I have recently came upon the revelation that crafting in this game is poorly designed.
First problem:
Once you manage to unlock the people passed the center room at Memory Alpha, the next tier of items are in the MK IV and MK VI range. I have searched everywhere in the galaxy and no vendor sells the "white" versions of the items.
Problem 2:
The second tier of items can only be found through random drops. If you are an admiral and trying to get to tier 3 of crafting. It is impossible to do. Since when you go to exploration missions the drops scale up to your characters level.
Problem 3:
The only way to get the white items to refine them to a better product is to buy them on the exchange. The prices on the exchange are unrealistic and hyper-inflated. No one is going to pay any asking price beyond any price for the raw material on the exchange.
Who came up with this crafting system and market?
I understand we have to craft some 400,000 energy credits worth of items to even unlock the third tier of crafting items.
I will be amazed that no one at Cryptic envisioned hyper-inflation in this market. Some one needs to go take a course in macro economics and micro economics.
This post has been edited to remove content which violates the Cryptic Studios Forum Usage Guidelines ~ Phoxe
Comments
Where are these postings you speak of...?
Unfortunately, they speak mainly of slapping layers of duct tape over the shoddy framework rather than tearing it out and making a good one.
The idea of "upgrade rather than base fabrication" was awesome. Every bit of the system design beyond that is terribad.
Engineering Report - April 20, 2010:
TRIBBLE Maintenance and Release Notes - April 22, 2010:
And the latest post:
http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?p=2601060#post2601060
Item experimentation on your ship. I've been preaching that since launch.
I mean, if a P&P RPG can have item modification within limit - why not an MMO full of engineers, scientists, and tactical officers.
All this does is lead me to a big long list of items, with no useful information. I did not come away with any thing I did not know prior to reading the message.
I would like to know what exactly is going to change and how.
I would like to know if in the Fleet Action tool, will it be anyone in the fleet can set up a instance, or are they making it so only the leader can do this feature. If only the leader can do it, that will suck. I do not think the leader can be logged in 24/7 to let people play in their own instances. My fleet has 92 members spread out over 9 time zones.
One of the updates that I would like to see is for me to be able to upgrade a mark 1 common item all the way up to mark 10 Ultra Rare, customizing the stats and damages as I see fit. Now this wouldn't be cheap to do, but it would be a nice to be able to choose the stats for your weapons. It would be nice to even update Uncommon and Rare items to Ultra Rare and improve/choose their stats too.
Erm, I think it means that when you want to do a fleet action you just make an instance and go do it. From what I gather the system revamp will let you progress along a tree something like this
O
/ \
O O
/ \ / \
O O O
| | |
O O O
With each "O" being it's own unique set of stuff that you can make. Also there will be vendors for common items to upgrade and better classification for your materials, so you know that some alloy will be used in the making of a weapon and some radiation sample will be involved in making a deflector dish.
Well, it wasn't clear in your post you wanted details of the changes, but they haven't released anything other than they are going to revamp the current system. Watch the places I linked to for any upcoming info.
Well if you actually bother to READ and not just skim the threads on the Crafting system (which I agree needs a LOT of work, and a near total revamp; they are doing this in two phases:
1) Add a UI interface tyhat allows players to see their progress (ie how close they are to unlocking the various tiers of crafting NPCs).
2) Seeing how the players use the system once that UI is in and players start to use parts of the system that haven't seen much use.
3) Making changes and further erevamping the system after phases 1 and 2.
The Devs have stated they realize the system is broken and not popular with the playerbase, and they want to change, update an d improve it. That said, they honestly want to give the players the tools to understand better how it works now, and see what the response is before doing the planned updates and changes.
Hopefully, we'll see something better as a result, but time will tell.
well then you havent looked hard enough.......There are vendors that sell white version of items you can upgrade in each of the 3 vendors. Look harder,
Wish i could be more helpful but the attitude of the player base has really gotten to me lately, I'm not in a charitable mood.
So we may be able to see the changes on Tribble soon...
*shrug* The crafting system is an unfunny joke anyway at this point, troll or not.