Test of Repair Costs

Has nothing to do with the issue at hand, but yet another blunder on their part involving UT trading missions. Any UT item of the first two tiers is hugely inflated. No doubt its a problem yet unresolved, just not this particular problem.

As Darth pointed out, we are seeing sweeping deflation occurring, and occurring exponentially since the release of the most recent packs and the flooding of "junk" armor into the game.

Ya know I was really believing his BS until Akamo said this:

"P.S. As of this posting i just bought my fifth cargo hold for 2 million credits...just saying! "

He has NO idea how to make money or save money with this type of post. Full account wide cargo hold goes for 300k(MAX, seen for little less than 200k too) on the GTN, why would anyone with even half a brain spend full boat on 1 character's 5th cargo-hold?

All I know as tank I spent over 200K in repairs attempting to pub tank Xeno Hard mode 16man and 8man. Our group could not get it together seemed. not enough DPS on the Cube and i would get zapped one hit kill and a huge repair bill to boot. That is incentive for me to keep trying to Tank Xeno NOT!!!!

Over time a f2p market will cause inflation. Key word is over time. Of course you can argue the now because it is subtle. But it is there. I'll copy this forum and wait the next 3-4 years of the game and post this up again. Either in my correctness or my complete wrongness. As I've said I've played F2P games over years that had the same baseline. Make their money off of a cash shop. And guess what? The inflation occured. Just a couple examples, Knight Online. Try buying an Iron Bow +7 which is at best mediocre and mid gamish, for 700million in game currency. That's after 8-9 years of their f2p model cash shop. I played at the start when the same weapon went for 150-200k. Another example, Legend of Ares, which ended up dieing because of how inflated their economy got because of the cash shop, and no new players came to the game because you legit need to spend real life money to do anything in game. What you are failing to see is that this model mixes in an uncontrolled variable. When someone has the money to purchase something in the cash, like say 389472834283456 cartel packs and sells those 4395436836453765 cartel packs then they make a crazy amount of money. When others open those cartel packs they can get an item that instantly grants them a crazy amount of credits, meaning more and more people have millions and millions. If you just think its the stab thing you are pretty wrong. They took a survey of how many people had over 10 million credits when the game was 5-6 months old and that was like 1% of the populations and like .02 % of them had over 20 mill. And now? I bet you will see 10% of the population with over 20 mil. and a good portion of the population with over 2 million credits (which is good money). The more money people have the more they will be willing to spend for stupid items, like say terenthium. Which I can sell easy for 10k for a stack of 10.

I'm bumping this thread because I've added an important (at least I think it is) update!

I tested the medium armor Recruit Gear chest, with some interesting results (see table, page 1).

I advise every fresh 50 (who needs to save money) to use the FREE Recruit Gear instead of the FREE Tionese.

The difference in repair cost is HUGE!

That is just asinine.

Either the people coding the repair algorithm don't have a clue, or there are some shoddy lines of code in the repair cost calculation routine.

Love the analysis, OP. If you get a chance (and feel like spending the creds, natch), I'd be curious to see the test with a higher-level orange piece to see how the repair cost scales (or if it stays at the same ratio against the sale price).

Already done:

Lvl 11 crafted orange boots (110/120): sale price 170, cost to repair 14

Lvl 40 orange boots (110/120): sale price 1720, cost repair 143.

All mods were ripped from these. The ratio of cost of repair/sale price = 0.08 in both cases. It all depends on the resale value of the shell to a vendor. Go with the orange shell with the cheapest resale value, which generally means very low lvl crafted orange gear.

Exactly - thanks for the addition, tdgesq!

You're mistaking correlation for causation. ANY mmo will develop inflation whether they have a f2p market or not (unless the gold sinks are finely tuned) because there are lots of ways to create credits out of thin air (dailies, killing mobs, looting chests). In this particular f2p set up, the cartel market items cannot be sold to vendors (which would create credits) but instead are sold to other players. That's a transfer of credits, not credit creation (and to be technical, it's a gold sink if they use the GTN as the game takes a fee out of the transaction, ergo a net loss to the amount of credit in the game). The credit faucets are the cause of inflation (too many credits being created), not the transfers of wealth among players.

Edited: And TotalTrash, your testing is much appreciated. (Sorry for semi-derailing the thread :\)