Slicing Profitability & You!

[unclekaula]

Bioware sure knows how to piss people off, they nerfed yesterdays buff to slicing with todays patch already.

Seriously Bioware what the ****...

 

Yep its nerfed again, just did Pointing Fingers after patch 1.1a and it only returned 1929

[Malotesta]

Yeah. Seriously, they need to stop toying with it, especially without even saying anything in patchnotes.

[DarthTHC]

problem? higher level daily earns TONS of money... and I have seen people shouting to sell good gear over 300k (this is 2 weeks AFTER the slicing nerf)... how is making a little bit of money every 40 min become a problem?

 

The real problem is: those who wants to enjoy the game slowly and not rushing to 50 suddenly found out they do not have enough money to even TRAIN SKILLS.... like riding 3 cost 330K... that is the problem.

 

I play a game to have fun, not to grind and hope to collect enough cash to train skills.

 

what happen to the fun element?

 

Work hard in RL just to survive in this bad economy already, I do not want to feel poor in a game also.

 

Luna

 

 

You might be doing it wrong.

 

I empathize with not wanting to work hard in a game to get the cash you need to play the game. It's been a mantra of mine since I started playing MMOs over 10 years ago. I absolutely loathe any game that forces me to work/grind just to play it.

 

But SWTOR isn't like that. I have yet to do anything "grind-like" for currency (or any other reason). I can afford everything I need (note that word - need) to do.

 

I don't feel wealthy. I can't splurge. Sometimes paying for stuff like training costs more than I'd like it to. But I've never even come close to broke.

 

I live this way by following a couple simple rules:

 

• Don't buy gear while leveling. The game should (and this one does) take care of your gear needs while leveling. You'll get gear and pet gear from missions, world tokens, flash points, even PvP if you do that. There's no need to burn currency on gear.
  
• Don't buy raw mats for crafting. If you intend to craft while you level, take the gathering skill that compliments your crafting skill. Gather while you adventure. You'll have plenty to keep your crafting skill on par with your level.
  

 

If you want to take it a bit further, you can do a bit more to make yourself more financially secure while leveling:

 

• If you don't use a skill frequently, don't pay to train to upgrade it.
  
• Take gathering professions (including Slicing) and gather while you adventure. Sell the results on GTN, undercutting by just a little bit. Current good choices seem to be Bioanalysis and Scavenging, but that may be just my server.
  
• Figure out which items have a low default sale value but sell for a ton of credits. Whenever you're at a GTN terminal, look for those, buy them, and re-post them. People are lazy and uneducated. They'll post valuable stuff for default value all the time.
  

 

Doing all these things requires a minimum of effort. Hopefully they won't feel like "grinding" to you, but they'll make you feel like you can comfortably spend the credits the game forces you to.

[IamthegreatM]

So, now that Slicing is back to the effect of picking up loose change versus fifties and hundreds, what were those most profitable missions again?

[Manathayria]

The slicing is the balance to the economy really, I think it should be UN-nerfed because people with slicing still have to BUY things off the GTN therefore giving the money to other players which helps them be able to afford things like the rediculous 40k credit speeder training at level 25! I mean you either want us to utilize crafting, or you want us to be able to use the speeder we got with our deluxe/collector editions it can't be both ways bioware atleast not without a lot of head scratching and over leveling in each area. I do every mission and I still have to pull money from other characters to afford that first Speeder training. I know the space missions help but un-nerf Slicing so we can atleast be able to afford things or reduce the training cost of some things like speeder training!

 

That's the thing... I was able to do the math with slicing.

 

How much of x mat would I get off y mission for a material. If your mats were within 50-60 cr of what it said, generally, I bought it. Which was a pretty fair market value since it kept me from sinking back into missions which are chance for mats (which is what I do now) and kept me giving other players money.

 

They apparently re-nerfed it though so I'm back to missions over GTN unless someone posts something that's too good to pass up.

[unclekaula]

Taking Back Control - Black Market Medium Credit Case (green) Item Roll Level 48 Class 5

3111 Credits

 

Thats about a grand higher than the pre 1.1 patch days average... maybe they didnt nerf it quite as bad as before?

