I am not in the complaining camp you mention (I got a lot of stuff out of it I'm happy for the sale) but I would just like to point out that the front page ad started after the sale was well in its first hour. I know this because I was online at the time and there was a picture with blurred out sales to come released by BioWare via some instagram post that I tried passing along to guildies and couldn't find where BW linked it so I searched the whole site including community blog and news posts. And there was nothing at least not nearing the end of the first hour.

Very true. Currently I don't mind one bit that I look unique in my Rakata outfit that I still have after coming back from a hiatus. However, if I could choose between being unique and having the freedom to get the armor set I liked again on a new character I would definately go for the latter. Freedom > uniqueness in my opinion. I always liked some of the Rakata sets. Probably imperial agent (hey look a ninja), imperial str based set (can't remember the name the one with the spikes on shoulder pads, War- sth.).

Really wanted the tauntaun. Tried to stay awake during the night until 6 in the morning but fell asleep 20 mins prior lol. Can't complain though. Got the other two speeders, xp packs, dye modules, character renames, few of the armor sets and another treek I might sell or use later.

The only issue I got was that for my timezone (EU GMT+1) I tried staying awake all the night through the morning for the tauntaun but fell asleep 20mins prior. Not blaming BW for that but it would be nice if they could seperate the hourly deals into two groups maybe one for Americas and one for EU so we don't have to stay up the whole night just to wait for the final sale.

Uhm you're off by a day. I agree, not sure if serious.

Well as someone who came back recently let me tell you this: Makeb will be fun for the first time when you do the story to lvl 55 but you will learn to somewhat dread it after you grind your dailies there. Especially if you are not a stealth class because of mob density. And yes CZ-198 is a daily area (together with 2 new flashpoints), along with Oricon (which also has 2 new ops) and Section X in Belsavis. EDIT: I should add I might be biased towards the negative after doing the staged weekly there.

Well in my view I am having a hard time replacing my rakata gear (with 78/72 mods!) on my operative. I tried believe me. You could say I am one of the bigger spenders on the CM right now. With black secondary dye it just looks too good and fits how I view my operative and her background (even though I don't roleplay much). I am not much of a fan for the ops gear that came after rakata for the operative. The Black Hole/Campaign stuff for example had too many wierd protruding things and that atrocious face mask *shudder*. Verpine/Dread Forged looks kinda alright I guess. It amuses me greatly when I join a ops group and I get whispers asking where I got the ninja outfit.

Well, Anarchy Online (a sci-fi MMO predating WoW) definately had swimming and also cooking ingredients at least (although no cooking skill per se). In fact maxing out swimming was seen as the ultimate noob declarance and continues to be a running gag in that community. It still misses fishing even today (yes there are still people playing it after what 13 years now?).

Wait, so does that mean they will only add the legacy off-hands to the vendor for people that still have tokens (or whatever else resource/reputation you need to purchase them). If you can't tell I missed the first one and would love to see the event in full return.

That explains the gist of it, but just counting the rated spots would give a incomplete picture. If I were to program a tool for calculating gear score I would use text matching on the last spots to attach a rating (ex: Verpine/Underworld = 168)

I would love to have this and I think it would be perfect as addition to the strongholds. Maybe a computer terminal that ports you to a scenario room (ala holodeck) of your choosing (regarding tank/healer/dps roles).

Well it should be doable with 4 probes, no problemo. And it would be, but lately we have been running into some oddity, where whenever the puzzle solver is coming down to the minefield to spawn the last probe, he gets put back to the tower as soon as he wants to spawn the probe. Now, usually there is also an add that spawns when the puzzle solver gets put back. Sometimes we are lucky and the add bugs out and doesnt attack, so the puzzle solver just has to come down to the minfield, run to the last probe and can then finally spawn it. Not that much time lost and usually we can complete the encounter with 4 probes even with that happening. However, if the puzzle solver has to also get rid of the add when he gets teleported back we usually hit turret enrage. Lastly we have been getting this so consistently that we developed the strategy of cc-ing both assassin droids, having one sniper run back just before the last probe is spawned so he can help killing the add with orbital strike - if it doesn't bug out and needs to be killed. I have seen threads where people reported this as a bug, however I haven't seen what can be done to prevent it. But, yeah, if you don't have this bug, you shouldn't have too much trouble getting a 4-probe solution solved without the turrets enraging.

Wait, did I miss something? Wasn't 1.3 supposed to make all social armor adaptive armor (i.e. armor changes its type depending on what your character needs). As for where to find this particular armor set, sorry, no idea.

I think it goes without saying that not everybody will have the same results in success rates of course. Also, if one looks at the SWTOR population as a whole, 1.8% probability of the OP's success rate is low but certainly not impossible if thousands of people keep trying over and over. It would still be nice if a dev could just claim they checked it again and it's working fine (not saying it isn't just confirmation would be nice. Because dealing with proof of RNG system can only reasonably be given by the entity who controls the deterministic system governing said RNG). Of course I fully understand dev time is limited so only as long as their time permits.

Also wanted to mention to the OP that you can use an online binomial calculator as another way to answer that question earlier. For example this one. If you plug in number of tries for "n" (837) and probability for "p" (0.2 for 20%) you can then set the property of X you are interested in. So, if you want to know, what's the likelihood that with 837 tries and a 20% probability of success you get at most 143 successes (your 17.1% success rate), you'll set the bottom field to 143 and switch the drop down to "at most". In this case, according to that calculator the likelihood of this happening is 0.018 or 1.8%.

