Slicing and Money sinks. Mostly Money sinks.

[RvEijndhoven]

Oh god, another Slicing thread!

 

Yeah, but this time, it's not about Slicing as such.

 

Regardless of whether you thought Slicing was broken or not, regardless of whether you think the nerf was too drastic or not, there is one thing that you must have noticed:

 

The Money sinks in TOR are out of proportions.

 

I'm not talking about too high in absolute values, though certainly they are, I'm talking about them being too high in relative terms to the 'income' one generates through simply playing the game.

 

Even pre-nerf you had a lot of people worrying about being able to get their Pilot 1 skill at lvl 25 because up to that point they are perpetually broke. People on chat will then reassure them that after lvl 25 the money gets progressively better.

 

This is not true.

 

Or at least it's not true in the sense that it not always true. What gets progressively better is the rewards you get after you arrive (for Empire, I'm not sure whether it's the same for Republic) to Tatooine and onward.

 

The difference here being that it's actually difficult and requires you to skip content to arrive on Tatooine at lvl 24 rather than, as my brother and I did, at lvl 26-ish.

 

This is especially problematic because while arriving on Tatooine pretty much doubles your income, the cost of Skill ups, Equipment repairs if you're unlucky (or geared well) and several other money sinks increases between levels 15 and 25 by a factor of three or more and doubles every five levels after that.

 

Basically the cost of money sinks increases faster than the income from 'quests' (word used to prevent misunderstandings between 'questing' missions and Crew Skill missions), loot and other content.

 

Why? Because these money sinks are based on the Beta's pre-nerf (post-beta-nerf) Slicing enhanced economy.

 

So if you wonder why everyone's so miffed about the Slicing nerf and how they can't afford anything now/are losing money now, while you can get by fine:

 

You probably lucked out in how you leveled, skipped some Heroics (or did all of them with full four man teams, which greatly increases the monetary and item gains), and arrived on the 'bigger money' worlds before you started getting the bigger expenses.

 

Or you may simply have a more efficient spending pattern.

 

At the end of the line though, if you're going to 'fix' the source of (possible) inflation, an important side effect of that is that you also have to reduce the measure you took previously to combat that inflation.

[Zeel_Aldair]

I don't know. I never had Slicing (I took Armormech for my crafting skill), and haven't had much trouble getting credits. At 23 I paused any progress on my crew skills (which were at my level at the time, and saved for speeder training so I had the cash by 25. Aside from that I haven't really done any kind of budgeting and am running at a healthy surplus each level after keeping crew skills up to date and training everything.

 

I'm not sure what you could be doing to have a lot less money though. Are you buying anything significant on the GTN? As far as questing I solo cleared out about 80% of all quests on each planet before moving on (so I was usually quite high level for each planet if anything), and did any heroic quests I could get an appropriate group for - otherwise I skipped them. Hardly did any Flashpoints so far. Quite a lot of PvP and space combat though.

 

But yeah, I couldn't put my finger on what's causing you to have less cash - I've followed a pretty typical leveling strategy and seem to be fine all the way.

[Twor]

I don't know. I never had Slicing (I took Armormech for my crafting skill), and haven't had much trouble getting credits. At 23 I paused any progress on my crew skills (which were at my level at the time, and saved for speeder training so I had the cash by 25. Aside from that I haven't really done any kind of budgeting and am running at a healthy surplus each level after keeping crew skills up to date and training everything.

 

I'm not sure what you could be doing to have a lot less money though. Are you buying anything significant on the GTN? As far as questing I solo cleared out about 80% of all quests on each planet before moving on (so I was usually quite high level for each planet if anything), and did any heroic quests I could get an appropriate group for - otherwise I skipped them. Hardly did any Flashpoints so far. Quite a lot of PvP and space combat though.

 

But yeah, I couldn't put my finger on what's causing you to have less cash - I've followed a pretty typical leveling strategy and seem to be fine all the way.

 

Sorry but the level range you are in is insignificant in regards of money sinks.

One skill costs 30-40k at level 40+.

