WARNING....... Wall of text crits you for 178809324812 points, you are no more.......


I have a Combat level 29, Provisioning level 50 toon. I have had quite a bit of trouble with writs, since the patch where writ recs were added for sale via NPC vendors.

1st off, it appears that crafting writs are contingent upon combat leveling. I can't pull a level 6 writ due to not having Vet status on this toon. However, ALL of the NPC for sale recs are at end game that include that vet level, level 6 crafting. They do me no good what-so-ever. So, I'm stuck, for the moment with fulfilling level 5 writs. #1 problem was Mammoth Snout Pie. Didn't have the rec. That ended up with a 3 day grind in Coldharbor with my V4 toon grinding boxes out of the city and the only 1 decent single player dungeon that has any amounts of containers in it. Finally got that 1, with getting about 10-15 recs per evening and passing the ones I couldn't use down to my wife so she didn't have to run into this one. Now? I pulled the 2nd writ this toon has to do and get Blue Road Marathon required. Don't have that one either. Asked in guild chat if anyone had this one for sale, again, and got the same thing I received last time, dead silence. So that set me off on another multipal day grind (I suppose, as I've just started that grind today, got about 10 so far but not the one I need). Altho, I have 2, count em, two, Mammoth Snout Pies this time around. The reasoning I'm doing writs at all is I've read here that the writ rewards include the gold recs and had no idea of that fact when I leveled the toon by, (gasp), making food/drink.

Now, I'm sure not afraid of grinds in MMOs. I ground jedi in SWG before the holo-grind. But, this is a game mechanic that is required to fulfill yet another game mechanic. IE; specific quest lines. But yet the game mechanics are just about "programmed to fail" development depending solely on drops and the loot tables for completion, loot tables that have so many items in them the drop rate surely is so low that hardly anyone is going to fulfill these requirements the 1st time thru, or even the 10th time thru. You get a bunch of time doing a 3 day grind (and yet another Sunday afterwards) which ends up showing the player all the problems associated with the mechanics. Here's what I came up with so far;

The for sale receipes for writs. ALL of the writs should of been added to the NPC vendors and not just the recs based on crafting level. Players should not be pigeon-holed into playing the game the way developers think they would play the game and leveling. Basing a crafting toon, or the recs required, on Combat leveling is also in error. I would imagine that this was due to the Vet levels being tacked on to an existing game and developers never figure out what 1 change is going to effect and cancel all the problems associated with that change. They seem to be too busy just trying to get out the change itself. That's the Producer's job, but very few actually live up to that standard. (I ran an SWGEMU server as Producer myself and developers there had all kinds of ideas, some that sounded "way cool" but after just a little bit of thought changed too much of the base game and left all kinds of problems, such as this one).

Get rid of all ties of crafting leveling to combat leveling. They are 2 separate game systems. You should not have to be Vet1 Combat to pull an in-game writ if your crafting is leveled in it's entirety. Crafting has it's own leveling. Base requirements on that and that only.

Next, is the NPC "guildvendor" system". I'm in a trade guild but no1 has the required rec up for sale and no one has the rec not even listed for sale either, that is willing to part with it. At least the people on at the time I spammed I needed and was willing to pay for it. VERY poor game design and game limiting mechanics. So, what do I do now? Drop this guild and community so I can spam "looking for guild that has "Blue Road Marathon rec" for sale as my ONLY requirement to join their guild so I can head to their vendor, buy the rec, and then drop that guild also? And the next time I get in the same position, rinse and repeat? That surely does not foster community within an MMO nor does it help the in-game economy at all, not to mention that community is what basicly keeps your players subbing after they reach end-game and have done all the themepark content. Then you have the ever luvin spam in general chat "looking for X item for sale" or "selling X item" that your database/engine has to deal with also. And in a game where you have your engine just about as taxed as the next item you program for it to do will cause crashes on top of all the lag, timed out missed key-stokes, dropped packets, hitting the same button 5 times to get the gap closer, etc etc etc, it just does not make much sense to have your engine taking care of nothing more than chat spam due to the fact you have limited the game mechanics to players who want to buy something or sell something.

Make the guild vendors open to ANY1 to look thru them and buy what they want. OK, so ZOS, or somebody at ZOS with some amount of decision making power, read Koster's paper on how the bazaar ruined the economy in SWG. I happen to not /agree with him as I was there and played his game for 8 years+. I knew Raph, in game, on the forums, and as the SOE SWG producer, still email him from time to time, but Raph didn't play his own game! Therefore, he just didn't quite make the connection why all the players wanted the bazaar to have a search feature. His idea of making people go thru countless 100 item pages to find an item, to make them go to the "neighborhood vendor" was wrong then and it's still wrong now. Much less to say what that did to the Berkly Database that SWG used. No1 wants the buying of an item to be a grind, there is plenty enough grinds in MMOs to cover that requirement without making the simplest transaction to be a large grind also.

Ok, I have tried to be as "constructive" as I can be, I didn't like it when some1 came to my forums yelling "YOU SCREWED UP!!!!!!!" without even telling me what I did-much less a way to fix it to their satisfaction, full well knowing that I most probably have days of checking boxes and running 1 single player instance, over and over and over, yet AGAIN. Fighting a loot table that has 50-100+ items in it, including lockpicks and water that have the most chance of spawning. I believe if I see 1 more of them, I'm going to have a breakdown. I think every one of my toons (8) have close to a full 200 stack of lockpicks and the provisioner has a full stack of 200, at that level water. The idea to add the crafting writs to NPC vendors was a good one but tieing the writs to vet levels does away with all the benefit of your change. And then there's the economy "feature" of sole guild vendors (see above). Sorry, but I just had to log out, get a break from the same ole, same ole, and come vent my frustrations. Hopefully ZOS will do a better job of reading and taking in "feedback" than Smedley and SOE did.