No that puts them into your currencies tab so you can use them. We're nearing the end of the season so I imagine most people are close to the end of the track (100 levels). How far are you?

You get 15 over the course of the season, and a couple more for random 4-day login rewards. I'm almost at the end of the track doing very little other than the conquest point objectives. Have you been spending them on other things?

So I'm of the opinion that the trade fees were largely unnecessary, and raising the GTN limit was the most important thing they could have done. Having said that, I'll offer a compromise solution since many seem to be in favor of these trade fees: 1) Keep all of the current fees on credit transactions (including gifts, sadly) 2) Shorten the list of items that incur a fee to only ones that could realistically be used as an alternate currency. Packs, crates, OEM/RPM, (maybe others, lmk) This change I think would maintain almost all of the benefits of the trade fees but frustrate way fewer players. I'll list some benefits: A) All credit transactions are still taxed. If that's our goal then we have to include gifts as well otherwise we introduce a very obvious loophole. I don't think taxing gifted credits is a disaster since you can just give a little less and still be out the same credits. B) No more fees on giving away random items C) No more brutal double tax that exists currently for most off-GTN transactions. D) It allows straight up barter trades for no fees, but I think that's fine. I don't see that type of trade replacing transactions involving credits or alternate-currency type items. E) Preferred players can at least barter with something. I have no idea how they participate in the economy right now. F) Since the alternate-currency type items still have fees, people will still have need for credits. This was the biggest risk of the original trade fees, and one I think the devs way over-solved by taxing a giant list of things. LMK if this seems like it would be a reasonable compromise, or if I missed some important consequence of this change.

Not an expert so I'll just go with what I know from the movies. We generally only see lightning used by powerful dark-side users. One exception is when Rey uses it on accident. Something I'm not so sure about is why. It seems to be very painful when Palpatine uses it on Luke, so it's inherent cruelty could be one reason. The fact that Rey uses it on accident makes me wonder if it's difficult to control safely, which could be another reason. I haven't finished the knight story, but generally it seems to have the knight focusing on thwarting very dangerous and evil plans of the empire. Rationalizing the history of force lightning with that story is a matter of imagination in my mind. For a mostly LS knight, maybe it's a lightning technique that is more controllable and less cruel (it just has to be no more cruel than bashing with giant rocks or slicing up with a saber to be lore-friendly). For a more DS knight, maybe they know it's cruel, but justify it's use against evil as a powerful deterrent.

I was skeptical too, but char_ell's post in the link below made me think that less access to credit sellers was the biggest cause of the deflation we've been seeing for three last few months. https://forums.swtor.com/topic/929354-just-so-you-wont-say-it-wasnt-predictable/?do=findComment&comment=9757724 The dates he shows where credit seller prices started going up coincide with when I saw the prices in the market going down. Even if you don't think bioware banned sellers, something happened. It's extremely hard for me to believe the tiny QT costs and repair fees had any significant impact on the economy compared to credit seller prices quadrupling. 7.3 seems to be lowering prices on the GTN in some areas at least. Packs for sure, and I've heard OEM/RPM as well, though I don't really follow those. Those make sense since I think those were traded heavily in trade chat before, so now prices are lower due to competition.

I agree that the quick travel fees and adjusted repair fees probably did not significantly contribute to the much lower item values we've seen in the past few months. I think that was mostly due to the banning of credit sellers. However, I have noticed specifically cartel pack prices going down by like 20% since 7.3. This makes sense, since packs were one of the few things worth sub-1b that were traded heavily in trade chat. I imagine many that would sell crates are breaking them open to sell in the GTN as well to avoid the brutal trade fees on traded items. Is that worth nearly shutting down trade chat and taxing gifts? I say no, but some may disagree.

They do apply the fees to credit transfers. The reason they didn't only do that was if they only tax credits, then people may just barter to avoid taxes instead. That to me though, is a reason not to do trade fees at all. I agree with everything else you said.

8m would be the tax on a 100m sale in the GTN. That's less than the price of a single cartel pack. I wouldn't say they're doing nothing. Well the quick travel taxes are doing practically nothing given the size of the economy. It's hard to say how much impact the trade taxes will have. If people are willing to eat the fees it will get rid of credits pretty quickly. I'm worried it will heavily stifle trade though considering how punishing it is. That will lessen it's effectiveness considerably.

I think it's fair to say that the initial economy post was pretty misleading about this. As others have said, the initial dev economy post says that items would be subject to "the same fee" as everything else. That's pretty unambiguously referring to the 8% GTN fee. What they clarified later is that the 8% fee would be applied to whatever value bioware assigned to the item. In GeneralGyro's original post, the assigned value was apparently like 5x the actual value of the item. Given that disparity, it's tough to call that "the same fee" with a straight face. It's not like dark projects are some super rare item that's tough to put a price on. There are pages of them on the GTN of them at all times. I bought some around the price that Gyro was selling them for a week or so before the patch.

