You misunderstand me. First, I specifically included implants from biochem and synthweaving as a whole, which follow the more complex upgrade path, in my example. I have, and so have my guildies, encountered the issue of needing to RE successfully several times to get the desired item. It's more effort than for the biochem consumables, but it's still not significant effort. Since the point of my argument is the loss of differentiation, even if I had made the oversight you point out, the increased effort you mention wouldn't change my point. Once most crafters can readily make most of, if not all, the useful items, crafters become commodities themselves - interchangeable and meaningless - and that depresses the economy.

I too am concerned about the "reverse engineering better chance" part, as I don't think we need a better chance. In fact, I think it's too easy as it is, and it provides little useful long term benefit. One of my guildies, better organized than I, had no difficulty keeping himself geared in purple armor (from synthweaving IIRC) he learned from REing as he levelled up. I've had some difficulty, but less than expected, from doing the same with Biochem for the implants and reusables. On the surface, this seems apropos because I, and any of my potential customers, won't be using the non-top-level items for very long, so it makes sense that access to them would be easy. But the access is so easy that there's little expectation for a long term market for the items. When I wanted to craft a blue, level 33, implant for a guildie, I hadn't the recipe for it yet, but it took me all of 10 minutes to craft some greens with mats I had on hand and learn the recipe for the blue. Yes, I was a bit lucky, but my expectation was only half an hour. This indicates to me that differentiation between crafters in the same profession will vanish over time, instead of increase. But it is differentiation, not similarity of products, that drives an economy. Now, I'm aware that the lvl 50 experience with REing is different, since the crafter's skill no longer greatly exceeds the item being RE'd. But if I know that a guildie will eventually progress to learn what I want made and all I have to focus on is acquiring the mats, (even if it's first the mats to help her/him learn), then I'm less likely to search for the item on the general market. Also, the market for found greens and blues already is non-existent in my experience. I never give them attention in the GTN as I level up because I want to maintain, or improve, my appearance as I level up. Making it easier to RE would mean, if I didn't care about appearance, I could more easily find a crafted blue or purple to meet my needs, further depressing the economy for found items. As a final note, for people focussed on appearance (which is good as it's a source of differentiation in desires for the economy), the current RE system is useless. If I find a low level green that I exceptionally enjoy the appearance of, it would be *wonderful* if there was some means (with the help of a willing crafter) to turn that item into something I could use at level 50 (and/or my current level) and preserve its appearance. And given the focussed desire on that one item, it would be entirely appropriate to make it *hard* to do so. Because at the end of all that effort, I'd be well rewarded with the desired appearance. Putting the two ideas together, if RE'ing enabled a crafter, with appropriate effort, to focus her/his attention on useful appearance related items, I think it would be a boon to the economy as it allows crafters to choose the styles they want to market.

