Leveling an alt slicer right now, currently around 250 or so. Started out with 5k credits, now have 18k (just from the slicing missions), and have found a bunch of mission scrolls. I only run rich or bountiful, abundant if necessary. Had I sold the missions I found, I'm sure I'd make a lot more credits. But I give them to my alts instead.

Undercuts happen in a lot, if not most, mmo markets. Particularly in a commodity market like swtor or wow because there is no differentiation between goods. Even mastercraft gear is the same as other crafter's mastercrafts. There are many reasons people will undercut. Perhaps they have cheaper materials or suppliers. Maybe they are switching professions and are dumping goods. Perhaps they bought something and realized they didn't need it. They could be ignorant to market prices or ignorant to markets in general. Maybe they're just kind-hearted and "don't want the buyer to overpay", or are ignorant of their labor costs. Or they just leveled up on too many of one good and don't want to sit on the stock. The list goes on but you get the point... So it all comes down to picking the right markets, understanding your production costs, break evens, sunk costs, selling at a loss when the market is lost, making the appropriate profit for your time, and patience for markets to even out. You do have to undercut due to the commodity market, but don't undercut retarded amounts. Just a one credit undercut will do it in most cases, maybe 50 or 100 credits for higher value stuff. Don't believe the myth that someone will buy a higher priced good just to spite your small undercut. It's pure bs. Always be the lowest price for your given market, assuming that price still meets your profit expectations. Sometimes it helps to make stockpiles and even undercut "yourself" if you've been undercut. If you're in a market and someone puts a bunch up at lower prices, consider buying them out; or just be patient until they sell their excess goods and the market goes back to normal. But think long-term. Will the market ever recover? Remember goods never stop flowing in a mmo, so prices will steadily decrease over time, unless there is a demand bump (e.g. jewels in the last major wow patch). But prices generally don't drop like a rock overnight either, at least not permanently. So don't just dump your goods for cheap just because someone dumped their goods. Think it through, and if you think the market will recover just enter a different market and come back later. In your situation, either your market is going down the tubes or you are paying too much for your materials. I suspect the latter. As others have suggested, perhaps it's time to make some alts and start your production line for materials, and your slicers to supply missions.

Alts are likely the best way to get your UT metals. Sure you could buy them from the GTN, but you're at the whim of the market, which could run dry or be high priced at times. Why rely on something you can't control? All you really need is an alt up to level 10, but you'll only have one companion. If you level to 14 and complete the class quest around that level, you'll have two companions to use, and you'll also have sprint which is so much better than walking. You'll also have your ship, which is where you want to park your alts so you get quicker login/logout times. So if you just want to focus in cybertech, I'd have one character (the "main") as cybertech, scavenging, and slicing. The other would be underworld trading, slicing, and a spare crew skill. I'd probably go scavenging with that extra skill due to the missions where you find the crafting mats you'd normally buy from the crew skill vendor. Those end up cheaper than buying from the vendor. If you want to do other profs, you may want to consider a character dedicated to resource gathering.

What are you smoking? I brought two (of many) equivalent examples to SWTOR and you call that an unrelated outcome? Your use of big words doesn't make you very smart when you cannot even recognize the simple correlation among similar mmos that have launched with nearly identical design.

In a few years most mmos will follow diablo 3's real money auction house design, and subs will be a thing of the past. When you're cursing the industry a few years from now, remember you heard it here first!

I did too, for the first month. It is definately a better leveling experience. But you WILL tire of leveling alts soon enough. But hey, who am I to tell you what you should and shouldn't enjoy, right?! You go on having fun if you're having fun. I'm just providing reasons based on historical evidence that SWTOR is not much different than any other wow-clone that has come out in the last six years, and most of those are F2P now. So based on that very reasonable analysis, it would not surprise me in the least to see SWTOR F2P as well. Another little interesting tidbit, having played all of them, I understand the psychological reasoning at the beginning of a mmo. I've enjoyed all of them the first month or so, until I discover that they are wow-clones. I mean, truly enjoy them, as in a breath of new life into the genre, can't put them down. Yet after a month or two, the same thing inevitably happens. They have the same exact design as wow and I realize that I've already done this before in a different skin. So I find it very hard to believe that anyone can make an actual appropriate mmo analysis without at least playing the game for 2-3 months. By that time, you should start to actually get an idea of what the game really is, and the novelty should have worn off. That's when you really determine how good the game is.

