Personally, I don't think the real problem is with the prices some people are charging with the exception of accepting the default pricing. My personal view is that the default cost on the GTN for a given crafted item barely covers the cost of getting your materials by running missions exclusively so you should mark up from there. You can also figure that the default price on the GTN for mats barely covers the cost of the missions used to get those materials. If you go out do some plain old boring running around and harvesting you can drastically cut those cost values. Buying materials off of the GTN is only for those trying to climb to the top tier of crafting on an alt in as short a time as possible and they are paying a premium for that privilege. Just my opinion, but the real problem is two fold. First, the amount of materials returned by both harvesting out in the game world and by sending companions out on missions is way too low. A return of 2 to 10 items for a given mission is just way to low. The same goes for harvesting out in the game world where a return of 2 to 4 items per harvesting action just turns into a waste of peoples time for most people. Returns from missions should be doubled or tripled and harvesting out in the game world should be increased even more say 3 to 5 times. The second problem is how missions seem to work. They really need to revamp the crew skill missions so that all missions for a tier show up and only get removed from the window when a companion is using that specific mission. Once a companion is out on a specific mission you should be able to tell the companion to run it multiple times similar to crafting items and let me queue it up 5 times so that I can send them off and forget about it for a while. Since those high tier missions can take 30 minutes to almost an hour, sending 4 or 5 companions off on missions that are going to take upwards of 4 hours to complete while I go to bed or work would improve their value. Both those suggestions together would have a better effect on the economy then worrying about some guy selling for what you think is way too low of a price. Anyway, I rarely buy raw materials off the GTN although I do look at them from time to time and just shake my head at the ridiculous mark up on them. I try to price my items to move and if they sell within 2 days I figure the price is about right. If the items sells in less then a couple hours I consider bumping up the price. If I throw an item up more then twice without it selling then I consider lowering my price on that item. But as a general rule I only mark up 3 to 5 times the base price on Tier 1 to 4 items anyway... For tier 5 and 6 items, I'm stockpiling right now and will look at the situation of selling my mats after I've crafted my main and my alts all the items I need.

So, you may still have to wade through page after page to find a topic relative to what you want to discuss. Giving each crew skill its own sub forum would allow for more focused discussion and maybe cut down on repeat topics. It may also make it easier for the Dev's to see what are hot topics for a given crew skill simply by checking out the post counts versus how long something has been on the forums.

First, I try not to buy raw materials off of the GTN they are usually way over inflated in price. I'm also willing to spend some time jumping between all my crafting characters sending out all my companions to gather the resources I need then ending up on one of my characters that has an extra companion I couldn't send out to go adventuring with. I just rinse and repeat this process whenever I'm in a relatively safe place to switch characters. Second, I find I make a decent amount of credits catering to the lower level crowd and those starting to level alts. So most of what I sell is between level 8 and level 30 or sometimes level 40. Too many crafters are focused on the end game items, I can see it being hard to make some credits or quick sells in that category. Third, at least on the server I'm actively on right now (planning on using that character transfer this week), finding any resource worth while on the GTN is a matter of the heavens opening up and aliens coming to take me away...

I could be wrong, I haven't actively gone after purple recipes since I make a fair amount of credits selling the reverse engineered blues (usually the critical versions). But the way I read some of the discussion on it way back when sounded like once you got to purple you stopped.

Personally, I don't try to figure out the cost of items I craft down to the credit. What I do is throw an item I've crafted up on the GTN and see what it gives me as its default sell price and use that as my cost value. I then take that value and round it up to the nearest multiple of 25 credits so a 205 credit item is rounded to 225 after the rounding I then multiply that by 2, 3, 4, or 5 depending on how well stuff seems to sell on the GTN. Armor seems to go best at a X2 or X3 multiplier while Artifice crafted Modifications seem to go well at X5. Cybertech Earpieces also seem to do pretty good at X5 multiplier. Anyway, my artificer is the richest of all my characters right now and he's not even my main.

just my opinion, but its probably Slicing + 2 of the harvesting skills (archeology, bioanalysis or scavenging) You can slice and harvest while out leveling your character and sell any harvested raw materials on the GTN for 2 or more times what the GTN gives you as the default price. Just try to sell in stacks of 20+ raw materials. The slicing part is pretty much pure credits while your out leveling grab any slicing nodes that pop up. If you want to you can run the slicing missions and sell any crafting materials you get for crafting augments on the GTN... not sure how well those are selling right now but after patch 1.3 comes out there will probably be a huge demand. Except for raw materials for Augment crafting, not sure slicing is worth sending companions out on missions and unless its been fixed, I've heard some of those missions can actually cost you more money to run then you get back from the mission.

Well for synthweaving, the base recipe (the one you start out with and can be blue or green) can be reverse engineered into 3 different improved recipes and they will get one of the following words put in front of the original name: Critical Overkill Redoubt If the base recipe was blue the the new reverse engineered recipes will be purple and that is far as you can go. However, if the base recipe was a green recipe then you can reverse engineer the new blue recipe to one of 5 purple recipes. Don't ask me the names of these new purple recipes because I don't remember them and there are 14 or 15 of them (5 for the critical, 5 for the overkill and 4 for redoubt unless they've patched the fifth one in for redoubt now).

