Julio Torres: In addition, the entertainer's perception of bards, that would pretty much go against any kind of Star Wars fantasy. A perception of that might come across from a miscommunication that we need to clarify. The ability to enhance a combatant in this game is really not like a bard, who speeds you up, gives you more strength, or buffs you in a particular direction.

It's more like a mind-easing process. If you go to the cantina and someone plays music for you or dances, the fantasy is that you'll feel better out there because you won't be as stressed. When you're out there, you just become more effective. They're not acting like a bard as much as they are something that is more therapeutic. I think that's the angle we want to go for with the entertainers. They definitely aren't needed out in the field. If you're a dancer, you can't go out there and dance while someone is fighting and participate in that way. That's fundamentally different, and we're not going to change that.

Dallas Dickinson: I would argue that the previous incarnation of what entertainers did was very much like the bard system. You would go there for a dancer buff, and the dancer buff would be something that would give you a combat advantage. We're going to be giving people something that's a little more subtle and much more in keeping with the Star Wars idea of the cantina being the place to be to make you feel better in the world.

Julio Torres: To move away from the entertainer and make a point that I feel is really important for people to understand, the movies are about groups working together to get enormous, important things done. The Rebels get together in the most unlikely situations and conquer things and they do it in a way that, in the end, people are cheering and waving their arms. That's the kind of experience that we want to put together with the grouping that we've done.

We want people to be encouraged to get together to finish these quests -- as opposed to the process of the first cycle of the combat system, where people were not as encouraged because soloing was a lot easier. In some sense, we're trying to bring our game in line with what the movie experience is. Hopefully, when people experience that and actually play it in game, that'll resonate and make them feel like they get it.

IGNPC: But even assuming most players want to fight in groups, not all players want to partake in the combat system. You have individual artisans and crafters who need to ply their trade too. How can they hope to survive lone trips out to gather resources?

Dallas Dickinson: To generally respond to that, we still know that crafting is one of the things that makes Star Wars different, and we're not going to change that. We do have a really diverse gameplay experience for players. We're supporting the entertainers in the same way that we're giving more to the combat folks. In the same way, we're going to give the same things to the crafting folks.

Specific to the crafting issue, we're dealing with a real problem. Players who are playing the crafting game are, for all practical intents and purposes, invincible and are able to harvest resources in the Ancient Krayt Dragon Field. That's not what we intended. We're going to be changing that experience for some people, people who have found their way around the game design in order to have a much higher crafting experience than should be available to them. That said, we're going to be offering a number of things to the crafters in the very near future that will still make it viable for them to go out there depending on their crafting level.

We also think that if you're going to go and harvest the most essential resource on Dathomir, right next to the witches, you're going to have to bring a friend, or you're going to have to have some form of defense. In the fiction of the world, that's a dangerous place. Right now, for crafters, it isn't, and we think that's against the central design of the game. We're making some changes that are going to make it harder for you to get rare resources but that actually enhance the crafting game. Because, when you have them, they're really valuable.

Julio Torres: Right, so now someone who's a powerful and strong crafter is going to have friends that will let them get the highest, most incredible stuff which is worth the effort and will give them the elite status they deserve. That doesn't mean that crafters can't craft or that we've taken away the ability to get good resources that will enhance them. People who want to be the masters now have a chance to prove through the system that they can be and will be. They will be noted as such in the game, and I think that's really necessary. We need to have all those levels in there, and this system gives them back.

IGNPC: While we're on the subject of items, how are you compensating players who have invested a lot of time or money in items that they can't use now?

Dallas Dickinson: I'm going to chalk this one up to a misconception. We changed the statistics on almost all the items that interact with the combat game, but we kept their relative values the same. If I was making the number one, top of the line blaster, it's still the number one, top of the line blaster. We just made the spread of the value much more reasonable. As you know, you can get the number one, top of the line blaster and it would make you invincible. It would, in fact, be orders of magnitude better than other blasters. We brought them into a standard deviation, but we kept the relative value the same. If someone wants to that number one, top of the line blaster, they still have to talk to that same guy who built the number one, top of the line blaster. It just happens that it won't make them ten times more effective in combat; it's going to make them a percentage more effective. For the hardcore player, that's still valuable. You still want to have the best weapon.

IGNPC: Is there a similar issue behind the new armor certifications?

Dallas Dickinson: Actually, the armor certification has another issue that we addressed very well. There was just one maximal version of armor. Everyone had that one armor. We wanted to make it so that some armors were better for some classes and were better for certain situations, and some armors were better for other classes and were better for other situations, so there was not an optimal strategy. The optimal strategy was what everyone wore. You saw everyone wearing the same armor and fighting in the same armor.

In fact, if you were an armor smith, that was the only thing you could make. Now there are actually a lot of choices for armor smiths. You can make very specialized things for players. That gives you more value as a crafter, because you're not competing with everyone in the world who are all making the exact same armor. This allows you to carve out a niche. It's an enhancement to the crafting game and makes crafters with specific skills much more valuable to a player association, to a city and to the game generally.