems like the Crafting aspect has the possibility of being much deeper than the system in many other MMOs.  I appreciate a player-driven economy, and I do hope to see some sort of option available to throw myself into that role when SWTOR launches.