This question is either for the devs or the whole community. Devs: If you have some key numbers that you look at to determine market 'health' across servers what would those be and could we get insight about them across the servers? Community: Short of an answer on the above, what do you/we think are good basic, quick, numbers that we can look at to give us an idea of the crafting community health throughout servers. I think some of the easiest would be just how many pages of x: (basic rafting material, crit crafting material, armor) Have at thee!

If you want metals so you can sell them, then this is not the solution you are looking for. If you want the metals to make your own stuff, then you might be doing it wrong. You should be diversifying so that you are never waiting to get materials, you should be ahead of your own supply. If you are purely in it for the money then look into more gift missions. I regularly see a 100%-200% ROI on these and they take half the time to run.

I would imagine that this will be so. It should probably temporarily increase demand for him. Also does anyone have thoughts about how the market merging will affect things?

See it was worth it when it was for other people, not just you. And thanks for the positivity. It really promotes understanding and community growth.

So level 2 gear is L18-24. Alusteel is used in medium/heavy synth and armormech gear, and some cybertech droid pieces(~100-150 different schematics). If your intent is just to craft your purple piece, then there isn't much I can help you with, but it looks like you may have found your market niche. The problem with gear for <25 people is fewer toons have the money to buy better stuff, they haven't figured out its worth it, and the margins and ROI isn't really worth the 50 slots you can use each day. How does your mod market look?

To upgrade you need kit + credits.

1) Diversification is the key to profit. I know you were crafting for yourself, but its normally better to develop a business strategy based on what you have not what you want. 2) How was 500 mullinine filling your hold? You can stack them up to 99...? 3) Look at who is making level 2 armor/ gear that would use alusteel. Look at who is selling mullinine. They could be all have info about a possible source of alusteel. 4) What is your underworld trading level? And what is the affection of your companions you are using. I use Swtor-crafter as my starting point for what materials cost for me.

For the record I don't think RE'ing is fair because I RE'd the 6 blues that I didn't sell yesterday and got 2 of them in a row to get me a purple schem. That's a 30% RE rate! Its completely broken!!!...but I digress... It seems that there is an abundance of people out there who have their stubborn heart set on getting this or that purple schematic. I'm wondering WHY you think you need THAT schematic, and also what is your business plan for making credits? How many do you plan on getting by the end of the game? In my opinion you don't need more than maybe a couple dozen good schematics (at most) that will be your specialized ones. Any more and you will not be able to make use of all of them. I will say this once again for all the 'RE-is-broken'-QQ'ers if you are trying to RE to purple for your own toons this is a waste of resources. You are paying 10x-20x the value of your armor.! This is the equivalent of jumping into content that you are 7 or 8 levels behind and then QQing about the fact that you always die. Please Stop!!

My ballpark numbers are: Be prepared to spend 15x to 30x the value of the base items to RE a tier 2 artifact level schematic.---THEN---Make sure that the profit you make per unit of artifact material is MORE THAN what you would make from just selling that material outright.---AND---be sure there is demand that lets you generate a return on your investment in a manageable amount of time (If it took you 1 week and 50k to research a schem, make sure you are making 50k in profit over the next week or so from it). When you can meet those conditions you are ready to craft for the GTN. I would caveat and say that I have had success selling blues on the GTN but I am on a smaller server and there is rarely anything blue for sale made by armormechs. I really like trying to maximize the profit per listing slot, that way you save yourself as much effort as possible. Starting out by specializing in a few sets of blues and then just REing what doesn't sell is a pretty profitable way to get your purple schems.

For me, it comes down to profit per listing slot. I've done enough research to know a wide variety of things that I can sell right now. My main descriminating factor is 'what is the profit per listing spot'. If I have to waste 10 spots to make 5,000 credits then its going to take a lot of work to maintain that listing. So if people aren't buying stacks of 99 Desh I'm not really interested.

I don't think so, but I have heard that the numbers of goods you may have seen in your crafting screen may be lower than what you actually have in your ship hold. If this was the case AND you crafted twice this is possible. Other than that, you should report the bug

I don't think that's what they are saying whizle. I think you are both saying the same thing except they are clarifying that your chance to crit OVER 20 times is different than your chance to crit the 20th time.

So I thought I'd pop back on and affirm what looks like the majority of people on here who show that they really do understand how the RNG works. I am sorry about overlooking the BoP part of the OPs post, but I still don't think you spending 20-times the value in materials is worth it when you could have purchases something like an exotech piece for like 3% less stats. Two things about my table are misleading, though. 1) It assumes that in the total population everyone who crits will stop making gear. This is not the case, but nevertheless, the numbers are fairly reflective of the probability of critting after so much time. It would be a different table to show what percentage of the population would get x number of crits after crafting 20 times. (I think only like 5% of people would craft more than 1 crit @ 20% crit rate) 2) The reason the RNG has to be what it is (your chance to crit is independent of how many times you've rolled) is related to the cost and rarity of goods. If 20% chance to crit meant you were guaranteed to crit before crafting 6 times then you would be unjustified in critting ANY MORE than 1 in 5 times. Otherwise 20% chance to crit would mean the total average crit rate would be higher than 20%, then like 50% of people would average something closer to a 35% crit rate and more people would come whining saying, "it seems like it ALWAYS take me 5 times to crit, what's up with that"