Speeder at 40ish is 225k- the training only.

Bank slots, Bag slots- all set prizes and money sinks you won't be able to dodge as there is no alternative for them.

[AWDBAHL]

What happened is he spent thousands of credits making stuff to reverse engineer so he could produce something worth crafting and wearing. Probably blew a boatload of credits doing grey missions simply because he didnt have enough mats at that level to keep spitting out green gear to RE.

 

Thats the real money sink in crafting. Reverse engineering 15-30 pieces of gear to be able to make something almost worth wearing. This is especially true for crafts that produce armor since orange gear with decent mods is better than anything you could ever hope to make.

[Dekadez]

Rubbish.

 

I am 48 now, with Biochem at 341, Bioanalysis at 400 and Diplomacy at 311. I'm sitting on 814.000 credits.

 

At level 20 I had 3.000 credits. I quit boosting my skills completely, and I had about 70.000 at 25.

 

At level 34 I had about 40.000 credits. Again stopping my Crew Skills got me to a comfortable 300.000 by level 40.

 

There are no tricks:

-Leveling Crew Skills entirely through companion missions is expensive.

-Questing income is more than sufficient to cover your leveling costs, be it speeders or skill increases.

-Sell Blue, Purple and Orange gear on the GTN. Of the 50 items I post, perhaps 30 will sell. Yet they still sell for a premium of the vendor price. Persistence is key.

-Inventory upgrades aren't worth the investment: Use companions to sell grey items. I bought the 5.000 upgrade, no others. I've been fine by planning my vendor visits with my quest NPC visit.

-Bank upgrades aren't worth the investment: Banks don't automatically update stacks. If you find your bank to be full, check to see if you haven't listed the same item 7 times, and turn them into stacks. Don't hoard your Grade 1 supplies when you're crafting at Grade 4 level either.

 

There is no such thing as 'credits being difficult to collect'. If the costs would increase by a factor of your income, we'd all by scratching our behinds with a rusty nail. That is hardly the case. What this is, is a case of Learn2Think and Learn2Plan.

Edited December 31, 2011 by Dekadez

[Zeel_Aldair]

Sorry but the level range you are in is insignificant in regards of money sinks.

One skill costs 30-40k at level 40+.

Speeder at 40ish is 225k- the training only.

Bank slots, Bag slots- all set prizes and money sinks you won't be able to dodge as there is no alternative for them.

 

Except I didn't say which level I'm at now, and I have all the extra bank slots and bag slots I need. I was just pointing out that, other than a small detour near 25, I've been fine for money ever since.

[Tesclo]

Rubbish.

 

I am 48 now, with Biochem at 341, Bioanalysis at 400 and Diplomacy at 311. I'm sitting on 814.000 credits.

 

At level 20 I had 3.000 credits. I quit boosting my skills completely, and I had about 70.000 at 25.

 

At level 34 I had about 40.000 credits. Again stopping my Crew Skills got me to a comfortable 300.000 by level 40.

 

There are no tricks:

-Leveling Crew Skills entirely through companion missions is expensive.

-Questing income is more than sufficient to cover your leveling costs, be it speeders or skill increases.

-Sell Blue, Purple and Orange gear on the GTN. Of the 50 items I post, perhaps 30 will sell. Yet they still sell for a premium of the vendor price. Persistence is key.

-Inventory upgrades aren't worth the investment: Use companions to sell grey items. I bought the 5.000 upgrade, no others. I've been fine by planning my vendor visits with my quest NPC visit.

-Bank upgrades aren't worth the investment: Banks don't automatically update stacks. If you find your bank to be full, check to see if you haven't listed the same item 7 times, and turn them into stacks. Don't hoard your Grade 1 supplies when you're crafting at Grade 4 level either.

 

There is no such thing as 'credits being difficult to collect'. If the costs would increase by a factor of your income, we'd all by scratching our behinds with a rusty nail. That is hardly the case. What this is, is a case of Learn2Think and Learn2Plan.

