Good to see that people were at least mostly reading my post through. Much of the criticism that I've gotten has already been addressed in my OP, and I'll comment on some of the criticism now. Here is the grand distinction between Gathering Skills and Mission Skill. BioWare made a system set up to be the best of both worlds (damn it you stupid song, out of my head!). There are many players who prefer to grind, it's what they're used to and what they enjoy spending their time doing. Great! They can take a Gathering Skill and grind to their heart's content. But on the other hand, there are people who would prefer to take advantage of the companion system that has been set up because they hate grinding. Perfect! BioWare has a Skill for you too, it's called a Mission Skill. My personal opinion: If you hate the concept of grinding, then maybe a gathering skill simply isn't for you. You said "I have no problem if someone wants to spend hours traveling around to find slicing nodes to make money, but to say that I MUST do that to make money is absurd." You're dealing with this as an obsolete: grind or don't make money. This may be the case with Slicing, but there are plenty of other skills that are quite the opposite. Perfect example of reading most of the OP. I don't blame you for skimming since it's quite long, so I'll reiterate. In my OP I agreed with you on this 100%. No one denies that Slicing needed a nerf, but at the same time most people agree that the nerf was simply too much. As you said, what they needed to do was remove Lockboxes as a raw source of credits and replace it with some other commodity that can be sold for credits. Now, to comment on your other posts: I disagree on your comments regarding Slicing's comparison to other skills. Every skill should be completely equal in income, whether it be from selling your mats or what have you. Where it was pre-nerf, Slicing made WAY more than any other Gathering Skill, hence the nerf. Where it is post-nerf, while it does make less from Missions than other Gathering Skills, it doesn't make THAT much less, simply enough that it required a tweak from BioWare. When I send my companions on Scavenging Missions at Grade 2-3 (That's all the farther my current Scavenger is, but I had one at 400 on beta) and sell the mats on the GTN, I will usually lose money. If I use the mats, along with those from my UT Missions, to make a Cyber item and sell it, I will usually break even, sometimes making a profit. From what I've heard, the other Gathering Skills are similar (Haven't done any other than Slicing and Scavenging, so I can't speak from personal experience) in that missions usually lose you money. For Gathering Skills you should be gathering from nodes. If you want to make money off of Missions, drop Slicing and grab an extra Mission Skill. And lastly, regarding your comment about Scavenging and Bio. Yes, they are the only two Gathering Skills that can harvest from dead creatures. However, this is offset by the economy. Again, I never had bio so I can't speak on it, but for Scavenging raw mats sell for very low prices. Why? Because there are a lot of scavengers, since it feeds 3 different crafting skills, and Scavenging yields are larger number of resources. However, just because they get more mats, doesn't mean that they're better. When you have too many people getting too many mats, the price goes down due to the laws of Supply and Demand. However, where slicing was before, since people were generating raw credits, any economic laws were removed. If you had too many people doing any of the other three Gathering Skills, their profit would lower because there were more people consuming nodes and more people selling the goods (too much supply), however if you had every single player doing Slicing, it wouldn't matter that there was 100% supply and 0% demand, because you weren't selling the results. ----------------------------------------------------- In conclusion, the debate of Slicing boils down to two different topics, Gather vs Missions, and "printing money". My personal belief is that if you are upset that Slicing Missions aren't making you money, then maybe you need to accept that Slicing isn't for you and change to a different Skill. If you want to make all of your credits from Missions, then get a Mission Skill rather than trying to change how Gathering Skills operate. Gathering Missions are there to supplement nodes, not to replace them. As for "printing money". People keep stating things along the lines of "Slicers would only produce the amount of credits that they needed, its not like they were stockpiling them in their cargo holds." There is a reason the US Government doesn't hand me one of their printers for making US Currency and saying "Only print what you need," because that will never happen. If you have the ability to create money out of thin air, then the human brain will make money until they can buy the absolute BEST of everything possible, which was what was happening. Slicers had the ability to have purple mods, weapons, armor, earpieces, etc because they simply needed to do Missions until they had the money, which left Slicers better off than everyone else. Supply and Demand doesn't allow ANY other form of missions to do that. Example: On Character A, I spend 24 hours straight doing only Slicing Lockbox Missions. Throughout the 24 hours I open the Boxes and make 1 Million credits. On Character B, I spend 24 hours straight doing only Underworld Trading Missions. Throughout the 24 hours I sell the mats on the GTN and post enough mats to make 1 million credits. The difference is, although Character B technically made the same amount of money as Character A, it doesn't actually turn out that way. Due to the huge amount of UT mats flooding the GTN, a lot of those mats won't sell and too much supply will slowly cause other UTers to lower their prices, thus your profit goes WAY down. That is why "printing money" is bad, is because it can be done unregulated and infinitely without the return rate ever dropping. This is the exact reason why Lockbox missions should just be scrapped in General and replaced with some other brand new concept (One of my ideas was a consumable that lowers the time it takes to craft an item, which would create a high-demand use for Slicing while guaranteeing long-term purchasing because they're consumable).

