bump!

Bump! This is an extremely important issue!!!!!!

It no longer plays music! It just follows you around, and its not even a pet it has a 30 minute cool down and only lasts for 30 seconds! This is a disaster!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I paid 55k to hear 30 seconds of cantina music every half hour, not have a mopey droid follow me around silently for 30 seconds! While you're fixing this please make the cool down 3 minutes and the music last 3 minutes, thank you.

I play on a very high pop server and only play when grouped with my friends. Other gathering skills have a node respawn in ~5 minutes. So we can clear a zone and they can gather on the way in/out. With slicing the nodes take 4 times as long and we all have it, so its not really great supplemental income for the person that only gets 1 node. Slicing as a gathering skill is hampered by playing in a group, which is the point of mmos. The other gathering skills generate new nodes by killing enemies so there will always be like 10x as many nodes available to a group.

Schematics sell for under 2k on my server or don't sell at all. Augment market is similarly dead. Not to mention the loot tables giving the same damn speeder/kuat drive yards missile pack over and over again. And of course the issue that once you get a schematic you no longer need to buy another, so there is a limited market. Do something to drive the price up on augments (make them better, make more gear with augment slots) then make the cost to remove augments more than a profitable amount they could be sold for and that'd go a long way to making slicing worth something.

There are problems with it as a gathering mission. Node respawn time, lower level pvp zones not having nodes (weren't they supposed to have more resource nodes due to the risk? Jundland is empty), bugged nodes, income being cut if grouped, inability to slice fallen enemies (most gathering skills gain bonus nodes simply by killing enemies).

Fundamental disagreement in philosophy here. You still had to put in the time to run the missions/lose companions/not do something else with them. It isn't just 'push a few buttons get money'. There is still a wait, mission cycle time, etc. If people want to sit around for 20 hours grinding slicing missions to become rich they should be able to. Those people will just find something else to exploit anyways. For the normal people it was running slicing missions while *playing the game*. I liked it because I hate crafting and AH baroning. I liked the idea of something to gain extra money(which in the long run was not even alot?) without resorting to the former. Without strong low level income no one spends any money in the early going. Prices plummet on low level purples/gear/mats/etc. Why spend money on a purple when you will just out level it soon anyways?

Mats are not guaranteed to be listed, nor listed for the price you're talking about (because of individual server AH economy), requires additional travel to go to the GTN and purchase, and buying materials instead of running missions for them does not skill you up. You can skill up a gathering mission while using the materials yourself to create items to sell. And in the long run your gathering missions will return more valuable materials.

But if they succeed you are guaranteed to gain something. Slicing missions can fail. But if it succeeds its the only one with a chance to return nothing.

And every gathering missions WILL (theres not a chance) return mats you can use to craft. Returning negative credits cannot be used for anything.

Thats 60 mission hours. Total real time is 20 hours. I ran rich tier 5-3, bountiful tier 4, abundant tier 6-4. Running rich tier 5 and other tier 6 missions is required if you want to gain level 340 mission drops. Please, tell me your winning strategy for slicing and I will track it for a day and see where it comes out.

I would be fine with a complete overhaul of the skill as long as it was profitable to keep. I have not even gotten into the augment side of things. Those things make no money and theres virtually no gear which has augment slots. What were they thinking there?

If you chose to sell. If you have the appropriate crafting you can simply turn the materials into other profitable goods. I can't turn -658 credits (my high so far on the loss side) into anything. Except more forum posts about why slicing is dumb now.

It should be closer to 200 credits per minute (this is with 3 companions) at least. The 70k I made in 60 hours of slicing covers 3 skill ups at my level. 60 hours of mission time for 3 skill ups! It would take 300 mission hours to afford speeder bike training 3. Crazy.

The slicing nodes respawn slower than other gathering skills, you can't gather corpses like others, and if you're in a group you're fighting over the lockboxes. And once again, those other gathering skills can run missions which do not return a loss. You still gain a tangible asset.

The complaint is that with max skill you still can lose money on missions (all of them) and this cuts into the profit. Crafters can lose money 'skilling up' but if they are smart they will stick around at their tiers and sell items which make money. Each crew skill can make a decision to 'make money' and all will come out ahead vs slicing. Grinding the skill should never come into a discussion on its economic feasibility.

This simply is not true. Every mission has a chance to lose money. I'm not talking about losing money in the long run. I'm talking about individual missions. Having any mission return you less credits than you put in is stupid and just arbitrarily kills the profit per minute. Abundants/Moderates/Bountifuls of all levels have a chance to return you negative credits. This is the worst and is the reason why slicing is no longer economically feasible. The goal is to get something for time & money invested. The opportunity cost of having slicing vs another mission running and not having your companion for questing. Right now slicing is a bad buy.

Every other crew mission I run returns me something unless I fail. And last I checked I was running slicing missions, not gambling missions. I'd gladly gamble credits in Nar Shaddaa like I did in SWG, but that's not an option. I have run 60 hours worth of missions to gain 72k. That is atrocious. edit: If I could gamble in space roulette like in SWG even that would be more profitable than slicing.

A nice little supplement for a level 10 character maybe. Level 30+ and the money gains just don't justify the time invested when your companions could be coming back with metals/gifts/anything more valuable than lockboxes.

The problem here is that you need to crit rich tier 5 or tier 6 missions to get schematics and purple missions to make money, but you're more likely to crit rich tier 3 or other weak missions than those. I am running missions with 10k affection companions and my data shows me I crit 12% of the time and lose money 34% of the time. so I'm 3 times more likely to lose money than I am to crit, and many of my crits are from automated saboteur which do not provide level 340 missions (the ones that sell) Make the missions not a money sink (you should only lose money when you fail, no other mission makes you lose straight up lose money you atleast gain *something*), increase the crit chance if you're not going to up the profit margin. Right now I can make more money than slicing selling companion gifts. Theres still so many bugged world nodes and of course if you're running in a full group like I suppose the designers would want (because its an MMO?) then either 1 person is ninjaing all the nodes or you're sharing and thus once again losing money for the time invested.

Total Missions: 155 Total Cost: 233675 Avg Cost Per Mission: 1507.580645 Total Time: 63.488 hrs Total Time w/ Affection Bonus: 53.965 hrs Avg Time Per Mission: 20.8897 minutes Total Reward: 303840 Avg Reward Per Mission: 1960.258065 Profit: 70165 Profit Per Minute: 21.17177356 Profit Per Minute / Missions At a Time: 63.51532067 Number of Crits: 22 Total Time / Missions at a Time 17.988 hrs Number of Rich Missions 101 Number of Abundant Missions 17 Number of Moderate Missions 8 Number of Bountiful Missions 29 155 Average loss -205.8518519 Average gain 804.7623762 Missions which lost money: 54 Missions which gained money: 101 Pretty ridiculous that a third of missions lose money. Just turns into a time sink. 63 CPM is very sad when one is not level 10.