Depends on boss... for example charging TFB and getting sucked up into the gate incurs 0 repair costs. However keep in mind that any damage even not death incurs some repair costs so could have been damage you already incurred before jumping to death.

No, definitely not was at one of the pylons... at first I thought it was due to being hit by a red flag'ed companion in the same area (that area is horrible due to everyone being flagged from the other quests and rampant aoes and tab target mistakes...) but then I realized that PvP deaths in the area cost repair costs. So wasn't that.

There is a difference between adapting to a change in mechanics or adapting to a difficult challenge then adapting to an arbitrary cost whose increase provides no increase in difficulty only increase in overhead. For example if there were now a tax each time you started an operation of 300k credits you bet everyone would be in arms about it and rightfully so. Doesn't mean I won't just pay it and move on with my life, but it is just a bad design decision.

Oh and that 30k was on one of my new alts that was in rakata/columi/tionese blend with no augments yet... so yea... something is odd.

There is definitely a bug though, the other night while running with a PUG on the gree event we wiped (don't get me started) and I had 0 repair costs... then the next time I had 30k in repair costs... so something is definitely not right in repair land... and I repair after every death (repair droid FTW).

No NM for TFB yet I don't think... EC NM can feel that way yes. Vorgath is the same pushover he was with a few new twists... The tanks and Kephess are brutal.

Really, wow I hadn't noticed the difference in cost... I hadn't switched to social gear on a few of my toons just because I use them to fill gaps in raids. *shrug* So I can see the benefit in fixing that, still if the reports people are having about 3x or more the cost are any indication, I think it needs to be adjusted down.

The first thing out of my mouth when they did that was, **** awesome! I remember dealing with EV NM in its buggy incarnation, nothing funny about those repair costs. Of course now it is too easy but that is why there is EC NM.

Umn, there are no non-modable dread guard. Even the belts and such are mod able at that level. Part of the reason even outside of progression to farm Vorgath in NM EC mode, he drops DG belts (if I remember correctly). I know folks tho do HM Drouks and tanks then switch to NM for vorgath just for the belts. That and because vorgath is a pushover in any mode. In BH land, only the belts, bracers and offhand are non-modable and only if you buy the ones from the BH vendor (in the case of the offhands, the MK-2 and such ones that drop are all modable)

This, finally someone making sense.

If the reason this was being done was economic I would have no problem with it. That is not (at least as stated in the patch notes) the case.

If the patch note read "increased repair costs to compensate for..." or something to that effect I would agree with you. I do agree that in a few months after they have measured the effect it has they will probably re-adjust it. As it is I suspect this was a case of a developer seeing a bug, fixing it and it not going through proper design/testing for the effect it had on the economy.

Yes, to quote myself from several posts previous: But basically there to my knowledge has been no sign of increased inflation to cause a need to increase the cash sinks. Certainly not to the extent that this change seems to inadvertently done.

Well I tend to disagree with you from a game design point of view, but that is besides the point. Putting this back to the larger conversation, I saw no indication that people were not being sufficiently disincentivized from dying prior to this change. And increasing said penalty is a large enough design decision that quite a bit of testing should have gone into testing its ramifications.

Read much? I didn't complain about dying to much. I was pointing out that you don't need a money sink to provide additional feedback to keep people from wanting to die. It is inherent in the act itself.

I disagree. Cash sinks exist to offset cash creation due to mechanics. I.E. they make the economy balance out so there isn't hyperinflation. That is the only reason they exist in games. Because you can create money (through killing things/etc) there has to be a place money is destroyed. That can be through buying skills, legacy unlocks or the like. The only reason to increase a cash sink is if there is an in balance in the in game economy and you start seeing hyperinflation. (i.e. people having enough disposable income that even basic goods go for a lot of money) As far as I can tell from monitoring the GTN, no such imbalance currently exists. Hence why a change of this nature is completely unnecessary. In fact eliminating the dailies entirely would lessen the need for repair costs as there would be less credit faucets.

There is, its called success vs failure. Death is a feedback loop to tell you you didn't succeed at something, Look at the PvP design in this same game. No repair costs, but death still has implications. Between the scaled time limit to respawn and the fact that if you die you failed at what you are doing, that is sufficient feedback for most people to choose to avoid doing it.

But again, missing the point. That is two hours that are pointless. There is no challenge in doing what you propose. Hell I could probably code a bot to do it if I were so inclined. I.E. bad game design.

Allow me to educate you on the difference. I have in no way complained about it. I have pointed out why it is a bad system. At no point did I say "oh no, I will never be able to keep up" or anything like that. I pointed out where the system falls flat and from a game design point of view, fails.

This is a gross generalization and false. One) many of the people discussing (not complaining) this change and proposing it be changed have plenty of money in the bank. I have a few mil banging around on my new character just for spending money. In fact I use a variation of what he does and have since about the first month the game came out. Two) The reason we are discussing this is it is a bad decision. It is practically pointless and bad game design. That's all. No other reason. However the people calling others names and ************ about the complainers apparently are only following and replying to the thread to feel superior in some misguided way. I pity you.

