You are, apparently. There's a very big difference between selling credits and selling items that players are willing to buy with credits. In the first case, they're directly increasing the total number of credits in the game, leading to inflation. In the second case, they're not. It may sound like a minor distinction, but it's not. Picture an MMORPG with a static population. Each player has, say, 100K credits. The prices of things are going to be based on that amount. Any item that is selling for 100K credits needs to be worth wiping out a player's liquid assets. Now, lets say enough players purchase credits to increase the total credits in the game five-fold. So each player averages out to 500K credits. Now, it's easier to spend 100K on an item, because instead of wiping out your liquid assets, it puts a small dent in them. Which means that more people are willing to purchase the item, driving up demand, causing the price to increase. People that would have paid 100K for the item are now willing to pay 500K for the item. So, you wind up needing to purchase credits just to maintain the same level of buying power that you had to begin with. Now, this happens over time naturally in almost any MMORPG. Devs create credit/gold sinks to stave it off, but staving it off completely would have other bad side effects, so they only try to control it. For example, the articles I've been reading about WoW estimate that the MoP expansion has caused little inflation, on the order of 15%, quite a bit less than some earlier expansions, so they're managing to control it better than they were before. However, allowing the purchase of credits that didn't previously exist in the game would be accelerating inflation, not trying to control it. This is for much the same reason as why some governments, when faced with a budget crisis simply print more currency, are capable of having inflation rates that would terrify the typical "first world" citizen. There are currencies out there in the real world that have lost so much buying power because of this that people would need over 1 million of the same currency to buy the same thing they could have bought with a single unit of currency a few decades ago. So yes, there is a difference, and it's not a small one.

Yup, my guild has run two of those, and I know that there are other guilds that do it as well. Probably a run every week or two, though you have to watch general chat on the fleet fairly constant to catch one, sadly. Maybe ask about one in your server's forum?

It's dictated by the class of the character you talk to the vendors on. So if you mail the tokens to a lowbie, that lowbie will be able to turn in the tokens for gear appropriate for that lowbie's class.

Not anywhere I've seen. A lot of people quoting that level cap are doing so because Bioware did three surveys through a third party of the "would you pay $X for..." and one of the surveys mentioned a lvl 55 level cap. However, each survey had a different level cap, 52 and 53 were also asked about. The prices also varied between the three surveys, from $10 to $40. It's possible, I've also heard rumor that the new planet is going to be huge. It would have to be to support 5 levels of gameplay. Personally, unless I find a dev mentioning it, I'm not assuming 55 is the new level cap.

As far as actual game play, none of the other professions will give you more than a transitory benefit at best at end game. You'll get craftable gear that will fill one or two slots but be replaced well before you're in best-in-slot gear, even if you don't do ops. They might help you get ready to raid, but that's about the extent of it.

A little bit of exaggeration going on there. Yes, at lvl 14, it's a great weapon, but really, it's stats are about that of a lvl 15 artifact ("purple") moddable weapon, trading off some secondary stats for extra endurance. Definitely not worth crafting lvl 15 artifact mods if you can have this, but by the time you get to 19, blue mods in a moddable weapon would be better stats. So best at 14, tied at 15, decent until 21 or so.

I can deny it. Level 50 legacy, hit it between the server transfers and the server merges, and I was at 8/12 character slots when the server merges landed, and I'm currently at 12/12, no change in upper limit.

As has been noted in this thread, yes, droid companions can gain affection, but only from gifts, not from quest-related dialog choices. Maximum affection is 15% efficiency and 5% crit.

There is no profit to be made from companion gifts! These droids are not the droids your looking for! Ignore the man behind the curtain! Or, yeah, what he said, a little more competition isn't going to kill me. It's not huge amounts of income, and there's the occasional bad day, but overall it's steady enough that I don't run dailies anymore and it's financing things like my habit of buying lvl 26/27 armorings/mods/enhancements in the GTN, buying legacy stuff, etc. Furthermore, I expect an uptick in the business when F2P launches, since free players can buy stuff in the GTN, but can't sell there. Then again, that should affect all (or almost all, at least) markets.

