In the Assault on Tython flashpoint, the bases of several trees are expanded and are allowing the NPCs to hide inside them and continue attacking while the player cannot attack. You have to let you companions take them out (while you stand around doing nothing since you cant target them with direct attacks), which slows the whole process down immensely.

Thanks. I asked because they seem to be operating in all the usual places more or less the same as they always have been. Reporting them has not seemed to reduce that at all, but perhaps it is just a matter of them being able to quickly set up new accounts when one gets banned. Bioware really needs to go after the people selling them the credits too, I'm pretty sure that is how the credit sellers get the majority of their credits now (from both players and guilds sitting at the credit caps)

Are we sure this happened or is it that credit sellers have changed the way they ply their trade and do not advertise in game anymore (or at least to a lesser degree) because that is how they get caught.

It encourages the use of gold sellers which brings credits that are currently out of the economy (being held by gold sellers to sell for cash) back into the active economy. Also with the high credit prices for Cartel Market items, it encourages the use of off-GTN sales/exchanges which bypass the only true credit sink in the game. Both of these things lead to inflation because they do not remove credits from the economy which is a vital aspect of a properly functioning economy.

It disincentivizes subs. When a new player gets done with his first character and looks at his balance then looks at the prices on the GTN he will reasonably assume he has no chance to buy anything there. In that case, there is no reason to sub as his credits won't matter anyway. The same is true for the returning player and even current subs. If they have no realistic chance to obtain those levels of credits playing they game in a way they enjoy, the f2p game will serve them quite well. Lost subs equals a dying game.

I hope you are right. The last attempt to curb "influx" of credits came with a major credit exploit that wiped out anything it might have gained.

My concern with raising the GTN cap is how many of the things listed for 1 billion will double or triple in price because the only thing keeping them in check was the GTN cap and the "difficulty" of selling things in Trade Chat on the Fleet. Could an increase in the GTN cap trigger a spurt of mega inflation?

The whole problem with the "needs" vs "wants" argument is that it is "wants" that get players to sub. A f2p player who plays up to his max level is going to look at what he earned completing missions and what even a minor cosmetic item costs on the GTN and make the judgement that he is never going to have enough credits to buy it and thus will not sub (same goes for a returning preferred player looking at his bank account and prices). A subbed player is going to make the same assessment on whether to re-sub. The high prices on the GTN (and elsewhere) disincentivize player subs. Whether it is a "need" or "want" is irrelevant. It is doubtful that Bioware would even be talking about fixing the economy if they had not made the assessment that the high prices are impacting their revenues negatively. Comments on the forums rarely, if ever, have an impact.

The best solution is to make sure all player to player transactions are taxed at some rate, whatever that ends up being (even if its just a set transaction fee based on the "rarity" of the items traded). That draws out credits from the economy far more effectively than the small credit sinks like QT tax and it impacts the players with the most credits the most since they are the ones currently trading off-GTN for free (and removes far more credits from the game than thousands of QTs). Some players with billions don't care about the cost of the minor credit sinks because to them they are insignificant and others don't use them at all because they never leave their strongholds anymore, trading exclusively on and off GTN.

You could accomplish the same thing as a partial credit wipe, the reduction of credits in game, with big taxes on big trades or more specifically making sure every player to player transaction actually removes credits from the game proportionate to the value of the items traded. It doesn't need to be perfect, but simply having categories (bronze, silver, gold, platinum for CM items or green, blue, purple, gold for gear) with a set tax applied to complete the transaction, a transaction fee per se. There would still be the people that don't want the economy fixed (because it devalues their stockpiles) to complain but a lot of the people threatening to quit would likely be alright with a "tax" approach as opposed to a "deletion" approach.

But you can't get the achievement for reaching the maximum reputation. Bioware allowed those items to continue to drop because people begged for it so they could complete their reputation tracks (not that the reputation levels are worth anything). It also helps out long term players that have maxed out rep on everything else so they can still get the Conquest points.

Technically it's not irrelevant because they have to be dealt with in different ways. Player to Player transfers of credits need transaction taxes while actually generating the credits requires reductions in rewards and credit sinks. Credit sinks do virtually nothing to player to player transactions and taxes do little to nothing in terms of credit generation as they are currently configured. Both need to be looked at to bring the economy under control but the untaxed player to player transactions are the elephant in the room that will keep any credit sink from working in any meaningful way.

Because they are limited time for getting the achievement

Since cloud servers need to be in a physical place (though they can be moved around as often as needed), which is what determines ping and responsiveness, any consolidation of servers to a single server would make the performance worse for a lot of players. If it was in the US then European and APAC players would see much worse ping and performance. If it was placed in Europe, it would be US and APAC players that suffered. If it was placed in Asia, US and European players would see their performance degraded. Worst case would probably be one US, one European, and one APAC server, though the language servers do present a bit of a problem. Most likely nothing will change other than potentially adding an APAC server if the costs benefit works out.

There is a huge glut of them now that they are part of GS rewards. You can't trade the packs from GS directly but they do drive down the demand for unopened Ultimate Packs (and thus their price). The same is happening with OEMs and RPMs as people have a lot more tech frags to spare to buy them and sell them increasing the supply (which lowers prices)

Credit sellers are most certainly a large part of the problem. They used exploits (no question at all here), farmed mats incessantly (until bioware nerfed that after years of it going on), bought up credits that would otherwise have passed out of the game when people left, currently buy credits from guilds and people at the credit caps (which were designed to keep credit totals in check), etc. Without credit sellers there would be far less credits in the economy. Notably, that third party service is against the Terms of Service everyone "signs" when they install the game. Buyers and seller should both be punished harshly.

