I wouldn't say anybody is doing it wrong, because I've farmed my encrypted terminal at times when I've felt kind of lazy, but at the same time, it most definitely is not a million dollar item. Or at least, it would take you a lot of characters and a fair amount of time to recover your million. In my experience, the average gain on one of those lockboxes is in the area of 2k. Now consider that crafting material prices have been somewhat inflated by conquests, so there are a number of items that sell for about 2k, and you are guaranteed 2-4 of them on a single harvest. Obviously, it's more profitable to gather the crafting materials--especially considering that you probably only have to lay out about 80k to get the utility decoration you need for any given crafting material. Additionally, you might actually take the materials and craft them into something useful at an additional profit--you can't do that with a lockbox. With neither are you going to get filthy rich, however. It's just a nice little low-impact way to supplement your income. I think the cost of the encrypted terminals on the GTN is just a prestige thing and because they look cool. More than one is, to be sure, overkill, unless you really like it that much as a decoration. 30k with a single character is either grossly exaggerated or was an /extremely/ lucky event. Typically, I just get the one harvest on them. Only once had a lockbox drop something like 9k, and I would say that 95% of the time it's less than 3k per box. Often much less. I've gotten exactly one purple crew skill mission off of it in what I would guess is about 100 harvests.

Never mind. Guess they changed the quest. Puzzle is gone. Now you just get the parts off of a busted droid you find on your way to the big bad.

Apparently, there's meant to be some sort of puzzle in the middle of the Dark Temple that you can use to summon a chest that contains some armor for T7. I've looked at some videos from a few years ago, and people on Twitter assure me it's there, but no matter how hard I look, there is no such puzzle. I even went so far as to reset the instance, and it's still not there. I made a video of where I think it's supposed to be. http://youtu.be/_Ng_Po3xPT0 Does anybody know if this is just bugged, or have I somehow neglected to do something that activates this puzzle?

I bought that one, as well, but am not using it. In general, it's just really difficult to justify placing any large decoration, when you could place, like, 8 decorations there instead. There should definitely be some additional layout options for large items, as well as a wider range of movement on the sliders (that's in general and not simply applying to large items). Then again, my goal is to cram as much stuff as possible into as few rooms as possible in my stronghold, just because of the theme I'm using.

That was just a guess. I've only got 8 characters, and I've never timed it. But figured about 15 seconds for switching characters, 15 seconds to put down and later pick up the utility decoration you're harvesting, 15 seconds per harvest, and you typically get 1 harvest (I've never gotten more than 4, so that would be a full minute of harvesting in a very rare case). So if you're being completely efficient, and you're standing right next to your legacy storage, so you can put stuff in as you're harvesting, you can probably average about a minute per character. But I tossed a little extra time just to be more realistic. If I'm being honest, I don't know why it would take you an hour to cycle through 18 characters unless all of your characters are improbably lucky! [Edit: Did it this morning--took me 9 minutes to harvest on 8 characters. I think I got about 14 harvests (got really lucky on one character). So figure average of (being generous) 4 materials per harvest = 56 materials, sell for, let's say, 1000 each, you can make 56k in less than 10 minutes (with some good luck). So...that's not bad, to be sure. Comparable to plowing through CZ-198 with a well-geared level 55 character.] Yeah, maybe. Unless you really hate running dailies. I'm comparing it with running, say, CZ-198 and Black Hole, which would take me about 25-30 minutes and probably earn me about...well...100k once all junk and loot is sold and mission rewards are claimed. Probably slightly more profitable, and certainly less of a hassle than trying to sell on the GTN. Plus, I'm getting reputation in some cases, and commendations, which can be turned into credits if you want to. I agree that it's probably a better use of your time if you're just doing it for your own stockpile and what you're harvesting isn't something that has a lot of supply on the GTN (otherwise, you'd just run dailies and buy what you want and pocket the remaining credits, right?). E.g., I've used the color crystal utility decorations for this purpose. Much better than running the color crystal missions or buying on GTN, where supply and prices are super-erratic.

They definitely erred on the side of waaaay too conservative with these utility resources. It only starts to become a productive use of your time if you've got, say, 16 characters, at which point you can spend 20 minutes cycling through them to earn maybe...100k (average # harvests = 1.5, average harvest amount = 3, good sell price = 1500/unit). That's not bad. Not fun, though I suppose some would say it's at least as fun as running dailies, and probably slightly more profitable per time spent. But selling is a hassle owing to getting undercut, and a lot of the prices on the GTN are kind of fictional when you actually try to realize them as a seller. The truth is, the materials market could actually use more inflow. I know it would suck a little for people who make their income this way, but as it is, the inflow on some items is still too low, meaning that prices are wildly erratic from day to day, meaning that it's very difficult to work out proper profit margins on crafted items. These stronghold utility items could have been a good way to give a necessary boost to the supply-side (think EVE Online, where basic materials prices barely waver and the player economy is very strong and stable), but as they are, they're mostly just nice as decorations at the moment. My suggestion would be to decrease the debuff to about 2 hours (so you can use them twice in a casual player's gameplay window) and probably decrease the debuff chance, because right now, I can go through a roster of 8 characters and very commonly get exactly 8 harvests. It's pretty rare to get more than 1 harvest per character, actually. I was pretty generous above when I said it was 1.5 per character. Probably more like 1.25.