What follows is a list of *basic* UI behaviors that I've noticed are not present. Basic in the sense that such things are obvious, intuitive and expected for anyone who pays attention to what's easiest for the user. 1) When adding a friend via the '+' button in the friends pane, the box for typing the name needs to have input focus when the window appears. Needing to click into the small entry area is unnecessary and wasteful. 2) Pressing return after typing a friend's name in the above mentioned field needs to act as if the "add friend" button were clicked. 3) When companions finish missions, the companion interface/reward window needs to *not* appear if the player has other interface windows up. Specifically, the companion window has, for me, interrupted GTN searches, inventory & cargo hold organization (nearly causing items to be destroyed), preference changes and crafting - all to great annoyance. I'm sure it interrupts other activities as well. 4) The split stack window currently appears via shift+right-drag. The drag is unnecessary as the click itself does nothing. Use shift+right-click instead. 5) When the split stack window appears, the following keys need to interact with the window: arrow keys (or +/-) to increment/decrement, enter to confirm, numbers for specific entry. It was *incredibly tedious* to do RE stat gathering of stackable items when each RE was of a single item and it still is tedious *every time* I want to split a stack. I expect that there are technical reasons why this suggestion might currently be hard to implement, but that's Bioware's fault for not planning for it. It still needs to happen. 6) It doesn't seem possible to move the companion's abilities to different quickslot positions, so I can't put the two or three skills *I* might want on the mini-companion-bar instead. 7) Preference options that allow the player to share the current keybindings across other chars. Multiple ways exist that might make sense, but not having any method at all is *very tedious* when you have 4 actively played characters, and 4 more that occasionally see use. 8) When interface windows overlap (GTN and inventory, for example) (yes, I'm playing at a smallish resolution), clicking on a window brings it to the top. 9) Currently when interacting with a vendor, or the cargo hold, specifically closing the vendor/cargo window (via the 'X') automatically closes the inventory window. This needs to *not* happen, because I'm deliberately making the effort to close that one window, instead of escaping out to close both. It's also counter-intuitive and inconsistent because specifically closing the inventory window in that situation leaves the vendor/cargo window open. Other issues/requests: 1) What is the "toggle chat pane" keybinding supposed to do? I set a key for it, expecting that it would make my chat windows appear/disappear (like the "toggle chat on/off" button), but instead pressing that key causes it to be entered as chat text, repeating entry when pressed multiple times - nothing actually gets toggled. 2) Can we have keybindings for the mission and currency tabs on inventory, companion equipment window, and codex and lockout tabs? 3) When browsing modifications, there's no easy comparison of a moused-over mod with the same type mods currently in use. UI-wise, it's not clear how to illustrate that when potentially you want to compare that one mod with all the mods in use by the character and/or active companion. Still, finding any solution would be a great help. 4) When assigning crew to missions, it would be nice to display how many credits I have, so I could plan better which missions to choose. There are likely other situations where I want to know how many credits I have without seeing my full inventory, so perhaps have a small window always showing just the credits? There seems to be room just below the player portrait and above the text showing name and class (for example). Final comment: kudos for allowing the crew skills to be dragged to quickslots - that's a nice touch that handily solves a couple of interface issue I had. But shame for not documenting such a nice UI feature - it only recently occurred to me that it might be an option. In fact, that and many other UI features are likely lost on many folks because of minimal/non-existant/hard-to-find documentation. Cheers!

While I used a spreadsheet for recording most of my data, I did not see any point into having the spreadsheet do anything fancy. Because I recognized going in that I didn't know what trends I would find and my results were specific to many features/habits of my testing. I also didn't anticipate my drive for data would flag so (ie patience wore thin fast), so I was expecting I'd add features as they seemed relevant. I imagine it would take a fair amount of effort to put together a spreadsheet that would be easy to use and still allow for the collection of useful data. Effort I am willing to contribute to, but I'm busy enough now with the holidays done that it would be deceitful to commit to doing so.

