You're assuming that by doing this alteration to the system, it'll become easier. It won't. Currently, there's an average value, a number of attempts required to get a purple. Let's say it's 15. There's also a range of values which are considered the most common, least unusual number of attempts--let's say, 10-20 (centered on the average of 15). All they would have to do in a system like this is make sure that the number of times you have to reverse engineer to get a recipe is, on average, 15, most commonly between 10-20, with outliers going out from 1 to 30. The result wouldn't be ANY different for the VAST majority of people. Almost nobody would notice the change because, again, this wouldn't actually increase or decrease the difficulty. All it would mean is that people couldn't get struck down by the luck gods--or at least, they couldn't get struck down any more than "30". Since this system wouldn't actually alter the averages or the standard deviations, I don't see how it could possibly encourage single people or small guilds or whatever to grind out items more. Nor do I see how it would flood the market with items--because again, it wouldn't be any more expensive or difficult than it currently is for 99% of the public. It would only make it easier for that 1% who are WAYYYY statistical outliers.

So I just spent the last 12 hours doing only two tasks: first, getting money through missions and PVP, and second, spending ALL of that money on materials for grinding recipes, so I can fully equip my level 50 character with purple gear. The only problem? Well, so far I've spent (rough estimate) 300,000-400,000 in credits (including the money I already have on hand) building blue items, and reverse engineering them. Or rather, I should say, building one type of blue item, and reverse engineering it alone. I have yet to get any purple recipes. Okay, that's just sad. I've been crafting a while in this system, I have all sorts of purple recipes, and I know that spending 12 hours focusing on a single recipe and not getting it is over-the-top unlucky. So, I've been thinking: the reverse engineering system really has a flaw in it, that it allows these terribly bad situations to happen. Why not alter the system? Instead of have a small drop rate on upgraded schematics per reverse engineer, why not have it so that the game randomly assigns a number, like between 1 and 20, of items that you MUST reverse engineer before the game will give you the upgraded recipe. It will still be random! After all, some people will get it on the first time, most people will have to spend thousands of credits getting the upgraded recipe. But, there will never again be statistical outliers like me, who have spent basically more money researching a _SINGLE_ recipe than I've spent crafting on all of my max-skill crafting characters _COMBINED_. It's ridiculous to think of how much money I've spent doing this, how long I've been trying to do this. I think it needs to get changed, the system needs to be less random... don't remove ALL the random, just, alter the system to be a reverse-engineer countdown until recipe drop, so that random outliers like me no longer exist. Eh? Anyone agree? Disagree?