I wanted to take a moment and let you all know of some exciting changes coming to the Cartel Market with the release of Knights of the Fallen Empire.

 

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Interesting changes, not sure how I feel about the new system with Packs, but willing to see how it plays out.

• All items from Cartel Reputation vendors that are not specific to that reputation will be removed. These items are still available in their respective Grand Packs.
  

What items is this bullet referring to? Is this talking about items like the Thana Vesh set currently for sale on the Bounty Supply Company vendor?

 

Also:

• The current list of available direct sale items will be pruned down quite a bit.
  

Are new copies of these items going to be unobtainable? Or are they all being moved over to the Bronze / Silver / Gold Packs?

 

EDIT: Nevermind the second question - I see now that it says the Bronze / Silver / Gold will include "items from all existing (pack and direct sale)" sources.

Edited October 1, 2015 by DarthDymond

Tait do you have a list of:

 

"The current list of available direct sale items will be pruned down quite a bit." That will be pruned or kept?

I saw no mention of where in the drop table Cartel Certificates might be. Just curious if a Cartel Cert is considered the "big ticket" item of the 2 items, or will it be in the slot of the companion gift, or are they being removed / implemented in a different fashion.

Ugh, was hoping for more, not less direct sale stuff.

What about the prices ? You reduce the number of objects per pack, do you also reduce the price of the pack ? Idem for hyper pack

 

Also what about certifications ? Only available in old packs ? How will it work for decoration with certifications ?

 

thank you for an answer Tait !

I saw no mention of where in the drop table Cartel Certificates might be. Just curious if a Cartel Cert is considered the "big ticket" item of the 2 items, or will it be in the slot of the companion gift, or are they being removed / implemented in a different fashion.

In the same vein, will there be additional Reputations added for the new Shipments? Will the "Monthly Packs" still be organized into 5-Pack 'Shipments' (or some variation thereof)?

Edited October 1, 2015 by DarthDymond

It sounds that we will get far more items on the GTN because they will be available from the permanent RNG packs. Good. That overpriced decorations or armors that increase in price from 100k to 10 mil after they are removed from the CM won't be an issue anymore.

In the same vein, will there be additional Reputations added for the new Shipments? Will the "Monthly Packs" still be organized into 5-Pack 'Shipments' (or some variation thereof)?

Agreed. My suggestion would be for the pack to be 3 items. 1 "big ticket", 1 Reputation / Cartel Cert, 1 companion gift.

Edited October 1, 2015 by azudelphi

The only annoying thing with the current cartel pack contents is the useless experience boosts. I like the cartel reputation items and jawa scraps from the current packs and I think they added a good value to the packs. I also think cartel reputation was a good incentive for buying alot of packs, so I'm disappointed these particular items are being removed.

 

More direct sales and the other changes sound great.

some of these changes are good, others aren't.

 

I dislike, highly, that you're removing direct sale stuff, there's no reason to remove a lot of that stuff, nand all it does it screw over new players, or force us to spend 50 dollars in 6 months in a "LIMITED TIME RARE SALE!"

 

I also find the removal of items from the cartel rep store...... unsastifactory. the way I see it some of that stuff was a nice "well you spend a gajillion dollars we'll make sure you get sure fire access to X"

Edited October 1, 2015 by BrianDavion

I'm wondering about cartel certs, are they going away, are they somehow in the two pack system, and if they are leaving, what happens to items that cost them?

 

Also, cost in general had better be lower than the current packs, especially how they've been creeping up in price lately. Also... do titles have a home in the new system?

Edited October 1, 2015 by Maullum

I'm wondering about cartel certs, are they going away, are they somehow in the two pack system, and if they are leaving, what happens to items that cost them?

 

Also, cost in general had better be lower than the current packs, especially how they've been creeping up in price lately. Also... do titles have a home in the new system?

 

and if cartel certs are being removed in general from the equation what about those of us with a considerable stockpile of them?

I'm also curious about the prices, right now you pay 250 cartel coins for one pack you get 5 things. 2 actual items, and 3 misc things (jawa junk, Cartel rep, companion gear). Since that is going away, and we are now only getting 1 actual item and one crafting thing or companion gift, are you going to lower the cost of the packs? Because honestly I'm not going to pay 250 cartel coins for a RNG pack of one piece of junk and the chance to get one item that MIGHT be a gold level item. To me this sounds like a huge rippoff.

Uh, thanks for the info? I guess?

 

I'm not a fan of the current pack-based micro-transaction system. Paying money to roll the dice is total ********. If it were accompanied by all items being available for direct sale but you having the chance to get want you want cheaper if you get lucky in a pack then I'd be more accepting of this practice. But instead you're going full steam ahead with the pack system and actually reducing what little focus there already is on direct sales!

 

You've got an exploitative system currently in place for your micro-transactions and you are not improving it, simply tweaking the same system. You'll get no thanks from me for that. And don't get me started on the fact you've released armour sets in the past (and presumably in the future) where some pieces of armour were rarer than others! That is mobile gaming next level dickery.

 

I am not against buying in game items for real money. Not even close. If items I wanted were available for direct sale I'd be happy to buy them as long as they weren't at Warframe levels of overpriced. Hell, even then I would probably buy occasionally. But I've never gotten anything from a pack that I actually wanted, it has all come from the GTN.