Well, Augment crafting is done by Synthweavers, Armormechs, and I don't remember the third crafting class that does augments. But the Augment raw materials are obtained through slicing missions. So if your going to do nothing but augments then you can pick up slicing as one of your crew skills with the other crew skill being the one you can harvest without running missions if you want (scavenging or Archeology depending on crafting class). If you want to make any blue or purple recipe's your at the mercy of the GTN for your special or rare crafting materials though. Personally, I like to be as self sufficient as possible, so I have one of each crafting class and one pure harvester... I haven't done the Bounty Hunter yet on my current server and he will be a second pure harvester once I do create him. Each pure harvester will be the ones with slicing and then feed other harvested raw materials to the crafters that can use or need them. My main is already at 400/400 on Synthweave, Archeology and Underworld Trading and my Artificer isn't far behind even though he is much lower in adventure class level from my main. But I've been working my Trooper/Armormech lately and also using him to harvest raw materials for my other scavenging based crafters. So, if you eventually plan on have one of each core class, you can easily be self sufficient and rely on two pure harvesters for your augment raw materials.

If you actually decide to craft something, you may find you won't be able to buy the raw materials off of the GTN for the harvesting crew skill you don't pick or they may be real expensive as you level so if you really want to craft then you should consider skipping slicing. If you want pure credits, I'd go slicing and 2 harvesting skills (bioanalysis, scavenging or archeology). Personally I'd go scavenging and archeology because those items seem to be lacking on the GTN, again on my server. Anyway look at whats got a ton of stuff and what is missing a lot of materials on the GTN for your server and then make your decision. One of my alts went slicing/archeology/bioanalysis. I make a decent amount of coin slicing the slicing nodes out in the world while running missions and I mail any harvested materials to one of my other alts that craft and can use those materials. Archeology materials are fed to either my synthweaver or my Artificer while bioanalysis materials go to my biochem guy. Scavenging also feeds 3 crafting classes Armormech, Armstech, and Cybertech. Bigger demand for Archeology and Scavenging materials although there are a lot of biochem guys out there too.

If I remember correctly, Efficiency only speeds up your crafting or harvesting. The +2 Crit should increase your crit chance by 2%. Every 2000 points of affection on a particular comapnion also grants +1 Crit if I remember correctly. Unfortunately I don't remember the base Crit chance for all companions, it might have only been 5% but I'd have to do some serious searching of the forums to find those values. I believe there were some other modifiers as well that were based on the mission level versus your skill (grey/green/blue/yellow/orange level missions). Again if I remember correctly, your best chance of critting on a mission is with grey missions but I don't remember the exact % boost based on the difference in mission color level versus your skill level).

Personally, I'd like to see them get rid of the randomness in what is available for me to send people out to harvest. I'd also like it clearly spelled out what the main resource returned is put in the mission description. Crits can of course add whatever it wants to from some table... but I want to know the base Item I'm going to get when I send my guys out on a mission. I'm tired of wasting an abundant, bountiful, or rich mission on some resource I already have a bunch of when I want the other resource for that tier. And while your at it, please bump the amount of materials returned per mission... 2/4/6/8 of something is way to low.... I think 10/20/30/40 would be a more reasonable return for the time and money spent on the mission. Heck I'd even settle for 5/10/15/20 of a material returned for moderate / abundant / bountiful / or rich mission. Give me some drop down menus like: Tier Quantity (moderate, abundant, bountiful, or rich) Resource Type (based on skill) Specific Resource The drop down menus do not have to be in that order Maybe show us our % chance of getting a crit on the mission based on the companion selected before we send said companion out on the mission. Companion Affection items should be on a separate list or listed as its own resource type so we only see them when we are trying to raise affection with a companion... and again it should tell us the type of companion gift we would receive with a crit again pulling a bonus from some random table.

To tell the truth, I really want to see the "Randomness" of all missions go away. I want a set of drop down boxes that let me pick what I want and then appropriate missions be displayed. So it might look something like First drop down box displays "Tier Selection" Second drop down box displays difficulty, "Moderate", to "Rich" Third drop down box displays a general list of items I can farm (in the UT example) "Companion Gifts", "Fabrics", "Metals" Finally missions that fit the bill for the selections made show up in the list with variable prices. Maybe have prices reflect a possible change in crit chance on that mission (lower priced missions slightly lower crit chance then the higher priced missions).

Those are quest items and not crafted if they have the characters name on them. I haven't had any problem crafting and equipping regular gear as long as its the right type of armor or other gear. I try to craft at least blue gear for my characters and companions if I can get the resources to do so, if not my characters come first.

People really need to start bug reporting this in game so that it becomes a priority.

First you need to have a companion to craft, so if you haven't finished the quest to get your first companion on your starter world then you can't craft. After you have your companion, press the N key to open your crew skill window and then click your crafting skill in the window next to your companions portrait. you should see a new window open up with your crafting recipes in them. pick one and click the craft button in the lower right corner. Note: you will need to buy new recipes about every 20 skill points on your crafting skill. Some crafting skills get them every 10 it seems and occasionally it may jump to 30 for a short period but generally check every 20 skill points with your crafting crew skill trainer for new recipes. Once you train for your harvesting and mission crew skills, you don't need to visit them again as far as I've seen.

Bump... This needs some serious attention.

Bump... This really needs to addressed sooner rather then later... Before the 12-20-2011 launch would be best.