I don't even know you, fool. Stop spamming the fleet like a gold seller. I'm gonna start reporting you for spam, because that's what it is - spam. The whole idea of those codes are to help out and encourage your actual friends to play. What you're doing is trying to profit from strangers and using general chat as a tool for your own RL gain. It makes you no better than the gold sellers who I have to take the time to report and ignore. Stop it. And by the way, stop spamming fleet with your stream info too. Why would I want to log out / tab out of the game so that I can watch you play? If you're really that entertaining or that talented of a player, I'll seek out your stream on my own. I got a link for you, son. http://www.swtor.com/legalnotices/rulesofconduct Peep out the part about how fools ain't allowed to, "...messages for any purpose other than personal communication, including without limitation advertising or promotional messaging, chain letters, pyramid schemes, or other commercial activities." And how fools caint be tryin to, "...sell, transfer or auction (or host or facilitate the ability to allow others to buy, sell or auction) , or offer to transfer, sell or auction, or buy or accept any offer to transfer, sell or auction, any game Account or game Content, including (without limitation) game characters, character attributes, items, objects, currency, credits or copyrighted material, or any other intellectual property owned or controlled by the Services, or its our licensors, without first obtaining our express written permission, nor may you encourage or induce any other player to participate in such prohibited transaction(s)." Gregory Peck on that Atticus Finch full clip cashin in them wolf tickets, son.

My little sister, who's name is also Kimi (long story), said she may be stopping by the cantina event while she's at Star Wars Celebration. She's a Bioware fangirl and has had a deep crush on William Wallace and also thinks Eric Musco is a demigod. She's excited to meet Eric but is also curious about Tait now. When I found this out, I had to sit her down for a big sister/little sister talk. This is what I told her. Me - "When you meet Tait, he'll smile and be polite, but you'll notice what the industry folks call 'The Thousand Yard Stare.'" Little Kimi - "What's that?" Me - "It's what a grunt gets when he's been on the forums for too long." LK - "The SW:TOR Forums aren't that bad." Me - "No, not that bad. But he's seen too much. And what's been seen..." LK - "...Can't be unseen, I know. Why are you being weird?" Me - "I just want you to be ready. Be polite and don't be surprised if he gets a little jumpy if someone gets a text and their iPhone is turned up way loud. Tait may even grab a BioWare executive and push them to the ground to shield them from the text with his own body." LK - "You're hurting my arm." Me - "This new guy, Nick. He won't have the stare yet, talk to him, because in time, all community team grunts get it. LK - "Daaaaaaaaad!!!" Me - "Thousand Yard Stare, Kimi. It's real. Now go have fun and I hope you meet your heroes. Take care when fighting trolls, lest you thereby become a troll yourself. And if you gaze for long into the forums, the forums also gaze into you. " LK - "Can I go now? Ninjago's on." Me - "Eric talks to his keyboard, Cowboy." LK - "I'm not a cowboy." Have fun at Celebration, little Kimi. You may come back a changed kid.

The Howling Tempest Gang!!