Thank you. Although, I do sympathize with people that don't want to read the post. Even I admit that it's a little too long. I knew from the start that my post would me mostly opinion based (I even tagged a section stating so near the top of the post). And to answer some of your points. Yes, to some people the economy is "new", but to someone who has been beta testing the game for months has already seen a smaller scale of how the economy will operate (I may be wrong, I may be a little off, but I'm saying that with my experience I can at least make a ballpark estimate). As to my speculation regarding how the skills operate, I'll let you into my through process: From the start of playing the game, I saw a single trend which was that most Mission Skills were basically the same, most Crafting Skills were basically the same, and most Gather Skills were basically the same. The only thing that distinguished the two was output. That theory was the basis for my entire post. Also, I knew that there HAD to be an intended difference between Missions Skills and Gathering Missions, otherwise BioWare wouldn't have made them separate categories. While this post largely fits in with the current slicing debate, that wasn't its original intent. I've been meaning to write this post for weeks, simply to give people a general idea of [how I thought] Crew Skills should work, and how their operations were intended to be unilateral. In my opinion, the game creators would never intentionally make one skill superior to another because that creates a division of wealth. This also lead me to believe (in relevance to one of your comments) that they would never intend slicing as a money booster for the economy, they would simply increase gains across the board so that way everyone is gaining money instead of a select group. The slicing debate simply sparked me to finally write the post, and then I applied my theories to the Slicing Nerf.

Have you left an in-game ticket labeling this as a bug?

This is the biggest fallacy supporting the anti-nerf side. I've heard it multiple times, "It wasn't a problem before, why is it now?" History Lesson: Slicing was a useless skill in the betas, I should know I beta tested for months. Imagine slicing without lockboxes at all, and that's what you had. On November 24th, in preparation for the massive Thanksgiving Weekend Beta Test, BioWare added to ability to loot lockboxes through Slicing Missions. Now, why do you think that it wasn't a problem before? Those weekend tester had the game for a grand total of 4 days, 92 hours. Most of them never got far enough to learn about the massive exploit, and the long-term testers were already level 50 and had no reason to pick up Slicing. After the 4 day Weekend Test, the server was shut down for maintenance for 3 days, at which point it opened back up for another 4 day weekend test before the beta officially closed. Lock Boxes from Slicing Missions were only in the beta test for 10 days of the servers being online.

^ this I don't get why everyone's so upset. "Oh boohoo, I'm not filthy rich anymore and have to earn my money like everyone else." I'm sorry, but no sympathy to you. If I tried making money off of scavenging missions I'd pay 500 credits for 15 flux, which will sell for a total of 400 (if I'm lucky). Or I'll do a mission for some metals; I'll spend 800 credits, sell what I make, and get 300 credits back. Go find some nodes.

