I was thinking about this, and realized there's no need to do this experimentally. You can calculate the probability of success for each # of dice rolls, and by adding up the percentages, calculate the percentile. So, for either 10% or 20% success: 50th percentile (median): 3 (20%), 7 (10%) 80th percentile: 8 (20%), 15 (10%) 90th percentile: 11 (20%), 22 (10%) 95th percentile: 13 (20%), 28 (10%) 99th percentile: 21 (20%), 44 (10%) 99.9th percentile: 31 (20%), 66 (10%) 99.99th percentile: 41 (20%), 87 (10%) 99.999th percentile: 52 (20%), 109 (10%) If you're not familiar with percentiles, it represents the percentage of the samples that fall under the given number. The most familiar percentile is the 50th, which is also called the median. In other words, if you roll for an RE at 20%, about half the time you'll get it 3 rolls. (FYI, the actual median is actually between 3 and 4, but I avoided fractional values here...) Continuing on, the 80th percentile represents the 4 out of 5 success number, or conversely since we're focused on failure, the point at which 1 out of 5 take *more* than the given number. 90th is the 1 out of 10 point for failures, 99th, 1 out of 100, 99.9th, 1 out of 1000, 99.99th, 1 out of 10,000, 99.999th, 1 out of 100,000. OK, so let's say the playing population is a million and that a tenth of them RE one green item every day. That means there's 100,000 trials (OK, you may quibble with the two factors I used, but come up with some estimate of how many trials yourself). And thus, *every day* one person loses the lottery and it takes them over 50 tries. EDIT: Here's a link to the spreadsheet data

It's not terribly difficult to write a dice roller program in whatever language you are familiar with. I wrote one in python. If you roll the dice a million times, counting how many tries it takes to get 20 or less out of 100, you will find that almost every time, you will find a streak of 50 or more failures before a success. In fact, in some million-roll experiments, I had as many as 5 such streaks. In about half of my experiments, a failure streak of 60 or more was seen. Yes, the likelihood of rolling 50 failures at an 80% chance is quite remote, but you have to be careful. Most people quickly calculate it as 0.80^50, which is correct, but that is the chance that I will fail 50 times in a row starting with my first attempt. The chance that I would roll that streak at any time during a string of a million rolls is quite different.

I avoid this as much as possible because I don't want spoilers for when I do play the class

I tallied my RE attempts the other day, and found I had a success rate of 21% over about 150 attempts. So for me the average is about right. FYI, using a simulator I wrote, I can tell you following: Median (50th percentile) is 4 rolls 90th percentile is 11 rolls 95th percentile is 14 rolls 99th percentile is 21 rolls In other words: About half the time, you will succeed by the 4th roll (and consequently, of course, the other half is 5 or over...) About 1 in 10 times, it will take you 11 rolls or more About 1 in 20 times it will take you 14 rolls or more About 1 in 100 times it will take you 21 rolls or more If you roll the dice "enough" (in my case, a million times) you will very likely hit a streak where it will take over 50 rolls to succeed. In about 5 out of 10 of these million roll experiments, I would find a streak of 60.

I won't make excuses or rationalize at either how SWTOR was designed for single-user or how much you can play it as such because frankly that's what I wanted and expected. My favorite games ever were KotOR and ME (except for ME3 because I won't put Origin on my system), and if SWTOR hadn't been like that, I wouldn't have given it even a passing glance. I did the MMO thing for about 7-8 years and found it mostly boring.

You realize you don't have to do that, right? Just hover over the price of any item that is being sold in a stack > 1 and the game will pop up a tool tip that tells you what the per-unit cost is. Of course, I'd also like to be able to sort by unit cost too. I flip-flop a bit between having the market tell me the statistics. Yeah, it would be really nice to know what things sell for. But on the other hand, about the only "skill" one can put into the market is to use some elbow grease and *really* study the prices of some items you might be thinking of selling, including test-marketing some. I've done that for a few classes of items, and I feel it gives me a leg-up on people who don't spend that time. Yeah, it's tedious and maybe not always fun, but there is a sense of satisfaction in doing that oneself.

Only if people turn them on. I for one would never enable them. I'm not against them for those who want them, but neither would I prioritize them very highly.

The problem is, if everyone could have a purple mod within a few tries, then everyone would. Then there would be no rarity of schematics, and the only rarity would come from needing the rare material. It seems to me that the prices would crash. Blue mods are 10% chance to RE, right? Then according to my simulator: Median (50th percentile) is 7 90th percentile is 22 95th percentile is 29 99th percentile is 44 about 3 times out of 100,000 eventual successes, you'll have to roll over 100 times

One issue with making space combat free-flying is that you'd have to totally revamp what the missions are and their objectives. If I could free-fly, it would make every other than "kill X fighters" trivial. The difficulty in hitting cap ship shield gens or bridges is mostly due to the amount of time you are allowed to have such targets on-screen. If I could just make run after run at such targets, it would be trivial. You'd have to do something else to make it harder, like having more and more fighters come at you, or having many more hardened turrets to have to pare down. Mind you, that could be interesting, but my point is that you have to create completely new missions with free-flying as part of the design.