SW:TOR is on the precipice of being the first MMO in history to induce an artificial recession. It's complex in it's intricacies and while it's not so dissimilar from real life economics, a few things are different, some of which make things more simple while some make things far more complex. Basic Economics in Real Life We are all familiar with supply and demand. In fact, whether or not we understand it, we are a part of that facet of economics. Even if our resources are provided by our respective governments and our buying power is subsidized, we become consumers with the given resources. In real life our personal wealth is obtained from working a job, investments, tax loopholes and enterprise, among other ways. All currency is issued by our respective government's central bank or in some cases a regional treasury. The rate at which currency is issued and destroyed, the actual physical currency as well as the data representing that currency, directly effects the value of said currency as balanced against other economic factors such as, credit rating, confidence and supply and demand for goods and services. It's important to keep two things in mind throughout this post - There is no economic "free lunch." Resources generated = economic production. Basic Economics in SW:TOR We all start out with zero credits in this game. For this point to be taken in it's entire truth, you'll need to think of yourself, the player, as a single account, not a collection of characters on that account, ergo, your new character in game may have 10K credits in his mailbox shortly after creation, but it is likely your own money from an existing character from which that money came. Sure, someone may send us money on our first character, however we will exclude that for the time being and refer to that as "player-to-player subsidization" later on. With the previous point taken as a given, we can then contemplate where money actually comes from in our game world. Money in SW:TOR comes primarily from questing (looting money and items of value) and quest rewards (the items of value and the currency given upon quest completion). There are some nominal currency injections from cartel pack "credit boom" items which can't be overlooked. One can also gather crafting resources in world and convert them into currency by selling them to the game system or by crafting items and selling them to the game system. (Yes, we can sell to each other, but that comes later. For now just concentrate on actual currency injection via the game system). However, the major currency injection comes from the game system itself via questing and quest rewards. Currency is destroyed when we spend money on repairs, buy items from vendors and use travel services. Some of us even pay a form of a "tax" when we list items on the Galactic Trade Network. Keep in mind, when the currency is destroyed in such a way, it doesn't get reissued by the game system in a balanced way. In fact, there is no balancing protocols in place within the SW:TOR economic system. I.e, if everyone stopped questing and doing dailies, but however continued to travel, repair items and list items on the GTN, the rate at which currency was destroyed would far exceed the rate at which it was created. There would be no correcting action taken by the game system to facilitate a balance. Now For The Complex Bits SW:TOR has minimal money sinks. In fact, there hasn't been a new money sink (a way of extracting currency from the system and destroying it) for months. Here's the troubling part... SW:TOR is about to become the first MMO game in history to extract tens of billions of units of currency from it's game system overnight. No other game in MMO history has done this, not even games like WoW and Eve. Eve has a complex economy, however it's one that's actually managed a bit and has checks and balances. WoW's economy has declined, but it's been a slow, gradual and arguably a "naturally occurring" decline. Some may point to games like SW Galaxies as an example of an economy tanking hard. However, while that bust was indeed fast, it was still drawn out over time and for a time while the game was holding on at less than 100K subscribers, the economy stabilized. SW:TOR will however have what is tantamount to an economic crash. What's worse, this crash is actually 3 crashes which will occur 3 times over the course of a few months on 19 August, 16 September and 14 October. It will be a TKO to the economy unless we take steps ourselves to correct it. Why will the economy crash? Galactic Strongholds. Now, to be clear, my opinion if the impending game system is great. I love the idea, loved the experience and preview of it on PTS and I think the game needs these systems badly. However, our economy will suffer greatly for it. Overnight, tens of billions of credits will be destroyed as we pay for stronghold unlocks and guild ships. What Happens After The Crash? The day after 19 August, the wealthiest people in game will be down to their last 5-20 million credits. The middle class in game will be down to their last 1-5 million credits. And the average players, which tend to have at most, maybe 2 million credits, will be broke or near broke. Only a small percentage of players (those taking a break from the game and those who simply do not like spending money) will maintain their pre-stronghold level of wealth. And remember, there will be a lot of guilds who make obtaining a guild ship a priority and thus hitting the middle class very hard for their personal wealth. Remember, if just 5 guilds on each side on any given server purchase the basic guild ship, not counting unlocks later, it will extract :sy_auction:500,000,000 from the game. Lets give a low end estimate and assume that each server only has 1,000 players who purchase 1 million credits in stronghold unlocks. That will extract :sy_auction:1,000,000,000 from the game per server. So what happens? People will of course have less money. This money will, in most cases, be invested in personal luxury items like homes and guild ships. Guild ships will never pay for themselves under their current design. They are not investments, they are a tool. People with less money will now be looking for lower prices on items such as mounts, color crystals, R&R items and consumables, for example. Listing wars will ensue on the GTN. Cartel items from cartel packs will become cheaper and the rare items currently for sale will drop. However, those of you looking for a Crate-o-matic for cheap will still see them priced just out of reach for the average player. Still, prices will drop considerably. Except in one area - The price of guild ships and strongholds - and that is where the real problem presents itself. The crash will effect all of us such that our personal wealth will diminish as compared to current prices. However, it will indeed scale with the fluctuating, and certainly crashing market. You will absolutely see items which were listing for 100,000 credits fall to 30,000 credits and less if some people panic. 