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DarthTHC

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  1. The problem was never the expense of the materials. The problem was always supply. Based solely upon mission cost of acquisition of the materials, augments, for example, could have been very profitably listed at around 45k each. The reason they were not is that if we did that, re-listers would buy them up and re-list them for the going rate, say 125-145k. We can only combat that by making more items to post... but we could never get enough raw materials to not lose that race. The re-lister could always run us out of raw materials doing that. The slot machines have solved the supply problem with a bullet. At the same time, they made the cost of the resources zero. This means it's a commodity. They're cheaper than dirt. Which means that even if you think you're going to work your slot machine and sell a stack of whatever resource it gives you on GTN, before very long, it's not going to be worth the time you spent clicking. But the real problem with the slot machine isn't even that it makes raw materials free. It's that it's CM encroaching into gameplay so significantly that it renders the area of gameplay it encroaches into not only useless but a disadvantage to use. Wouldn't it be cool if you could get something from CM that made it utterly stupid to ever play Ranked PvP or do an Operation again?
  2. BioWare has this really awesome community team, part of whose job is to dredge through the forums and compile feedback for the developers. They're humans, too, and I think a bit on the younger side. Very professional, pretty good at communicating back, active, and living a thankless life of digging through user posts to find the usable, actionable feedback. When I post feedback designed for their consideration, I use a style that I believe people of their background, education, and intellect (all of which I respect) will find not only informative but hopefully at least mildly amusing in the hope that it somewhat breaks up the monotony of their day. (As in my post of this morning that's getting a lot of "traction" but basically boils down to, "I see what you did there, but most don't, nicely played.") However, going back to the uninformed opinions of unthinking mouthbreathers being injected into my conversations, yeah, they get a decidedly different treatment. But then, I'm not really writing those posts for BioWare's consideration.
  3. In "reali life", I usually have a more direct line to individuals in the organization(s) providing me goods and/or services. Here, not so much. It's all forced to be sort of public. It seems wrong to hit Eric's PM inbox... but it doesn't seem wrong to walk up to the local Lowe's Customer Service counter, you know? If I take issue with a good or service I'm provided, I decide on the impact of the issue and the remediation I'd like. In almost all cases, I'm just going to go and buy somewhere else, because there is plenty of competition for almost everything I want to buy. Not so much here. There are other MMO's, to be sure, but this is my favorite with a bullet. So in this case, if I want my favorite MMO to keep being my favorite MMO, I have to provide feedback. I have no choice. Similarly, I value my spouse, daughter, friends, family. I can't, WON'T just "walk away" and find new ones. They get the same treatment - they get feedback. In the middle of those two is something like my job. I value it, but I could go get a different one if sufficiently motivated, and that motivation would take less than changing spouses, for example. They get feedback, too. But, again, in all those cases in which I'd try to provide feedback, there's a clear, easy, open line to provide it. Not so much here, aside from these forums. In many cases, when providing negative feedback to a goods or services provider in the real world, my tone is terse but professional. Here, it's more snarky. And then you have the final difference between here and "the real world"... participating spectators. As I provide my feedback, were some mouth-breather to inject is completely moronic, uneducated, but equally "valid" (hah!) opinion into my conversation with the customer service desk or my spouse or my daughter, I assure you that my response to him would be every bit as rude as (though decidedly less green than) my responses to the same here. Conversely, someone injecting educated, reasoned, thoughtful information into the conversation might be met with resistance (don't get into the middle of a conversation with my spouse or daughter!) or welcome (as in offering an alternative solution to an issue I'm discussing with the CSR at Lowe's).
  4. There's no panic. This is a boon to crafters. For the short term, anyway. The issue is that they've introduced a CM item that makes it utterly foolishly stupid to ever play part of the game again - running crafting missions. This is a direct contradiction to BioWare's previous statements that they would never, EVER do that with CM again. It flew to the joy of the masses because y'all think crafters are evil money-grubbing credit ho's and want them to be harmed because they use "Credits" rather than "Boss Kills", "Gear Level", or "PvP Rank" to keep score.
  5. I can't believe you don't understand this. You're usually pretty good about thinking through issues. But then you use arbitrage... you're not a crafter. The CM Certificates make the whole thing profitable as long as you can sell CM Personnel Decorations for something around 10k. That means that as long as that's the price point on GTN, the slots pay you to gather materials. But let's say the market crashes and you can't give the stupid things away... The drop rates on the slots still mean that: The cost of each artifact crafting material is 20% of what it is doing missions. You get more artifact crafting materials in 7 minutes of running coins in slots than you could hope to get from 7 minutes of sending your crew on the right missions, then waiting for those missions to return 30-45 minutes hence, and the missions you launched crit about twice as much as usual. That's not a market "change". That completely eliminates the need or desire to run a mission ever again. It would be epically foolish to do it. I should save this to PM to you later. If BioWare leaves this machine as it is, that is exactly what will happen. If they adjust it, well, we'll have to see what the adjustment is. Remember when I asked you about arbitrage... how to get into it? Had you asked me about how to get into crafting before last week, my answer would have started with, "Take 3 gathering skills and...." Today, my answer is, "Don't bother. Ask me again if BioWare changes the slots." New crafters won't be able to compete without a slot machine. They'll have to grind dailies for a good long while to afford one, then to afford enough coins to feed it to generate enough materials to start to be profitable, and by then every crafted item will be a commodity - too little profit to bother with. Running dailies will become the best way to get credits for everyone. Well, except for the very few elite crafters who are gonna do what I said I'm gonna do above. But, for the most part, the Labor caste has "won". Now, everyone gets to do dailies. Or arbitrage with CM items, I guess. Or RMT's. Whee.
