Thanks you all for the thoughtful feedback and conversation. I learned a lot and didn't know about the credit caps and some of the other issues surrounding the GTN and in game currency currency. My sub runs out and I think I'm done with SWTOR for a bit. The only reason I came back was to do this experiment and make this post. If you haven't done so already I would recommend posting on the dev post: 7.3 CREDIT ECONOMY INITIATIVE: UPDATES AND THE GTN Thanks again.

1 – Access to other players in a fair system. I don't trust the randos selling stuff for over 1 billion. 2 – Not intuitive at first. Takes a while to learn. 3 – Saved custom searches or maybe a search history. I typically look for the same stuff when Im in there. 4 – I think some of the drop downs are old and no longer relevant and end up hindering item searches. 5 – Price. Price fluctuation like houses on Zillow. An interface where I could watch the price of a particular item over time and some type of reminder if an item went on sale at or below a particular price. Other thoughts: It would be nice if the GTN was more of an auction sort of like eBay where I could set a price and folks could purchase or make a lower bid. For instance, if I asked $100k credits for an item and someone was willing to give me $75k than I would have the option to sell or try again once the 3 day timer ran out. Most of the time I don’t really know what the items I sell should cost, but this way the market would decide the true value at the moment of sale. Raise the GTN limit to 10 billion.

Couple points: 1 - You can craft and do almost any other game content: FPs, PvP, questing, and scrolling on the GTN. Once your companions come back you can send them out again no matter what you’re doing. If you’re on the GTN trying to estimate value you can't do any other activity... except craft. 2 – I get your point: You can put items on the GTN for 3 days, forget about it, and either cash in or get your money back. After I got familiar with my inventory and generally had a sense on what price to ask for that did save some time. However, prior to posting, I still had to see what other people were asking to determine my own asking price regardless of what I thought the item was worth. I made a profit overall, but also got stuck overpaying for some items. So, from my experience, as someone who didn’t have a good preconception of CM item valuation, it was a bit of a grind hr-wise recording the items to find an asking price that would sell for a profit. The experience was also time consuming in overall duration because the asking prices fluctuated throughout the 6-week period.

Why not? The currency cap isn't like the deficit cap debate in the US where it actually has adverse economic impacts. I don't understand the issue in SWTOR, my computer can count past 100 billion just fine. How do other games handle this? Interesting because as the inflation goes up the actual value goes up as well unlike the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008 where houses were over valued and the crash happened. This isn't a bubble, its the true value because the market supports. WoW must have faced this problem, anyone know what they did?

Interesting dilemma. Its not a currency bubble like the 2008 housing crisis, things are valued correctly because there is enough liquid currency to support. In real currency, the Fed would tax to slow, but what do you do with this when taxing doesn't really do anything? Its only going to get worse as multi-billionaires become increasingly common.

Thanks for the encouragement and the post. What types of CM items did you find were most profitable? I started with a wide array of items, but ended up focusing on augs at the 45 and 73 levels and MK10s and 11s. The factors to keep in mind are availability of mats, speed of sale, and market price. No surprise, everyone needs augs. To get the highest quality mats you really have to play the game and I wasn't really playing the necessary end game content or conquest grinding during this time period. I focused on armor sets for CM items. Its a lot of information to try and understand each category of sale in the GTN so I got smart on armor sets. The high profit item was the Exquisite Dancer armor set. Sith badass and bikini armor were the hot categories from my experience. Can you give some further clarification on the difference in length of time between Categories 1 vs 2? When I started I used a stopwatch to answer this specific question, but then I forgot after a long session so sadly I didn't collect any data on that. What I can say is crafting is more of a background activity and the more you do it the quicker and less intrusive to other gameplay it gets. You can put the companions on gathering missions and either go to another character and put them on missions or do a PvP match, FP, or play with the new character interface, or anything else because gathering missions are about a 20 min cooldown where you do nothing. You can do it in the middle of soloing, in a FP, or capping in a warzone ... yeah I'm that guy. When your on the GTN it takes 100% focus. I had to make a log of everything I was buying and selling and keep track of costs. I have a note book full of the armor sets and what I payed and estimated value.