70% price fluctuations are normal, both in times of crash and boom. In fact, during a crisis such as imminent drastic weather such as a hurricane or earthquake, it's normal for prices to jump up 70% for basic necessities like food and water. However, a Porsche will always sell for it's MSRP, no matter if the weather is bad or good. The only time a Porsche will drop in price is when it's driven off the lot or if the demand drops considerably. The point is, things which are in inevitable demand, like life-sustaining goods, will fluctuate depending on crisis and boom as well as supply and demand. Luxury items tend to fluctuate in price based on supply and demand only. High priced items will only fall in price based on the confidence of the seller in the market conditions. One of those conditions is supply. With that in mind, understand that an ST-7 Walker will not become less rare from packs. However the purchase of packs may become less rare. Packs can only be purchased by cartel coins as a matter of market injection. They end up on the GTN only after cartel coins are spent. This brings me to the final points... How To Self-Correct The Crash BioWare doesn't seem to have a team of economists to consult with or else this problem would not be upon us. The problem we face is that the player based economy will suffer a crash while the game system economy remains stable. It's as if prices for guild ships and strongholds are based on current wealth and not the wealth of future players. After the crash, the 'Earn 10 Million Credits" achievement will actually be a feat for most people. To be clear, I'm not calling for prices of strongholds and guild ships to fall. That's another debate which I don't want to engage in. However, I do want to make some recommendations for us to take and use to stabilize the economy post crash. A lot of these recommendations focus on the middle class of :SW:TOR, or our "middle class" players. Like it or not, they make up the bulk of the economy so far as sustained transactions and more importantly resource generation. 1) Avoid Abuse of the Middle Class/Casual Players - I've seen guilds planning (and some already implementing the scheme) to charge individuals 1 million credits to join their guild so they can buy/recover the cost of their guild ship. Don't do this. Players will be seeking guilds with guild ships, it doesn't mean they can afford to pay for it, even a little part. The best approach is to make it a guild effort to work towards a guild ship naturally, not force taxes upon current and new guild members. Driving away the casual players with schemes like taxation for amenities will harm the economy. Casual players could tend to play less and production will suffer. Be good to casuals. 2) Accept Lower Prices or Accept Long Term Investment - First of all, don't panic. Understand that as your personal wealth diminishes, so to will the prices within the market fall. You will still be able to afford the basics and you can still save up for that flashy status mount or that cute armor set. But what if you have an item you are speculating on like a mount or armor or a color crystal which you've invested in by spending credits or cartel coins? The fact is that you will not be able to sell your Korrealis Baron mount for 50 million credits like you had planned. In fact, you may not even be able to sell it for 25 million credits post crash, at least not for a long, long time. "But I bought my crate-o-matic for 30 million credits. I'd like to sell it for at least 30 to make my money back. It's so rare!" Sorry to say, your investment was sound last quarter, but this quarter it's not such a good idea. You can wait until Q2 of next year and reintroduce your item at your pre-crash asking price and hope that the market is stronger, but for the time being you will need to accept the lower asking price which is more realistic. However, if you did sell your item for 15 million instead of 30 million, be aware that the prices on everything will have fallen and you can scale your wealth to the new market. 3) Maintain productivity - Do not lose confidence in the game itself such that you "take a break" in protest. If you compare your time spent away from the game in protest versus being in game and being active, your time is better spent remaining productive, questing, raiding and participating in Guild v Guild world events than it is in silent protest while you play Minecraft or Star Citizen. You won't be sticking it to TOR or BioWare, you will just be mismanaging your wealth and losing productivity. If you know there is a chance you will come back, then don't leave. Also, be supportive of the casual player so that they remain productive. The hardcore people may have more personal wealth and time to play, but the casual, middle class players, add up and can far exceed the productivity by volume of our hardcore players. Be a wise GM and Guild Officer, maintain your casual base. 4) Intermingle The Classes - Even the hardest of the hardcore guild should allow a corps of casual players within it's ranks. This will promote growth in the economy and stability as casual retention on our servers will not suffer as badly as they would should we make ourselves exclusive once guild ships are available. 5) Remember the basics - Remember that while wealth can be generated from the GTN, the injection of currency is manifested by the game system itself. Get out and quest. Level up some new characters, do dailies, gather resources using crew skills in world as opposed to send your crew on paid quests. Reliance on GTN wealth is perfectly fine, however do not ignore farming and questing as sources of income. Lastly, don't be afraid to engage in player-to-player subsidazation. Helping out your friends goes a long way to stabilize the economy such that we retain people within the economy and increase the chance for future productivity. It's not welfare, it's community. Nobody knows what will happen in the post-crash economy of SW:TOR, not even BioWare. It's not likely they will even acknowledge the issue. In fact, it's not likely that they have anyone qualified to acknowledge the issue in terms of pure economics. However, this event will be unprecedented and fascinating to live through. BioWare tends to have tunnel vision when it comes to some aspects of their game. If not, they wouldn't have a Rakghoul event going on during a real world, unprecedented Ebola outbreak. Maybe if it were in the US it would matter and thus cause mindfulness. The economics of their own game could have used review from a university economist. Things like arbitrage pricing theory, hot money (cartel coins to credits and credits to cartel coin artifacts) and consumer confidence would have been discussed and a possible market precognitive optimization scheme could have been implemented. It's too late for that now. Now, it's up to us. Thank you. - Kimi I'm Interested In Your Ideas Personally, just caring about the keeping the markets stable only, I would have liked an alternative method of obtaining guild ships like a massive quest line including tackling Ops content and so on. I would have also been happy with a cartel coin only method, however I like to buy cartel coins and I am in a "thriving minority" there. I also thought up an alternative currency for guild ships similar to tokens we already use as a stand alone method of obtaining guild ships. What do you think? Without resorting to bashing BioWare or getting into the tangent of RL politics, what would you have done to solve this issue, given that you acknowledged it in advance and saw it as an issue?