Think, I'll need to start a second slicer character because this is getting unreal. I get so many failures now.

Keep in mind that its been a while since I had this stuff in school. Having said that, it seems what you are looking for is the standard deviation of the distribution. This can be calculated from the variance very easily since it is just the square root of the variance. First off, let "n" be the number of trials, n = 837. Let "p" be the probabilty of success, p = 0.2. Let "q" be the probabilty of failure, q = (1-p) = 0.8. Let "mu" be the expected number of successes for n amount of trials (also called the mean of the distribution), mu = n*p => 167.4 Let "sigma" be the standard deviation for the distribution, sigma = sqrt(n*p*q) = 11.5724. So for 837 trials of a binomial probability distribution (binomial meaning the outcome can only be "success" or "no success" while the probabilty stays the same for each trial and all trials are independent of each other) you should have roughly 167 successes +/- 12 successes standard deviation to be within the bounds of expected outcome.

All of what you say is true, ofc. I think though what I quoted is probably the reason many of us are frustrated at the moment or at the very least are starting to wonder. As some people claim it was working fine pre 1.3 I don't think most even had the need to track this stuff to try and prove a point. I certainly didn't. So, in absence of empirical sets of data pre 1.3 to compare with, are there other things we can compare to draw some conclusion? Can we compare the success rates of different mission skills (say UT) with the same companion boni and mission difficulty types to the success rates of slicing missions on the same character. If the system is the same and the boni are the same, shouldn't the distribution of the outcome be close to one another (within acceptable deviation limits ofc). I dunno, it's been a long time since I had probability theory in school (if you couldn't tell ). It just seems odd to me that there's just one mission skill that is so far off than the others in success rate. Then again, I did notice a slight surge of Biochem threads about Diplomacy crit success rates being borked, so maybe it is all one big coincidence after all...

Well, according to Mathematica, the variance of a binomial distribution with n = 752 (number of trials) and p = 0.2 (probability 20%) is n*p*(1-p) which is 120.32. On a side node, I was up to 210 blue parts before I got a crit again. Now if you stipulate that you get 4 blue parts per yellow mission (of which there are 2) and 2 blue parts per green mission (of which there is 1) you get 10 blue parts per cycle of sending out companions. This means I ran this cycle 21 times for a total of 63 missions before I got a crit. Or broken down by probabilty (I have 2 maxed affection companions w/o any crit bonus to slicing and 1 companion with a +2% crit bonus (SCORPIO)): 21 missions with a crit probabilty of 0.22 (22%) and 42 mission with a crit probabilty of 0.2 (20%). On the other hand, when sending out my companions for UT missions in search of orange schematics, I get a steady supply of mando irons, promethium, etc every 1 digit number of missions. If I were to guess (e.g. purely subjective w/o empirical data, totally ignoring the law of large numbers yada yada etc.), I would guess that the base chance of slicing missions is slightly lower, maybe by a few percent.

I picked up slicing before 1.3. And before 1.3 like a previous poster I also had a roughly 1 in 5 ratio. However, now I am seeing much lower than that. Usually, I have about 1 stack of 99 blues and 3-5 purple. Or if I am unlucky 140 blues w/o any purple at all (as is right now). That is with all maxed companions and 1 (SCORPIO) has a +2% crit to slicing (20% and 22% respectively for success rate). Yeah, I'd definately say there's something weird about slicing at the moment. Also, more anectdotal, I have the direct comparison to pretty much all mission skills except Investigation. Take Underworld Trading for example, also with maxed affection companions and 1 companion has +2% crit on UT. I have no problem at all roughly approaching the 1 in 5 ratio with Mando Iron like I did before 1.3 with slicing. Yes sometimes I am a bit unlucky and don't get Iron for a couple missions but its usually restrained to a 1 digit number of tries.

No, Enforcer is for DPS ops and Field Tech is for Snipers (which you can easily see from which set bonus comes with the gear, e.g. Field Tech has 2 piece set bonus "Increases the duration of Orbital Strike or XS Freighter Flyby by 3 seconds.", Orbital Strike/XS Freighter Flyby being a Sniper/Gunslinger ability). However, what the previous poster suggested, going by mods can be a good idea if you already have gear that provides you with set bonuses you need. I would go further and say mixing and matching of single mods is actually required to min-max your stats.

casts as in casting a spell/formula/mind trick (whatever you want to call it in this game).

I support this. On my operative I would like option 3 best ofc, not only because of ops bosses hitbox but also because auto-turning of enemies makes it difficult to apply backstab (even when specced with Debitlitate's cooldown reduced). Maybe if the enemies auto-turn with a slight delay you could actually try sidestepping back-forth or something equally based on player skill, but yeah if not option 3 then at least option 1. EDIT: just wanted to say, if Lacerate applies Acid Blade everytime without anything in return it would be too OP, so to compensate its gotta be either that it needs some prerequisite (like maybe TA) or its one of those "can only happen once every 20s" things.

Yup, bad luck, I'm afraid. On my sorc I saw more agent/gunslinger drops and on my operative I saw more sorc/sage drops. So far I do have better luck on my gunslinger though.

Yep we experianced that as well. Same instance, same error+symptoms, same way of fixing it (alt+f4, wait, re-log).