So a lot of posters in this thread can't wait for Server Transfers to be implemented ? Yeah, I couldn't either, but instead of whining endlessly (and fruitlessly) on the forums, I just transferred myself I left 8 characters (most with Crew skills in the +300 range) and a decent pile of credits behind on a not-so-busy server and started from scratch on a busy server. And I'm loving it ! But then again, I enjoy leveling in SWTOR, besides, it's easy and fast. I didn't want to wait for a month or 2 or 3 to continue enjoying the game, I wanted to enjoy it NOW ! So I did what I had to to realise that goal. Simple really... Nobody "traps" you on a deserted server but yourself.

My impression so far is that crafting in SWTOR is aimed squarely at self-sufficiency, with supplying the market being a distant second. I'm not at L50 yet, but it seems to me that the choke-point is the rate at which one can gather resources. You can level 2 armormechs, but you'd be running crew skill missions 24/7 to try and provide BOTH those 2 crafters with enough blue mats to craft sell-able items. I'd imagine it would be more advantageous to double-up on gathering skills, rather than crafting skills if you want to become a "manufacturer" ?

You could apply that logic to all crafted items, seeing as nobody "needs" any crafted items at all while leveling. You can level all the way to 50 in green loot drops, commendations and quest rewards, specially seeing as it's quite easy to over-level a character for the zone they're in. I'm leveling my first character on a fairly busy server, and I put almost all my green loot on the GTN. And guess what ? I sell 75% of it within 1 day of listing. Granted, I don't list at "premium prices", but there is clearly a lot of people on my server that buy and use green loot drop armour when they can get it cheaply... But the crafted items add "quality of life" to the journey, and I buy crafted if I can afford it

When last did you hear someone say: "That's a REALLY good MMO, but I hate it, and wouldn't play it if you paid me" ? It's a "good" MMO when you really enjoy playing it Totally subjective, as one man's meat is another man's poison.

You honestly think that the current prices on the GTN are a "temporary phenomenon" that will magically disappear once 1.3 hits ? Not a chance I wasn't just talking about resources, on my server everything in the lower tiers is very expensive. A new character cannot afford to buy that gear, but the alt of a L50 most certainly can. And this game is oriented toward making alts, so that situation will not change. It happens in all themepark MMO's that I've played, so it's not a fault of SWTOR. It simply happened here much quicker due to the high leveling speed. As I said before, the high prices of "endgame" perks reflects the fact that the "average" player has a lot of cash. Those huge credit sinks are not there to restrict "endgame features" to the top 5% of players, they are there to drain off surplus funds from the average player. If your L50 has 10M credits and nothing to spend it on, then you'll not think twice about paying 30K for a L15 blue bracer for your new alt. It's pennies to that L50. But that price would be a joke to a brand new player who is lucky to have that amount of cash in TOTAL. It's the big L50 wallets that drive up the prices on the GTN for everything, because those big wallets are funding alts that are leveling up. Inflation is a fact of life in the majority of MMO's, and SWTOR is no exception. At least in SWTOR, it's possible to advance quite easily without having to buy from other players. Quest rewards and FP drops keep a new player well geared. They just can't afford the "shinies", but that's optional. So the inflation doesn't cripple the game.

Inflation is rampant in SWTOR, because the levelling speed is so high. There were a great many L50's a month after launch, and their earning capacity is high, so they've been generating credits at an amazing rate. No wonder there are such heavy credit sinks at "end-game". I only started SWTOR about 2 months ago, and I could clearly see the effects of inflation, just by looking at the pricing of items on the GTN. When L10-16 crafting resources are selling for 200 to 300 credits EACH, it's obvious that the seller is targeting L50 characters with big wallets who want to skill-up their alts. And those resources get sold at that price, I know this from personal experience. Which brand new player can afford a L11 armour piece with an augment slot, when they are often priced anywhere from 50K to 150K (server dependent) ? Those will be bought for alts only. So the GTN prices for crafted gear and resources are already set for characters who can "easily" earn 200-300K a day from their daily missions. It's inevitable, goods are priced according to what the market can bear, and the market in SWTOR can bear quite a lot, it seems. The game metrics will confirm this situation, and hence the devs continually look for ways to drain the "credit lake" being created by the average L50 player. If you are not an "average L50", and happen to be on the left side of the bell-curve, you will feel pain...