Summary: After returning from more than 3 years I thought that it would be interesting to see how much cash I could make in a single subscription period. I limited the duration to 6 weeks because I needed some time to put this together. The three main credit making categories I counted were normal game play get cash, crafting, and selling Cartel Market (CM) items: Which is the most effective and which is the best? I found I could make money quicker in the CM, but it is very time consuming so crafting is really the best because it is a somewhat passive activity. Playing the game actually cost credits because I wasn’t doing hardly any missions and had companions out almost constantly. Background: Initially, I thought it would be better to start with a brand-new account, but decided on using my existing account because most people who might read this have probably been playing for a while. Furthermore, it would be very difficult to compare crafting and CM item sales in this amount of time if I needed to build the crafting skills and companion ranks from scratch. Additional I started with a large assortment of crafting materials (mats) 6 Cartel Market (CM) items ready to sell and $171M in credits. It does take money to make money. Objectives: Given 6 weeks, actively pursue earning in game credits through game play, crafting, and selling CM items on GTN. Credits earned were initially broken into 4 categories: 0 – Starting Amount: This is the $171M 1 – CM Items: These are items that originate from the CM, but can be bought and sold on the GTN. 2 – Crafting: Items created from materials by companions to be sold on the GTN. 3 – Gameplay: Cash earned and spent in game for any activity. Observations: At the end of 6 weeks, I netted $1787.9M after the GTN tax. Adding category 1 and 2 I made $1858.011M, but in-game play cost me -$70.111M so the actual total number earned was $1787.9M. 1 – CM Items: $1120.93 M 2 – Crafting: $737.081 M 3 – Gameplay: -$70.111 M Category 1 – CM Items: This currency was made by selling 14 CM items obtained partially through purchase in the GTN and with old items on hand. The GTN was used for all sales and purchases. Spent a total of $559M for CM items for the expressed purpose of selling. The purchase range was from $1M – $500M, but most of the items bought were in single digits. The most profitable sale was a purchase for $9M and net sale for $305M. This range seemed to be the sweet spot for ability to both buy and sell with a markup. This activity was very time consuming. It required pen and paper to track and make good value estimates. Part of this method required building the inventory of goods to sell. Had I continued, I think I could have doubled again in the same amount of time using the 17 remaining CM items and cash on hand to continue to search for underpriced CM items to sell for a profit. Category 2 – Crafting: Unlike the research-intensive CM approach, this method was relatively easy and only required keeping companions on missions to gather and craft. After determining what was selling, I able to focus on those items and the necessary mats. Factors for consideration were the availability of the mats, how quickly the items sold, and how much they could sell for. There was a ready market to sell crafted items from each of the 6 disciplines. I ended up starting with 6 characters, but eventually paired it down to the 2 that were making the most profitable items. Category 3. While in the game environment, most of the activity was limited to crafting, sending companions on missions, and working and researching on the GTN. Placing 7 companions on gathering missions for LV11 items costs about $47k each rotation. This is how I account for the negative number. There were also thousands of mats left over; however, not calculated in this. There are two other important factors that should be mentioned: Left over CM items and crafted items that were ready to sell. Below are estimates of the income, but the sales data supports these assigned values. For this I developed categories 5 and 6 as potential currency as follows: Category 4 - CM Potential. There were 17 items still in the account purchased at below estimated costs. After looking at market value, $528M is what I think I could reasonably receive from those items. 4 – CM Potential: $528M. Category 5 – Crafting Potential. This is a collection of crafted items that are still in the account ready to be sold at fair market value. This does not take into account the materials that were gathered. 5 – Crafting Potential: $577M. Adding up categories 1-5 the total figure is $1787.9M + $1105M = $2892.9M of currency made and potential currency. Limitations: 1 - This date was collected with a notebook and excel spreadsheet and not game logs so there are probably errors in the observations. 2 – Did not collect specifics on the income earned and spend during normal gameplay. The $70M deficit was a surprise. Conclusion: Crafting defiantly required the least amount of time and focus, but did not have the rewards. Had this experiment continued, the potential was there to have an even greater gap between the amounts made from crafting vs selling CM items. Overall, there is a lot of cash to be made from either, but like everything else in this game it comes down to what you want to put your time into. Key observation is the in game economy is too inflated and the GTN’s current $1 billion credit limit is too low. Couple recommendations to fix: 1 – Raise GTN purchases to $10 billion. 2 – Develop other ways to spend cash like selling more weapons, skins, mounts stronghold items, etc. The expanded interface makes it now possible to have multiple sets of armor and stats. This will probably create some further demand for spending, but not sure if it goes far enough. 3 – Ability to keep things on the GTN for 5 days. There are pros and cons to this, but I think it will eventually keep prices down for consumers. Final Thoughts for Players: If you have a mature account where you have been collecting stuff for years it might be time to have a garage sale. When I left there was a lot of concern of a shrinking player base. I think one way to keep folks around would be to have a more robust GTN with more items, increased selection, and at reduced prices. Same is true for crafting. The more people crafting, the more availability and lower prices for stat improvement items.

Change is bad.

I understand your point, but much of this will be left to the randomness of who you q with. Winning was kind of a mix between personal contribution and luck, but underpinned somewhat by a dedication to the grind. Now that that consolation prize is gone you can only sit back and hope that the Arsenal Merc with 217 gear is on the other team.

Before, pretty much in a single session I could get daily and some progress to weeklies no matter what. This evening I went 3L and 1W. The loosing teams I was with were hopeless. The team I was with that won was OP and would have won without me. Getting stuck with new folks with poor armor didn't really bother me with challenge and rewards system, but now it feels like a waste of time. Now the game is reduced to seeing what side of the premade I will be on. I really am struggling to see the point of PvPing right now -- feels like wasted evening.

Change is bad.

Change is bad.

Add legendary embers to granked and/or ranked rewards. Accessing the hardest and most competitive gameplay is all about augs since getting 306 gear has been reduced to Hammer Station runs and you need legendary embers to make the best augs. Even if you don't craft, legendary embers are worth a fortune for those who do on the GTN so still a viable reward.

I have never been concerned with not finishing HS at any level no matter who I was with. Depending on the group, finishing BH is not a foregone conclusion especially if your pugging with a lower level toon.

This was an attempt at humor by highlighting the high ratio of HS pops when random cueing. I find it to be silly.