 

edit going to do a couple more, I cant tell yet

Edited January 19, 2012 by unclekaula

[DarthTHC]

Bioware sure knows how to piss people off, they nerfed yesterdays buff to slicing with todays patch already.

Seriously Bioware what the ****...

 

The answer is simple. The buff with the initial patch was an error. They did a build (the Rakghoul patch) that failed to include the slicing adjustment. When they discovered this and learned they needed to re-patch, they re-applied the slicing adjustments.

 

They're not farking around. They're farking up. Classic symptom of an immature development shop. Surprising for Bioware, really, but I'm sure they'll adjust quickly and stop making these types of mistakes soon.

[Anticasper]

The answer is simple. The buff with the initial patch was an error. They did a build (the Rakghoul patch) that failed to include the slicing adjustment. When they discovered this and learned they needed to re-patch, they re-applied the slicing adjustments.

 

They're not farking around. They're farking up. Classic symptom of an immature development shop. Surprising for Bioware, really, but I'm sure they'll adjust quickly and stop making these types of mistakes soon.

 

Luckily they nerfed it again just in time for me to not subscribe for another month.

Would have felt really had, when they would have renerfed slicing just after I would have subbed.

Thanks Bioware!

[DarthTHC]

Luckily they nerfed it again just in time for me to not subscribe for another month.

Would have felt really had, when they would have renerfed slicing just after I would have subbed.

Thanks Bioware!

 

If your only complaint is that missions within a gathering skill return less profit than you'd like, and you're unsubscribing because of that, well, that's sort of silly. Unbelievable, really.

 

What else do you dislike about the game?

[lunagirl]

ok guys I will ask one more time...

 

What are those missions that still make profit (slightly)?

 

Level, description please.... rich? bountiful, what level. cost.... please help... thanks.

[unclekaula]

ok guys I will ask one more time...

 

What are those missions that still make profit (slightly)?

 

Level, description please.... rich? bountiful, what level. cost.... please help... thanks.

 

Theres a list of them and what level/cost/yield on the Pre 1.1 sheet

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0ArCSGLnwZLADdGxYdlhEejBFclBjR3l1N29OaW1kYUE&gid=15

[lunagirl]

I have read the sheet and I have been doing abundant level 6 and bountiful level 4 and the return is pretty bad.

 

Am I doing something wrong?

 

for level 5 rich, i often get back less money than i put in.

 

That is why I ask for help. I have studied the spreadsheet in details as well.

 

Please help.

[Anticasper]

If your only complaint is that missions within a gathering skill return less profit than you'd like, and you're unsubscribing because of that, well, that's sort of silly. Unbelievable, really.

 

What else do you dislike about the game?

 

It is about managing expectations and the feelings of their customers.

Slicing was meant to be the skill that makes people have to grind less for money or work as other people call it.

Grinding or working in a game is simply bad design in my opinion as it is meant to be entertainment and not work.

When the game was released I was happily slicing away and having fun with the game I felt rich I could buy the stuff I needed and concentrate on the story telling.

Then the slice nerf hit, it hit me pretty hard to be honest, I felt poor as a result of it.

I was still enjoying the storytelling, but feeling poor all the time kept nagging at me and I felt pretty annoyed at Bioware for them taking away my feel like a banker print virtual money machine.

The game started to slog after lvl 30 the grinding for xp started to become pretty slow but I felt I had to reach at least lvl 50 with one of my characters so I kept at it.

With patch 1.1 I was quite happy to see they fixed slicing to be viable again that certainly made me reconsider subscribing for another month.

And today I feel like they double shafted me.

Plenty of reason in my view to say goodbye to a bunch of devs who obviously have a hard time keeping a concept they themselves introduced alive and obviously are unable to keep me as a paying customer.

I am sure many will not agree with me but then why should I care.

[DarthTHC]

I have read the sheet and I have been doing abundant level 6 and bountiful level 4 and the return is pretty bad.

 

Am I doing something wrong?

 

for level 5 rich, i often get back less money than i put in.

 

That is why I ask for help. I have studied the spreadsheet in details as well.

 

Please help.

 

Only expect long-term profit from green and gray missions. I've seen that yellows can fail and oranges do way too often.

 

What pets are you using? What is their affection? This seems to affect my slicing mission returns. Bribe that affection up!

