For the standard, you must use World of Warcraft. Not because it's the first or best, but because it is the most played. Millions of players have played it as their first and only MMO, with a population that dwarfed EverQuest and other predecessors. Because of it's ubiquitousness, anything that comes after it will be compared to WoW: The AOL of MMOs.
SWTOR is a story-heavy MMO. It wants your choices to matter, and it wants to make your character's abilities change based on the decisions you make. There will be prescribed amounts of 'light' and 'dark' force points you earn based on these decisions, and the only way to do this will be through making clear choices during scripted events.
So a large part of character development will feel like a choose-your-own-adventure book. If you decide to spare the life of an attacker, go to pare 35. If you choose to execute him with your light saber, go to page 114. The characters are also heavily voiced, meaning lots of cut scenes, and lots of the game enjoyment will be cinematic and not actively engaging. Add into this that we're told that your companions will do most of your actual crafting for you, even while you're offline, and where does that leave us if we derive enjoyment from participating in the economy?
How much of the economy will be player-driven? What will material availability be like? How will trade skills progress over time, and how useful will they be for manufacturing items used in combat? We're not getting a lot of answers right now, but given how much hand holding Bioware is planning for character development, I'd wager the tradeskills/professions aspect of the game is going to be thin, or at least heavily diluted.
Bioware has given us a few hints on what to expect.
- You will be able to make weapons & armor that is equivalent to gear required to start raid content.
- You will be able to 'brand' items so people know who made them.
- Becoming highly skilled in a craft requires more than materials, it will require time invested (no powerleveling tradeskills).
- Crafting will include quests, that take anywhere from minutes to hours.
- Gathering is done by your companions to free you for other activity.
- Crafting will reward both the casual crafter and the very dedicated crafter.
That is what drives the economy, more than anything else. If you don't need to build, you don't need to buy materials. If you don't need to buy, you don't need to sell. If you don't need to sell, you don't need to gather - and now two-thirds of the skills are broken. WoW started strong, but missed the boat. At the very high-end of content there is room for both raid rewards and crafting rewards, and they should require an equal amount of effort.
Here's an example. Let's say your guild knocks over a boss and loots his pockets for a MegaBlade, and in your crafting system you know of a pattern that exists for a MechaBlade, which has equal abilities. If your raid has 8 people in it and it takes them 3 hours of playtime each to raid and loot the MegaBlade, it should take 24 hours of playtime (not offline NPC crafting time) to craft one MechaBlade.
The raiders will say "but we worked to gear ourselves up to tackle this content, so it's a harder effort." To that the crafter replies that they spent weeks (months?) leveling up their tradeskill to the point that they can learn the difficult recipe. It should be no different; the ability to acquire gear should be dependent mostly on time invested. If either method is significantly easier than the other, people will abandon the lesser one altogether in favor of the easy one.
And as new raid content is introduced to provide progressive challenges, crafting should mimic it equally. I mean, think about it. How in the hell do the bad guys always get the best weapons and equipment, and why are they in their pockets? If they have a MegaBlade in their pocket why didn't they take it out and stab me with it? It doesn't make sense. And if I were living in a practical universe, and I wanted to acquire the best Blaster I could find, would I fly to Alderaan and look up the best engineer on the planet, or would I go out into the wild and kill space boars randomly until I find one crammed up its ass?
At the beginning, WoW's crafting and economy made sense. When raiding began it was harder than it is now, and the best craftables were comparable to the best 5-man blues. There were some very rare epics, and there were epic questlines to craft epic items. There was room for both in the expanding WoW universe. Soon however, the recipe fell apart. When they improved access to raid content for players, they forgot to compensate crafting with equal attention and it was relegated to a series of hoops you jumped through to gain a combat buff, and little else. Most serious players these days craft only for the raid buffs - if they raid - or only gather and sell materials - if they don't.
The net result is that the gold being pumped into the system doesn't cycle through crafting costs, and gold sinks have to be added constantly to prevent inflation. Now in Cataclysm, those inflation-fighting measures are failing, and the economy is failing with it. Unless WoW addresses (see: completely revamps) tradeskills, the game's economy will implode. And in WoW's case it's a game-wide issue, since wealth is transferable in significant amounts across any realm at any time.
The newest Bind-on-Equip items from Firelands raids are selling for tens of thousands of gold in the auction house, and people are buying them at those prices, because gold is so plentiful, and there are no crafting alternatives that come remotely close. So crafting begins to feel worthless for the crafter, useless for WoW as a way to control the economy, inflation runs rampant, and everyone is a billionare with nothing worth buying.
Some things make sense, and some don't - here's hoping that Bioware learns from Blizzard's mistakes and the economy in TOR makes sense.
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