Posted by Zlatto in Zlatto's Bazaar | 6 Comments

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 swear the info coming out about the game has me spinning around like a Stim-pickled SW:TOR kid. As I sort through all the of the press articles and wait impatiently upon the Fan Site Summit to happen, I figured I would circle back to an item I read recently that really caught my eye.

From a recent article on MMORPG’s Michael Bitton (potential spoilers – beware!)

The Hammer is one of the new Flashpoints that appears to be more focused on gameplay and puzzles than the cinematic flair present in the previously revealed Black Talon and Esseles. Some bits of group dialogue precede the actual Flashpoint, but once you arrive, it plays more like a typical dungeon run. However, what really stood out about the Hammer was the way Crew Skills were used throughout the experience. Players proficient enough in certain Crew Skills could, for example, re-activate a mining drill in order to break through a wall, circumventing a good deal of the Flashpoint’s trash mobs and allowing the group to beeline for the first boss. Later on, an elevator could be sliced, though no one in the group had high enough Slicing to figure out what that would have entailed.

What I get out of that is, that in some cases, players could be leveraging their Crew Skills within the Operations or Flashpoints for value beyond just gathering resources.

We all wondered when we saw an Imperial Agent messing with a computer terminal instead of dealing damage during the Eternity Vault video, what mechanic was really being used by the player. Anyone who isn’t an umron has to be wondering whether leveraging Cybertech on a damaged droid could also potentially create a ‘pet’ for a player. Or using your Biochem skill to create special adrenals needed to get the group down a different path and save some time. Just think, instead of being a liability by putting the group at risk when distracted by harvesting a node, you could be sought after for the combination of your combat and non-combat skills. So in the nicest way possible, elitists can go suck a flaming flarg nugget. They might be needing us crafting-focused players more than you think!

So what does it mean for ‘Looking For’ chat spamming? Well, besides looking for just the right class, we could see players trying to find the right class with the right Crew Skills to either gain more value or complete the mission with less effort.

In many previous MMOs the crafter was brought along to generate extra loot (can I get an AMEN from anyone who skinned the Beast in Blackrock Spire?) and whenever Finkle’s Skinner dropped, everyone with skinning was looking around hoping they were the only skinner. So it’s not ground breaking for gatherers to be seen as value-adds for instance runs. In many a run through Molten Core, there were plenty of side loot rolls for those who would skin the Core Hounds. High-end materials that can be gathered from mobs or nodes within the end-game locations has always been one way MMO designers have tried to limit the amount of certain materials to the masses, I am just extra excited about the leveraging of the actual ‘crafting’ side at the end game.

So what are you ideas or guesses related to the way BioWare can add true utilization of our Crew Skills to bring value to the ‘raid’?