Georg Zoeller posted an article on BioWare's Community Blog for The Old Republic, talking about
economic changes. Here's an excerpt:
Hi everyone,
Massively Multiplayer Online games are built around living, breathing worlds that are always evolving, and Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ is no different. In our upcoming Game Update 1.2, we’ll be introducing a wide assortment of new features and content, while also introducing a number of improvements and changes to the in-game economy.
As we work to create a more player-driven economy, you can expect significant improvements to Crew skills, and an extension of Crew skill gameplay, such as item creation and research, into the Elder-Game content. You’ll also see new items brought into the game, including new schematics, Legacy items, a new tier of Player vs Player and Player vs Environment weapons and armor, Legacy items, new schematics, and the ability to extract base-mods from purple items, as well as many other changes and improvements.
Weekly patch 1.1.5 (which is now on the Public Test Server) implements a number of changes in preparation of the upcoming Game Update, including the much requested removal of Light Side / Dark Side requirements on color crystals.
As it is expected when large scale changes are made to an economic system, enterprising players often find interesting opportunities to benefit from their knowledge about the changes beforehand (for example by studying test server patch notes).
With patch 1.1.5, we’ve decided to embrace these economic entrepreneurs and even go a step further:
By publishing a series of rumors and stories that are coming in across both the Imperial and Republic news wires, we are providing all of you with advance knowledge about some of the things to come in the near future…
The rest of the article includes these in character "rumors and stories". Mainly it's changes to speeder availability and color crystals.
It must say that I'm having a hard time understanding how this might impact me. I understand that part of it is talking about the crystal vendors that they've added on the test server; though I thought that those were just added to test the crystals it seems now that they're intending to add those to live as well, but only briefly. It feels as if they're doing this to seed the community with those crystals and then removing supply leaving it up to players to sell them on. Then again that only works if those crystals don't bind (as binding an item effectively takes it out of the economy) or if they intend to regularly re-supply the community again.
I don't think I like that. I guess it's a way to keep items rare now that they're no longer bound by alignment. But I think that the whole thing of keeping items 'rare' is BS to begin with. I don't want color crystals or speeders or anything else because it makes me 'special', but because I like the color/vehicle/etc. And I'm certainly not going to pay a fortune to another player just because they had the money and level and were lucky enough to get an item during the brief time the item was available.
I'm still hopeful that I'm simply misunderstanding the whole thing and that they are planning to add these items as their own puzzles much in the way that they did the Magenta Adegan crystal. That at least sounded like fun. Then at least you can work specifically towards it. But all having truly rare items will do is create a class of haves and have nots. Then again perhaps that's not fair of me to say considering that I still (even at level 50) use my pre-order STAP speeder to get everywhere. But at least I can't sell that.
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