This is absolutely correct. That stim that is costing you such a large portion of your net worth is due to the fact that there are people sitting on loads of credits that are willing and able to pay those high prices. That's what the market will bear. If Bioware adds other fun sinks that depletes these players net worth, then the prices on things like stims will drop. I.e., the average number of credits available per player has decreased. You have now become, relatively speaker, richer by abstaining from these sinks.

I believe it was tkaen shortly before the guild summit. They showed a corresponding plot of where most credits were leaving the economy. For a long time it was primarily from learning skills at the trainers. I believe something else had just overtaken it a couple weeks prior (can't remember what), indicating that a substantial fraction of the population was at or nearing 50.

I think you're wrong. I could have sworn that very few of the unlocks require both (like the ship GTN).

FYI this statistic was in reference to level 50 characters. I assume most level 50 characters are played.

Well, I'm holding on to a couple tens of millions in credits across several characters. It's mostly in assets like crafting mats and missions that are moderately liquid. I fully plan on immediately purchasing augmentable gear when it shows up on the auction house, and am likely to pay the early buyer's premium on these. There are rich crafters on every server, and likely they've been saving up like me once they learned what will be available. There's going to be a lot of stockpiled credits like are suddenly dispersed in the economy via the GTN when 1.2 hits. You should plan accordingly.

Remember, the legacy rewards that need to be purchased are mostly available with just legacy levels. That's how you're intended to gain them (except for a few of the items like the ship bonuses). Puchasing racial unlocks and other things are meant as an ALTERNATIVE method. They really don't want people acquiring them this way. They're using these to pull credits away from the rich people who've been hoarding them and get them out of the economy. For most people, if they want one or two of these things early, they can work at it and get an early reward. These things are meant to take time to acquire. Personally, I think the costs are fine. Granted, my point of view is a little skewed since working the GTN has netted me enough in assets to probably purchase everything on day one. The ship GTN/mailbox is something they want to avoid being super common to keep people on the fleet (so it doesn't feel dead). For that purpose, it's priced accordingly. Only people who are nutty wealthy will be able to afford these, and I think that's what they want. I believe they said at the guild summit, if you're super high up in legacy or swimming in a credits, you've earned the right to become a crazy solitary hermit on your ship. Or something to that effect.

Then I can only hope that when Georg was commenting about some systems not showing up on test right away (referring to PvP credit/xp rewards), that it can be meant to include softcap changes and that it just hasn't migrated over for some reason (fingers crossed). Seriously though, if they don't change the softcaps and add all those secondary stats, the next tier of gear will have very little improvement. =(

Just for the record, in case it wasn't clear, I do appreciate your effort here. =) I am also curious as to what's going on regarding diminishing returns and such. P.S. You're correct, it's been a while since I've worked with uncertainty and it was mostly in experiments with radioactive decay, where it's just sqrt(number of 'clicks').

Well.. the sample is small, sadly... ~35% of 1800 is 630. You're talking about a binomial distribution (i.e., each attack has two options, crit or not crit). Statistical uncertainty for this kind of measurement goes as sqrt(N), or in this case, sqrt(630) = 25. So, that means that one standard deviation is 25 crits or ~1.4%. So, if you performed this measurement (1800 ticks) an infinite amount of times, you would measure between 33.6% and 36.4%, 67% of the time (1 sigma), assuming that 35% were the true crit percent.

Stop spreading misinformation please. This is true of EV and KP. They've explicitly said it will NOT be true going forward, including the new Op in 1.2.

Heh. Yeah... The whole 'omg I'm unsubb WAAAHHH' is really sad and childish. Makes me weep for humanity a little.

Georg Zoeller was asked specifically about the softcaps in relation to the new tier of gear at the guild summit. He said that they were all rebalanced, and they have to be. Especially considering if you look at the black hole stats, they're putting more of the item budget into the secondary stats. With how low the current softcap is for crit and surge, there's barely a point adding more otherwise. The new tier of gear will end up being 1% better than the last one. I think the earlier poster is correct, either it's just not displaying correctly in the client (most likely, imo), or they forgot to make the changes. EDIT: If it's true , Rakata should do better once on the PTS, since some stats (if you swapped mods) were already into softcaps.

Indeed... *rubs his hands together like a rich miser* It is a good day to be a multimillionaire. =)

Oh, sorry. I was just trying to emphasize that it's indeed really likely, since the devs liked the idea.

Well, it's surely possible. Someone suggested at the guild summit and the devs straight up said pretty much "Hmm.. that's a good idea."

Even with a timer, this would allow an entire op to stack these for PvE encounters, and would get quickly overpowered. The only thing that could reasonable work would be a relatively long AoE hot that doesn't stack. Or, just one with a debuff so you can't get affected by it more than its cooldown.

Thanks for doing this. It's fun to watch you guys figure out a new fight like this. =)

Except that slicing is a *gathering* skill, and has no patterns. Nice try though. I suspect that Artifice will in fact gain augment crafting abilities (likely up to grade 25), and existing augments will simply plummet in price.

Sorry, I haven't read the other posts in this thread, however... It seems pretty obvious to me that what is being implied is a future mechanic to add an augment slot (or some other method like a refinement or 'enchantment' if you will), to existing gear, that will put the two methods of getting an extra stat bonus on equal footing.

Oh god yes, please! As a healer, I basically can't send people on crew skills when heading into an Operation. I've actually had it cause a wipe when it popped up just as I switching targets to heal someone about to die.

What's infuriating, is that with PTS player transfers, it would have taken less than an hour and a half for a group of players to test this. That's short enough of a time investment, that you could probably actually get a few guilds devoted to testing this once every patch. As a programmer of numerical simulations (not always really that complex) I know programming something as complex as an MMO must be daunting and convoluted, but geez they really need to test these. I've been basically giving them a pass week after week, because I know how hard this crap is, but now it is abundantly clear to me even, that PTS player transfers need to be reprioritized in the interest of preventing a frustrated player base. EDIT: One thing people need to realize, is that it's not really surprising that they don't test the fights. (Or test an entire instance run for sure). Assuming, that to be 'exhaustive,' they run a full 8 man HM or NM EV run. Let's assume that the devs aren't doing this for free in their off time, so it's probably a minimum wage earning QA tester. A dev's time would be way too expensive, especially requiring 8 of them. So, 8 * $7.25/hour * (2 hours .. probably not l33t). $116 for each run. Ok, so that's not a lot. I guess they're just cheapskates. =) There's probably a lot of overhead, on top of that, so that figure is probably pretty low by at least 50-100%.

Servers have actually been up for a while, though the launcher claims they are not. Just hit play.

I once had all 5 companions out on lvl 340 discovery missions (all 1000 affection), and 4 out of 5 failed. Go go RNG! Most of the time they all come back successful, but that one was particularly painful. EDIT: Oh, now looking at the above post reminds me. I often send out on 5 diplomacy missions, and each one I accept claims to have the same return (specifically, the gift). But, that's a bug. If you look in your inventory you'll have a few different gifts. Maybe not all of those actually failed that time, but just looked like it. I didn't inspect my inventory after.

It's for 3 adrenals, actually, but that's still ridiculous. =)

Yes, actually they are. =) Just zone in and out of your ship, or run a rank 1 mission Bio mission and all missions will repopulate.