No its not. Sorry for the short response, but people have complained this many times. See here. The basic decision logic should be this: if you just want to use what you are trying to make, if it is selling on the GTN for anywhere close to 5x the materials to craft it, I don't see why you should waste the time to try and do it yourself. You should know the risk you are getting into before dumping time and credits into this. Here is another way to think about the crewskill critting RNG: RNG Stats tables for the mathematically curious: Also, if what you are trying to make is a hard difficulty, I don't think your base rate is 15%, I think it starts at 10%. So also you can think of it this way. Crafting Choice: You could roll a die for 200k and have a 33.33% chance to get nothing back AND 66.66% chance to get 200k back. GTN Choice You could roll a die for 350k and have a 100% chance to get at least 200k (depending on how you value what you buy).

There goes my dream of being an offtank scrapper...

Simple enough: does the absorb stat increase what DS can absorb? Is it effectively a temporary 100% shield mechanic buff?

I was thinking that an interesting way to get people to experience more diverse and challenging end-game content would be to include an operation that would require you to bring a primary and an additional or multiple alt toons into an ops. You could only play one toon at a time, but the mission would have phases or stages that would force you to switch back and forth between your own toons, tag-team style. I don't know how the developers would handle this kind of thing, but it could really change the way you experience operations, especially if you are swapping back and forth between say a tank and a healer...

You can't find anything you want, or you can't find anything at all?

Fine. I give in. Lets make it crit every other time. But don't come QQing when you see the artifact (crit) materials market crash (along with the cost of all of crafted stuff from those goods). I've done the math, and if you make it still RNG + nobody has an RE-string longer than 6 non-crits in a row you will see prices drop by 40-50%. This would cut margins on some servers so low, that people would be forced to roll for purple schems a whole lot more. Then, the only way demand could stay high for crafting mats is if more people were to go and RE their goods for schematics. BUT this would mean that more people would be making artifact schematic stuff. However, right now, the cost to acquire the rare material for an artifact (tier 2) recipe, you must spend between 5-15 times the value of the base tier recipe materials. That means that you have to price the purple gear at about 5 to 10 times the price of the green base to make back the return on research investment (15-30 RE'ed pieces) in a reasonable amount of time. If there would be 25%-50% more purple mats floating around that would mean 20%-45% cheaper purple gear (because the purple mats make up most of the cost to produce). This would mean profit margins would be cut in half, requiring 2-3 times more goods to be sold and listed to make back your investment. Add that to you competing with more people with the same cheap artifact schematic as you and you WILL BE BACK HERE QQING THAT YOU CANT SELL YOUR PURPLE GEAR!

If Bioware were to mess with the results of the 25% of people trying to research so that research was easier it would shift a whole lot of demand down. Demand for materials would go down. A proper and less intrusive solution would involve not affecting the total resources consumed. When stupid people are continuing research paying 20-30 times the worth of something when they many never make that value back, that is what is factoring in to the cost (and demand) of materials.

I've seen a video online where people slotted a bound item into their legacy gear and them mailed it. This was a workaround bound stuff not being usable.

See my other post above on RE. As it stands, people are hardly willing to pay the actual cost in materials for a purple piece of gear right now. Even if you could RE gear to the purple one you want with 100% efficiency instead of close to 1-2%, the ROI on selling green gear is SO MUCH BETTER right now. For it to be worthwhile to RE to tier 2 (purple) gear, the profit margins have to be tiny on green gear (<25%), and/ or people have to be willing to spend 2x more to get 2x more at the same level. They simply don't right now.

Please stop this QQ. Check my response to your other post. If you are planning on getting most of your profit/revenue through crit crafted goods then you are doing it wrong. If you think that critting on crafting should be easy for you, then should want it to be equally easy (and worthless) for everyone else, and then you would all be doing it wrong, but together. If you are expecting to make a ton of your income from RE'ed purple gear (below level 50) then be prepared to make next to no income because the the time to get a return on investment for that strategy is very drawn out.

So you think it would be more fun if you had to craft 5 things and then the 5th was a critical? That would be MORE boring.

Not this. You can control the outcome of crafting. The base crit rate is different on each piece of gear you want to make, but if the base crit rate is as low as 5% then maxing companion affection and having a companion with +5% crit means that you have improved your ability to crit by 200%. What you people are talking about is really about time and cost. In other games, it sounds like you have the ability to essentially buy a crafted crit at a premium while not having to spend the time to wait for it. With 1.3 augment tables that is all changing so this will all be irrelevant. The push for temporary push for augmented orange gear has meant that people have gotten the perception that the majority of your profit in crafting will come from critting. This was not how it started, and will cease to be the case with 1.3, just wait and see.