This is quite annoying, and extra annoying when you get the warzone invitation that sits right beneath it (and also can't be moved), and therefore can't be clicked. Pro-tip, however: Ctrl+U+U to reload your UI will clear the nameplate.

The thread title pretty much tells it all, but I will say that if there's no way to have them automatically trigger upon the initial load of the stronghold, at the very least, you could have them play continuously so long as there is at least one person inside the stronghold. It's very inconvenient to have to constantly be turning it back on every time a song ends. Edit: Quick addendum. Some songs cut off abruptly. On the Underworld Classics machine, anyway. Probably, because they're designed to be on a continuous loop. It still sounds weird. This is where they should transition to a different track.

Thanks--reading over the comments on tor-decorating, that was the sense I was beginning to get, as well. Guess I need to start running some hard mode flashpoints with bonus bosses.

Can't you just buy any crafting supply you'd ever need off the GTN for probably less than you can get them on the crafting material vendor? I'm not sure, honestly--I typically run the crew skill missions for crafting materials. Sometimes I end up with a surplus and sometimes I sell it on the GTN, and it usually seems there are a healthy number of other players looking to dump crafting supplies as well.

I'm right there with you on your rant. I started typing out a long explanation of why RNG for decorations is so obnoxious for players, but you've already explained it well. There should be an alternative procurement method if nothing else. Purchase through reputation, tokens, whatever. E.g., I want the Czerka Data Core (actually, about four of them)--if you told me I could either farm Core Meltdown for a random chance or alternatively, I could attain Legend standing with Czerka and spend 10 Universal MK-3s for each one, I'd actually just grind out reputation and prefabs rather than rely upon farming Core Meltdown. Because I know I'll have what I want if I invest the time. But making it a random drop from Core Meltdown, I could run the friggin' thing 40 times, maybe only see the decoration a handful of times, and lose the roll every single time. And that's lame.

I apologize, but your objection makes no sense to me.

+1 Here's what I do now to get to that terminal, assuming I'm in my stronghold. Hop to the fleet. (loading screen) Go down to the starship parking ring. (loading screen) Click priority transport terminal. That's two loading screens that are basically just completely wasting my time.

Oh, awesome. Thanks for looking into it! While you're at it, can you look into some of the items that are listed here: http://tor-decorating.com/commendations/#Warzone The crates, specifically, don't seem to be available anywhere. The generators I've actually seen in game, but they're not from warzone commendations, so maybe those simply got changed at the last minute. Edit: Actually, I take it back. Generators aren't in the game. I was thinking of the large hook power transformers.

I'm not sure why everybody is getting on the OP's case for this. Unless you were paying attention to all of the released information, reading Reddit, the PTS forums, etc., I don't really see how you would know that DK and Coruscant don't support the class starships. There's no big warning in game or anything like that when you buy it. Why would anybody "do research" when I think most players would reasonably assume that they would be able to park their starships there, since they already know the starships are available as decorations? This is very condescending and a terrible analogy.

Just have to put some nice plants on the blank sides. I'll agree, this did strike me as a little odd when I first saw it.

Why is that hard? It only has to do it one time when the stronghold loads. After the NPC is created, it doesn't have to do anything else with it. The stronghold would literally need to know nothing at all about those characters except for how they look. It doesn't need to know what classes they are. Doesn't need to know their skill trees. Doesn't need to know how much HP they have. Doesn't need to know what's in their inventories. All I'm talking about is a straight visual copy. That should be so simple. They do it on the character selection screen.

All these tables and nothing to eat...

The thing I don't understand is I can have up to 50 players in my stronghold, but I can't have 7 of my alts in there at any given time? It seems as though it would actually be less load on the server to clone my alts as NPCs.