Yesterday's patch was a distinct improvement, we now get the "you already know this schematic" at the start, automatically cancelling the "learn" bar, rather than cancelling it after the schematic disappears. The tooltip discussed was not included in that update.

1.2 is when it changed to the "correct" behavior of only being able to run one of a given discovery mission at a time and not being able to right click an item starting the same mission. At some time after that, but prior to 1.4, it broke into the current situation of "you can click it, it will go away, but you don't get the mission." As for the return amounts, I was spot checking at first when 1.4.1 went live, didn't see any problems, so haven't been paying close attention since then.

If you don't mind hiding it, you can pick up the hat for the social outfit on your capitol planet at about lvl 10 for 300 credits or so. It's moddable and adaptive, so it works for anyone, but won't look like a helmet, In fact, the female one looks like someone with a high speed camera filmed something like a lightbulb in mid-shatter. If you want something that looks like a helmet, you can check the legacy vendor on your capitol planet for a moddable helm, though I don't remember what legacy level it requires, so if you're on your first toon, that won't work.

Agreed. I can see ways for it to result in a bad compromise, but it's got potential. Frees the players strong in the OCD from feeling like they have to keep relogging until they get what they want, and also gives them a knob they can turn to fine tune the economy, if they're in the mood to do so.

It's been fixed for all missions I've checked. Also note that the learning learned schematics has been fixed, but NOT unlocking unlocked discovery missions, you can still lose missions that way.

Acknowledged bug, I'm hoping it gets fixed tomorrow, as I've probably got several days, if not a weeks worth of UWT missions to burn through. FYI, It affects more than just the discovery missions though, it affects all rich/wealthy/prosperous missions I've tested that give stacks of items (so credit box slicing missions seem unaffected). EDIT: The known bugs list shows this as being fixed in tomorrow's patch, though there are caveats on that.

Ah, I see our difference in point of view. I have slicing on almost every toon I've got. I get so many discovery missions that sometimes I have to fight to keep up with them. I don't mind getting more than I can handle, because most of them sell well. Multiple slicers scale very well. Some crafting missions are returning less materials than intented. This includes all of the 340-skill missions that come from discovery items (those sold in the GTN). I'm not sure how it's working for those, but for Rich missions (all of them that I've tested, so this isn't a small problem), you're getting half the mats you're supposed to get unless you crit, at which point you get them all. Oddly enough, it seems that at least some bountiful missions work fine UNLESS you crit, at which point you get half of what you should. Yes, that means critting reduces the reward for some missions.

From what I've seen, unless you get the drops from operations to RE until you learn the grade 26 and 27 schematics, there's more to be made in slicing than in cybercrafting, mostly in the form of mission discoveries that you can sell on the GTN. That market is a little depressed at the moment due to a bug.

That's all that's changed recently, the lack of reasonable distribution of mission types, for some definition of reasonable, has been going on since beta. I haven't noticed any real changes in the distribution of the mission types in the 1.4 patch. The reason that the artifact-grade mat prices has gone up on the GTN is because of that bug. The most consistent source of those mats is suddenly returning half as much of those mats as it used to. Supply has gone down without the demand going down, so the price goes up.