Inflation is rampant in SWTOR, because the levelling speed is so high. There were a great many L50's a month after launch, and their earning capacity is high, so they've been generating credits at an amazing rate. No wonder there are such heavy credit sinks at "end-game". I only started SWTOR about 2 months ago, and I could clearly see the effects of inflation, just by looking at the pricing of items on the GTN. When L10-16 crafting resources are selling for 200 to 300 credits EACH, it's obvious that the seller is targeting L50 characters with big wallets who want to skill-up their alts. And those resources get sold at that price, I know this from personal experience. Which brand new player can afford a L11 armour piece with an augment slot, when they are often priced anywhere from 50K to 150K (server dependent) ? Those will be bought for alts only. So the GTN prices for crafted gear and resources are already set for characters who can "easily" earn 200-300K a day from their daily missions. It's inevitable, goods are priced according to what the market can bear, and the market in SWTOR can bear quite a lot, it seems. The game metrics will confirm this situation, and hence the devs continually look for ways to drain the "credit lake" being created by the average L50 player. If you are not an "average L50", and happen to be on the left side of the bell-curve, you will feel pain...

Veeery interesting, thx for the linky Well, I can certainly see the price of resources on the GTN rising substantially post 1.3... Augment kits will probably be in abundant supply, seeing as you have to make and RE 10 belts (of the appropriate tier) to get enough for components for 1 kit. I imagine orange shells with a crit-crafted augment slot won't sell for much more than the cost of a kit + shell + augment table fee... But the good news is that it may put augmented orange gear in reach of lower level players, due to the tiering. The augment-slotted orange L11 gear will now only be useful to a high level player if they spend the additional augment table upgrade fee.

The outcome of a RE attempt is determined solely by the RNG, there's nothing you can do to influence that. The bulk of the complaints seem to center around the RE process, not so much critting for an augment slot. As you correctly added, after 1.3 the augment crits will be of far less importance than they are currently. So the only part of crafting that you CAN affect slightly (via companion affection) will be of far less importance. All I'm suggesting is a mechanism whereby we can improve those RE odds. Not a guaranteed success, just some way to stack the deck a little in the way that you would prefer. Like allowing companion affection to influence BOTH crits and RE outcomes. Or even a one-time choice whether you would like your companion to have a +crit or +RE stat, for instance.

I understand the reason for making the RNG the basis of crafting outcomes, but giving players limited to no influence on the crafting outcomes makes for a very bland and uninspiring crafting system. Basically, you sit down in front of the "crafting one-arm bandit" and pull the lever until you strike it lucky. Yawn... In SWG there were research points that you could spend to influence the crafting outcome. In Lotro you can add rare drop materials to improve the odds of your success. In EQ we had clothes and tools with bonuses to crafting success. And so on. Giving players the means to improve their odds of success makes the process more interesting, and adds a meta-level to the crafting "game". As it stands right now, it's us versus the mighty RNG, and we are largely spectators, powerless to affect the process in any way.

As a crafter in SWTOR, you have to learn to love the RNG, because it rules everything you do. There's almost nothing you can do to influence it's workings, other than to improve your companion affection, which will give you a small boost to mission and crafting critical success rates. But it's a very small boost which you're unlikely even to notice, unless you keep a spreadsheet of your activities. Crew skill missions - the RNG determines which missions are available to you in the crew skill selection window. You can zone or login and out to "refresh" the displayed missions, but YMMV... and neither of these are really an option if you're out in the world busy questing. So the rate at which you can gather specific crafting materials is largely out of your control. Need metal, but there's 3 compound missions, a consumable and a "moderate" grade metal mission on offer ? Sucks to be you. Relog a few times or run some of those unwanted missions until a good metal mission randomly pops up again. Attempting to RE an item for a new recipe ? You have no control over which "flavour" of schematic you will get, and no control over whether you will get one at all. No way currently to influence the outcomes, the RNG rules here unchallenged... Attempting to craft an item with an augment slot ? Your companion affection supposedly improves the odds, but don't hold your breath. It will most likely appear that there's zero difference between the outcomes of a companion with 0 affection and one with 10K. Record ALL your crafting attempts, and you may see a slight difference once you have 50 or a 100 results recorded... I HATE the RNG ! At least show us the outcomes of the "crafting dice rolls", the way we see them reported in group loot rolls or conversation rolls. The workings of the RNG in crafting are entirely hidden from view, so there's no way to monitor what's actually going on. Given the history of SWTOR to date, it's not entirely surprising that so many players view these "hidden workings" with some suspicion...