I've posted elsewhere about this, but to reiterate: I would love to be able to do FPs/Heroics solo (and I typically starting at about Nar Shaddaa when I overlevel to the point of being able to, up until they get to be L42-43 or so when 4-man quests start to become impossible for a L50). I don't care about rewards--I just want to experience the story of these quests at my own pace. If I want to take 5 minutes to see if can jump up to the top of some boxes to see if anything's there, or if I want to take a minute or so to choose a dialog option, I want to be able to do so without pissing off a group of players. I can see two possibilities: Allow for "difficulty" scaling when entering such instances with less than a full group (and if it also scales rewards, fine with me to discourage farming) Use a suggestion I saw in another thread, and allow you to use up to 3 other companions for Heroics/FPs I really like the idea of being able to bring along my "team" from an RP point of view. Given how there's really only one or maybe two "right" companions for most questing, I'd like a reason to keep the rest of my team geared and playable, and being able to dust them off for a session every now and then.

I don't PvP and have no desire to, so the addition would be a big "don't care" unless it is possible to contribute via PvE without being PvP-flagged.

I don't see how cross-server play works in general from a technical aspect. If you think about it, to get two characters playing from different servers into the same environment, you basically have to implement an on-demand instant transfer there and then back for one of them, and that takes solving all the same issues like names and legacy names, and getting all of one's equipment and items to transfer right, etc.

I like this but for a different reason. I play SWTOR primarily for the story and in-game solo-RP. I find that when playing most heroics and FPs that story just goes out the window. It becomes "just" an arcade game--- rush, rush, rush from objective to objective, and in convos. I'd really like to be able to take my time, poke my head into corners, look around at the scenery, take as much time as I want to pick the conversation option, and to have the conversations go the way I want them. As it is, I haven't even played an FP on my L50 past the Jedi Prisoner pair of FPs..

You've got to be somewhat careful in doing something like this so that you don't make it hard for people leveling to be able to compete in the crafting market. The cost to RE something to blue and purple is part of what drives the price you charge (or it should, if you're looking at it like a business). To have some L50 (or L400 in crafting skill) swoop in and be able to get all the schematics for a fraction of the cost could undermine the market for low levels.

At least you have a chance at getting a schematic you can use. I have a cybertech, and UT never drops a CT schematic...

I don't PvP at all and have no desire to, so I'll stick to my PvE server... However, I think they are already moving to implement your first point. Isn't some of that already part of 1.2?

Eve is the only game I've ever played that has the capability to have "buy" orders, so I wouldn't call it a common feature that they left out. In fact, my first MMO (Earth and Beyond) didn't even have a market at all... Personally, I like the Eve market, but it is a much more complicated system than most. Great for people who like to "play the market" but it does contribute to the "spreadsheets in space" criticism that Eve gets from some (and not entirely undeserved either).

I keep my camera at max zoom-out, and I just about never have to adjust it manually, so either it's not an issue for me, or I don't understand the problem.

You're not entirely accurate. Scoundrels (a stealth class) has Disappearing Act that breaks combat and stealths, so I think that works a lot like Force Camo. However, Scoundrels also have a non-stealthy aggro-reducer (Surrender). Frankly, from the point of "realism", the trinity and such abilities as "aggro-reducing" really don't make much sense in general. If you want realism, having a combat system where you only get most of your defense (and perhaps even not a flanking penalty) against your target would mean that "aggro" would be managed by not hitting the mob while someone else is... Knights (well, Sents in particular, haven't played a Guardian yet) suffer from the lack of a long (60s) non-droid CC ability, so I don't think Sents have tremendously large amounts of survivability (compared to a Scoundrel that has combat stealthing as well). Of course, I'm primarily looking at this from the point of PvE since I don't ever PvP..

FYI, I wrote an RE simulator in python the other day to get some stats on this. From this, I can estimate for a 20% schematic: The median (50th percentile) is about 4 rolls The 90th percentile is about 11 The 95th percentile is about 14 The 99th percentile is about 21 Thus, 1 in 10 times when you go to RE an item, it will take you 11 or more to succeed. 1 in 20 times, it will take 14 or more. 1 in 100 times, it will take 21 or more. Of course, this is "on average" across all time. You could take 50, you could take 20 twice in a row. But the numbers above reflect what will happen over time across all attempts. FYI, if you roll the dice a million times, you will almost always find a handful of attempts that take 50 or more rolls. About a third to half of the time, you'll find one that takes over 60.

