Slicing post-nerf, please look at the numbers BW

[zepfya]

Yep cant wait till all the gold spam, good job everyone.

[Pansophist]

Again, just reinforcing what has been said...this was a bad move.

[xGBox]

Slicing is a way to achieve extra credits without the essential need of a GTN as a middleman. This is one of the KEY things you need to take home, gentlemen. If you don't want to deal with the GTN, this is the way to go.

 

However, never look at your companions as a sole method of profit. This is the problem BW has rectified; People were essentially touching themselves while their companions made them in excess of 10,000 credits an hour. Companions are there to level up your skill when the environment you're in isn't feasible enough to do so on its own. Like every other gathering skill (which is what slicing is), you need to go out and find them and level up the conventional way.

 

The only people who complain that slicing is nerfed is because these new MMO kids think they are entitled to every single slot, ability, and vehicle the instant it becomes available to them. You people are very mistaken.

 

However, the net loss ratio when at level 50 needs to be reduced. You need to almost always make a small net profit to keep up with other crew skills, where their profits soar as well and where they see the most potential with their crew skills. Nowhere near as high, because remember that this crew requires less use of a GTN, and their profits should be reflected as such.

[acheros]

I thought i posted this, but it didn't seem to go through - my log thing was messing up when i tried so, that might be why.

 

Slicing was clearly meant as a money maker. and now there is no point in it.

 

Was it OP? Yes, alittle bit. But people are just afraid of big numbers. However, slicers really got nothing out of their skill BUT money. I dropped it because of this nerf, now its just another money sink. I'll pick it up if its fixed, untill then i only have two skills..

 

With EVERY other skill, you have something to show for it. You can make an item and sell it for anywhere from twice, to quadruple what you invested in. its only a loss if YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING.

 

But even the other gathering skills, you had something to show for it, that was used in your other skills. If i send my companions on five hours of slicing, now what do i have to show for it? A loss of credits, some if im lucky some missions for things i can't even use and no one buys.

 

So, crafters, when you wonder why no ones buying your stuff in the future, you have no one to blame but yourselves. Because now, thanks to your crying, instead of just picking up slicing and making money. You ruined it for everyone else.

 

So now theres less money in the game, which means less people willing to buy your ****.

[Eliseoscuro]

What a failure from the "balancing" team, just credit yield nerf, not even tried to redesign it or anything.

 

Random fail augments= fail

Mission Discovery? = fail, 1/99999999999 chance, and why would you pay credits to lose credits doing a mission where you might not get anything you want.

Lockboxes?= lose credits....

Schematics?=1/99999999999

 

Before it was something you could do if your not interested in crafting, now its useless, IT IS NOT ON PAR WITH OTHER CREW SKILLS.

 

NICE LAZY DEVELOPMENT.

 

For me its strike one from Bioware, I just hope its not the start... Ive seen a lot of fail nerfs in lots of dead mmmos, in fact fail nerfs where the start of a lots of failures.

 

TLDR: Im not happy and Im frustrated.

[Fellfromgrace]

Yup, people can make fun all they want and say it won't lead to spamming but it will.

 

If you were to poll people in WoW why most of them purchased gold a great majority would say it was to buy their mounts and the skills to use them.

 

Star Wars was genius b/c you could slice to pay for these things. There was absolutely no reason for anyone who wanted to cut corners to purchase credits with cash. Therefore there wasn't any spam.

 

I guarantee by the end of the week all planets will be spammed now.

 

In short I get more annoyed by all the damn spam then I do about the economy. Throw in the fact that there will be no looking for group tool and now your entire chat box will be.

 

LF healer

LF tank

BUY CREDITS ONLY 2.99 AT RANDOM CHINESE SITE

LF Healer

Chuck Norris this

Chuck Norris that

BUY CREDITS SUSY LOVES YOUY AMERICA

BUY half off 20% free OF CHARGE

 

Thanks QQ'ers

[VioletZero]

Okay, here's a solution that will benefit everyone:

 

Double the yield you get from lockboxes, but triple the cost of mission skills

 

So that people actually get up and go hunting for lockboxes.