Of course, crafting the augment kit and selling it is only half the story The catch is what price will be charged to use the augment kit at the Modification Table, because this "NPC price regulator" will tend to determine the price cap on both augment-slot kits and indirectly on critted armour with an augment slot. It will be difficult to sell a crit-crafted item (with augment slot) for more than the average price of buying an augment kit and using it at the Modification Table. Hopefully the fee that is charged for applying the augment kit will not be too high, otherwise it will limit sales of the kits...

Thanks for the clarifications, David ! Can these augment kits be used on ANY item, or are they restricted to player-crafted items ? If they can only be used on crafted items, does that include ALL crafted item quality tiers, or can they only be added to orange shells (custom) ? Will all grades of crafted items (green, blue and purple) yield augment kit components when RE'ed ? Great to see that the augment kits are level-tiered. Will that be tiers 1 to 6 (similar to the crew skill level tiers) ? Or are they graded differently ? I assume the components from RE will also be level-tiered ? So we'll get "Augment Material 1" from RE'ing L10-16 crafted items (e.g. belts and bracers), and "Augment Material 2" from RE'ing L17-25 items, etc. ? When you say that the drop rate is not random, and "currently it's set to 10", does that mean we get the same amount of augment components, regardless of which item is RE'ed ? So you can RE either 10 bracers or 10 chest pieces and still only have enough components to make 1 augment kit ?

The thought occurred to me as well. It would make sense in a twisted sort of way, hehe Perhaps the materials for the augmentation kits will ONLY come from RE'ing orange crafted shells. The orange crafted shells generally require more materials than other items at their level, so they are relatively "expensive" to make. Receiving augment kit materials from RE'ing them would be a "consolation prize" for not getting the crit augment slot when you crafted the item in the first instance. If augment kit materials can be gotten from RE'ing any item, then logically it would be most efficient to make 100's of belts and bracers, which I doubt is the intention here.

Now of course, it may well be that the amount of "augment kit materials" that you get from RE'ing an item is affected by somehow "crit RE'ing" that item... It could also be that RE'ing L50 chest pieces returns more "augment kit materials" than RE'ing L9 bracers... So it's highly likely that your proposed formula of "4-5 RE'ed pieces at that same level" may be too simplistic.

If the Augment Kits are universal, i.e. anyone can use them regardless of level, then their pricing on the GTN will naturally be determined by what a L50 player can afford. That means that only L50 players and their alts will be able to afford them. But I can't see any way of making them "level-bound", unless they can only be applied to non-upgradeable gear (i.e. NOT orange shells). Otherwise, what will happen to a L11 orange shell with an augment slot added via augment kit ? If the kit is only valid for upgrading L11 items, should the augment slot "fall off" if the orange shell is upgraded more than a pre-determined amount of levels ? As usual, the gap between what will actually be implemented, as opposed to what was said in the podcast, will probably be significant.

The TIME required may well be the same, but the cost of the eventual critted item won't be.

