SWTOR Guild Summit: Crew Skills and Economy

Georg Zoeller on economy and crew skills:

The details disclosed:

A. Economy
– economy going well “in spite of GTN”
– annualised GDP in-game has surpassed that of Germany
– crew skill distribution: artifice most popular crafting, underworld most popular mission skill
– wealth distribution level 50’s: 80% or so have less than 400K credits
– less than 1% have more than 10 million credits (!)
– majority of credits spent in-game are on ability training, then things like container purchases etc take over after reaching Level 50
– credit sources: quest rewards dominate
– relative wealth: starting to see that people are able to save credits
– inflation rate in-game is 12%
– faction selection: 57% Empire / 43% Republic across all servers
– 70/30 male/female character gender selection
– Smuggler / Agent remain least popular classes, Inquisitor most popular (hard to see figures on charts on live stream sorry)
– levelling curve – extremely smooth, no large discrepancies in time spent per level etc
– 84% of level 50’s have less than 1 million credits
– understand repair costs are too high but can’t change immediately
– Ilum chest looting: fix coming in 1.2
– not seeing a lot of bots / credit farmers but they are around here and there
– credit spam in-game minimal, people banned immediately where needed

B. Crew Skills

– System overall well received – number two location of where credits go
– 1.2: legacy upgrades, C2-N2/RV-NQ crafting abilities, endgame mods from reverse engineering, every crew skill being given an endgame purpose, lowering cost of higher end speeder training, new schematics
– average crafter is richer and better geared

Q&A

– ‘maybe’ going to add repair costs to PvP gear but nothing formalised and definitely won’t be equipment damage on dying in PvP
– social impact or purpose of crew skills: crafters best source of custom appearances as of 1.2
– reusable content (stims) likely to be phased out – focus is on creating content not for one or tewo benefits linked to end-game
– crafter contract system: not an immediate concern but on the ‘wall of crazy’
– ‘we are in love with our crafting system,” and want to bring it up to the glory it deserves
– 1.2 will have tooltips to tell you if you can reverse engineer something
– longer crew-skill missions of 16 hours or more: “We like that idea,” would incentivise ‘popping’ into the game once a day
– two companions on one mission to reduce time” nothing planned as want to keep GUI simple (off-hand comment about an iPad SWTOR app “way in the future”)
– no failing of expensive missions bought on the GTN coming with 1.2