I want to be clear that I am currently having a lot of fun decorating my free Nar Shaddaa rooms. I've been crafting up a storm, probably spent about a million credits on decorations from the GTN, and grinded out some Czerka rep just to get the stuff that required Friend standing. I like it a lot. But here's where I think the pain points are going to be moving forward: (Nobody will ever read this, but that's okay.) Everything good will be in the cartel market. Look, I'm used to not being able to have everything I want--Tulak Horde outfit, black dyes, Morlinger speeder, etc.--but ultimately, other perfectly good options exist. With strongholds, there are some ideas you simply cannot realize without the cartel market. Most egregiously, the decision to make every single cantina item (except stools, I think) cartel market restricted. This was either incredibly smart on BioWare's part, or incredibly dumb--I can't decide. Because I can pretty much guarantee you that 50%+ of players who are remotely interested in making a stronghold want to have a cantina, or at least a bar. Yeah, you'll capture some cash from some of those players, but for most of them, if it's a matter of dropping 500k on the GTN per item or paying real money, it just seems they're going to disengage from the content instead. It's defeating from the outset that BioWare decided to monetize this thing that is almost core to a lot of people's Star Wars love affair. By all means, put the "high class" version of those items on the cartel market, but the basic, hole-in-the-wall cantina stuff should have been attained by prefabs. Related, and despite talk of strongholds reinvigorating crafting, I'm just assuming here that what we have now from the prefab droids is pretty much all we're ever going to have. Not just everything good, but almost everything new moving forward will be a cartel market item. Just an educated guess based upon how crafting has generally been treated since the introduction of the cartel market. Not trying to be cynical--just realistic. This stinginess about NPCs has to change. They need to make them available from all areas of the game--social vendors, planetary vendors, reputation vendors, maybe even random world drops. And there should be a huge variety so that if we're decorating Nar Shaddaa, for example, we can actually have a clientele that looks as though it belongs on Nar Shaddaa. And they should do different things--not just stand there. A lot of the decorations available from reputation vendors requires stupidly high reputation (Champion, usually). Friend or Hero is pretty reasonable, even for a casual player. I wouldn't go higher than that, really. Decoration drops in flashpoints being random drops. Can't express how deflated I felt when I discovered this. Some of these decorations are decorations that I'd conceivably want quite a few of (e.g., Czerka data core). So if I want, say, four, how many times am I going to have to run Czerka Core Meltdown? It wouldn't be so bad if I didn't have to roll against four other players for it. You could probably make some of these things purchasable with tokens or reputation if you just have rotten, rotten luck. Companion holograms. Nobody seems to like this. I think the way they implemented it was just kind of dumb, but I think technologically, they've probably gone too far down the road in the wrong direction to turn around on that. Still, it's annoying people now, and it will annoy even more people when stronghold opens up to the free-to-play users. Me, personally? I'm not using companions in my stronghold at all because of this. Can't display our alts in our strongholds. Honestly, this should have been a launch feature. The fact that it wasn't kind of makes me assume it will never happen. I'll keep my fingers crossed, but if I'm sharing my stronghold with my legacy, then I'm making a stronghold that represents each of them in some way, and it would have been great to have them all there enjoying it at all times. We need a bit more wiggle room with the hook system. Generally speaking, it works pretty well, but it would work really well if they doubled the X/Y translation distances. It can be a real frustration trying to get stuff to align the way you want it to, and a lot of times, you've got to settle for "close enough", but I hate settling when they could probably fix this pretty easily. Honestly, there just aren't enough hooks sometimes for what you want to do. Like, there's this one side of my character's "office" where I know I could squeeze a chair or a droid or something, but I used a table there that required a medium square, even though it doesn't really have a bigger footprint than a lot of stuff that only requires medium narrow. The holographic tree could probably go on a small hook. Stuff like this could stand a bit of adjusting. I mean...it's not too bad. Some of these issues could be gotten around if they'd increase the X/Y translation on hooks so I could move things, say, further out from the middle of the room, which is where you usually get the most hooks.

This would be my number one most wanted feature for strongholds. If they could do one thing and one thing only, I would want them to do this. Displaying companions is all well and good (though I'm not doing it, because of pet limit and the fact they turn into holograms), but I spend the most time focusing on my player characters. I go through the trouble of designing them in the character creator. I spend countless hours picking out just the right armor pieces, right down to the bracers, sometimes dying different pieces individually in order to get a specific look. As a result of how the story and voice acting connect you with your characters, I'm more proud of them than I am of anything else I've accomplished in game.

You can also get it from boxes sold by the PvP items vendor, but it's total trash. I did it once just to see what it was all about, and I think it was something like 600 warzone commendations for a box that gave me exactly 3 pieces of the green Jawa scrap, which could probably be converted into a value of about 2000 credits. Worst value ever. No exaggeration.

I haven't been quite so frustrated, maybe because I've been working in Nar Shaddaa and the hook options are a little better. I've occasionally been a little miffed about this or that, but in truth, I've been largely able to work around it to create some really nice (and cluttered-looking) layouts that don't look like they owe anything to some pre-defined floor plan. Which is nice. But with that said, I totally agree that they could stand to increase X/Y slider range. It is very frustrating when you're that close to squeezing something in without clipping into its neighbor object--like, you could do it if the slider when to 11. Or when you want to, say, center something, but you can't quite get it there. More wiggle room, please!

Oh, nice. I'll check it out when I get home tonight. Thanks!

Yeah, I don't think Dufly or tor-decorations mention, however, whether it's the boss that drops them or a bonus boss. Guess I'll have to do a little bit of research.