[Bad-Mojo]

So basically, because slicers had no problems to buy the speeder + skill @lvl 25 and some non-slicers had, this crewskill had to be nerfed 1 week after release?

 

I see...

 

At 25 I was Synthweaving/Underworld/Archeology and I had 59,000 credits, enough to buy a speeder +skill.

 

A more accurate statement would be:

 

So basically, because slicers had no problems to buy the speeder + skill @lvl 25 and some non-slicers had poor credit management common sense, this crewskill had to be nerfed 1 week after release?

 

And apparently the answer is yes, nerf to oil the squeak.

 

That said, splicing was probably too good, but there were other ways to fix it. Remove the "abundant/rich/etc" tags for one and the income will drop as folks do random missions. I never looked at the yield (I switched to slicing at 25) and made @ 100,000 by level 31 - a far cry from those that only went with the "best" missions and their hugely inflated incomes, which is reasonable. The skill itself wasn't the money maker, it was being able to cherry pick the better missions.

Edited December 28, 2011 by Bad-Mojo

[Syas]

Are you serious? You can sit in town, feed money to an alt, and have them do the exact same ****. Make a UWT alt and its the EXACT.SAME.****.

 

Except UWT is not self-sufficient. You require that money you "fed" to the alt.

[zepfya]

Okay, here's a solution that will benefit everyone:

 

Double the yield you get from lockboxes, but triple the cost of mission skills

 

So that people actually get up and go hunting for lockboxes.

 

Sounds fair to me.

[VioletZero]

At 25 I was Synthweaving/Underworld/Archeology and I had 59,000 credits, enough to buy a speeder +skill.

 

A more accurate statement would be:

 

So basically, because slicers had no problems to buy the speeder + skill @lvl 25 and some non-slicers had poor credit management common sense, this crewskill had to be nerfed 1 week after release?

 

And apparently the answer is yes, nerf to oil the squeak.

 

That said, splicing was probably too good, but there were other ways to fix it. Remove the "abundant/rich/etc" tags for one and the income will drop as folks do random missions. I never looked at the yield (I switched to slicing at 25) and made @ 100,000 by level 31 - a far cry from those that only went with the "best" missions and their 500k incomes by 40, which is reasonable. The skill itself wasn't the money maker, it was being able to cherry pick the better missions.

 

Take out the lockbox missions.

 

Before, there was no reason not to have all of your companions on a slicing alt doing that at all times. That could, and did, cause serious problems.

Edited December 28, 2011 by VioletZero

[Mannic]

Slicing is a way to achieve extra credits without the essential need of a GTN as a middleman. This is one of the KEY things you need to take home, gentlemen. If you don't want to deal with the GTN, this is the way to go.

 

However, never look at your companions as a sole method of profit. This is the problem BW has rectified; People were essentially touching themselves while their companions made them in excess of 10,000 credits an hour. Companions are there to level up your skill when the environment you're in isn't feasible enough to do so on its own. Like every other gathering skill (which is what slicing is), you need to go out and find them and level up the conventional way.

 

The only people who complain that slicing is nerfed is because these new MMO kids think they are entitled to every single slot, ability, and vehicle the instant it becomes available to them. You people are very mistaken.

 

However, the net loss ratio when at level 50 needs to be reduced. You need to almost always make a small net profit to keep up with other crew skills, where their profits soar as well and where they see the most potential with their crew skills. Nowhere near as high, because remember that this crew requires less use of a GTN, and their profits should be reflected as such.

 

^This.^

 

The system was broken. Is it broken now? Probably not. Now that maybe some people will actually take Cybertech instead of Slicing, maybe there will be a market for your augments. But when 75% of the players who know better take slicing, of COURSE there won't be a market for augments.

[Kashaan]

Well I guess in the end we'll have two choices. Make schematics and missions we get from slicing vendor food, or start to overcharge to make up our losses and really screw up the GTN. I'm for the latter. Nerf that you bastards.