[pdxmarcos]

I have read the sheet and I have been doing abundant level 6 and bountiful level 4 and the return is pretty bad. Am I doing something wrong? for level 5 rich, i often get back less money than i put in. That is why I ask for help. I have studied the spreadsheet in details as well. Please help.

 

There isn't enough data to be statistically relevant yet and there may have been some nerfs in 1.1a. Just keep running 'The Automated Saboteur' and 'Be careful what you read' for now and in the long run you will generate more credits than you receive.

[pdxmarcos]

Only expect long-term profit from green and gray missions. I've seen that yellows can fail and oranges do way too often.

What pets are you using? What is their affection? This seems to affect my slicing mission returns. Bribe that affection up!

 

This is completely incorrect.

[DarthTHC]

This is completely incorrect.

 

You hit Submit Reply before you finished your thought. Please do share... can yellow and orange missions NOT fail somehow? In all the research I've done, the best profit-per-mission comes from those which don't fail. And yellow and orange ones do fail.

[Anticasper]

I have read the sheet and I have been doing abundant level 6 and bountiful level 4 and the return is pretty bad.

 

Am I doing something wrong?

 

for level 5 rich, i often get back less money than i put in.

 

That is why I ask for help. I have studied the spreadsheet in details as well.

 

Please help.

 

You are not doing something wrong, the only way you could possibly make some credits now with slicing is by gathering slicing nodes and hope on a underworld trading or treasure hunting 340 mission which you can sell on the GTN.

You are possibly confused by all the happy chatter after the release of patch 1.1 which made slicing viable again but unfortunately slicing has been murdered again with today's patch fix so there are no profits to be made with the slicing missions.

[Manathayria]

You hit Submit Reply before you finished your thought. Please do share... can yellow and orange missions NOT fail somehow? In all the research I've done, the best profit-per-mission comes from those which don't fail. And yellow and orange ones do fail.

 

The reason he says this is incorrect is, if I remember correctly because affection does not help with mission failure.

 

Affection helps with the time it takes for the missions to complete.

[Antipiety]

Before this patch slicing missions were still plenty profitable at 400 you could make about 5-10k credits an hour with 2 companions at lvl 15ish. I know I have 6 i run and make about 50-100k credits a day off them for about 3 mins of logging in/log out every 40mins.

 

Will have to see if there is any change with todays patch. Oh and that was not counting selling schematics and missions i just hoard those in my inventory atm for later but i have like 150 missions in cargo hold atm across those 6 characters and probably around 40 schematics.

[pdxmarcos]

The statement was "Only expect long-term profit from green and gray missions. I've seen that yellows can fail and oranges do way too often." It is correct that mission failures lose money, obviously. This is a myopic view of the data that has been presented through our collection.

 

The information presented here is not a leveling guide for slicing. The purpose of this data collection is to find the missions that offer the highest return on time and credit investment at 400 slicing when there are no more "yellow or orange" missions and you are left with only grey and green missions to select from.

 

The color coding on the spreadsheet should not be taken as the color they appear on your mission window as I discussed in a previous post.

[Nahela]

Oh good, trashed again.

 

Glad I read this before picking up Slicing again.

[Selenajra]

The data I've been getting since the servers came up this morning suggests that they made changes. pdxmarcos, could you please cycle the active sheet so your data-collectors aren't mixing current data with yesterday's data?

 

(in an aside, while I don't have a statistically relevant sample size the numbers yesterday looked to me like they may have accidentally hooked green lockboxes up to the same payout as blue lockboxes. With the same caveat it looks like today while lockboxes have been tuned downwards, blues lockboxes have been left relatively untouched, and green lockboxes have been tuned to somewhere in-between)

[scootle]

cool thread. i was wondering if someone was collecting detailed data on slicing returns, and of course, the internet never lets us down.

 

just one thing i noticed... at 400 slicing, i've never seen the non-green mission "The Azure Databanks"... was it removed?

[NostalGeek]

I'm not sure how people are not making profit off slicing...

I don't think I'm doing anything special and I certainly haven't overthought it yet I make a pretty steady return.

 

Sure sometimes I might get a mission or two that return say 200c less than it cost but it's not that often and I get several green cases, missions....

That's not even counting world gathers.