Not too far off, the Rank 1 gifts are more cost effective from 0-3999 affection. You can actually get the gifts cheaper through missions than from the vendor, but you generally won't get the missions you need. Gift missions seem to be more for someone that intends on selling them, or someone that is stockpiling every time of gift because they plan on doing enough characters that they'll hit all the types of gifts. Treasure hunting gift missions often return tokens that can be exchanged for specific types of gifts, rather than gifts directly, but you don't get enough tokens to get a gift from a single mission. That's nice if you are only interested in a single type of gift and don't want to go through selling the wrong types so that you can buy the right types. Don't do any of your companion quests until you hit at least 8000 affection. That way, you get that affection when the affection would be most expensive to obtain through credits. Pay attention to which gift types get you the most affection from each companion. I recommend checking http://dulfy.net/2012/04/22/companion-gifts-and-crafting-bonuses-for-1-2/. That also gives the base amount of affection for each type. Also pay attention to credits per point of affection when choosing what gifts to purchase. Purple gifts give 2.4 times as much affection, so don't spend more than 2.4 times as much per purple gifts than blue, but also don't buy the blues if the purples are less than 2.4 times as costly. Sometimes the blues are more cost effective, sometimes the purples, just because prices vary. I've seen the credit cost ratio go as high as 5, and as low as 1.5.

That's been the case since late beta. In fact, I had a slicer go broke due to a string of poor misson rewards one time, even before the beta slicing nerf, back when slicing was a licence to print money. Part of the reaction to this is because after every patch, someone starts asking these same questions. It's usually someone that had a string of bad luck. Without showing a decent data sample, some people will tend to assume that this is more of the same. I'm not knocking the fact that someone came to the forums and asked if anyone else is seeing the same thing, that's a reasonable step. On the other hand, don't expect anyone to go out of their way to prove or disprove it if you're not bringing some actual data. I can only remember two actual times since launch that that assumption was incorrect. One time, the nerf was added to the patch notes, and the other time, it was a bug that was fixed about a week after someone managed to document it well enough that the devs could see what's happening. That latter occurrence has some important lessons (though admittedly they don't directly apply here). Basically, people started saying that they were losing credits on slicing missions. This went on for several days, until Dulfy collected enough data to show exactly what had happened. Green quality credit cases were returning an average of 60% of what they were before the patch, which meant that they were returning less than white cases of the same level. This detailed information got posted, the devs took a look at it, and within 24 hours said that they had found the problem. It got fixed in an unscheduled maintenance about a week later. Basically, when you're talking about credit returns on slicing missions, you have to think about thinks from a statistical point of view. Sizes of data sets, testing methods, etc. Without that, it's all anecdotal, and everyone has their own view and recollections. For what it's worth, when 1.4 bumped up the character-per-server limit, I rolled 4 new characters and took slicing on every one of them. None of them got rich, but they all better than broke even in the long run even before selling any bonus returns on the GTN. My existing slicers have continued to have normal returns, crits, mission discoveries, etc. In fact, because of the bug on rich-or-better returns, my piles of unrun missions is getting to be annoying. I'm at somewhere around 30 of the 340-level UWT missions, 20 340-level slicing missions (or I was before I started selling them off). These are all pretty normal amounts for just over a week

They all contribute towards the same set bonuses (except the black hole gear, which doesn't have a set bonus, though I could be wrong about the Tionese gear), so as long as you keep the set bonuses, you'll be fine. The campaign gear set bonus is on the armorings, the rest of the gear has the set bonus on the shell. Do keep in mind that there are different set bonuses even within the same set of armor for different roles, though.

Yeah, missed that last line, apparently I need more caffeine.

Or you could watch the devtracker, they've already acknowledged this as a bug there, no clue why CS doesn't know about that yet. I'm not. Bugs have to be far worse than this to get a fix in days. It's only been around a week, took two days for them to acknowledge it (they had to reproduce it and determine that that wasn't an intended change), then we had two days of weekend. The odds of them having a fix for a bug monday early enough that it could go through QA for a patch tuesday is rather low, and that's assuming that the patch cut off isn't earlier than the day before. Given the number of bugs that came in in 1.4, I wouldn't even be surprised if this is their top priority. I'm happy if they fix it by next Tuesday, even though my discovery missions are getting seriously backlogged.

I saw a dev comment on this, and one of the things they said that would terminate the time early is to mail it to an alt. The only other thing I remember is to add an augment slot, which wouldn't work here as it would bind it to you.

Interesting, I've never seen that, but since I stick to the lvl 49-50 missions once I'm leveled, my sample size is probably on the small side.