I imagine that the materials needed for building the Enhancement kits will be randomly dropped in small quantities as a by-product of the RE process, in addition to the "standard material refund" from RE'ing. Similar to the way that purple crafting materials are currently obtained from crew missions, perhaps ? The BW devs do seem to love their RNG, it crops up everywhere Once the Enhancement kit is applied, will the item be bound to whomever applied the kit ? Or will the enhanced item still be freely tradeable ? I can see how this change is an attempt to satisfy everyone. That great looking loot piece you just got as a Campaign or HM FP drop can now be further improved by adding an Enhancement slot via the Kit+table method. No need to buy an expensive "rare" orange crit-crafted item from a crafter ! No need to strip the mods from your loot drop to place them in an orange crit-crafted shell ! Orange quest rewards will no longer be eclipsed by crit-crafted items with an augment slot... The only time a player will need to buy a crafted orange item from a crafter will be for purely aesthetic reasons, or because they can't easily or immediately get an appropriate piece for a companion via quest rewards. And crafters can still craft, in fact they will have to craft more items than ever before, because their main source of profit (and possibly sales) will be Enhancement kits, which can only be made by crafting and RE'ing loads of items... It will also clear the GTN of "dumped" crafted items, because it will be potentially more valuable to RE a surplus item for materials rather than dumping it on the GTN at a cut rate price. If these "enhancement kits" are tedious to make (i.e. requiring endless grinding of crafted items for RE'ing), their price will be very high, due to the time and materials needed. It will also push up the price of materials on the GTN, because demand for bulk materials will rise.

It looks like instead of fixing the original "bug", someone decided to just apply the previous functionality universally to all GTN searches. It reeks of "quick-win fix", and the result is very irritating. I can only imagine that they are trying to limit the complexity of the database searches for some reason. Sloppy database design can have that effect...

You are disregarding a significant "other" reason, i.e. the L50 main character with a fat bankroll and limited patience, who wants to skill-up an alt rapidly. Someone like that will buy up stacks of "overpriced" resources without a second thought. I'm constantly being reminded on these boards that "a L50 can earn 300K credits daily just from doing daily missions". I've not reached that level myself, so I've no way to argue.

I came to the conclusion that the dev's expect crafters to specialise in only a handful of items from the huge list available to each profession. Just RE'ing green L24 earpieces to get ALL the blue variant recipes for all of them cost me a few full stacks of materials, which take a few hours to gather. I'd not be surprised if it took 4 or 5 hours of dedicated gathering to get together the materials to RE all those L24 earpieces to Tier 2 recipes. It's a staggering amount of work to gather the materials, and they vanish in a few minutes of RE clicking I'm an enthusiastic crafter, but I do it for own use only. Crafting for the GTN is really a waste of time and effort, imho. Nobody REALLY needs the crafted stuff, it's nice to have, yeah, but not if it's "too expensive". The pace of levelling is too fast to justify spending on decent gear, which you'll probably outlevel tomorrow...

Perhaps my sense of "rare" is seriously skewed, but I keep on seeing posts on these forums from people complaining about how they made 20 or 30 items in a row with no crafting crits... But I guess they are just clueless players. And yes, I'm playing SWTOR "wrong"... I've been levelling my characters in parallel, instead of jetting one char to L50 in a week and then funding the alts with the daily 300K+ that I will earn as a L50 player. So, to me, something that costs 100K on the GTN is staggeringly expensive, and most definitely "rare". I would feel a major sense of achievement when I can afford to buy one of those, but that's because of my chosen playstyle. However, I am enjoying myself nonetheless

Indeed, and I believe that Legacy gear also falls into the "rare" category, given that you have to firstly attain the required Legacy ranking, and secondly, spend a considerable amount of credits. The average player, upon reaching L50, does not pop over to the Legacy vendor and quickly buy a full set of orange legacy gear without breaking their stride. Well, obviously not if they already have a few orange pieces with an augment slot What I was trying to say in my post was that currently the dev's seem to regard augment slots as "special" features, otherwise they would not make it so difficult to get those pieces. Unless they plan on changing that approach in future, I doubt that the ability to add an augment slot will be freely available to all that want it.

Yes, the dev's have said that they "are looking at some way of adding augment slots to already crafted gear". However, the current method for getting augment slots (random luck via critical crafting success) is clearly designed to keep augment slotted gear in the "rare" category. Just check your local GTN terminal for pricing on augment-slotted gear So it is unlikely that any new method of adding augment slots to gear will be any "easier" than the current system, unless the dev's intend to make augment-slotted gear the new standard.

Clearly, you don't understand the concept of "opportunity cost". I can either use my companion to earn credits for myself, or I can use my companion to process the stack of materials you have provided. For example, if my companion can potentially earn me 30K profit per hour (from crafting or missions), why should my "service fee" to you be less than 30K per hour ? The fact that you have provided a stack of materials is entirely irrelevant to the fact that I can earn 30K per hour from using my companion for personal gain.