I appreciate the amount of time that the OP took in expressing their opinions and felt strongly enough about some of their comments that I wanted to post my own responses. I do not mean to disparage the OP or any other opinions which may be expressed within this thread. My responses to the OP below are only meant to provide a contrasting opinion. While some of my comments may come across as rude, they are not meant to be so. I've only responded to the first bit, because the post was so long and I'm not much for posting. Perhaps I'll get around to expressing more opinions later. I disagree. I'm quite happy with the current level of customization and feel that they adding to our ability to customize at a surprising rate. I feel that while some customization in the early levels is nice, the ability to customize should scale up as one progresses in the game be it in terms of level, money, or some other means. I think this is acceptable. Being able to remove mods from armor and insert them into other armor should not be free in my opinion and I do not consider 100,000 credit to be difficult to come by for a level 50 character. I disagree with your initial premise as I understand it. I think certain appearances should be reserved or restricted based on certain criteria. I do not believe that any character class is restricted to any particular armor look thanks to social armor. Personally, I don't think I could care less about a dye system. It's hard for me to imagine a new game system which I would not prefer to see more than this. Please do not do any of these things. I whole-heartedly disagree with pretty much everything in this section. I have a crafter of every profession at 400 with the exception of Biochem which is somewhere around 350 and I'm quite happy with crafting.

I've only done a few so far. Update: Out of 12 missions of various levels that were rich or bountiful and have returned a green lockbox, 11 have returned losses ranging from 1-43% and one returned a profit of 13%. The losses seem as though they may not be as significant based on this small sample, but lockboxes certainly don't seem (to me) to be changed back to pre 1.2 level returns either. It may be that a nerf was intended in 1.2, but the lockboxes were also broken. Now they may just be nerfed. Clarification would once again be nice.

I (and I imagine many others) greatly appreciate your response. Thank you. Since we have received the desired response, would a moderator please close this thread?

Comments like this are off topic. The point of this thread is to understand if these changes were intended as there was no mention in the patch notes and, if they were, to understand the reason behind the changes. I do not want this thread to become derailed by debate over how one believes the skill is intended to be used or the new augment missions.

That is what I was missing (combat technique) thank you both for your replies. It would be nice if the armor tooltip showed the increase for skills/buffs the way that defense chance does.

I've run a few more missions (almost exclusively moderate or abundant) and these seem to be either unchanged from prior to 1.2 or showing slightly increased returns. Unfortunately, my sample size for moderate and abundant yield slicing lockbox missions is quite low. Your comments regarding Rich missions almost describe the way it was prior to 1.2 generally speaking and based on my experiences. These missions (rich and bountiful yield) would be negative or offer very small profits. The crits were what kept them profitable. Since patch 1.2, the low end on these missions seems to have dropped considerably. Based on the level of loss I was seeing, I don't really want to just take my chances that after several tries I'll get a crit that will bring my average profit into positive territory. I'm skeptical that would even happen considering the apparent changes as they would have had to increased the crit yield significantly to make up for the scale of losses I have noted.

The Stasis skill description indicates that increases armor by 20%. When I take this skill with approximately 4800 armor, I get approximately 400 armor. I believe 20% of 4800 is 960. Am I missing something?

UPDATE: The response below was received. It appears that slicing lockbox mission returns may have been significantly reduced. Is this intended? I'm not trying to start another debate about the returns. I'm only trying to determine if these changes are intended. If so, may we have some additional information regarding the extent of the changes and the reasoning behind them? Were returns lowered in general or maximum and minimum changed to increase the spread, etc. I track my mission returns (not just for slicing) and while I've only received results for a few missions since the 1.2 patch they have all been the lowest I've ever seen without a failure. Some of my sample sizes for individual missions are in excess of 100. I've seen the drop in missions in multiple tiers. As an example, Finding Our Way costs 1,930 credits, since 1.2 I've gotten returns of 1063, 1071, and 719. Prior to 1.2 my lowest return was 1440. Across my samples (again in excess of 100 for this particular mission) I only have a few less than 1600 and those are all pretty old.

Absolutely great! I loved the videos!

I was not pleased when I read the post this morning regarding the upcoming patch which is scheduled from 9 am to 1 pm on a Saturday. Once again, the servers are coming down at a time when many Europeans will be wanting to play. Please, please stop taking European servers down at times when large numbers of Europeans want to play on them. I think the scheduling of downtime has been unfair to all Europeans, but especially in in the CET time zone or those further east. Scheduled maintenance windows often appear to run from 9 am to 5pm for CET. The further east you get, the worse it gets in my opinion. Below is a list of European countries which use the CET time zone. Many players in these countries are losing significant amounts of playtime compared to US customers simply due to your business practices. Please provide scheduled downtime for European servers which occurs at the same local times as it does for those in US time zones. Albania Andorra Austria Belgium Bosnia-Herzegovina Croatia Czech Republic Denmark (mainland) France Germany Gibraltar Holy See/Vatican City Hungary Italy Kosovo Liechtenstein Luxembourg Macedonia, Republic of Malta Monaco Montenegro Netherlands Norway Poland San Marino Serbia Slovakia Slovenia Spain - except Canary Islands, which are on WET/WEST Sweden Switzerland

The thing which most bothers me most about this issue is that I have not even seen an acknowledgement of it from BioWare. As someone else pointed out, people are generally unlikely to be aware of it until they have tried to RE something unsuccessfully enough times that they get fed up and look for information. This is an issue which can cause people to waste significant amounts of resources/credits and as far as I can tell BioWare isn't even admitting that it's a bug. I'm pretty sure there are some items which can't be RE'ed. Couldn't they disable RE for these until the issue were fixed?

I was looking for this thread amongst the stickies today and couldn't find it. Why did they unsticky it? I started thinking I was looking in the wrong place or I'd imagined that it had every happened in the first place. edit: Also, has anyone ever seen a rich grade 2 underworld metals mission? I've tried repeatedly to get one to show up with no luck. I get rich grade 2 underworld fabric missions and I can do up to grade 4 missions.

I've had failures on yellow missions prior to skill level 400.

When I started RE'ing low level green items, I'd just queue up 5 different items and wait until they were all done. Once they were done, I would re them and then add a new green to the my queue of 5 when I successfully got all of the upgraded schematics for an item. At the lowest level of armstech weapons (those usable at level 9), I started with the misc weapons and worked my up the list. I got all blues for everything other than the virbroknife and shotgun without seeing a single upgrade for either of those. I also randomly tried upgrading a few higher levels in these two weapon types with no success. At this point, I'm assuming that it isn't possible to re upgrades for these until I hear that they've been fixed.

I'm only just now about to hit 400 in Slicing, but I've never seen rich yield lockbox missions in the 33-40 range. If you look at the spreadsheet provided by pdxmarbos in the thread linked below, you'll also notice an absence of those missions which leads me to believe that others aren't ever seeing them as well. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=72970 edit: For those unfamiliar with the issue, I don't believe the OP is talking about how some missions may disappear for a little while after running them. Rich yield lockbox missions appear that they are never available for this bracket.