Posted by Zlatto | 18 Comments

Zlatto’s Bazaar: Habits Of A Successful Merchant Player

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…

“Wealth is power. With wealth many things are possible.”
George Clason (little know fact – he was part Toydarian)

So who doesn’t want to be that player?  The player that never worries about credits, gets to taxi wherever and whenever  he wants and has tricked out their starship with all the best armament from around the galaxy.  When you see that player, its humanoid nature to wonder why not me?  Well, lets talk about why it’s not you, and what you should be planning to change in your gaming ways to be that player in Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Identifying The Change

“Worst of all has got to be the need for some individuals to constantly want to their upgrade gear. They want the best of the best, and no one will stop them. If there’s an epic item on the AH, they want to be the first with it. That’s a pretty huge issue for leveling characters, because (especially at first) there’s a need to differentiate from the pack. This might plague certain people.” – Momus

Now, I would trust this player with my credits only if he kept them in my line of sight the whole time, and I had my blaster out and charged.  But his opinions about economics and MMOs should be required reading for any gamer wanting to make an impact on their server. Momus’s brand of merchant madness can be read over in his column Blaster, Beggars & Credits right here at Ask A Jedi.

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Posted by Zlatto | 16 Comments

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.

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Zlatto’s Bazaar: Crew Skills Configurations

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Posted by Zlatto | 41 Comments

Zlatto’s Bazaar: Choosing Your Crew Skills

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…

I’m fairly certain that it’s not against the NDA to state I had more free time this past weekend than I had “hoped” I would.  In Hutta terms I got krolped.

So I’ve decided that it was time to sit down with all the information we have seen/read/heard about the crafting opportunities in Star Wars: The Old Republic and finally pick my path. Since I have set aside so much free time and nothing to spend it on, of course. (See reference to getting krolped above).

As many of you know I am Toydarian. By default, my hope is to cheat off of someone else.  So I will go ahead and outline some of my thoughts and hope that someone who has done more homework than I have will post something I can put into play when the beta weekend invite I SO RICHLY DESERVE arrives in my gmail account come next Wednesday.

Now, my decision making process may seem counter-intuitive. I do recognize it might be seen as such, but I will explain.  Without access to schematics, I find it very difficult to just select a Crew Skill strategy, and then back fill the options.  That would be the easiest way right?  I mean once you choose a crafting path you are locked into your options, but I wanted to take a different approach.  So here are my thoughts.

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Posted by Zlatto | 14 Comments

Zlatto’s Bazaar: What Defines A Successful Crafting Economy?

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 – I’ve got stuff I gotta sell.  Your comments are encouraged, especially if they make me credits…

It seemed to me that creating some discussion around how we all view the components of a thriving crafting economy could be a good start on the road to finding ways for us to be successful in the SW:TOR economy itself. Not to mention, it will give me insight on which of you all have a corporata mindset.

Where do I start? Well I’m an avid reader of blogs about MMOs in general, and when looking for deep thoughts on concepts I sometimes turn to Tobold. The principle I will be discussing was inspired from a larger blog post by Tobold posted back in 2009 on MMO economies. I call it the Tobold Principle.

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