As of right now, the hot debate going around ToR is the issue regarding the slicing nerf. For those of you who aren't familiar with the "Slicing Nerf", I'll go through some brief background information. Following half a dozen months of beta testing, in late November BioWare added a new feature to the "Slicing" Crew Skill. This new feature meant that Slicers could now send their companions on Slicing missions to obtain Lockboxes, which would generate raw credits. The reason for the Slicing Nerf was because players could generate well over 2-3 times the amount that they spents (ex. You could spend 400 credits on a mission, 20 minutes later you would open your lockbox and gain 1500 credits) and BioWare thus lowered the credit yield for lockbox missions. However, they lowered the credit yield so much that you would now begin to lose money from missions (ex. You can now spend 400 credits on a mission, 20 minutes later you would open your lockbox and gain 300 credits). The big debate regarding the Slicing Nerf has inspired me to create this thread, which will essentially be an analysis of the difference between Gathering Crew Skills and Mission Crew Skills, because a failure to realize this difference is what is creating such a huge debate regarding the Slicing Crew Skill. NOTE: This thread was created for friendly discussion based upon individual viewpoints. I, nor any other standard player, claim to speak for BioWare or am an accurate representative of their views. Several things that I, and other people, will state are based upon personal opinion and speculation. Please, do not bash other players, or claim any information to be true without proof, whether via quotes from ToR databases, or links to articles and information posted by BioWare. Thanks you! ---------------------------------------------------------------- The difference between Gathering Skills vs Mission Skills is quite a simple concept, which is easily identifiable by the name of the given skill. Gathering Skills, are designed so that a player can make profit off of gathering resources. Missions Skills are designed so that a player can make profit by sending their companions on missions. Now, let's look at these two concepts a little more in depth, with a few examples to go along. Gathering Crew Skills: As stated above a Gathering Crew Skill is designed so that a player can make money by gathering resources and other items, a fairly simple concept. There are three methods that Gathering may be used in order to make profit, Selling, Crafting, and Supplementing Selling resources entails taking the raw resources or other items gained from the Gathering skill and selling them, whether to a vendor or on the Global Trading Network. Crafting entails taking the resources gained and using a Crafting Crew Skill to create finished items, such as weapons, armor, modifications, and a range of other items, which would then be used by the player or sold. Supplementing entails using Gather Skills to obtain non-resource items which are used to aid other Crew Skills, such as Missions Skills and Crafting Skills. Examples include extra Missions and Crafting Schematics. "Simple enough, but how do we get the resources that we use to make money?" With Gathering Skills, there are two methods to obtaining resources, Nodes and Missions. Nodes are objects throughout the game that generate Gathering items, whether resources or supplementary items. When a player encounters a node while adventuring, right-clicking on it will randomly yield different materials, depending on the type of node and the Gathering Skill that the player has. Nodes may be simply found on the ground, or may also be created from slain creatures, such as droids for Scavenging. Missions are assignments given to companions which yield similar results to gathering from nodes. After paying a fee, the companion embarks on the mission for a set amount of time, and upon their return the player receives the materials (if the companion succeeded, that is). "But wait, I thought Missions Crew Skills were completely different than Gathering Skills. So how come you can do Missions for Gather Skills?" Here lies the key difference between Gathering Skills and Mission Skills. When using a Gathering Skill, the primary source of income is from nodes, whereas Missions are used as supplementary methods and are not intended to make profit. What do I mean by this? Nodes aren't always the easiest things to come by and require you to venture out into combat areas. However, sometimes a player needs only 1-2 more resources to craft their item or to have the max of 99 of a resource in order for it to sell better on the GTN, or maybe the player needs a specific type of resource and simply can't find the node for it. Whatever the reason, here is where the Missions portion of Gather Skills comes in handy. For a small fee , Gather Missions allows a player to save themselves the hassle of finding a node while still producing their materials. "Oh I get it, so the point of a Gathering Skill is to go out exploring and find resources, but Missions are there for those few occasions when you're willing to spend credits in order to make the job faster." Exactly, with nodes you're spending time