So I was wondering what people are speculating this could look like? Could there be capital on capital battles with spacefights and docking and everything. Would cybertech crafting be a lot more in demand making stuff for these ships? Any other ideas?

What if we had some abilities (passive or no?) that were based on our health levels. I don't think it would be a far cry from our current play styles. They would come at different levels but something like: "All you've got": When below 25% health the Global Cooldown has a 6% chance to reset all noncombat abilities (e.g. disappearing act, defensive buffs, cool head, etc.) "Critical moment": When below 25% health your critical rating goes up by % of health below 25%. So at 1% health your critical rating would be +24%. This is the idea, the numbers can change. You kind of would get this interesting risk vs. reward payoff that is true to the nature of a smuggler.

Or going along with the buff idea. The repair could be a buff based on how low you let your armor go down. If you repair most of your armor for a total of 650 pts you could buff yourself 650/1000*repair buff (over 2 mins) or something. I could see this being abused through forced deaths and stacks of armor, but it would be a way to make the other crafters have consumables.

Has anyone found it profitable to 'farm NPCs' for credits? I don't know if Credits dropped/HP is a mature concept yet in the game, but what are people's experience so far with this idea? So far I've probably only made like 5-10% of my income from credit drops, but I imagine that there are only a small handful of NPCs on each planet that are worth the time investment in DPS to get money directly from their drops. Thoughts?

How would it change things if there were BoP 'crafting' and gathering tools? They could in themselves be craftable, maybe by cybertech or artifice and maybe be a freehand option. Each one would have only narrow application such as making gathering only one level of material, or only criticaling on level 25-30 chestguards.

So i'd like to know what Battilea 'wants' this implant? Does he plan on selling 50+ of them to cover his cost to make it? Otherwise if he is only going to make it once or twice for himself and his guildies his beef about an expiring schematic is meaningless.

Alright then, I see a future where the market will always be flooded by cheap high level purples sold at or below the value of materials to make them. IOW your investment wont pay off...

Even option 3 would be a bad choice? I was thinking something like: So say on average you need to RE 50 blues to get the purple, you would make the efficiency 'half life' be equal to 2x the RE investment. So you could make 100 purple items at 100% efficiency before you then needed 10% more materials; e.g. (+1 metal for a 2/4/4 recipe). At this point you would have presumably made back double your investment and then some because the markup on purples would be more than the cost of the blues. You could continue to manufacture the purples at a 'cost' of 10% inefficiency and still be turning a profit (depending on the margins). This would be a mechanism that would prevent the monopolization of one crafted good but also be able to stabilize prices.

Hear me out, one concern with people all being able to more easily RE purple gear is that eventually everyone will be able to produce their own gear. While this would just be economically backward for everyone to do, would it be better if schematics could somehow 'expire'. Perhaps it could be after x number of uses, or maybe after not using them for so long. Or perhaps they could never expire but have an increased 'inefficiency' after more uses so that it costs more and more materials to make the same thing. They would be reset by 'RE'ing the lower tier gear again, which would be easier this time.

I think they should change the 'crew skills' forum to a "Game Economy" with some sub tabs. I was thinking the other day, an interesting end-game idea would be the ability to equip and contract one time 'dropships' or 'deployments' of small groups of standard, strong, and/or elite NPCs. They would have to be outfitted with a variety of crafted gear, and the stronger the group, the tougher it would be to craft the gear. These could then be used in limited quantities in flashpoints or pvp areas. It would definitely be a valuable add to the game.

Why can't we auction these coins?

Also, two things that could more evenly distribute 'life cycle equipping' cost (see above) would be: 1) Sub lvl 50 crafted armor set bonuses which make sticking to one type for an extra level or two worth the bank and... 2) "Passive" bonuses for working crew members.- By this I mean that there could be a random bonus, augments slots with skill bonuses associated with them that granted 1-3% crew skill bonuses, or +1 or +2 crit bonus. Depending on how this is implemented, this may not help armor crafters as much, but would increase total amount spent on player crafted equipment as more people would demand items for their crew. Ultimately, it would be nice to be able to direct all of your toon's crew from one 'parent' character which would boost the usefullness of the 2nd option.