 

I have to agree with this. People waste their credits on ah gear and crafting at low levels and then blame credit sinks... well yea stop wasting all your money! Some people are new to mmos and dont understand this. They have to learn the hard way. Some people will never understand it and will continue to buy gear on the ah every 2 levels. You dont need to have max crafting! Stop it! Get to 50 then worry about that crap. While your leveling take professions that will bring in credits. Picking up some credit box while you're already out there questing is quick and easy. Why not have slicing just for the extra free credits? Why not have scavenging to sell the items you pick up while questing?!

 

Its called END GAME for a reason people. You do these things once you're already level 50. Who cares about your 200 level cybortech at level 20? Nobody and you're losing more credits taking it to that level that the random items you may sell on the ah. TLDR: Stop wasting your money and use the tools given to you by the game to make money.

[Donger]

I have to agree with this. People waste their credits on ah gear and crafting at low levels and then blame credit sinks... well yea stop wasting all your money! Some people are new to mmos and dont understand this. They have to learn the hard way. Some people will never understand it and will continue to buy gear on the ah every 2 levels. You dont need to have max crafting! Stop it! Get to 50 then worry about that crap. While your leveling take professions that will bring in credits. Picking up some credit box while you're already out there questing is quick and easy. Why not have slicing just for the extra free credits? Why not have scavenging to sell the items you pick up while questing?!

 

Its called END GAME for a reason people. You do these things once you're already level 50. Who cares about your 200 level cybortech at level 20? Nobody and you're losing more credits taking it to that level that the random items you may sell on the ah. TLDR: Stop wasting your money and use the tools given to you by the game to make money.

 

Oh! So all those low level 12-25 green armors I make are for end game? Wow no wonder they don't sell! I'll just have to start stockpiling them in the bank and wait for 50's to buy em so they can be properly geared for raiding.

[xmercxrayx]

IMO Some things are expensive - the should be. Not everything was intended to be owned in the first week the game. You assume because you sunk 100 hours of your life into your character already at this point that you should just have access to everything and frankly, I do not believe you should. Furthermore, the economy is broken because of the multiple alts per server model which is allowing everyone to farm for themselves - so it is hard to say how much money you should or shouldnt have at this point.

[ViskarNogame]

Oh god, another Slicing thread!

 

Yeah, but this time, it's not about Slicing as such.

 

Regardless of whether you thought Slicing was broken or not, regardless of whether you think the nerf was too drastic or not, there is one thing that you must have noticed:

 

The Money sinks in TOR are out of proportions.

 

I'm not talking about too high in absolute values, though certainly they are, I'm talking about them being too high in relative terms to the 'income' one generates through simply playing the game.

 

Even pre-nerf you had a lot of people worrying about being able to get their Pilot 1 skill at lvl 25 because up to that point they are perpetually broke. People on chat will then reassure them that after lvl 25 the money gets progressively better.

 

This is not true.

 

Or at least it's not true in the sense that it not always true. What gets progressively better is the rewards you get after you arrive (for Empire, I'm not sure whether it's the same for Republic) to Tatooine and onward.

 

The difference here being that it's actually difficult and requires you to skip content to arrive on Tatooine at lvl 24 rather than, as my brother and I did, at lvl 26-ish.

 

This is especially problematic because while arriving on Tatooine pretty much doubles your income, the cost of Skill ups, Equipment repairs if you're unlucky (or geared well) and several other money sinks increases between levels 15 and 25 by a factor of three or more and doubles every five levels after that.

 

Basically the cost of money sinks increases faster than the income from 'quests' (word used to prevent misunderstandings between 'questing' missions and Crew Skill missions), loot and other content.

 

Why? Because these money sinks are based on the Beta's pre-nerf (post-beta-nerf) Slicing enhanced economy.

 

So if you wonder why everyone's so miffed about the Slicing nerf and how they can't afford anything now/are losing money now, while you can get by fine:

 

You probably lucked out in how you leveled, skipped some Heroics (or did all of them with full four man teams, which greatly increases the monetary and item gains), and arrived on the 'bigger money' worlds before you started getting the bigger expenses.