 

 

Pretty much. Until now, we were able to sell our extra schematics and missions on the AH for a reasonable price. Now we're going to have to gouge the crap out of them to make up for all the losses of running the missions... which are much heavier losses than crafting missions. At least crafting missions always return items. Schematics and missions were already rare as it was.

[ImperiumAlpha]

Some people DON'T understand one fact. Most people DON'T care about a nerf of lets say 25-50%... But this is a 90% nerf and i'm being generous.

 

My schematics will now be minimum 10 000 Credits each for the most common and wait to see the price of the 3XX-400. After all thats the only way to do money now.

 

 

EDIT : Thanks for the fix'

Edited December 28, 2011 by ImperiumAlpha

[acheros]

Okay, here's a solution that will benefit everyone:

 

Double the yield you get from lockboxes, but triple the cost of mission skills

 

So that people actually get up and go hunting for lockboxes.

 

I'm not sure exact numbers, but even double seems alittle low. I'd say 1/4th to half the credits per hour people were getting from slicing is a fair amount.

[Sleeptastic]

The whining in this thread is hilarious. To summarize, it seems slicers actually thought that one gathering profession producing enough credits to support 5+ alts/entire guilds was balanced, and want it reverted back to the way it was.

[acheros]

Some people DON'T understand one fact. Most people DON'T care about a nerf of lets say 25-50%... But this is a 90% nerf and i'm being generous.

 

My schematics will now be minimum 10 000 Credits each for the most common and wait to see the price of the 3XX-400.

fixed that for you..

[Zidaen]

Just adding my $.02

 

Slicing missions provide augments or credits. Other skills provide mats or gear built with those materials. I had a conversation with a friend today who was pro-slicing nerf where as I am against it.

 

Why do I slice? I slice because it gives me on a very rare chance missions for other skills. I also slice because the boxes are worth more than the mission cost.

 

Take away the positive credit income and we are left with augments and rare missions at a loss of credits.

 

Why is that bad when my artificer also loses credits? Well, why do you craft if not for the money? "I craft so I can provide alts/friends items while they level".

 

Why not sell your artificer items for income? "I choose to reverse engineer for a chance at better recipes".

 

OK. So, post nerf slicers net negative credits but so do other crafters. We both are looking for "rare" rewards through a different process. They reverse-engineer and we run dozens of missions.

 

What's the difference between slicing and say synthweaving? A synthweaver can choose to sell his guaranteed items for a very small profit. A slicers guaranteed items are augments which are useless until end game items have augment slots and we can therefore only sell the <46 lvl augments to vendors for a net loss. At 50 augments become useful but ALL dropped and commendation gear comes with blue+ augments already.

 

TLDR: Slicing is now a net loss profession with a totally useless guaranteed low level reward (augments) which are also mostly useless even at end game. The only way to make a profit is to sell our rare rewards which provide epic missions for other skills at a high price (8000+ cr) which nobody is willing to buy (I keep trying). Effectively making slicing a dead profession. Sure the other crafting professions are mostly useless but it is fun to receive a item a few levels sooner than you naturally would.

 

Crafters should have the choice of selling their wares or keeping them for their benefit. Slicing does not provide such options. Our choice is vendor everything we get or sell missions for less credits than it costed us to acquire them.

 

Instead of nerfing slicing BW should FIX it. *** augments? Y U NO GO IN ORANGE GEAR MY LVL?!!!!!

Edited December 28, 2011 by Zidaen

[RockOnn]

Game economics actually follow economic theory fairly accurately. To put it into perspective, slicing was raw income without producing anything of value other than capital (with rare exceptions when it would drop a schematic or mission discovery). In developed economies this is known as capital gains. The reason for the nerf was that we saw inflation go through the roof (which is what happens when capital out values goods produced). The effect of the nerf (after things settle down) will be that inflation will decrease (people will think twice before dropping 10K on something, but will purchase the same item for 1K for example) so the amount of capital in the economy will go down.

