Do you not see the problem here? If the only people buying your mod are crafters trying to learn it, making it unlearnable will eliminate your sales, and you're in a worse position because at least now you have credits from those other crafters. Making credits off of a well known schematic is entirely possible; other crafters buying your monoplized mod is proof of that.

Most armoring schematics people are learning are coming from Dread Guard offhands, but agent offhands have barrels instead of armorings. The only hope of seeing a crafted Advanced Skill Armoring 27 before 1.5 is Hazmat belts and bracers, but the chances of that happening is pretty small.

Even back when I was playing Rift I was crafting for tips. I found that people were incredibly generous when I let them decide how much my time and effort spent learning a weapon's schematic was worth and it more than made up for the occasions when people didn't tip. People aren't quite as generous in SWTOR, but its probably because of the crits that I'm now depending on. I'm also a big proponent of expediting the gearing process, and given the cost of the materials I felt that adding a crafting fee was just an arbitrary barrier preventing people from getting gear they wanted. Some people are in the crafting game to maximize their profit and that's fine, but its not how I want to play. Also, I can now craft the Advanced Aptitude Mod 27 (34 endurance, 56 willpower, 44 power), Advanced Commando Barrel 26 (57 aim, 60 endurance), and Advanced Reflex Armoring 27 (72 aim, 52 endurance). As to suggesting new organization schemes, perhaps you can take advantage of the template nature of the item modifications. The mats don't change within a rank and type of modification, and the stats only vary by which main stat and secondaries and not how much of each. For example, have a section for rank 27 armorings since they all use the same mats, and a subsection for tank armorings where you start with the template of 60 endurance and 57 main stat, then before each armoring indicate which main stat it uses. And another section for rank 27 mods would have an A variant subsection, which have 72 main stat, 44 endurance, and 13 secondary (from the first group of secondaries, so no surge/alacrity/accuracy/some tank ones; there is a q&a answer out there that seperates out the secondary stats). Then you'd have a list of crafters for each mod that uses that template, starting with the mod name, followed by the main and secondary stats, and then providing the list of names. If you want, I can edit out this awkward textual description and replace it with an example. Alternatively, you can let torhead do the hard work for you and just provide a link to the item's schematic, which provides the stats as well as the mats required.

I can now craft Advanced Commando Armoring 27 and Advanced Force Wielder Armoring 27. Stats for these are 64 Endurance and 60 Aim/Willpower. Mats are the same as the Might 27 I posted earlier. The primary source of people initially learning armorings are those taken from Dread Guard offhands. This means no Skill Armoring 27, since those offhands have barrels, and no Resolve Armoring 27, since as far as I can tell they all have Force Wielder Armoring 27, until NM EC. There's a faint glimmer of hope in that The Writhing Horror has dropped some Hazmat belts and bracers, but that's a low drop rate with a low schematic learning rate.

I can now craft Advanced Might Armoring 27. Stats: 72 Strength 52 Endurance Mats: Synthetic Energy Matrix x 2 Molecular Stabilizer x 6 Mandalorian Iron x 8 Durasteel x 12 Zal Alloy x 12

On both of those it should be 150*6 and 200*3. With your numbers you come out to 2550 and 1800 respectively instead of the listed 2500 and 1750. Six as the number of 150 coin months also makes sense, since from December to July is eight months and most people have received two free ones. I don't understand how people are seeing four months of 200 coins. If your subscription renews before today or exactly today you'd see three: one for each of August, September, and October. If your subscription renews after today you'd see a 200 coin payout from when you paid in August and again when you paid in September. The third, for October, hasn't happened yet. I don't think its a multiple month subscription thing, as those people could possibly be breaking the 3000 barrier with the added November and December. Or it could be a multiple month subscription thing, but they're deliberately cutting it off at November indicating thats when they plan on launching the free to play option.

Please show me where I called for an end to all crafting fees, and please show me what entitles you to be so condescending.

Color me super jealous of your server, I'd love to see that sort of selection and competition for crafting.

I'm very curious as to who is BiS already. Seeing as you can't get all the gear from TFB HM alone, and very few people have learned any armorings. The only Armoring 27 I've seen on the GTN on Jedi Covenant was a Force Wielder for 3.25 million, which didn't sell as it is an incremental upgrade from the 26. I imagine the only ones BiS are in guilds that are doing the raiding, which isn't at all what most people here are complaining about. And even then I don't think you'll see any BiS agents until EC NM is out, since the off hand gives a barrel instead of the armoring. Drops increased, but as more schematics are learned that require twice the mats the prices will keep climbing back up. The same will happen for synthetic energy matrices as soon as armoring 27 schematics become known.