Your optimism is refreshing and all, but I find it naive. Did you know that WAR and AOC had roughly a million subs (just half that of this game with a much less-known IP) in the first two months; and after the 2nd and 3rd months dwindled down to less than 100k? Why is that you may ask? Because they were wow-clones. And guess what, SWTOR is a wow clone. It's essentially the exact same game (solo to 50, raid for end-game) with a star wars skin. WAR and AOC got just as good press at the beginning as SWTOR did. They were "rockin the industry" just as much. Yet they ended up just as dead in the end. This industry is filled with hype, most of it created by publisher marketing machines (and EA has one of the best hype machines around), so you just cannot go on believing that these publications mean squat in the grand scheme of things. I can tell you that to me SWTOR has the best MMO leveling experience I've played. But guess what, that doesn't make it a good long-term mmo. For all intents and purposes the 1-50 experience is completely seperate of the end-game experience, almost two completely different games. So to take reviews of the game a month or two out and proclaim them as gospel is not only naive, but premature.

For ANY other game that didn't have the star wars IP I'd state with extreme confidence that SWTOR will be F2P within a year. With the star wars IP, I realize that a portion of its playerbase may never have been exposed to wow and might actually find this game compelling enough to pay a monthly fee for some time. Without those people though, easily F2P within a year. Even with them, I don't know if that will be enough...

Much more a single-player game with an online component than a mmo at this point. I don't see how that's going to change without a whole-scale redesign.

Looks like he failed pretty badly on that whole design principle. It's funny to say that too because SWTOR actually has a fairly decent crafting system, but there's absolutely NOTHING that sets any crafter apart. It's the same exact commodity market as wow with re-engineering thrown in for some flavor. Not only that but if you actually make an attempt to craft heavily and get all those purples, the auction house is of such a poor design that learning all those schematics does nothing but frustrate you when you try to list them and research their markets. Add in the 50-item limit and you have to wonder what crack these guys were smoking.

My primary point is that most everyone's already played wow, and slapping a star wars skin over a 7-year old game is only novel for a short period of time. The Star Wars environment will hold some people over a bit longer, but ultimately most people are going to arrive at the "been there done that" conclusion. I'm not arguing innovation for innovation's sake, and in fact there's lots of older concepts that aren't innovative that would work well in this game. I'm just saying you can't essentially copy wow's format and expect it to breath new live into the genre. There's a lot of good gaming concepts to use from wow, but the same tired old design is just a recipe for failure in my book. Don't get me wrong, the game is immersive and I enjoy it, even if I think they went overboard on the movies. I just don't see it as a long-term mmo. As I said from the start, I heartily agree with the bloggers that this is a "3-monther", or a "hold-over" until a real mmo comes along that I want to play. The only thing that will change that are some amazing repetitive design principles that we have not been introduced to yet. And I don't believe such designs are in the works. I think that we're looking at TOR now as it will be two years from now minus a few raid patches. And Bioware won't be getting my sub fees for long with such a game.

It's because wow is essentially the same game in terms of mmo design. solo quest to max level and raid. That's it! Everything else is secondary. It's not mmo burnout, it's theme park burnout, and it doesn't take long to get there. That's because themepark mmos are shallow based on their most basic design principles. They are designed to be beaten! And a mmo should never be beaten. Beating the game defies the very idea of a perpetual mmo. Perpetual means forever. If you beat it, it clearly isn't lasting forever.

In context to the discussion, a true mmo will have enough content that you'll keep your sub active for longer than three months without running out of content until the next content patch. This is done through repetitive mechanics which are not completable in a short amount of time. e.g. gear acquisition, crafting development, meaningful pvp, world events, accumulation of wealth, stuff to spend that wealth on, etc.