 

Or you may simply have a more efficient spending pattern.

 

At the end of the line though, if you're going to 'fix' the source of (possible) inflation, an important side effect of that is that you also have to reduce the measure you took previously to combat that inflation.

 

 

Questing one night for maybe 2 levels in Aldaran netted me almost 100K. Questing money gets A LOT better after Tatooine. Training, however, gets sprsrs

[Dredknut]

Rubbish.

 

I am 48 now, with Biochem at 341, Bioanalysis at 400 and Diplomacy at 311. I'm sitting on 814.000 credits.

 

At level 20 I had 3.000 credits. I quit boosting my skills completely, and I had about 70.000 at 25.

 

At level 34 I had about 40.000 credits. Again stopping my Crew Skills got me to a comfortable 300.000 by level 40.

 

There are no tricks:

-Leveling Crew Skills entirely through companion missions is expensive.

-Questing income is more than sufficient to cover your leveling costs, be it speeders or skill increases.

-Sell Blue, Purple and Orange gear on the GTN. Of the 50 items I post, perhaps 30 will sell. Yet they still sell for a premium of the vendor price. Persistence is key.

-Inventory upgrades aren't worth the investment: Use companions to sell grey items. I bought the 5.000 upgrade, no others. I've been fine by planning my vendor visits with my quest NPC visit.

-Bank upgrades aren't worth the investment: Banks don't automatically update stacks. If you find your bank to be full, check to see if you haven't listed the same item 7 times, and turn them into stacks. Don't hoard your Grade 1 supplies when you're crafting at Grade 4 level either.

 

There is no such thing as 'credits being difficult to collect'. If the costs would increase by a factor of your income, we'd all by scratching our behinds with a rusty nail. That is hardly the case. What this is, is a case of Learn2Think and Learn2Plan.

 

This is the realization that I came to @ lvl 23ish when I failed to prepare myself for the 40k speeder training.

 

STOP leveling Crew Skills when you need to accumulate credits. Questing and GTN will earn you lots of credits quick as long as you limit your expenses. WoW economy worked a little different than SWTOR, it just takes a little getting used to and a little more planning.

[RvEijndhoven]

I have to agree with this. People waste their credits on ah gear and crafting at low levels and then blame credit sinks... well yea stop wasting all your money! Some people are new to mmos and dont understand this. They have to learn the hard way. Some people will never understand it and will continue to buy gear on the ah every 2 levels. You dont need to have max crafting! Stop it! Get to 50 then worry about that crap. While your leveling take professions that will bring in credits. Picking up some credit box while you're already out there questing is quick and easy. Why not have slicing just for the extra free credits? Why not have scavenging to sell the items you pick up while questing?!

 

Its called END GAME for a reason people. You do these things once you're already level 50. Who cares about your 200 level cybortech at level 20? Nobody and you're losing more credits taking it to that level that the random items you may sell on the ah. TLDR: Stop wasting your money and use the tools given to you by the game to make money.

 

The problem I have with this attitude is that TOR has only two true items of appeal (that is: things that no other MMO has) that motivate people to pick it over any other MMO in the same basic 'style' (WoW, Rift, etc...): The fact that it's Star Wars and the fact that it has fully voiced 'quest' briefings with a lot of background and story.

 

Neither of these things really shine in this all holy 'End Game' the people who consider themselves 'hardcore' keep talking about. The Star Wars bit sorta still features if you're a Roleplayer (which luckily I am), but you won't be encountering much new lore or background.

And once you've heard the briefing for the End Game Flashpoints and Operations a few time, they hold nothing new, so the fact that they're fully voiced just makes it take slightly longer to skip through them. In lvl 50 PvP there's next to no briefings at all (and certainly no new ones).

 

So there is, ultimately, very little separating TOR end game from WoW end game, or Rift end game or the end game of other games with a similar system (hotbar, gear dependent, 'talents', different 'resources' for different classes, etc...).