Why are you acting like taking actions against credit sellers is an unreasonable thing for them to do? They did it, and it had a very positive effect on the economy. It's my understanding it had been a while since they did so, but it still had a huge impact when they did. That's means they don't even have to do it all the time for it to be effective. I'm just a few months after they took action against credit sellers, prices of most items I monitor were down like 60%. Many items fell much further than that. How long do you expect it to take for all these draconian fees to have that much of an impact?

I see this repeated as fact all over the place but it differs very greatly from my in game experience. I've been playing since October, and I'm confident I've removed far more credits from the game via GTN taxes than I could ever generate from in-game rewards. It's my understanding that some credit rewards used to be too much but have since been toned down. Conquest rewards and certain vendorable items I think.

I don't even know that you'd need to make them cost credits. If we got a long-overdue crafting update, the materials and crafted items would be all over the GTN, getting taxed and taking credits out of the economy that way.

Even if old unused characters have their names freed up, trying to create single word character names with just the alphabet is going to be a struggle. I think the "Firstname Lastname" construction should be the suggested way to name characters. If you try a single word character name that's taken, I feel the game should suggest using 2 words. It's a simple way to construct a very likely unique name without having to resort to symbols and alt codes. It's even lore-reasonable for surnames to be distinct from legacy names. Leia is a Skywalker even though her last name is Organa.

Yeah they really need to raise the GTN cap. I imagine any item worth over the GTN cap use going to get hit with the item fees. It will really stifle trade for those types of items, probably pushing the price up. For items under the cap I can't imagine why anyone would do off-GTN trading after the progressive fees get implemented. Both sides of the trades get fees at the highest fee rate.

Did they change that? The first post says otherwise The trade taxes will be even worse though so I'm pretty sure people will mostly use the GTN if possible

Yes, sorry if I didn't make that clear. I'm against all the new trade fees. The issue I have with them is that they attempt to push fees on people who are specifically trying to avoid them. There is pretty much no way to do that without a ton of collateral damage. If the GTN limit were raised the majority of the transactions would be on there anyway, so we wouldn't get enough benefit out of trade fees to offset the negatives.

When hypercrates were 12b not that long ago, it's my understanding that people did these types of trust trades all the time. The issue with allowing tax-free gifting is that you make that the objectively best option to trade items. Remember that both sides of the transaction are getting fees with the proposed changes. Both parties would have incentive to do the gift trade. I'm still of the opinion that if the GTN limit were raised, the vast majority of transactions would be on there with or without all these draconian fees.

I mean the proposed changes will almost certainly stop bartering. Even if you could get the community to agree to an alternate currency that doesn't have a fee associated with it, pretty much any item you'd trade for will still have a fee associated to it. The issue is the proposed changes are so heavy-handed that people probably won't be doing very much trading at all.

OEM/RPM would be the most likely alternate currency after packs. Maybe even before packs

Well since this change is coming before the GTN limit increase, they don't really have a choice if the items are worth over 1b. The proposed changes charge a fee to both sides of the transaction. I don't do any off-GTN trading but if I did I'd be pretty irritated.

When I said they were inconsequential, I meant from an economic standpoint. I don't monitor off-GTN items so I guess I can't say one way or the other conclusively. I see character renames on the GTN consistently now, I think they were like 2b when I started in October. There are several items that would sell instantly at 1b that are selling for like 300m now. I figured a bunch of the previously 1.5b-3b stuff would have fallen to GTN levels by now. Thanks for the insight. I figured credit sellers stock was from banking credits from previous versions of the game with better credit generating, and saving credits from exploits.

You can't be serious. Prices on items are like 1/3 of what they were a few months ago. I'm pretty sure I've seen you, yourself posting math on how the new credits sinks are completely inconsequential compared to the size of the economy. There's no way they're responsible for what I'm seeing in the market. Regardless of whether they cause inflation or not, banning them seems to have had a massively positive effect on the credit economy. Far more than I would expect any of the proposed economy initiatives to have over the same time period.

I'm not sure what you're saying here. Credit seller prices went up. Prices on the GTN decreased drastically along a similar timeline. You're saying these facts are unrelated? That credit sellers don't affect the credit economy? Something caused prices to drop drastically in the past few months. We should all heavily encourage whatever that thing was. Bioware banning credit sellers is the only thing I've heard of that makes sense. If anyone has any other theories I'd love to hear them.

Your chart corresponds with the price drops I've seen pretty well. Definitely the best theory I've heard for what's happening currently in the credit economy. The prices on most of the things I monitor are like 1/3 of what they were a few months ago. If that's the effect of banning credit sellers regularly, then bioware should just do that and scrap all these fees against legitimate players.

From my phone I can select text and am given a 'quote selection' option. Not sure if that's there in PC but I'd guess it would be. Regarding Swotorista's post, she summed up the issues pretty well I think.