Did you ever stop to think that people left those games because of bad design? I agree that disgruntled chatter can cause a FEW people to quit, but the masses? Don't be delusional. Only reasons TOR hasn't hit that point yet is because 1) The single-player pre-raid content is more polished and there is more incentive at the start to play around with alts. and 2) The star wars name will hold onto people a bit longer. I think the only reason I'm still here is because I re-rolled to Republic, leving a level 50 and multiple sith alts behind. If I hadn't done that, I don't think that existing content would be enough to keep me here. In fact my sub ran out about five days ago, and I reactivated it primarily to respond to a forum post. How sad is that? The game was secondary....

I can't help but agree on many points, specifically the part about it being a "3-monther". This is the failure of the theme park raid-oriented design, and it's not exclusive to SWTOR. It's the same with wow. You eat up all the content and wait 3-4 months until the next patch. Over and Over. If you're not a raider (and guess what, most normal people do not raid) then you're waiting even longer between patches. I'm sorry, but that is not a mmo to me. What's more sad is that's what most people THINK a mmo is thanks to wow.

I second the idea, although my primary goal for housing is to create "shopping malls" and remote shops like we did in SWG. The auction house has its uses (even though SWTOR's AH stinks due to a horrible interface), but shops allow a lot more diversity in available items due to an auction house's time limit. Make housing vendors that could allow up to say 30 days for an item to be displayed, as well as the ability to have item packages (say a lvl 9-50 leveling kit with custom armor and all the mods, hilts, enhancements, etc needed for leveling).

Says who? You? MMO stand for massive multiplayer online. Not massive raids online. PVP warzones with a huge pool of people is massively multiplayer. Playing the market with thousands of other people is massively multiplayer. Developing a community based around merchants serving adventurers is massively multiplayer. Wandering around solo in a huge world where you can group up and interact with thousands of people is massively multiplayer. Raids also happen to be massively multiplayer, but they are far from the deciding factor of what makes a game a mmo.

You know, typically I would respond to your snide arrogance with my own brand of snide arrogance, but I'll let that go today. Suffice it to say that raiding is not required for social interaction. See, I get it. You know for 100% fact that you as a raider are an extreme minority. You know for 100% fact that if a mmo was released that catered to the more casual crowd and ditched raiding, that you'd probably never see another raid-oriented mmo again. So I understand. You fight for your raiding just like I fight for my crafting, and we're both fighting an ultimately losing battle. So keep up the good fight, for what good it will do you in the end.

Agreed 100%. I'd go as far as to say that we need more than a handful. As you state so well, the mat requirements should be very high to equate to the time it would take to get equivalent gear raiding. Of course the raiders will never go for it, but I don't much care what they think anyways.

Yuck. I don't begrudge your opinion but I strongly feel that crafting should not be tied to min/max raiding in any way. It turns crafting into a sort of character slot. IMO crafting should be solely for the economy.

Good points. Focusing in the top level market when everyone else is there is a path to extremely thin margins or no sales at all.

I'd argue that Diablo has a higher investment in the character, primarily because your gear isn't replaced every six months. Keep in mind that D3 will have the real money auction house, which will provide cash flow to Blizzard similar to that of a mmo. Actually, I think that the RMAH will make Blizzard a crazy amount of money, way more than wow. Call me crazy, that's just my take on the matter. If this ends up being correct, how soon until we question the profitability of the standard monthly p2p mmo? D3 isn't going to use a raiding system, and will rely on repeatable content, thus development costs are FAR less than trying to make new raids every six months. Something to ponder...

WOW is a great game too. But is it a great mmo? I argue not. Same with SWTOR, so far at least. Although to be fair I do think that SWTOR is a slightly better game than WOW.

To be fair, I've often thought that a game focusing on battlegrounds could be pretty popular. You could treat it like a fps and give everyone the same gear (perhaps some slight upgrades ala the battlefield series), and have like 10-15 maps. Clearly not a mmo, but would use mmo battle mechanics. It wouldn't be my cup of tea but I think there might be some interest.

no problems binding tilde here. I use it to summon my speeder all the time.