Games are supposed to be fun, and "no free money" are real life nonsense slurs you need to take away from these forums.

"you need to save money and skip as much crafting/buying till 50, you'll learn if you play more MMO's"

Matter of the fact is, you either picked slicing or you didn't.

If you didn't, the only way to get through the game is indeed do the normal skip content routine or you'd be be out of luck by level 25 and you wanted your first mount if at level 18 you spend your 15K at that time on running enough missions and crafting to get some blue/purple gear.

If you did have slicing, and were also following the regular skip content/save up routine, you'd indeed end up with a load of leftover money by level 25.

If you didn't pick slicing, you should have at around level 15-20 started dabbling in your crafting deeper with the refreshing RE system in game, and list some of that blue/purple gear at 5-10-20K prices so by level 25 you'd have sold a couple to leave you with enough to buy your skills.

If you did pick slicing, you should have maybe at around level 15-20 started spending some of your money on the AH on either resources or equipment at proper prices.

Reason slicing got nerfed?

Player mindset, nothing to do with a broken game system, if anything, they should have made the game itself harder* so people were forced to not "skip content till level 50".

*by harder I mean, for example have a flashpoint with a level cap of 22 that gives a special title/achievement/whatever, but pretty much requires all 4 to be in second tier RE gear at level 20 to complete.

The best possible missions gave 115C/min. These missions were not always available. Sure if you said you were on 24/7 with this income you would make 800K a day. But realistically you made about 30-100k a day. This is not a lot of money in this game.

So slicing give money, but you also lacked the ability to craft anything useful since picking up slicing pretty much nerfed you in any crafting profession since slicing would take up a valuable gathering skill needed. This meant if you wanted to craft you had to buy a lot of materials which would outweight the profit gained from slicing.

So slicing was a profession for those who wanted to make easy money. Crafters still make a whole lot more money in the AH. I can easily make 200k a day selling materials and items I've crafted.