 

This is not a bad thing in itself but economics is complicated. There is another factor, which will cause some problems. If the fixed cost of production (the amount of money it costs for gathering missions of components for blue and purple items) remains the same, plus the taxes (the cost to train skills / buy things from game vendors) also remain the same, people will be less inclined to invest in crafting (they will need their money for important things like training skills or maybe the occasional purchase of a speeder), which will cause what basically is a recession and a lower GINI Coefficient (value of income distribution – more poor people and less wealthy ones but the wealthy will be much wealthier).

 

Economic theory predicts that we will see more people willing to accept wearing slightly worse gear they get from quests, versus purchasing the blue enhancement just about every level, which will drive the production of the blue enhancements even further down, which will lower income for those crafters, make the few items produced by those who can afford to manufacture them more expensive, and so on.

 

One way to avoid that will be for Bioware (which is the government entity in this context) to either lower taxes or to come up with some sort of a subsidy (which is what Franklin D. Roosevelt had to do following the Great Depression) to allow those with little capital to survive. This is actually very similar with what we are dealing with in the real world, where we saw a “booming” economy of capital gains and double digit inflation of the 1980s, followed by policies in the 1990s in an effort to correct that, and the global recession which has hit all of us in the late 2000s. While people might not like this and flame on it - economics is economics, whether you are dealing in Dollars, Euros, Yen or virtual currency. While I am not sure that we will see direct welfare (something like every player sitting below 20K in their bank receiving a game email with 10K credits) we have seen subsidies in other games through various dynamics (increase in legendary item drop rates in LOTRO and world node frequencies; grind obtainable purple gear in WOW; etc.).

 

I am sure we will see either game wide subsidies in SWTOR to offset the economic effect of this nerf if it becomes needed, or even some subsidies for slicers like an increase in world slicing nodes. Unfortunately subsidies cause other problems (especially the displeasure of the rich, which could have obtained those things without the welfare), so it becomes a rather interesting balancing act. There is an old joke. What is the difference between an economist and a used car sales man? The used car sales man knows when he is lying.

 

While I don’t think I will ever hear a response from the devs on this somewhat philosophical topic, I would love to find out if there was some internal meeting or discussion at Bioware, where someone pulled out their old college economics text book when considering how to address the issue of slicing (like I had to do when thinking about this) and what effect this will have on the game. I actually love this stuff so while I did lose some of my income I look forward to figuring out how to make what we have work. More of concern to me is the mechanics behind the nerf and how they will affect other gathering skills.

 

For all gathering professions, the yield was an important factor on the quality and quantity of the return. This seems to now be broken at least for slicing. I am not sure about other skills at this point but am concerned about them. What I am seeing consistently is that the Yield (Moderate, Abundant, Bountiful, Rich, Prosperous and Wealthy), is no longer appears correlated to the return in either the amount of credits you receive from the box, nor the schematic / mission discovery. I have started doing some economic modeling and it looks like the amount of yield is no longer reflected by what type of mission you run. I could be wrong but I am not quite seeing the algorithm behind the returns for slicing, which are very apparent for other crafting professions. Basically - right now my modeling is based on a very small sample (34 missions from 3 toons) and there could be some variance based on the difference in companions, the level of the experience from the mission (some are grey, green, yellow, orange), the actual level of the skill (varied from 400 to 150) and maybe some other X factor (that I am failing to consider) but here is how it is shaking out so far. Overall PROFIT 5.69% (1,575 credits); which breaks up:

 

(a) Rich Missions LOSS 1.34% (-185 credits)

(b) Abundant Missions PROFIT 8.78% (934 credits)

© Moderate Missions PROFIT 25.45%(826 credits).

 

By the way, the Rich and Abundant Missions produced NO schematics or mission discoveries, while the Moderate Class 2 missions cited above produced two.

 

Over the next couple of weeks I will continue modeling this with additional data providing clarity as far as the some of the variances that I described, but I would be curious to hear from the devs if in their opinion the yield mechanics are performing as designed or if there seems to be some flaw in game logic.

Edited December 28, 2011 by RockOnn

[xOneChoicex]

No point in lock box missions any more. Might as well just remove them because with this bs knee jerk reaction "fix" it has ruined it entirely.