A mandatory tip is a fee. I'm fine with people charging fees for earpieces/implants/armor, just don't call it a tip if its required.

Its 26 and 27, since the 25s aren't craftable. And the shot about tips is a little unfair; at least name some names. I know I've never demanded a tip and am perfectly fine not receiving one, as are a lot of the other crafters, so a good public call out would help end such practices.

I don't want to put words in your mouth so I would appreciate it if you stated clearly what you think the point of end game raiding is. Because what I think it is has no problem with the current crafting system. Those people and guilds with all those credits got it by exploiting a monopoly on the schematic and price gouging anyone that wanted or needed it. The quickest way to stop this is for others to learn it. The easiest way for others to learn it is to buy the crafted product and learn from that. In other words, eliminating the current system will only make this problem worse. And the only reason I've kept playing is because of this crafting sub game and ahving a reasonable way to learn the schematics. It kept things interesting for the long period when I was sick of doing EC HM and waiting for TFB, the same period that caused half my guild to quit. What's your opinion on people who are clearing the instances, not getting lucky on their reverse engineernig attempts, but still learning schematics from goods bought on the GTN? This idea of others stealing the schematic is ridiculous. You invested time to learn the encounters and got lucky learning a schematic. They are investing credits to buy your products and making the same choice you did, that they'd rather try and learn the schematic than put it to immediate use. If the credits you are receiving for selling the products isn't adequate compensation for the time you spent raiding then its a pricing issue, not a theft one. We could go back and forth on this until the cows come home. You appear to be one of the people who paid exorbitant fees to get into the special club and are upset that the price of admission is being driven down over time. I'm also one of the people in the club, but I'm doing my best to subsidize anyone that wants in after me because I think the party will be better with more people in it. If raiding is about the gear then yeah, the current system stinks. But raiding in SWTOR for the gear has always been a dismal affair since each tier is such an incremental upgrade. If raiding is about the experience then being able to acquire and/or supplement your gear outside of the operation can only serve to reduce the tedium of repeated runs.

I learned the Advanced Deft Mod 27 schematic last night.

Read what I wrote. They are giving the best campaign armorings for the slot. So I'll finally be able to get Skill Armoring 26s with the set bonuses. So your argument is that this gear should be given as a reward for clearing top tier content... ...but clearing top tier content isn't about getting the gear. Then why in the world do you care about how others get their gear, if its actually about the experience of raiding? People don't unsub because they get powerful gear. People do unsub when repeating old content ad nauseum, or going through stupid grinds for marginal benefits. Having full rank 26 gear without entering EC HM doesn't invalidate EC HM, it just makes doing it less of a chore. EC HM was full cleared the week it was released iirc. A person could have been full campaign that week, if he was the tank of a guild that gears their tanks first. But surely thats not a problem. BTW, three weeks is silly hyperbole. Its taken months for the crafting markets to get where they are now. Its been how long since TFB HM was released? And, on Jedi Covenant, someone has finally learned one rank 27 armoring. That's just such an unbelievably fast process, I don't know how the raiding community can tolerate it. 20+ million credits isn't any where near instant gratification, especially in an economy where the typical player's wallet amounts to a few hundred thousand credits. You got it first, congratulations. The people coming later always have an easier time. Strategies are provided online, encounters are decreased in difficulty, higher tiers of gear become available, and a host of other factors conspire to make it easier for later groups to join your exclusive club. I'll admit that I am curious though, how quickly you feel people should be able to gear up. Should a new 50 have to climb the gear ranks completely, from Tionese to Dread Guard, going through weeks of unlucky EV and KP drops, without skipping a step? What about when the next tier is released, is it okay to give them a leg up or is that cheapening the experience? I mean, you had to grind to the top, why shouldn't they? I think you have a terrible misconception about whos buying the rank 27 mods off the GTN. You get an additional 8 stat points when going from rank 26 to 27. Not many people are willing to pay a million credits, let alone the 2.5 million he was charging, to do that. As far as I can tell, the only ones actually buying rank 27 mods are other crafters. I don't believe that at all. If you weren't doing it to be sickly rich you'd be selling at cost instead of price gouging. If you wanted to limit the supply then you wouldn't even bother selling them and keep it in guild. The fact that you are selling, and selling for ridiculous mark ups, tells a better tail then what you're trying to weave here.