to save money and with missions you're spending money to save time, but remember that you can't put a price on time and since Gathering Skills are geared towards making profit from nodes you're not intended to make money from Missions. Mission Crew Skills: As stated near the top of the post, a Mission Crew Skill is intended so a player can make money off of Missions, just like the name suggests. But it's not like a player's companion can return with credits. Similarly to Gathering Skills, there are a few different ways that a player can make money from Mission Skills: Selling, Crafting, Supplementing, and Consuming. Selling for Mission Skills is just like with Gathering Skills. It doesn't matter what it is that you receive from your mission, the simplest way to make money is to sell your rewards. However, since Missions Skills allow more of a choice than the nodes of a Gathering Skill, a smart Missioner plays the market, paying attention to what items are selling for higher than normal and gearing their Missions towards those items. Crafting is exactly the same as it was with Gathering Skills, where a player uses the received resources to craft items. However, be careful not to relate the types of skills too much. When using Crafting Skills, certain items will require Mission Resources and certain items will require Gathering Resources. The two types of skills will never cross, so you will never get Gathered Resources from Missions or Missions Resources from Gathering. Supplementing, again, is just like Gathering Skills. Missions can yield results such as Schematics, which a player may use to aid their Crafting Skills. Consuming is very similar to Supplementing, in which a player uses an item obtained through Missions to aid the player. However, Supplementing aids Crew Skills whereas Consuming uses an item to aid the player in some other aspect of gameplay. Examples of Consumable Items obtained from Missions are Companion Gifts and Light/Dark Side Points. One key aspect of Missions Skills that all players should note, is that Missions are the only way to use Missions Skills. Whereas Gathering Skills have nodes, Mission Skills have no other method of obtaining items, which means that until a player has more than one companion that player should be prepared to either do a lot of questing without their companion or do a lot of waiting for their companion to finish missions. What Acutally Makes The Different? "So far Mission Skills sound just like Gathering Missions, they just give you different items. So what's the real difference?" On the surface, there is only one difference between Mission Skills and Gathering Missions, which is the items received. Gathering is geared entirely towards supporting Crafting, but Missions can be used for Crafting but serve other purposes as well. Also, the Missions from Missions Skills usually take a longer amount of time for companions to complete than there Gathering Skills equivalents, as well as costing more credits (in most cases, but not all). "But you said that Gathering Missions aren't meant to make profit, but Missions skills are. How come? What's stopping me from doing Gathering Missions and selling my results for profit?" The thing that BioWare knew from the start would govern Gathering Missions is the simple economic law of supply and demand. Gatherers have the option to explore and gather raw materials at zero cost, which helps to lower the cost of their items. However, Missioners HAVE to spend credits in order to gain their items, which will raise the cost of their items, especially since they have a chance of failure. Here's a simple example using and in-game scenario (Please note that all of the base numbers are made up for the purposes of the example): There are four friends that all play ToR together. They are called Gatherer A (GA), Gatherer B (GB), Missioner A (MA), and Missioner B (MB) GA and GB both just started their new Gathering Skill, Archaeology. After walking around and gathering Orange Crystals from nodes, GA gets tired of gathering from nodes and decides that he's going to send his companion of Archaeology Missions while he does a quest, not wasting his time to go out of his way for nodes. After four missions, GA spent 100 credits per missions and received two Orange Crystals per mission, a total of 400 credits spent and 8 Orange Crystals. GA then decides that he's going to sell his Orange Crystals on the Global Trade Network for 500 credits, making 100 credits in profit. Pretty good for not doing any work. Meanwhile GB has been questing. Here and there along the way he would spot a node on his map and spend a minute or two killing some extra NPCs in order to gather some Orange Crystals from the node. After finishing his quests and returning to [insert location here] with 8 Orange Crystals, he goes to the Global Trade Network to sell his Orange Crystals. Doing a quick check to see what other people are selling them for, GB sees that someone is selling the same number of Crystals for 500 credits (GA). Being a smart businessman and having done a bit of research on Archaeology Missions, GB sells his 8 Orange Crystals for a total of 400 credits, 100 less than his competitor who used Gathering Missions. GB