Dec 26, 2011

Posted by in Blue Milk & Cereal | 12 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: Should TOR Have An External Crew Skills App?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

As more and more of us finally get into the game and become familiar with our Crew Skills, we start to wonder about the best way to improve our crafting, gathering and mission skills. If you’re unfamiliar, BioWare created a very interesting system that allows the player to send his or her companions to complete these tasks, rather than the player himself. Although, you as the player can still get harvest a resource node out the wild, should you so choose!

While some crafting tasks may only take a minute or two to complete, other missions may occupy tens of minutes or longer which causes many players to queue them up while they take a break or even head off to work or school. Due to the relatively passive nature of the Crew Skills,  some players choose to level their skills in windowed mode while doing other tasks. Whereas other players use remote-client applications to access their main computer running the game from their mobile devices such as an iPad or iPhone.

What if BioWare actually expanded on what these players are already doing? What if we had a web-based “Crew Skills Client” that allowed players to give orders to their in-game companions while they were somewhere other than in the game? BioWare could even go all the way and create a fully integrated smartphone application that acted as a communicator between the player and the companions, reporting on the mission outcomes? This would definitely give the Crew Skill system a truly innovative dimension.

So what do you think? Should TOR have an external Crew Skill application? Do you think it would have a positive or negative effect on in-game economy? Let us know below!

Should TOR have an external Crew Skills app?

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  1. I think something like this would be really helpful when we aren’t in the game. Especially for those students and people at work, where getting on to do crew stuff isn’t possible.

    • Lady Republic says:

      Good idea in theory, except that many employers block access to websites or game applications from their firewall. In my case, not only do I not have access to gaming sites, but I can’t even have my cell phone at work. :( Though that’s not typical – but blocking games sites often is. (Something about “productivity”, heh.)

  2. I would have supported this right up to the point where I realised that Slicing made more money in cash than it did in items. At that point, anyone not using this service is at a large cash disadvantage, and it skews the market.

  3. At first I thought an app like this would be awesome, still could be. The problem is that once you start getting more companions in game, it gets easier to level crew skills. With an app you would have players that are level 10 with max crafting in no time and ruin any chance of an economy

    • This would be great, and there’s not much danger of level 10s becoming crafting masters because of companions. The companions allowed out while crafting are limited to 2 at low levels, then increase to 3 at 30, 4 at 40, and 5 at
      50.

      Also, disliking this idea because it gives those with iPhones advantages over other players is silly, as they are not in-game playing. You could say there have been “advantaged” people the whole lifetime of MMOs: those that have all the time in the world to play, and thus level faster and craft more. If anything, this app is an equalizer to help people who can’t be in game all the time succeed a little more than they could before.

  4. You wouldn’t believe how strongly I feel about this. Launch day I’m sitting at work being very antsy because I was loosing time managing my companions

  5. All For The Empire says:

    I think a mobile app would be great, especially if it had some cool features like managing auctions and chatting with guildies. I hope they add some sort of armory feature to the web too so you can look up players and guilds and track your own gear progress.

  6. I like my brick-phone. I don’t want to feel like I need a hundred dollar smartphone to keep up with slicing inflation.

    But considering people are already leaving their characters logged in and using a whatsit to keep doing crew skill stuff without quests, I suppose adding a web interface would help me keep up a little.

    I used to be all 0_0 at million credit mounts, but it looks like that’s about the norm for a level 50’s spending cash these days.

  7. Dirtyshadow says:

    For auctions and just communicating with guildies, okay, wow armory does a good job at that.

    But to allow crew skill assigments, I think that is one BIG step too far. The point of the crew skill system is that your crew are doing the skills while your adverturing or while your offline… not while your psuedo online. And if an API code can assign crew, then someone will program an App to automatically macro them in sequence and instant-gold-farmer app, (never having to log into the game).

    There has to be some physical seperation from the game, else you will have the “haves” and the “have nots”. But I do believe there should be more social and website functionality for a game in 2012 than the same old build where the game moves forward… and the official website doesnt.

  8. I would like to see an app that gives me access to the Kodex entries. While I’m sitting on the game client I’ve no time to read all the entries.

    It would be fine also having access to the character stats and items just for Analyse purpose.

    In short terms a read-only access would be enough. I do not need to play the game elsewhere.

  9. only porb with this is that people at school cant get on the internet for stuff like this so its not very useful to us.

  10. I wanna say Yes, but I don’t have a phone that can use those apps. :(

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