The people who are dissatisfied with the current system are the most likely to comment when they are told that they are wrong. The fact is that end game crafting would have been a joke without this. A 20% chance on a once a week drop to learn the armoring schematic? A drop that isn't even guaranteed any more, since 1.4? No thanks. I learned the Advanced Skill Armoring 26 on my 15th attempt. That would have been almost 4 months of raiding HM EC, if the skill dropped every time and was fed to the crafters every time, to learn just that one schematic. But the truth is that during approximately that amount of time raiding, we only saw a couple skill armorings drop. So I still wouldn't have the schematic despite, as another poster put it, putting in the effort and taking the big risk. And I'd probably still be raiding in rakata armorings, with a full campaign set rotting in my bank, becuase they gave snipers patron armorings in almost every slot.. And for those that think us people learning from crafted items have it easy, think again. It took me seven tries to learn the Advanced Artful Mod 27. The only one that could craft was refusing to do so directly, and I had to buy all seven on the GTN. For 2.5 million credits each. Of course I crashed his market 45 minutes after learning the schematic (mostly to protest his ridiculous crafting policies), but it still drove me nearly broke and made him, the one that learned it from a piece of dread guard, filthy rich. Finally, this idea that its wrong to gear up easily is ridiculous. Content grows stale after 6 months of repeating it weekly regardless of how fast it gives you gear, and making it take 6 months to get your gear from it is just frustrating. Raiding dies when guilds can't easily bring in new members, and being able to craft top end, or near top end, gear is a great way to keep fresh blood in the potential raiding pool. Gear will not teach you how to play your class, grant you raid awareness, or give insight into boss mechanics. Over gearing isn't possible for progression raiding. Easy to obtain raid gear will only allow you a fair chance at the fight, and denying that to others so you can be in your special club is short sighted. P.S. You should get on the test server and start raising a stink, cause people are able to buy best in slot campaign armorings, set bonus and all, for a few dozen Black Hole comms. Talk about gearing up fast, at least buying rank 26 armorings off the GTN is expensive compared to what will happen in 1.5. Its unfortunate to hear that the people on your server were like this. I know I've been telling everyone that has asked about my methods, as well as fleet chat a few times. People have also posted it in a few crafting threads, but it has been rather buried until now.

Thanks for adding my republic alt. I've recently added a few more schematics to my repertoire: Advanced Potent Mod 27 Advanced Artful Mod 27 Advanced Agile Mod 27 As usual no fees, but I do keep any extras from crits.

I forgot to mention this in my earlier posts, but I have a Republic alt, Draginiss, that people can use to get in touch with me for crafting.

Its greedy, exploitative, and short sighted business; great for making a quick buck before other people know the schematic but terrible for building relationships and reputation. And now there are plenty of people that know the schematics, including Cereal and me. I craft for free, just provide the mats and know that I'll keep any extras that are produced by crits.

That's dissapointing to hear, it actually made this part of the fight interesting.

The As actually have about more endurance than vanilla, but there may eventually be a ranking where its still worth going for it because of the main stat multiplying buffs and talents.

There's also choosing between the vanilla mod and the A variant. Vanilla comes with more secondary stat, crit or power, while A has a chunk of main stat and a smattering of the secondary. I'm pretty sure these two have the same amount of endurance, with the B variant being the high endurance version.

Before 1.4 I was logging on for maybe 2 hours total each week. Now I'm only going above that for raids. If I'm trying to cash in my horde of Columi tokens for cash I'm doing it because I want those credits quick, not sometime later this week. Quick cash for repairs before, and during, raids. Quick cash for buying a big ticket item that is rarely on the GTN. Quick cash for getting some rank 27 gear crafted by the one guy that knows the schematic and I usually don't see online. There are numerous scenarios where people need a quick infusion of credits, so it is not reasonable to dismiss them out of hand like this. I think a better solution, or at least an easier one to implement, would be credit boxes to trade for commendations.

And now I can make Advanced Reflex Barrel 26 on my Armstech alt. Mats are also 2 Synthetic Energy Matrix, 6 Molecular Stabilizer, 6 Ultrachrome, 10 Durasteel, and 10 Zal Alloy.

I can now make Advanced Skill Barrel 26 on my Armstech alt. Mats are 2 Synthetic Energy Matrix, 6 Molecular Stabilizer, 6 Ultrachrome, 10 Durasteel, and 10 Zal Alloy. Also komani, I sent you an in game mail from my republic alt.

Move Along and Dark CLAW have been doing NMP at 7:00 server time on Wednesday for a while now, so I guess we should reserve that timeslot since it has opened up. I'll post again if we decide to stop doing pilgrim so we can focus on TFB exclusively.