knows fully well that people will always buy his Orange Crystals over GA's because GA will never be able to match his price and still make a profit. Once GB's crystals sell out, people will then begin to buy from GA, but that means it takes GA longer to sell his Crystals The two gatherers spent the same amount of time playing the game, yet GB will make hundreds more in profit than GA, and will sell his Crystals faster than GA will. If demand for Orange Crystals begins to go up, the GB has a better ability to raise his price than GA, because he has a 100 credit buffer zone to raise his prices, plus GA can't raise his prices too much or people will stop buying. However, if demand for Orange Crystals goes down and people stop buying both GA's crystals, he will never be able to get his prices low enough for people to buy his Crystals (unless he wants to lose money), plus GB has as much room as he wants to lower his prices and still make a profit. Thus, the law of supply and demand makes it very difficult for Gathering Missions to turn a profit. Now, back to MA and MB. Both players picked up the Treasure Hunting Skill in order to sell Gemstones. Both players will send a companion on Missions while they quest or do other things. If a Treasure Hunting Mission for Gemstones costs 100 credits and produces a single Gemstone, both MA and MB will be on level playing ground, because there is only one way to obtain that Gemstone. After each player obtains 4 Gemstones, MA goes to the Global Trading Network and sells his 4 Gemstones for 550 credits, 160 credits of profit. MB, in a similar manner to what GB did, will take his 4 Gemstones that he got and sell them for 540 (or 530 or 525, doesn't really matter) so that way his prices will beat those of MA and people will want his products more. The faster his products sell, the faster he can send his companions out on more Missions, and the faster he can begin selling more Gemstones. The next day MA notices that his Gemstones didn't sell. After the two gather 4 more Gemstones each, MA will check other people's prices for Gemstones and see that MB is selling them for 490, so he decides to sell them for 480 so that his prices beat MB's. The day after, something similar will happen and MB will lower is prices to 510. This will go back and forth until, eventually, the market stabilizes. Everyone's Gemstones are selling for around 500 credits, give or take 10 credits (depending on how long you're willing to wait for your Gemstones to sell) and everyone is making profit because everyone is on even playing ground. That long, ridiculous, stupid example spells out the difference between Gathering Crew Skills and Missions Crew Skills in a nut shell. It all comes down to the primary source of income for the given type of skill. "So what's stopping me from just spending all of my time doing Missions and making lots of money?" The answer is nothing. If someone wanted to, they could grab a Mission Skill such as Underworld Trading, spend all their time doing it, selling their loot, and making a lot of money. But again, supply and demand! If it were that easy to make money, everyone would do it, and if everyone's doing it then there are too many people selling and not enough people buying. Prices drop, and soon you're making just as much profit as before for even more work. The bottom line is: In the end, the market will even itself out. It may take a few days, it may take a few weeks, it might be a month or two, but eventually it will happen. ------------------------------------------------------------- Back to the top, how does all this relate to the Slicing Nerf? The reason the whole issue with the Slicing Nerf made me think to write this post is because everyone's complaint about whether the Skill needed a nerf eventually boils down to the fundamentals that I've detailed above. People constantly argue thing like "Slicing pumped credits into the market," "Slicing brought in too many credits, everyone could afford the most expensive gear," "More money means you don't have to grind NPCs!" Everyone is arguing about what is the proper amount of profit that Slicers should make per Mission. The answer is 0. Slicing, as it started before the November update, would only produce augments, missions, and schematics. Lockboxes were added because there wasn't high enough demand for the other Slicing items. The problem with slicing is that it is, as many players have complained, printing money. Slicing, before the nerf, meant that you could send your companions on missions while you watched a movie and, by the time the movie was done, the player now has 150k credits. There lies the problem with Slicing, either you're making lots of raw credits or you're not making enough money to make it worth it, there can NEVER be a happy medium. First of all, Slicing is a GATHERING Skill and not a Mission Skill. If BioWare had intended it to be a Mission Skill then that's what they would have made it, so for the love of God please stop saying Slicing is designed to make huge profit off of missions. What BioWare needs to do is increase the spawn rate of slicing nodes, which will decrease the amount of people that are using Slicing as a Mission Skill. Second, players