I think right now the answer to this is dependent upon the end-game culture, and the level distribution of players on your server. I don't think the end game culture is decided yet because the legacy system hasn't been worked out. As far as custom vs. artifact gear goes, that is really supply/demand dependent. It is much easier to find the custom gear mods for every level when you are just replacing mods to level up. If there was a much more accessible demand side to things where it was known who has specialized in what craft specialty (ex. leadership vs. hawkeye), you could much more easily mail a player in the game with an 'artifact set request' for your next 10 levels (2-3 sets) and it could be more reasonably priced than buying 15-20 new mods for that span of time. So you could express this cost in terms of the 'life-cycle equipping cost'. The faster a player will want to grind exp, the more they'll want to be at their optimum equipped state. This translates into higher equipping cost. My assumption would be, following the 'pareto principle' that 80% of the equipping costs will be in the upper 20% of a player's level. Which means, if you will spend 500k (in NPC or crafted purchases) in the lifetime of your character's leveling to lvl 50, only 100k will be spent on anything made for levels 1-40 and 400k for lvl's 41-50.

http://www.swtor-spy.com/guides/character-statistics-in-swtor-and-what-they-mean/120/ I found this link which will be useful for determining specialty strings.

I'm hoping crafting matures in the near future and specialization becomes a profitable thing. Whether this would be for guilders and friends leveling alts or whatever, here is some analysis. Which some requests for help: Okay I was wondering if anyone out there has done the analysis combining the 14 prefix specializations and the character classes? I've also noticed that when you are buying schematics the schematics typically have 2-3 flavors per prefix ranging the spectrum from favoring more offense, more defense, or balanced. So we could say that there are upwards of 14(prefix)*3(flavors)*3(high, med, low)*7(regions-wrist, hand, etc)=882 "strings" of specialization. This wouldn't include discoverable class restricted armor or droid parts, however. There are 42 distinct companions, and I think about 20 advanced classes. However, the classes and companions are basically mirrors of each other (debatable?), so you could say there are more like, 32 separate armorable entities. If you want, you may subtract the droids because they are a little more complicated. Needless to say there are many armor combos out there, but if somebody wanted to specialize in just 2 of 14 prefixes up through level 50, with approximately a new flavor set every 5 levels) they would need to research 2(prefix)*3(flavors)*3(weights)*7(regions)*10(levels)=1,260 separate artifact schematics. Looking at these numbers, that simply doesn't seem achievable. So the question that I'm going to be working on will be, what would be the top 2-3 prefix/flavor combo would be best for each entity (toon/companion) so we can further see what an optimum 'product line' would be necessary for a crafter.

Yeah, valid alternatives. I just wanted to get the concept on the table. I put bigger numbers up there thinking that it would be more interesting if these contracts would be performed more by a guild rather than an individual. The contracts could be accessed and shared through each planet's trade skills vendor in a separate tab, and you could just sell the items you have on you to the vendor to incrementally fill the contract. You'd get the money up front there. Then when it is complete, the contract owner gets the bonus goods and can dole them out how they see fit. Side idea: What could be interesting too, is if you could asssign a companion to a contract so they could continuously craft and sell these things to the purchaser. It would allow for continuous crafting. But maybe offline crafting isn't something Bioware wants.

no comments? Would this help with anything?

Please see my post I just put up as a suggestion to grow the low level crafting product demand. Basically, have NPC issued contracts for large orders of cross-skill goods. You could make it so guilds or players can get the contracts and they would vary in size, difficulty, and reward. I was thinking too that filling large contracts could have some even more interesting PvE effects like unlocking a flashpoint or having a planetary effect/buff or something.

So correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that one issue with crafting is that the ROI on premium and prototype items is just in their evolutionary step to a purple item. What if things were a little different... I'm thinking that there could be a way that you could get maybe, daily missions for crafters, or maybe even 'flashpoint' type crafting missions. But they would be issued in the form of contracts with an order of items to be fielded. So I don't know the math for the ROI on all the crafting levels but here is an example of what I am thinking: Mission/Contract: The Republic Fleet's Navy 23rd Armored Cavalry Squadron is upgrading its outdated gear. We are looking for a vendor to provide the following items: 30 Redoubt Reinforced Mesh boots 30 Redoubt Reinforced Mesh gloves 30 Redoubt Reinforced Mesh belts 30 Redoubt Reinforced Mesh chestguards 30 Light Ripper Blaster Rifles The reward for this contract will be 150 credits per item, 5 Random (depending on hardness) [Artifact] Armormech Schematics, 25,000 credits bonus upon completion, and +25 exp crafting bonus. You would turn in these things incrementally rather than all at once. You could only have one contract at once, and they may or may not include items outside your character's crafting skill to be filled. I see this creating more demand for lower level stuff. It would be interesting if you even could say, field an entire unit, that could then be deployed with a one time effect in a pvp warzone. Just some random thoughts