Zlatto’s Bazaar: You Want Me To Get This?

Zlatto’s Bazaar is the one-third Wall Street, one-third criminal empire and one-half gossip rag. You need to keep up on the Bazaar if for no other reason than to keep an eye on your competitors. Don’t be a Ho-tah and visit often.  Your comments are encouraged, especially if they make me credits…

Ok, before I get into my bi-monthly rant, I feel the need to share something that is on my mind and quite possibly on the mind of 95% of the player base. Is it just me, or is the shot below the most frinking depressing image you can see on a daily basis?

Back To Bazaar Business!

Love it or hate it, Gathering is a necessary part of the crafting cycle in MMOs, be them sandbox or theme park games.There are many implementations of gathering. One of the most common – which we know TOR has as well –  is node gathering.  Now, the gang at BioWare has also gifted us with companions, and one of their functions is as crafting and gathering minions. In a few of the videos we’ve seen both the character and the trailing companion stop at either an exposed node or a dead creature/droid to harvest. That’s a nice twist where your companion can stop and do the dirty work, while you keep on truckin’.

From a non-combat point of view, what does walking around with a companion actually gain us besides one less crew member crafting or doing missions?
I know having a companion out impacts your combat, but is real-time gathering the only thing they are bringing to the party?

So what do you gain (or lose) by not picking it up yourself?  Do you or your companion have different chances at different results?  Do your companions all have the same skill level as your charactger? If skill level factors into the resources to be found then we could be missing out.  Now, I have no idea on how the nodes resources will be generated.  Is the value in the node determined when it generates in the game world, or does our gathering skill influence what you get out of a node?

Lets walk through my concerns using an imaginary Lava crystal node as we imagine adventuring across Mustafar (which is of course, not one of the launch planets!)  It will have regular Lava Crystals of course, but on rare occasions maybe an “exquisite” Lava Crystal can be mined from the same node. If the gathering system generates all resources in the node outside of any player influence, then the value of the node is set when spawned and the skill level in gathering from the above node is moot, except to determine if it can be gathered.  So having my character with skill Y gather the crystal node will have no impact on the resource gained versus having my companion with skill Y-20 gather it.

/speculation on

I know, I know.  You’re wondering what kind of giggledust I’ve been snorting to even think about the concept of nodes relying on the skills of the gathering player.  But there is some logic to my delusions.  We were told there would be a chance of critical successes in Crafting (Crew Skill #1.)  Daniel Erickson mentioned for Mission Skills (Crew Skill #2) that “kinda a roll would happen, maybe they get something small maybe something big.” So why not critical successes in the last of the  Crew Skills triumvirate, Gathering (Crew Skills #3)?  We know that Jedi Knight companion Lord Scourge (via the last update) has +10 Archaeology Efficiency, but does that just  allow him just a head start in mining nodes or does it also allow an ongoing advantage to getting blue drops out of crystal formations as compared to Mako?

The speculation is that this bonus will enable him to complete his missions a wee bit quicker than others without it, but what if, as the +Critical helps his ability in crafting to generate a critical success, why should he not hope for some sort of critical benefits in Gathering?  I know it seems far fetched, but if there is a chance to critically succeed in Crafting, and a chance for our companions to fail/crit succeed in Missions, then maybe we see something in Gathering too?

It’s not like they will be gathering from nodes in your absence, right?

There has been a lot of forum speculation about the concept of Missions and their impact on Gathering.  How they are ‘perceived’ as a way to bring resources into the crafting cycle without nodes (great concept) and the concern that Missions will be money sinks (doh!). Now, the concept of off-line gathering has always intrigued me. Setting up a droid for some strip mining in Star Wars Galaxies always made me smile. I like the concept, but I really have no context.  So before we all get too worked up we need to wait till the NDA drops or BioWare releases more official information. The challenge we all face is we have no idea of the credit to value/rarity/impact ratios of items gathered via Missions.

So a few weeks ago I asked about your Crew Skills configurations. The concept of how we gather with our companions impacts whether we will follow the standard Gather, Craft, Mission combo, or maybe we get greedy about raw resources.  Since there is a cost associated with Gathering Mission skills, will it be more common to see players wait on these until they establish their credits pipeline?  These are all questions I hope to pursue with you all once the NDA drops, the team at BioWare finalzies their in-game algorithms, and we can all sit down over a beer (craft-brewed, of course) and do some math.