I vote that you stop spamming about this on the fleet. Enough already. So tired of seeing the OP spamming in fleet chat for people to come and support this thread. If people actually care enough about their class to read the forums, and of course their respective class forums, they will find this thread and make their opinion known either way. I understand the desire to affect change and make things "better" from one's perspective. However I think that spamming and basically advertising your thread in fleet chat constantly is annoying. I finally muted you. With that said, someone has to be really, really annoying or repetitive to get an ignore from me. I don't even put most of the credit spammers on ignore. You've made your opinion known and you've gotten your thread some attention. I think the work is now finished. Let it run it's course or simply, for the sake of people who don't care, stop spamming about your thread in fleet. If everyone promoted their threads in fleet chat we'd have nothing but people basically #ing their threads to get eyes on them. It's just bad form. Sorry.

Really constructive post, OP. Glad to see someone putting some thought into things before they post. Now, with that said, my first reaction to your thread was to kinda giggle to myself at the suggestion for us to be able to write ourselves an RP bio in our profile. The reason why I giggle is, as a former SWG player, it seemed like bios in SWG were pretty much a waste. Why is that? Well it seems that the bulk of them started like this... "Orphaned at a young age...." Yeah. They really did start like that. SWG was filled with orphans and people who didn't really have much artistic vision. If we get player bios, prepare for a genocide of fictitious parents in the Old Republic. Oh the virtual humanity.

Get on my level, bro.

I have 2 simple solutions to your problem. 1) Be productive in the Galaxy, jump in for the big win and....get a space job. 2) Go back to Alderaan.