Perhaps many of us do see it but have a broader view of things than you seem to give us credit for. As to your specific point.... Click on crew skill, click on companion, click on mission, submit... repeat 5 times, wait 30 minutes do it again, and again, and again, and again.... gather results, sell on GTN, repeat.... How is that /not/ grinding? It is practically the encyclopedic description of the term. Frankly anything that a macro could do easier or even better than a human can is grinding. There is no point to it. There is no challenge. Grinding.

In addition to being atrociously spaced, this point is fallacious on its face. WOW and others like it might have ridiculous repair costs for better gear, however by no means can it be accurately claimed that / EVERY/ game has this mechanic. There were a lot of online games before WOW and many since that have had no repair mechanic at all. This is not talking about dumbing down the game. This is talking about lessening the pointless, mindless parts of the game so people can spend more time on the fun, difficult parts of it. Operations are fun because they are difficult and challenging. [and if you say they are not, I challenge you to prove to me that finishing EC NM was easy for you] Mindless money grinding, whether it be through the GTN or through dailies is pointless in part because it is a complete waste of time. There is no challenge in it (as you have rightly pointed out in your examples). Why require people to waste time on content that is trivially easy and nothing but a waste of time when you can have them spending time on the more difficult and fun parts of the game. How is limiting the mindless easy parts of the game dumbing the game down in any way.. Instead it is allowing the game to focus on the better/more difficult parts of the game.

Ok, want to get into specifics... good. Proposal, half all repair costs. Done... Plus sides Less time mindlessly grinding for cash or farming the GTN, more time actually playing the game (challenging yourself against challenging content, pvping, leveling new characters, whatever). Easy, would probably take almost no time to code. Affects everyone equally. Minus sides None. The only complaint I can come up with at all to this is "well I have plenty of money so who cares". Just because you are well off doesn't mean everyone else is. If you have enough money or a guild mechanism that means you aren't affected by this then this decision doesn't affect you one way or another, so butt out. Why did bioware/ea make the change. I can only speculate but having done professional programming in the past, I am going to guess that some developer saw a broken line of code and went wait a minute... this semicolon shouldn't be here or this shouldn't be commented out... and fixed it, put it in a patch note. When it got to QA, qa tested it based on the patch note and saw it worked. No one sat back and said, huh I wonder what systematic effect this will have on the game.

You don't get it.... you can level all crafting skills to 400 without using a single blue material. You don't need underworld metal to level crafting. From saying mods, it sounds like you are leveling a cybertech. While leveling cybertech, make green level mods/armorings and you don't need any underworld metal materials. Buy your mods/enahancements from the planetary reward vendors with commendations, get them from rewards or use the greens. There is no content in this game that needs the blues or purples while leveling if you do all the quests. If you skip everything and just do the class quests and are a level or two behind the world ... yes you will have problems... but that is a state you put yourself in, it is by no means necessary.

You can easily level based only on gear you get from rewards. You can easily level crafting skill based only on the materials you gather in the field, you don't need the blue/purple craftable items to level crafting skills. You don't need blue/purple craftable items while leveling. So "needed" costs are: Skills. Crafting Schematics. Repair costs. Speeder. *cheap on the GTN right now so might as well use the GTN once* Now to offset those costs, usually when I level a new character (I have 8 level 50s currently working on my 9th) what I do is give them a crafting skill, the corresponding gathering skill (even if I will later change this at level 50) and slicing (even if I will later change this at 50). Slicing more than gives enough credits to buy crafting schematics and skills on its own if you just stop periodically to RE boxes. Mission rewards more than pay for even the newly jacked repair costs. The resulting 1+mil I get at the end of a level 50 character run, I feed into legacy unlocks for the next one as well as switching any crafting skills if desired. NOW that being said. If you remove the speeder cost (one time, cheap purchase for an adaptable form the GTN (probably less than 30k), Jacking one third of the costs associated with leveling is a bit drastic of a "bug fix" regardless of everything else. As a progression raider, I do worry about costs as we do not do what you do and have the guild fund it all. We all fund our own costs and reap or own rewards (we roll for crystals for example). We do pool molecular stabalizers but we then distribute them among the raiders when requested for gear, we don't use them to create gear and GTN them. So to turn around your admonition, don't claim to speak for all progression guilds. We all do things differently. Now that being said, this is not going to keep me from throwing myself week after week against NM EC or against any new content that comes out. It will however mean instead of raiding most nights, I will have to spend time grinding. Time that I would rather be running alts through ops and teaching others to do ops/etc. I will do it, but frankly grinding is a stupid concept that needs to exist less in these games, not more. Make the content difficult and interesting enough and people will run it regardless. Making it "necessary" through an artificial grind mechanic is just lazy level design. Remember the game's purpose is to have fun... do people have fun with progression raiding or pvping or... any number of difficult things they may not succeed at at first and may take considerable time to do... yes. I don't think I know anyone who finds mindless grinding for credits fun.