Last weekend, while relegated to playing on my laptop, I decided to carefully gather some stats. I had a mid-30s Biochemist (331 skill), and an alt just in position to choose her skills, so my testing focussed on the low level Biochem crafts. The idea being to have my experienced biochemist make most of the items so that my newbie biochemist could RE at controlled skill levels. What follows is rather long and likely only of interest to those who want an idea how to better determine what RE's success rate depends on. First test was the experienced biochemist RE'd 30 Compact Medpacs (who already know the blue and purple versions) to gather info on how often the "you already know that schematic" message appeared. It didn't appear once. I'd been hoping to see it happen multiple times as it would have made the later testing simpler. Oh well. Second test, my newbie RE'd 158 Compact Medpacs at skill lvl 1, until my patience gave out, without success. I then did 5 rounds on the newbie of: 1) skill up to 9 by making Compact Medpacs 2) RE them until success 3) unlearn biochem The number of REs needed were: 4, 1, 6, 7 & 5. I did three rounds as above at skill 7, with success after 2, 1 & 4 REs. At this point, I was losing patience with waiting to skill up after each successful RE, so I got my experienced char to make a pile of each of the stimulants so I could RE multiple items at each skill level. The newbie then tried to RE 20 each of two of the stims (I think resolve and skill, but I'm not sure), but without success. I put that idea on hold since the stims weren't behaving like the medpacs were. I did 5 rounds on the newbie as above, but skilling up to 5. The number of REs needed were 5, 12, 4, 1 & 3. Then for skill 3, I only managed two rounds on the newbie. Again patience was a factor in the testing, but this time because the number of REs needed were 15 & 84. Yes, 84 the second time. At this point, I made the realization that the second of the skill 3 tests may have been affected by the fact that I skilled up to 3 by making a stim, not a medpac. In other words, I realized that whether my char had actually made any of the item being RE'd might be a factor in the success rate, which could explain why the 40 stims didn't yield success. At this point, I went back to REing stims on the newbie, but at skill 11. I REd 63 Reflex stims without success, and never made any of them (I'd intended to RE 70, but I accidentally RE'd a stack of 7 of them, again, without success). Might stims, of which I made several throughout the testing, RE'd after 5 & 6 attempts, but the third run failed after 42 - my notes aren't clear as to whether I skilled up to 11 that third time by making any might stims. Skill stims were RE'd 33 times without success, even though I made some to skill up to 11. Resolve stims, which were also made during skilling up, were tested 4 times, REing each time after 1, 8, 10 & 14 tries. My patience was almost non-existant at this point, which is perhaps why I delayed so in posting my data. Anyway, I went into this testing with the conjecture that the ratio of the char's skill with some "skill rating" of the item was important to the success rate of the RE, and that would be consistent with (but not confirmed by) the medpac data. The stim data though raises questions: 1) Does the char making the item increase the RE chance? 2) Do the stims have different "skill rating"s? 3) If making the item matters, then does resetting the skill reset the memory of making the item? Another question I had at the beginning was if the "you already know…" message appeared as frequently as a successful RE, which I had intended to test by doing multiple rounds of: 1) skill up to some fixed value 2) RE until success 3) RE until "you already know…" msg 4) unlearn Oh, and I can answer the question of what happens to learned schematics after you forget a skill. Every time but one, my char did not recall the learned medpac schematic upon relearning biochem. Given the number of times I relearned, that one exception is likely to have been a UI bug (or operator error) - I didn't test it by trying to make it, since my focus was elsewhere. Anyway, since my number of tests are still relatively small, little can really be concluded from the testing. I clearly don't have the patience to continue with the methodology, but perhaps others in this forum do. Oh, my newbie was (and still is) a lvl 8 Imperial Agent, who went to fleet right after acquiring Kaliyo - in case folks want to track the companion's skill contribution to the testing. To sum up the methodology suggested: A) use a low level char that has zero investment in any skills for the testing, because the char will need to unlearn the crafting skill multiple times B) RE at a particular skill level C) track the items made to skill up to that level for each run *and* in the entire history of the char. D) have multiple types of items to RE at each skill level, otherwise you may spend longer preparing to do each run than doing the run itself. E) Even if you expect to RE in under 10 tries, it's good to have 40+ of the item in question. F) I suggest to only RE items that are learned from the initial training, or from REing those - otherwise there'll be too much variation in the data (and you'll be paying for schematics just to forget them later). G) (Edit) Make most of the items to be REd from a higher lvl char. If the item stacks then you can make help yourself a little with the following trick. Before you start REing, put the item in question in a quickslot so the game will tell you how many of that item you start with and you can then see how many are left when the RE succeeds. If you don't do that, or the item doesn't stack, then carefully recording each RE can get tedious too. You can't go by the number of messages received about the items looted from the RE because sometimes nothing is returned. I figure that focussing on the numbers that result when REing the initially taught items, we can tease out a pattern. Here's hoping all that info helps!