It works for some and not for others apparently. It's like the Smuggler "Bowdaar is missing" bug you can read up on in the customer service thread. Some people are just fine, Others have a bug that can't be fixed for god knows how long. I'm thinking the devs aren't finding the error in the coding that's causing bugs like that - and personally I think it's either a file corruption on the character server side (Character Server - the beast that is a hellish fiend only comparable to the account server) or it's actually a client side bug. ((Bowdaar is most likely a corruption issue on the Character Server, this datacron I think is client side.)) This is just my opinion on the matter though.

First off, I will like to state I am not here to troll anyone or start fights against anyone here. Now I play on the imperial side most of the time and have noticed endgame content bugs out and normally corrects around server maintenance time (when the servers are rebooted). This normally means players are doing something and giving up on the mission Poisonous Strategy comes to mind with how the items you use come up with the error "Object is currently busy". What this might suggest is players are using the boxes to do the mission, dying, and giving up. The boxes stay locked to that player until the mobs are killed - but the mobs despawn over time. SO the solution I have in mind as a temporary fix to bug fixes until the teams come up with ideas to do this without it. Set up the servers to reboot at a given time when they aren't busy for that area either daily or every other day. This will also help with server/client latency issues. At most the server down time would be what....15 minutes for everything to come back up? It would help with several things until everything is fixed.

I just noticed that - I got used to tuesday mornings and just woke up....so meeeeh.

I noticed no updates to this and the servers weren't taken down last night, so if this was moved to a different day/time, can you at least tell us when the servers will be going down? I believe we have a right to know when the servers are going down for several hours in advanced.

Irony has it, they could also improve the testing done if they were to leave the test server running while the live servers go down on top of this. Gives people something to do if they are awake when servers are down.

Problem with series of shot testing is I was testing on level 1-2 mobs on Hutta to prevent issues with armoring and shielding. Combining with one hitting them, a 15 second cool down, and a reduced crit rate from removing gear that boosted surge (also boosting crit), You end up getting a very long time testing the skill. But irony has it my numbers started balancing out during this last test. I can run the test a few more times later on, just need to find something that survives past the first hit. Edit: Agreed with Above

I'm actually looking at changes to crit damage with OUT surge being factored in

Note: Removing Surge gear removes crit rate, so this took longer then I expected while remaining unbuffed. After getting 25 of each noncrit and crit hit on Overload, Snipe, and Series of Shots - this was the best I could do to remain on "white damage" that was mentioned earlier Since I don't feel like making a mile long post - I'm going to input this into a google document and link people to it, I'll summarize the findings here though Overload Shot Lowest Hit Non-Crit: 798 Highest Hit Non-Crit: 863 Lowest Hit Crit: 1199 Highest Hit Crit: 1291 Average Damage Non-Crit: 831.24 Average Damage Crit: 1245.44 Average Gain From Crits: 49.83% (Maybe I was unlucky on my original test) Snipe Lowest Hit Non-Crit: 1338 Highest Hit Non-Crit: 1483 Lowest Hit Crit: 2006 Highest Hit Crit: 2164 Average Damage Non-Crit: 1393.24 Average Damage Crit: 2080.16 Average Gain From Crits: 49.3% Series of Shots Lowest Hit Non-Crit: 681 Highest Hit Non-Crit: 732 Lowest Hit Crit: 1189 Highest Hit Crit: 1296 Average Damage Non-Crit: 704.4 Average Damage Crit: 1252.88 Average Gain From Crits: 77.86% (I actually saw some diminished return here without surge) The link to my numbers is: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkSzpXHuY73VdHhHeURma3FmZDJzWnppS3Q4QTZ3OHc

Accurate and hellish on me personally. ~.~

While this idea is somewhat solid, and I plan to do this eventually, removing my surge gear also means removing my critical gear in most cases, which in turn is more time to test this. I'll do 20 noncrits and 20 crits on the same three skills. Any other things you feel I should test while I'm at it to help prove something is off with the diminishing returns? I'm open to suggestions

Yes, I took a shot and then wrote down how much I physically hit for off level 2 mobs on Hutta.

I was going off average values for my math work on that because of the variance in damage you have normally. Focusing on the lowest hit I can do without gear in multiple slots to disprove my theory isn't helping me going "the returns feel steep"

Alright, I removed all gear that boosts critical damage and ran some tests for this. For reference, I'm a marksman speced Sniper and ran these tests to see if there is diminishing returns on critical damage in general First skill I tested this on, was Overload shot - quick and easy enough to test when you are one hitting what you are testing on. My averages will be posted here, I'll add actual numbers into spoilers for you guys. Overload Non-critical hits: Total of 7 for an average of 826.71 damage Overload Critical Hits: Total of 4 for an average of 1216 Damage Going off the averages of both values - I'm looking at a 47.08 crit damage multiplier Next up I used Snipe to get larger numbers and more crits to test the numbers with Snipe non-critical hits: Total 7 for an average damage of 1399.71 Snipe critical hits: Total of 6 for an average damage of 2063.83 Average of Increase came out to be about 47.44% Both of these should be at 50% with a 0 surge rating - so I'm losing somewhere around 3% off base values. Next we hit Series of Shots - This has +30% critical hit damage from Imperial Assassin, so the crits are more easily noticed - Now testing this on Hutta when i'm level 50 was taking some time due to only getting one shot off before the enemy died on me. - should be averaging around 80% critical hit damage Series of Shots Non-critical damage: at 9 hits, averages around 706 damage Series of Shots Critical Damage: at 4 hits came out at an average of 1182 damage This comes out to be roughly a 67.42% increase in damage from criticials Note these tests are with a 0 surge rating, meaning the base critical hit multiplier of 50% should be applying to these values. Imperial Assassin raises critical hit damage for Takedown, Series of Shots, and Followthrough by 6% per rank, max of 5 ranks (What I have). These are unbuffed values as well, so I'll let any of you confirm my math, but diminishing returns are hitting too steep for something only supposed to be hitting off the "surge rating"

deleting post out of stupidity, need to test on something else....sorry - tough day

The irony of this is I'm shocked this wasn't mentioned. From what I've been told, the surge diminishing returns will also affect skills which have similar wording to "Increases Crit Damage by x%". If this is true, then as a marksman sniper, Yes, I am heavily effected by this because now the skill that I spent my points on to give my snipe crits more damage, is actually wasted points because of this "Re-balancing" I could understand effecting surge by itself, but if the crit damage + skill tree are also effected, that would be why the OP is complaining about sniper/gunslinger nerfing with this is because we rely not only on surge, but also on the tree bonuses for crit damage.