 

In short, TOR's appeal versus other MMOs does not rest on it's end game and focusing your enjoyment of the game on that (accepting, for instance, being undergeared for your level if that level is not 50 because you don't want to invest in something that you won't use two levels later or willingly doing nothing with half the content available in the game until you're lvl 50 because that content requires you to invest in game money you don't have) is ultimately useless.

 

I should note: I'm not a Slicer. I never have been. In other threads I've pointed out I play together with my brother and he is. He financed the both of us because sharing a crew skill (Archeology) for our crafting skills (Artifice for me, Synthweaving for him) allowed him to take up Slicing.

 

We're not screwed because Slicing was nerfed though.

 

We're screwed because doing all quests as a two player party caused us to have the 'in a party' XP bonus for those quests... And so we arrived on Tatooine at lvl 26/27. And because the money you make isn't tied to your level, but to the world you're questing on, we had to buy skills (and work up to the money for our vehicle skills) while questing on Nar Shadda, not Tatooine. We're slightly ahead of the curve for levels vs. the planet we're actually on, so we start getting more money about two or three levels after we encounter the money sinks intended to keep our income balanced out.

 

We're not poor because we spend too much money carelessly or needlessly, we're poor because the game expects us to have more money at our level than we actually do. And pre-nerf Slicing balanced that out, now it doesn't.

 

We have two choices:

a. We skip the content that makes up the majority of TOR's appeal vs. other MMOs in order to get to the next world earlier and hope that means our available funds eventually even out with the money sinks.

b. We continue to enjoy the game's main attraction at the cost of having to wear gear in heavy disrepair, not upgrading our skills and not doing anything with our crew skills, because the game thinks we each have 50k to by the time we next level up when we actually have barely have 9k between us.

Edited January 1, 2012 by RvEijndhoven

[Msbungle]

I should note: I'm not a Slicer. I never have been. In other threads I've pointed out I play together with my brother and he is. He financed the both of us because sharing a crew skill (Archeology) for our crafting skills (Artifice for me, Synthweaving for him) allowed him to take up Slicing.

 

 

We're not poor because we spend too much money carelessly or needlessly, we're poor because the game expects us to have more money at our level than we actually do. And pre-nerf Slicing balanced that out, now it doesn't.

 

 

Ah, archeology. See, that explains a lot. Notice most people that talk about having 70K at 25 are usually bioanalysis or scavenging. Both of these gathering skills have 3 methods of gathering: nodes, mission, or mobs. For archeology you either have a node or you have to spend your money on a mission. I don't know about you, but I never seem to get that item I need from any of the missions and the nodes are not necessarily abundant. I'm sure it is worse when playing with another archeologist.

 

But on my main who is archeology I always had much less credits per level than on my alts who all use scavenging and biochem. But I never have to run missions with them because robots and wild animals are very prevalent in SWTOR.

Edited January 1, 2012 by Msbungle

[RvEijndhoven]

That is also true, not only do you regularly not get what you need with Archeology, but often on an Abundant, Bountiful or Rich you get loads and loads of things you don't need. (Like Blue or Green colour crystals when you're darksided, or the first type of Grade 3/4/5/6 Crystals when you need the second type. (At least you'll have a use for the second type ones you get when you need the first type, later).

 

And none of the things you can make except the 'mark 1-4' Hilts ever sell to a vendor for anything less than a 60% loss, usually you lose more. And only the 'mark 4' (Resolve/Might 4 Hilts) sell for a profit when you get the mats through a Mission rather than a Node. And even then only if you crit on a Moderate or get lucky on the single 'Abundant' Mission.

 

Nodes are overtaxed because there's less of them than for Salvaging/Bioanalysis already and the 'Crystal' and 'Artifact Fragment' ones are rarely ever in the same area. (Salvaging meanwhile gets often two different resources off of each single node, while Archeology only gets a -chance- for that on Colour crystal nodes, which are often not a colour you can use if you're Darksided even on Empire-only worlds).

 

So yes, Archeology probably also adds to my 'woes'.