Star Wars: The Old Republic Crew Skills Developer Blog

Principal lead combat designer Georg Zoeller has taken advantage of a new Star Wars: The Old Republic developer blog to talk about the improvements they're making to crew skills in the game's forthcoming Update 1.2: Legacy content patch. Quite a few welcome changes in here:
As alluded to in a previous blog post, color crystals are seeing some change in Game Update 1.2. We want players to be able to choose their weapon color without having to worry about stats. To this end, we are introducing top-end crystals for all available colors to the game.

Lack of schematics is one of the major concerns we've heard from the community. To address this, we are adding a large number of schematics to the game. This includes elder game crystals as powerful as those found currently found through the highest level of Operations, as well as +Power crystals of various colors.

We have also added mid-level and end game schematics for the creation of the prestigious magenta crystal to the game along with a new exploration activity chain for obtaining them. All magenta crystal schematics have been changed so they can be freely traded via the Galactic Trade Network.

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Finally, on the topic of everyone's favorite character, the C2-N2 Droid and its Imperial counterpart, the equally charming 2V-R8 Ship Maintenance Droid, I am pleased to publish the following statement from the Republic News Wire:

"The C2 Droid Corporation is proud to announce the development of a new series of Droid sensors for their most popular product, the C2-N2. These sensors may significantly improve the crew skill efficiency and critical success chances of this unit when operated under normal, non combat conditions.

Not the be outdone by their Republic competition, the 2V Droid Corporation has announced a series of sensor updates for their popular 2V-R8 line of Droids. The corporation categorically denies reports that these new sensors may cause increase vocal frequency in the upgraded units!

Both lines of Droids reportedly had their personality matrix updated with an experimental emotion response chip, allowing them to accept gifts and tokens as a show of appreciation from their currently selected master. Crew skill performance of these units will increase upon acceptance of these objects in a way carefully created to simulate the response often associated with the transfer of goods between organics.

In related news, Balmorra Microprocessor Corporation has announced the discovery of a critical engineering flaw in the 'appreciation' subroutine of their bestselling 'Droid Vocal Response Chip' used on almost all ship maintenance droids currently available. The flaw is said to cause excessive expression of appreciation towards owners entering the proximity sensors of their Droids and is likely to blame for the sharp increase in escape pod related incidents around the galaxy over the last two months. A repair and replacement plan for the affected units has been devised and is said to take effect in the immediate future."