On my server at least, <lvl 50 gear was selling on the GTN in relatively good amounts pre-nerf. Post-nerf it's not. Not even at a loss. Lvl 50 crafted gear may not be very good (scratch that: It's not even present), but before that at least some of the gear some of the Crew skills can make outperforms the Commendation stuff for non-tank builds (Pre-50 commendation gear is rather obviously intended for people who solo and thus need endurance even if they're not tanks). However now people are opting for the less useful Commendation stuff because it's basically free (the game just throws Commendations at you in normal play), while better gear costs credits you need for Skills, Repairs and other money sinks.

Preaching to the choir, but preach on!

Yeah, the whole Slicing thing was just people upset that Slicers were making money from Crew Skills and they weren't. And when people pointed this effect out (the 'Slicers actually buy stuff, without them there is basically no economy') before and after the nerf (especially after, since they suddenly noticed the 'not for lvl 50's' stuff wasn't selling anymore) a load of others basically went and said 'You shouldn't craft before lvl 50 anyway! Once you reach lvl 50/400 skill you'll be rolling in money from all the stuff you'll be selling'. That worked out well, didn't it?

If I had been in charge of designing Colour Crystal Recipies, I would have done it somewhat differently from the current way. How it works now: Currently, gathering colour crystals (I'll use the term capitalized for the Saber/Weapon part and uncapped for the crafting material) through Archeology yields three colours: Red, Green and Blue. Red is Darksided, Green and Blue are Lightsided. Yellow and Orange colour crystals can be gotten from Treasure Hunting missions. Yellow is Neutral (the only craftable Neutral colour) and Orange is Darksided. When crafting colour crystals into Colour Crystals, each grade/tier has six (two per colour for +End and +Crit) Premium and two/four (same deal) Prototype recipes. Red, Green and Blue for Premiums, Yellow for Prototypes at the lower tiers and Yellow and Orange for the higher tiers. Other Colour Crystals cannot be crafted, only found. The end result is that there are two Darksided colours, two Lightsided colours and one neutral colour. Of the Lightsided colours, both recipes are Premium, while of the Darksided colours one is Premium and the other Prototype. The Neutral recipe is Prototype. Artificers who want to craft Colour Crystals for Darksided characters will find that 2/3 of the colour crystals they find through Archeology are unusable to them. They can use both of the colour crystals gotten through Treasure Hunting, but they won't be able to get any Orange Colour Crystal recipes they can use until fairly late. Artificers who want to craft Colour Crystals for Lightsided characters will find that 1/3 of the colour crystals they find through Archeology are unusable to them and 1 of the colour crystals gotten through Trasure Hunting will be too. How I would have done it: I would have made Red, Blue and Yellow the three gatherable colour crystals, one Darksided, one Lightsided and one Neutral. There would be no colour crystals gathered through Treasure Hunting, since Treasure Hunting is not a Gathering skill anyway. Each grade/tier of Artifice recipes would have three Premium (-RE> Prototype -RE> Artifact) Colour Crystal recipes: Red (Darksided), Blue (Lightsided) and Yellow (Neutral) and three Prototype (-RE> Artifact) Colour Crystal recipes, Orange (Darksided), Green (Lightsided) and Purple (Neutral). Red Colour Crystal recipes would be made with red colour crystals. Blue Colour Crystal recipes would be made with blue colour crystals. Yellow Colour Crystal recipes would be made with yellow colour crystals. Orange Colour Crystal recipes would be made with red and yellow colour crystals. Green Colour Crystal recipes would be made with blue and yellow colour crystals. Purple Colour Crystal recipes would be made with red and blue colour crystals. This would: Give both Force aligments an equal number of usable colours (four). Spread those colours over an equal number of Premium and Protoype recipes per grade (two per colour per grade for both qualities). Ensure that Artificers would be able to use all colour crystals they gather regardless of Force Alignment. And thus keep the GTN from being flooded with crystals of one alignment or the other like it is now (on my server at least). Other colours would still be drop only (but adding more colours to the recipies later would be easier). That colour mixing isn't how it works in the lore, but then again in the lore they also don't put lightsaber crystals in Blasters, Vibroswords and heavy weapons and it takes weeks or months to attune to a single saber crystal rather than the current 'swap and swing' method.

