SWTOR's Crafting Goes Farmville

The first insight of the TOR crafting system sees the light from Electronic Arts Winter Showcase in London.

BW have said all along that hero's will have a heroic crafting system. So you are unlikely to see a Sith mining or making cloths. With this in mind, BW have come up with the crew skill crafting system.

From your ship, you will be able to command your companions to complete crafting tasks, with different companions excelling in specific areas.
This Crew Skill system will be divided into three majors groups, Gathering, Crafting, and Missions.

These skills include-

• Gathering - Bio Analysis and Slicing
• Crafting - Artificer and Bio Chem
• Missions - Diplomacy and Treasure Hunting

Active companions would only be useful in gathering, I see this as you killing/questing and your companion looting hides, bones and the like.
Other companions in passive mode will be to complete other tasks, crafting and missions. Missions and crafting can be stacked, this kind of hints that they will continue to complete there tasks while off-line, just like you would find in farmville.

It seems that almost everyone no matter how they feel about crafting, will at least dabble with the crafting system. I find this way of crafting a bit of a let down with the very little info we have received. With everyone having the same pool of companions to pull from, and with tasks being able to be stacked. Players that tend to lean towards crafting as a high priority at end game content. Will have no benefit over a PvPer, or a player that likes to do raids.

This will leave players that like tailer there class to be a crafter over PvP/PvE class. I may be wrong but I see no benefit in trying to be a crafter. If missions like t-hunting is all governed by a random dice roll, I fail to see a dedicated crafter like myself having any benefit over anyone else.

Crafters take pride in there work, and do many things that others find boring. Taken time out of raids and PvP, and do some of the more time consuming aspects like mining and gathering, this is the 1 point that sets us apart from the rest of the competition. Having this 1 aspect taken away from us kind of kills crafting as a viable end game.

I do hope I am way of my speculation here, but it does look like crafting, and those that like to stand out as top end highly dedicated crafters, are going to get totally shafted.

Time will tell.

BW do not shaft this 1 up please. You may or may not know how important crafting is to some players. So please give it the time it deserves and let crafters standout from the crowd.