I'm going to go to fleet and trying shouting out for heroics, see if i can recruit from there as well since not so many people on planets. It would be nice if you could register for groups for heroic missions kind of like warzones. If there is a mission I want to do but can't find a group, I can just set a flag for it in the mission description, and as soon as couple other people also flag it we all get a message to join/jump back to that location.

I'm on Saber of Exar Kun. On the server activity boards it doesn't show up as a light server, it still often goes into 'heavy' on peak use times, but i get the feeling a good chunk of the population either already dropped out of the game by this point (lvl 20-30) or has already progressed past it, and doesn't really bother with the story for their second time through with alts. The server has plenty of people on it, just none of them are ever on NS. Tonight on the server two guys waited on general chat for 2.5 hours for someone to try to progress through missions far enough to help them with "Building a Better Monster", but they finally gave up and went to sleep sometime before midnight. I FINALLY found one person to team up, and we did about 6 bonus series missions together because we knew if we left group its impossible to get one again. We didn't finish, so i imagine that's the end of that.

I've been on this planet for at least 2 hours every night this week and still cannot get a group to work the heroic group missions. At peak there are maybe 40 people on the whole planet, and the server is showing an heavy player load then. Anyone else having this problem on their server? I want to do the story, but its impossible.

Awesome, finally, some good stats in there. I've been keeping a log as well, but Armormech is a little different. I've also noted how often i'm crit crafting items while I'm making them to RE, and who did so. I have seen Mako with a higher level of affection crit craft almost the exact same number of times as my droid with zero affection. I have seen similar trends of huge numbers of RE with nothing and then have two REs back to back, not enough info to be statistically sig yet. Do you have a spreadsheet? Heading for NY today, return next thurs, but I also hoped to put together very simple spreadsheet/crafting log that people can use to track their crafting stats easily without having to manage all of the stuff on their own.

I've also noticed the popup stat comparison window to be a little flaky (sometimes it shows a stat as a red decrease when it is actually a green increase, etc.).

If you can mod anything it will kick some new life into armormech.

I know there's been 8 million topics with people complaining about how Orange Armor makes Armormech skill irrelevant. However, I notice on the patch notes today that "Fixed an exploit that allowed the removal of Armoring item modifications that were not intended to be available for removal on Artifact quality items." Does this mean you can now no longer remove armor mods from orange at all, or certain items? If so, does this also mean you can't just keep modding your orange armor to infinity?

The nice thing about RE is the companions don't do it, your main has to do it him/herself. AFAIK companions don't have anything to do with RE, just with crafting. Right now we're just looking at the RE aspect. You're right on multiple unseen variables. However, mathematically I think we can reduce them to a single unknown variable to vastly simplify. I THINK if you use a 'z' variable for a catch-all for all the many other unseen/unknown variables that may affect RE success, then we should still be able to see a trend, unless 'z' is much more influential than 'x' (your crafting level) and y (crafted item rating). Recap: X - Your crafting level Y - Crafted item rating Z - All other unknowns

What is your crew skill level? Every time you RE an item you increase its rating. If you are very low level, you might want to work your armormech level up a little by manufacturing some items and try again later. Not sure what effect crew skill has on RE success, but it couldn't hurt.

So to put together an experiment someone tell me if this sounds viable: I pick a low level green item, and RE it all the way through all 17 of the potential family tree iterations, recording my armormech level and each of the item ratings. This should give me 3 data points for the level 2 RE, and 14 data points for the level 3 RE. Since a sample set of 30 is statistically significant, if I finish out two green item family trees of the same rating, that will give me 28 data points for the level 3 RE (should be able to figure regression per your equations, gnar, but think need a z variable as catchall for any other variables that might be in there?). Will only have 6 data points for the level 2 RE, could see what that looks like, or maybe have to run a few more items. This is not too much work, I know several people that have finished out item families for some low level items, just finishing out two of them should give us something to go on. May only be valid for a particular crew skill, but I'd be willing to bet they're similar. Edit: number error

I'd be willing to bet that P_0 is calculated from several variables, including crafting skill, rating of the item to be crafted, and potentially the number of other items in the same family that you have previously RE'd and/or crafted. This would hold in line with a lot of what people have reported (for example, those that crafted an item 50 times and didn't get it are possibly running up against an item whose rating outweighs their skill). Don't know how that fits with the endgame crafting RE issues, though. I do know that item Difficulty is strangely calculated, I'm seeing weird patterns when I sort item tress by difficulty that don't align with rating, I used to think was proportional to rating, but now I think maybe has something to do with how many of the item you've crafted. Edit: Assuming P_0 is a function of crafting skill(x) and item rating (y) and potential unknown variable (z), then we can calculate the probability based on brute force. So assuming P_0 = f[x,y,z], then essentially P=1-(f[x,y,z])^n If enough people pick one item and report these following variables: How many times did you have to attempt before you got schematic?(n) What was your current crafting level?(x) What was the crafted item rating?(y) Then we could potentially calculate the distribution (P) from the number of answers, and use that to back calculate the dependent function f[x,y,z], because then the equation would only have a single unknown variable. My math is rusty, this right?

Pretty sure the game treats this exactly the same as it would if you had manufactured the item yourself. So for example, if you buy an item and RE it, you have the same odds of achieving the NEXT tier in that same item family as if you had manufactured it yourself. So, for example, if you buy a T1 item and RE it, you will potentially receive a T2 schematic in that item family. However, I would not recommend doing this on a T3 item, because there is no "higher" tier in that family. You don't learn the exact same schematic of the item you RE, but you have a chance at getting the next level schematic. That said, it makes it very pricey to try to learn schematics from GTN. You would have to buy several of the item for a chance at the next tier in that item's family. I did this accidentally early on when I wasn't sure what I was doing. You can test it out with some lower level items if you like, but GTN prices are so wonky you'll have to find an affordable niche. Edit: Forgot to say, this is probably dependent on your crafting skill. I don't think you're going to pull off RE's on items that are much higher rating that what you can currently craft.

This is worth checking out, definitely. I was playing around with the relationship between "Rating", "Difficulty", and "Level", which is kind of interesting. Initially I thought there was a directly proportional relationship, but what I THINK I'm seeing now is that "Difficulty" is dependent on your character's level when you created the item, how many times you have crafted it, and/or a few other variables. This would also make sense for crafting probabilities, its not just a straight percentage probability, but could include quite a few more variables. So its not just a matter of "You have a 2% chance of crafting this item with your current Armormech Level", but there could be quite a few other variable dependencies that prevent from being a straight probability.

Yes, I will at work.

There is nothing printed or stated on exactly how the system works, that's why we're so light on information and so much of this is based on supposition. Basically, the only thing that has been proven is the 3 tier item family system, most of what we're operating on right now is guess and assumption. So your first assumption of "nope, I haven't done it either" is pretty much how it goes right now. From developers' published comments, game experience, and reading a LOT on the subject on this forum and some really good resources outside this forum that actually use some probability math to help prove some of this, I believe that Bioware is trickling a small amount of the very high level schematics onto each server through RE or other avenues. Its controlled, not everyone can all have the same upper end schems. Not proven, but it's a strong hypothesis, I think 6 months from now we'll see as more epic items start hitting GTN.