 

To many whiners who don't realise that at the higher levels slicing is going to be weak compared to making high level items and selling them on the market. But that would require effort and there are to many lazy ****wits in this world.

[Donger]

Scary stuff here. A seriously drastic nerf on something not far off from release. Catering to a small handful of low level crybabies... it is a bad road to travel down. Heck I'd go so far as to say that the economies on most servers are not even stable yet. Mine isn't and it is mostly a 5-15 min wait to get on most days.

 

I've enjoyed this game more than anything else this year save for Skyrim thus far. As of now though, I'm having second thoughts on paying a monthly fee for a game world I don't agree with. If the company is going to allow low level whiners control the eb and flow of the game then there is no telling what other drastic changes might come about. Might as well get a month of fun and then pause it. Wait and see what else they jump the gun on.

[schizoophrenic]

I only got through the first page before I got tired of reading about everyone not making money off slicing. I think the majority of people crying about the change don't realize the point of gathering professions and crew skill missions. The way I see it, there are nodes throughout the game where you gather your mats. If you're doing space combat or instances or pvp you probably aren't going to encounter these nodes. So you can pay to send your crew out to get you mats while you're doing these things. No one does these missions to gather mats to put them on the market, they use these mats to further their main crafting skill. Then you're reverse engineering the things you craft in an attempt to reclaim some mats so you can make something else to get another skill point in your craft and/or "learn" an improved schematic. So there's no monetary gain in any of the other gathering missions. They brought slicing in line with the other gathering professions so now you'll have to struggle to buy your speeders and skills just like everyone else without slicing. If you want capital gain out of your skill, go farm up slicing nodes. Those are free.

 

I had to lol at "No one does these missions to gather mats to put them on the market"

I really did...I don't know what server you are on,but on mine people are putting level 3 rares on GTN for 2000+ credits EACH,

and taking 3 gather/mission skills in order to do the exact thing that you claim NO ONE does.

Nice application of internal logic to an external situation bud.

 

it seems people can explain til they are blue in the face that credits were/are the "Mats" that slicers are supposed to gain from missions,in turn to spend on the mats they didn't get from...ah you know what,I'm not bothered anymore this thread is a classic case of "he says she says" and is soon to be troll vs troll anyway.

[acheros]

The whining in this thread is hilarious. To summarize, it seems slicers actually thought that one gathering profession producing enough credits to support 5+ alts/entire guilds was balanced, and want it reverted back to the way it was.

 

The fact you can't read is hilarious.

 

Slicers aren't whining it got nerfed. They're saying it got nerfed TOO MUCH.

 

We knew a nerf was coming, at least the smart ones did, oh, trust me, we knew it.

 

We did not, however, expect it to become a CREDIT LOSS.

[Zennshi]

True or false? You can still harvest Slicing nodes, receive a lockbox, open that lockbox, and get immediate free credits for doing so.

 

No other profession makes a net income from missions. They are a net loss for everyone. More than anything they're a way for you to buy skill-ups in a craft with money rather than having to go out into the game and do something. Why should slicers be any different? Until now Slicing was the only profession that could entirely offset the price of skilling up to 400 through missions, and not only offset those costs but make a profit from nothing more than doing missions.

 

So, not only did slicer not lose money like every other profession, they actually made money. And this dynamic of no net-loss for doing missions meant that any level 10 alt could have a slicing ability of 400 and make thousands of credits an hour. A stupid, stupid system, and one that needed to be nerfed into the ground. I'm sure they'll do something to make it a little better in the future, but right now it's exactly where it needs to be.

 

This is a problem with the design of the professions, not just slicing you troll. You can argue the same for level 10 UWTing alts who find and sell rare metals for exuberant amounts. Get off your high horse.

[Seifz]

The fact you can't read is hilarious.

 

Slicers aren't whining it got nerfed. They're saying it got nerfed TOO MUCH.

 

We knew a nerf was coming, at least the smart ones did, oh, trust me, we knew it.

 

We did not, however, expect it to become a CREDIT LOSS.

 

It's not a credit loss unless you're doing it wrong.