The only part of the Original post that I can honestly say I disagree with (rather than mildly agreeing or not having an opinion as with the rest) is this bit: If fun is your goal one of the last things you should be doing is attract the attention of lvl 50's to a lvl 24-28 area. See, PvP is not just 'end game' and too many games already have an attitude where players, if people are ganked by others 25 lvls higher in a pvp area, start shouting 'well then you shouldn't go into PvP areas until you're lvl x (where x is the maximum level). Let's not turn TOR into one of those.

Because Lockboxes for Treasure hunting return Equipment (at a loss, if you try to vendor them, admittedly), the money (if any) is a bonus/consolation prize. Slicing Lockboxes however give money and only money unless you crit. Also Treasure Hunting also produces Gifts (or Gift Fragments) and Gemstones. Slicing only produces lockboxes,

Nothing in the above was evident from your previous post, but at least you clarified it. But no, see, the problem is that it's f-ing hard, as you well know, to make money with Archeology and much less hard to make money with Scavenging. In fact Scavenging can easily make more money than Slicing, depending on the server economy. So to say that 'Slicing is in line with the other Gathering skills' implies that the other gathering skills are all equal, they quite blatantly are not, but only slicing gets grief.

Yes, replace 'girlfriend' with 'brother' and that's me. It also does not illustrate anything regarding your point. So... Grats on having a girlfriend... I guess?

Which is ********, because the other Gathering skills aren't even remotely comparable to each other either. Sorry, was I supposed to explain that in flowery words and longwinded arguments? I can't I'm too tired of the blatant tunnelvision Slicing whine is infected with. That thing you said is ********. And I'm not even a Slicer.

And yet the whining about Slicing far exceeds the complaints about, say, Scavenging and Bioanalysis. You see, Scavenging and Bioanalysis can harvest from Nodes created by dead creatures. Archeology and Slicing cannot. Even without that, Scavenging and Bioanalysis nodes are far more common than Archeology and Slicing nodes. Scavenging nodes also have a chance to net more materials (technically more types of materials, because there's a chance of getting normal amounts of two, rather than only one, material) per node than Archeology. I'm not sure about Bioanalysis. Archeology has three different types of nodes (and three different types of materials) versus only two types for Scavenging and one type for Slicing. Again, not sure about Bioanalysis. In addition, Scavenging can get both types of material (in normal amounts) from a single node regardless of type. Scavenging supplies materials to three different Crafts, Bioanalysis supplies only to one. Archeology supplies to two and Slicing supplies to none. Scavenging, in short, is better than Archeology. Bioanalysis is somewhere in the middle, if for no other reason than that Craft it supplies is currently the only one remotely useful in 'End Game'. Underworld Trading and Treasure Hunting both have 'Companion Gift' missions. Underworld Trading produces more actual Gifts than Treasure Hunting. Treasure hunting instead produces 'gift fragments' traded with the Curator for actual gifts. On the one hand Curator Gifts give more affection than 'regular' gifts. On the other, Fragments are useless until they're traded in for a gift and you need specific numbers of them for specific gifts. It's possible to spend 20k on 'Gift' missions for Treasure Hunting and not end up with a single gift worth of Artifact Fragments (nor a single gift). It's also possible to spend only about 400 credits on 'Gift' missions and end up with enough Fragments for a Quality 5 Purple gift. UT will get a gift on every success, but a Purple Quality 5 gift may require 20 3k missions to get. Neither Synthweaving nor Armortech can stand up to Raid gear, but only two (max) out of five of the companions for each class has any use for Synthweaving produced gear, so Armortechs have more chances to sell to players wanting to kit out their companion for solo play. (Not that anyone bothers). tl;dr: Not all Crew Skills are made equal, yet only Slicing got whined to death.

Is it? That's weird, because the GTN on my server is absolutely flooded with 'Light-sided' objects and Republic only stuff and no one's buying it.

So you want to put words in people's mouths they didn't actually say and twist what they actually said because you have a small and funny shaped reproductive organ. some people seriously need an education in 'two-can-play-at-that-game-ology'.

Hey! UO was awesome. It's not the players' fault they made it suck nowadays. Bit of respect for MMO history please, if it hadn't been for UO there would be no TOR. It proved that subscription based MMOs were a workable concept.

It's the same for Hilts (Artifice). This is because they follow a different progression (Green -> Blue -> Purple) than armour and weapons (Green -> Prefix 1/2/3 Blue -> Prefix 1.1/1.2/1.3/2.1/2.2/2.3/3.1/3.2/3.3 Purple).

Why? Why should something that takes millions of credits before you can make it (take into account here: skilling up and RE-ing costs credits, who knew) be worse than something you can get for something you were going to do anyway?