are not meant to produce credits. NPCs produce credits, whether through drops or selling to vendors, and those credits are then pumped into the market when someone wants to buy something. I've heard the comment many times that "I play a game to play, not to work, and grinding is work, so I shouldn't have to grind NPCs to make money." Excellent deduction! You are absolutely right! And the truth of the game has always been (and still is, even after the nerf) that you don't have to grind to make money, that's what the Crew Skills were made for. Obviously you can't earn credits for doing nothing, which is what people were doing with Slicing pre-nerf, so you have to do SOMETHING (and sitting in a chair and watching a timer count down to zero is not something). If you're not willing to put in some effort to get your credits then you shouldn't be playing an MMO, you should be playing a 1 player game where you can type in a cheat code and get all the money you want. Lastly, Slicing for Lockboxes, as a concept, is entirely stupid. I can understand understand getting them from nodes because it's basically the same thing as killing NPCs for money (you're just avoiding the NPCs instead of killing them) and it requires you to do some work for your money. The dumbest argument I read on the forums for why you should be able to make lots of profit off of Lockbox Missions was this: "Slicing fueled the economy and kept it alive. It was the largest source of income in the game and BioWare removed it. Having lots of money in the game won't affect the economy anyways because then Slicers will spend more money per item and eventually prices will go up, so everything evens out." This is a comment I need to address because, although it is the weakest argument, it's the one that I see the most. I can, off the top of my head, list 5 good reasons that everything in that comment is false. 1. There should be no single crew skill that fuels the entire in-game economy and is it's largest source of income. Income from Lockbox Missions should be equal to me doing Scavenging Missions and selling the items to a vendor (By the way, if I did that I wouldn't even make half the money I spent), which should be equal to the Missions of every other Gather Skill. When added up, the money pumped into the economy due to each Crew Skill should be roughly equal. 2. Having the prices of everything go up is a terrible thing called inflation. Albeit, inflation in small amounts is healthy for an economy, but at the rate slicing was going the GDP of ToR would have doubled at a minimum. 3. It's impossible for the prices of "everything" to go up because there will always be some services that cost the same, such as repair costs for equipment and training cost for abilities. Let's pretend that BioWare intended half of your money earned per level to go to abilities, then add billions of free credits to the economy, and now a player is spending less than a third of his credits on abilities. Inflation when certain services have fixed prices would ruin the game. 4. People can only spend so much money. As a slicer, if someone make 100k credits and for 50k credits can get the best equipment for his level, what happens to the other 50k credits? It gets locked away and goes to buying extra inventory space, or get's spent on purple mods Now you have all of the slicers with the absolute best technology, and extra money stashed away, and everyone else is left with what they were meant to have; mostly greens and blues, a couple oranges, maybe a purple or two. 5. If everyone has lots of money, then bad things begin to happen. Relating to numbers 2 and 3; a player has a certain Cost of Living which is equal to his repair costs plus his ability costs. Since that number will never change, if there is large-scale inflation then that means players will have more money left over to spend. Using the examples from number 3 and 4, if BioWare intended for a player to spend 50% of their money per level on the Cost of Living, that means they intended for a player to spend the other 50% on new items and upgrades. When inflation happens, now a player is spending 25% on the CoL, and the other 75% on new items and upgrades. The problem is, however, that no matter how much the price of an item goes up, it will always cost the same percentage of your money. If a Jacket42 costs 500 credits, which is 5% of you money per level, and inflation causes it to go up to 1500 credits, it doesn't make any difference because Jacket42 will still cost 5% of your money, the only difference is you have a larger percentage to spend until everyone has lots of money and everyone has the best of everything. And if everyone has the best items that they can get, what the hell is the point in playing the game? The point of an MMO is to work to be the best that you can be, which is useless if every level 50 has the absolute max. ------------------------------------------------ If you lasted all the way to the bottom of this post, I applaud you. I already know that when I go on rants I tend to ramble and repeat myself...a lot. I hope you found the big mess above useful and I hope if gave you a different perspective on how Crew Skills work. Let the commenting begin.