I used to be able to hit the unlock icon by accident a lot (and I use keybinds for activities, but use the mouse for primarily turning during a fight). But since 1.2, it seems like the unlock button's active area has shrunk by a lot. I have trouble hitting it WHEN I want to unlock/lock on purpose... I suppose there could be a preference to disallow unlock and the UI editor from the UI, but I personally like it the way it is currently.

I'm usually L20 at least by the time I leave the capital planet (Coruscant in my case). I usually get my speeder before the end of the next world (Taris for me). Personally, I don't find the scale of Taris, nor Nar Shaddaa, to be so big that earlier/faster speeders would make a significant QoL issue for me. I bet you can cross Taris in about the time it takes to cross just the Dune Sea of Tattooine.

From my experience with MMOs since about 2000, SWTOR is the most "stable" game I've ever played at launch (meaning that I personally have neither experienced a server or client crash). To the extent that the choice of an engine that has already had a lot of stability issues worked on, don't discount that aspect. I can imagine the forums if this game had the stability of even Eve online when it launched (server crashes about every other week to begin then maybe monthly for a while, client crashes maybe weekly, not being to log in again for hours or a day if you got kicked due to a client crash or disconnect). As for the choice of Hero over Unreal, I played in the aborted beta of Stargate Worlds which used a combination of UE and Big World, and that was a crash/glitch-fest to the point where I couldn't even start to play for a month at one point, and even when I did, had the entire screen go bonkers when I did. So I don't find the idea of using UE to be an automatic win. As for 64 vs 32-bit clients, most people don't really understand the implications of this. It is not "automatic" that one should go 64-bit for everything. In fact, using 64-bit has some performance negatives that must be considered, over and above the fact that not everyone runs the 64bit OS. When running a 64-bit process, every "pointer" (an indirect reference to memory) has to be 64 bits wide, and every direct memory reference has to refer to a 64-bit address. This increases the data and instruction segment sizes, leading to much less efficient use of processor h/w memory caches. In the performance game, cache hit ratios are incredibly important, given how "slow" main memory is compared to caches. In a properly-designed 64-bit OS (not sure if Windows fits that bill), the "penalty" for running 32-bit on 64-bit is mostly that of having to "translate" the arguments to and return values from system calls, which isn't all that much of an overhead. To this day, some 64-bit OSes still have the majority of their applications as 32-bit. Not sure if it has changed, but the last time I looked, the recommendation for Ubuntu linux was to run the 32-bit OS for a desktop system, and only use 64-bit for servers. So don't be quick to jump on the term "64-bit" blindly.

Write a simulator like I did (see a post above), and you will see that long strings of failures are certainly possible, in fact, likely over time. I ran my simulator for a million dice rolls, and after doing that 10 times, each experiment had one string that required over 50 rolls to succeed, and about half of the experiments had one that took more than 60. In fact, the 90th percentile is at around 10 rolls, meaning that 1 in 10 times you try to get a specific schematic, you will take 10 or more. The 95th percentile is at around 14, so 1 in 20 will take that many. And the 99th percentile is at 21, so 1 in 100 will take over 20. Like you, I thought the RE chance was broken, but luckily, I keep complete records for every RE attempt I make. I was surprised to find out that my actual success rate is slightly over 20%. It goes to show that we humans suck at having a feel for probability.

I'm probably a bit more on the hardcore side of crafting than the casual, and I don't see anything wrong at the moment with material acquisition. UT 340 missions go for between 20-30K, Mand Iron for about 8-10K per unit (I'm primarily cybertech, though working on others atm). There seems to be no shortage of "in-demand" items on the GTN. In essence, what is being asked for, from what I read, is not a shift of how current materials are obtained, but an overall addition to make the non-gatherred mats easier to obtain. But that will lead to an oversupply of items, and a reduction in prices. Maybe that will stimulate some demand, but my belief is that supply will overstrip any such demand increase. An economy is a pretty complex interconnected system--it's like the "butterfly" effect--twiddle one small bit in one place and the whole thing unravels. Way back when I played Eve (from launch for about 3-4 years), I saw them do a fairly good job overall, but it was by no means perfect. Did you know they had an economist studying and advising on their design? If I recall, they actually controlled the money supply in the game by throttling how money entered and left the system. The inflow was controlled by how many asteroids they seeded daily, and also how many resources would be bought by the NPCs (you couldn't just bring a ton of tritanium to a vendor--you had to find an NPC with a buy order on the market. Then when it came to item rarity, they did it by restricting the blueprints (schematics). And boy did they restrict it. There might have only 5-10 schematics handed out for the new top level ships when they first came out (for a player base of maybe 50-100K). Didn't get one? Too bad--there was no way to "RE" one. By the time that a new schematic got out into more general circulation (and you had to grind missions for research agents to get "points" in a lottery system), the profit margin started vanishing quickly. Frankly, I don't envy anyone the task of trying to design and manage an MMO economy.