I believe "swagga" is the state, station or condition of an individual being imbued with the overwhelming and conspicuous qualities of being rich in wealth, attraction/attention gathering of the opposite sex, being a high-quality example and also the outward appearance of overall superior status. Those experiencing the blessings of swagger often report having,"mad game" and "gettin all big budget up in here." I was told that "swagger" starts small. It can manifest in such ways as not having a key to start your car, but rather a push-to-start button. I believe that if a key start is used, "swagga" can only be made manifest if the key is a "switchblade key" such as can be found on the Mercedes E Class or the BMW M series. This is to say that a normal key start would indicate a "normal" vehicle. A "baller" starting device would thereby indicate a "baller" vehicle. There is a phenomenon where cars such as the Prius, which is in no way a "baller" vehicle, are said to have or exhibit, "tryin to be on point and [stuff]. This is do to the push-to-start of the Prius, which doesn't make up for it being a "low budge" vehicle." In TOR, a "baller" vehicle would be the Cartel Recreation Skiff. The "swagger" lends itself to the cost and rarity of the vehicle. A very "baller" vehicle would be a rare drop vehicle like the tank mount. This is a "baller" vehicle do to the inherent difficulty of obtaining the mount through combat and the association with such a team who could obtain this vehicle. A "trying to be on point" or "low budge" vehicle would be pretty much any vehicle purchased from a normal planetary or fleet vendor, with the exception of the collector's edition vendor or PvP vendors.

Update: Post expansion - "Swagga" intact.

But do you have swagger?

First, a poem. Hey hey, hey hey hey. Buy cartel coins erry day. I won't bore you with the minutia of the control groups and the test subjects, I'll get right to the findings. My experiment has found that cartel coins greatly increases one's swagger. This swagger can be augmented by the items contained within the Cartel Market. One test subject reported,"Fools know that I don't have to ask my mom to play this game, SON. I drop swagga bombs like a B-52. You know this." This is to say that by being a regular cartel coin purchaser, the station of being as such greatly augments social status and thus affords the purchaser the ability to live, as one test subject put it,"...all big budget, like a James Cameron movie, SONNNN." Cartel coin purchasers seem to realize that idle time, such as hanging around in the fleet, which is a significant portion of time spent in TOR, can be just as important as raiding or doing daily quests. One more successful player reported,"I'm spitting mad game at [female players] up in here, son. There ain't no weather effects on the fleet....until I make it RAIN, B. I got so many rocks on my holocommunicator that I can't see who callin me." On particularly high female population servers such as Prophecy of the Five, cartel swagger seems to be most profitable. One of the preferred methods seemed to be obtaining a recreation skiff and toggling the run/walk so that a "slow roll" could be achieved. Once embarked on this "slow roll" through the fleet, test subjects experienced greater swagger-to-hollah ratio with a notably positive outcome. "Yeah...it's like I can't even raid anymore. Shawties be all like,'oh daddy send me a XP boost' and 'daddy when you gonna drop the Malgus, I needs to train' yeah, dog. It's like totally changed my life. Even my lightsaba's iced out. Powerful cartel coins, son" I highly recommend buying cartel coins. It's not enough to simply be a subscriber anymore. If one wants to "spit mad game" and "buy wolf tickets" then cartel coins are a must.

I appreciate your points and your views, Trooper. I think one thing is clear to us all, no matter what angle we approach this conversation from - something needs to be done. Sooner rather than later, mind you. Thanks for posting.

I know. You're are absolutely right. And that's what makes me feel like I'm "holding fast" and not simply being patient. I think being patient would be the posture to take if I knew this stuff was on it's way , firing those golden bullets in rapid succession. However I just don't see that fire mission coming down. As it stands right now I feel like I'm holding fast until the game falls down around me. TOR will never "fail." But my friends will leave and I will become some kind of raid logger for raids that may or may not happen. Then that shiny new game comes along and I'm the moron for not playing it because "OMG IT'S SO FUN, KIMI." It's like that right now with Diablo 3. I don't even own it yet. But I ordered it this morning. That's how it starts. I appreciate your comment.

I stopped listening to (and never cared) what Gamebreaker has to say a long, long time ago. Everything they do is artificial and staged or dramatized. They manipulate their audience and do a lot of give/take pandering. They will do whatever it takes to get attention including, but not limited to, manipulating polls (ask Darth Hater about that one), pandering, fabricating facts and passing them off as "inside information" and even latching onto rumors for the sake of traction with the community. We all know TOR kinds sucks right now. I didn't need Gamebreaker to tell me that. But doomed to fail? On the off chance they are right, it will "validate them." When TOR doesn't fail they will just glaze over it and move on to their next proclamation. That's how it works.