  6. You're missing the long-term picture. These things produce crafting materials in a manner that makes the game pay the player to get them. An unscrupulous player *cough*credit seller*cough* could macro clicking these... macro a roomful of computers clicking these... and make a profit just doing that. So they'll do that. And we'll see the prices of every single crafting material that can be obtained via scrap fall to the about 100 credits per stack range. Which will be "good" because we crafters no longer have to click the machines, we can buy from GTN for effectively "free". Yeah, it puts money in credit seller hands, but who cares? So we'll start crafting with those things and compete like nuts because our mats are free and then... then at some point the actual credit value we get for the effort of learning to make things you want, making them, posting them to GTN, etc.... will become not worth it. So a lot of crafters will stop at that point. Those who were just here to craft, and who were subscdribers to do so, would stop, taking their subscription revenue with them. Those who enjoy other parts of the game would go do that. Meanwhile, the credit sellers now can go macro a mess of whatever widgets they can build with their massive supply of mats that they have too many of. And they can do that in quantities of all those things to mark them right down to under 1,000 credits each, no matter what they are. And you'll buy them, because they're cheap. I mean, who cares if the credits go into the hands of credit sellers, right? While that's happening, the smart crafters... the tenacious crafters... the 1% of the 1% who really relish the thrill of the game... they will figure out how to make their money next. And we... I, because this is exactly what I plan to do... I will get the recipes for the artifact level 37 item modifications. And I will pick one or two to specialize in. And I will use my vast resources and the knowledge I've gained playing the crafting game in MMO's for a decade... And one day very soon you will go to the GTN and search for "Might Hilt 37" (or whatever else I pick), and you will sort by price, and you will see 19,685,000. And you will think that the GTN is bugged because that has to be the outlier. So you will click that column header again and you will see 25,000,000. That will happen because the combination of resource scarcity and schematic scarcity means there are few crafters who can make it and not enough resources to flood the market. It will happen because with the wealth I've accumulated by selling you all the lowest price item of its kind tens of thousands of times let me totally control a market with that level of resource and crafter scarcity. And my weekly profits will be tenfold what they ever were before. This is not hyperbole. This is not alarmism. I've done the math. I've evaluated the markets. I know I can do this. Meanwhile, you'll be able to buy credits from the gold sellers for something south of $1 per million, so you'll have that going for you at least.
  7. No, that's actually pretty accurate. They're not making 2 to 10 million EVERY day. They could if they tried. But it's only 20 mil a week, which I know about because that's about what I do when I try. If you choose to spend that about 20 mil a week, that's not terribly hard to do. You're buying high-end, rare CM drops mostly. Mounts are pretty expensive - in the millions. If you want to go back in time to get an embargoed one that you missed, that's a lot more. Some of the toys or regens or emotes go half a million or more each. You can get to 20 mil spent pretty fast.
  8. Why would they make accounts that they spent all that time and effort leveling to X to get the chests, have crafting skills, earn credits, etc., just to throw them away and have to start over, causing yet another period of low / no productivity? Wouldn't it be smarter (and they're not idiots) to use one set of accounts to earn the money, another set of accounts to transfer the money to the buyers, and yet a third set of (f2p because they gonna get banned) accounts to spam ads? Wouldn't it be even smarter to set up your credit "selling" business as a middle-man, offering the service of pairing buyers and sellers, both of whom otherwise are just "regular" players, and taking a fee for the service? It wouldn't even have to look like that was the service, at least probably not to the buyer. I see lots of assumptions on this whole thread that are misinformed by a decade. It's... something.
  9. No, they do not understand. Nor do they care to learn. They are probably incapable of it. Tilting at windmills trying to explain this to the daft. Anyone with more credits than they have is an evil money-grubbing, price fixing sumbit... and they have nearly none because they can't figure out how to make it but sure as heck spend it as fast as the game shoves it into their pockets. They can't even figure out that everyone buys only the lowest priced items, so therefore the wealthiest crafters, who they hate with the fire of 10,000 suns, are the ones who consistently have done the most to keep prices as low as possible. As my momma always tellin' me, ya cain't fix stupid.
  10. Maybe BioWare will sponsor a class at the local continuing ed program, "Remedial Reading for MMO Players"?
  11. Please explain how a merchant steals credit card information processed by PayPal.
  12. If credit seller accounts are F2P, how do they transfer more credits than the F2P limit?
  13. Think of it this way: They'll be so busy botting the slots that you can have the chests back.
  14. Grr. Beat me to it. "GTN Scam Solution" = "Force players to learn to read."
  15. Yeah, wouldn't it have been neat for the devs to realize we /ignore for player behavior not character behavior and made the whole thing account wide for the whole account doing the ignoring and against the account being ignored? Le sigh.
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