Weeks to months depending on how dedicated you were to grinding the credits and how diverse your activities were. Prices were also more stable so you could have a certain number of credits as a goal and by the time you were done collecting, the item you were interested in was still available for about what you expected. There was a lot less flipping of items (why I'm not sure, could have been a lack of huge numbers of credits in the game) people bought the items to use them.

Really, how so?

It took a bit more than that and you know it so I'll assume that is sarcasm, the missions rewarded a lot less than they do now and there were more players in the game so the credits were spread around much more (fewer people had enough credits to buy out the entire supply of anything much less CM items). Bioware made a couple of mistakes that put the economy in the position it is in now and all the credit sinks in the world won't change that. The only really effective credit sink was the GTN tax (which at the time really did pull out almost as many credits as went into the economy). It was once off GTN trades took off that the economy went wild. Each off-GTN trade avoided the best credit removal tool in the game. 1) Too many credit rewards for Conquest Objectives. This dumped a ton of credits into the economy at a time when there was really nothing to spend it on except CM items on the GTN (which drove their prices through the roof) 2) Allowing max level players to get max level rewards regardless of the planet they were on. You got basically the same rewards for doing a mission on Coruscant as you did on Corellia if you were max level. Again pumped massive amounts of credits into the game. 3) Allowing off-GTN trades for credits. This bypassed the best credit removal tool in the game (and it still is even though it is much less effective with all the off-GTN trades going on). 4) Allowing credit sellers to operate freely for so long. Over time people leave the game and their "credits" go with them but with credit sellers, they could sell those credits and get real world money and the credits didn't leave the game (during the greatest efflux of players from the game, the economy was more or less stable even though rewards were increasing because credits were passively leaving the game). Credit sellers are becoming a new problem because some people (and guilds) have accumulated enough credits to hit the in game caps and instead of losing them, they are selling them to credit sellers that pump them back into the game further increasing the supply of credits. People talk all the time about the credit sinks Bioware removed (like training, etc) but these were all small potatoes compared to the GTN tax. Much like the QT tax, they made no real difference in keeping the economy under control.

The economy is broken because 5 years ago, you could afford just about anything from the CM (in credits) just by gathering credits while playing the game (no need to flip items, sell high grade mats, or anything like that just completing missions was enough). Now you are "forced" to "participate" in the credit seller economy to get even something minor. Your example of the raiders dropping you isn't even remotely the same. How much of your 5 billion (or is that off by a factor of 10 like your "I left the starter planet with 90,000 credits post") was gained by completing missions and playing the game versus the amount gained from selling things in an out of control economy (my guess would be <5%). If the economy wasn't broken, you wouldn't have acquired anywhere near that many credits. You benefited from a broken economy and are using that to justify why its okay to have to "participate" in a broken economy in order to get something from it.

Except that the average QT cost is more like 1000 credits. You would need 1,000,000 QTs to "remove" 1 billion. A conservative estimate of players playing the game is around 20K/day so each player would need to QT 50 times per day (25 times if the number of players is double that or a dozen times if it is 4 times that). That doesn't take into account that probably less that 25% of the players playing the game use QT more than a couple time s per day. Personally, I don't use it anywhere near that much and I consider myself to be a pretty typical player. Edit: Also, not every player plays everyday so you would need an even higher number of QTs per player to average 10 QTs/player/day. Also updated players to players/day which is the relevant number

I think it would also be safe to say that those generating the vast majority of credits in the game (whether they have billions or not) are not using quick travel at all). QT points are in the wrong location for doing repeatable content in general - the only time I use them is when doing GSI missions - which is rarely. When I am running heroics my travel costs are zero, yet that is one of the best ways to generate credits in the game (as opposed to accumulating them from the GTN or other player to player trades)

No, it is not. There are more credits in the game now than when it was implemented (billions more at least). As I tried to explain to you before a reduction in increase is not a reduction. Note the quotation marks around the word remove (this is typically used to indicate the word being used is not the correct one but is the one someone else is using). In this case it is indicating that you used the word "remove" incorrectly and I used it to use the same term you used although it is incorrectly used.

You are having difficulty understanding the difference between reduction and reducing the increase. These are two different things. reducing the increase does not remove any credits from the game (at the end of the day, you have more credits in the game not less). Reduction removes credits from the game. The two sinks implemented (QT and Repair costs) do not reduce the credits already in the game at all. Unless credits are actually removed from the game, prices will continue to climb. On the other hand, the GTN tax does remove credits from the game. This should have been what they were looking at as it is far more effective and impacts the people generating the credits the most (since they are mostly selling what they get from the repeatable missions with their level 80 characters) As to the "adjust inflow in certain repeatable content". It doesn't do that at all. The only content impacted is the non-repeatable RPG content (leveling). The repeatable heroics, FPs, and Operations (as well as PVP) do not use QT. People running FP get a free transport to the FP location as do PVPers and Raiders. Those running heroics simply use the heroic transports (which don't have a travel cost either) As to do the devs having only this credit sink planned, the answer is most likely. Why would you implement only 1 credit sink if you planned on implementing more, especially when it is so similar to the other "transport" mechanics which didn't get a "tax" and are used much more often.

It's not an effective credit sink if it doesn't actually remove credits from the game. It would take dozens of credit sinks like this to even slow down the influx of credits in the game. Implementing one very minor sink does nothing but annoy players (and it also is directed specifically at the group of players generating the least credits). It doesn't remove any credits from the game at all, it only marginally slows the increase and is easily bypassed by the players generating the vast majority of the credits each day (billions more credits have been added to the game since this was implemented - billions removed per day is a massive exaggeration). So while it reduced (it does not remove) credits from the total generated each day it did not reduce the credits in game at all. A much more effective way to do the same thing would have been to reduce credit awards for all play styles by 1% (which would "remove" more credits from the game than this misguided credit sink)