 

Thanks to my past experiences with the pack system I will only buy items for direct sale. So by cutting back on that system, which you barely use currently, you will be ensuring I don't partake in micro-transactions. I hope the whales guzzling down hypercrates and farting them out onto the GTN keep you in business.

Edited October 1, 2015 by Estarc

Great changes but for gods sake can I just buy the item I want to buy directly like, I don't know, EVERY STORE in the world! Enough with the packs! I don't care if you charge quadruple the price it would be in order for me to buy the item I want directly but it would be worth it to save up for that item.

All items from Cartel Reputation vendors that are not specific to that reputation will be removed. These items are still available in their respective Grand Packs.

 

Wait a minute. Contraband Resale is all about items that are not specific to that reputation. There are two vendors, one that sells rare items from the pack itself, and the one that sells lvl 43 artifact chest pieces that are not worth the credits or effort.

Edited October 1, 2015 by Gamazson

If the amount of stuff I get from packs is going down from like 5 to 2 (at least the regular XP boosts and certs had some use), the price of each pack had better be reduced as well. I'm frankly not pleased about how this is looking, as it'll be such a gamble to purchase one of the item packs (armor, weapons, etc.) and hope that I get the one thing I want out of the thousand that are in it (Like seriously, ***?).

 

Also, why on earth would you want to remove stuff from the reputation vendors that some of us put so much money into leveling? That's just a huge slap in the face. Not pleased with these changes one bit.

Until you release more slot machines for the different cartel reputations, and maybe also ease off the nerf on the Contraband Slot Machine just a tad bit, I'm not too interested. Or maybe if you want to give us the option to purchase legacy-wide gear unlocks with credits (instead of just cartel coins), then I'll be onboard.

 

Pack Embargos – When a monthly pack is removed from the Cartel Market, it is unlikely to return to the market in that form. However, the specific items that are found in that pack are all automatically placed in their corresponding Bronze, Silver or Gold Pack. Ex: The Example pack launches on September 1st with an example mount. On September 1st, you can also now get the Example mount out of the Silver and Gold Mount packs. On October 1st, the Example pack is embargoed from the Cartel Market, however, the Example mount will remain available in the Silver and Gold packs for the rest of time.

So...does this mean that we'll only have a month to build reputation with a vendor?

 

All items from Cartel Reputation vendors that are not specific to that reputation will be removed. These items are still available in their respective Grand Packs.

That's a load of zeldrate dung. As an above poster observed, the whole point of those items being thus available was to reward those who bought loads of packs, even if they had bad luck with RNG. Bad change, cancel it.

 

Man, it's like BioWare is doing its best to make sure KotFE drives me away from this game. I've subbed since pre-launch early access, and I've enjoyed playing SWTOR. But the absolutely idiotic changes to Troopers, the mind-boggling decision to force downscaling on everyone, the removal of enjoyable content (RIP hardmare EV & KP), and now EA's money-grubbing fingerprints all over the Cartel Market might just be enough to make me quit playing.

"All items from Cartel Reputation vendors that are not specific to that reputation will be removed. These items are still available in their respective Grand Packs."

 

Absolutely horrible change. I managed to max out my CM reputations for specific items: throne, masks, Morlinger Aggressor, etc...

 

Why the hell would you take this away from people who already went to the trouble of maxing rep? I understand the desire to not put any more items from packs on future rep vendors since they'll be available in the gold/silver/bronze packs, but this is just punishing people who sunk a lot of credits/CC into their reps.

 

Do not institute this change. Totally unacceptable to do to people.

Edited October 1, 2015 by Millardkillmoore

Even if I didn't take part in the Rep grind, I think it uncool to take away the items people may be after who did engage in this rep. grind. Why not just add them to the pack and have them on the vendor for those who reached max.

 

Question

 

As other have asked are the price going down since you taking away items?

What about cartel certificates and the items "decorations etc" that you use them to buy?

Will this devalue items on the GTN? One of the best ways to make credits is to get the items from packs, hold on to them for a few months until they are not available, then sale for massive (relatively) credits. but if everything is available on the cartel market there will be no need to buy them on the GTN. But I guess people may just want to spend credits instead of CC. Over all this sounds like positive changes, can't wait to see how it all plays out!

To the poster above, at first it sound good, but from what I understand all the gold decoration will be in one pack. Think about all the gold "decoration" that have been released till this day. Say there is one decoration you want out of the let say there is a 100 gold decoration 1/100 and it will only get worse with each new pack. Mind you I could be wrong and they might divided them into Gold Grand Pack decoration shipment one, two etc. but from what I understand all of it goes into one massive pack. If this is the case your odd won't be good at all and it will actual make thing harder to get after the pack go away. As the reason some of the items remain affordable is because people continue to by large amounts of packs when they come back. I think they are making it sound like well have better odd when they are making it in truth harder (making you have to go directed buy when they do there limited sale), but as I said I could be wrong. Edited October 1, 2015 by SithEmpress

Typo alert!

We will occasionally bring pack highly sought after pack items

As someone who buys hypercrates regularly I would also like to hear what is going to happen with jawa junk, cartel certificates and reputation items.

 

I like all of the changes but am confused and a little wary of the pack contents being reduced so drastically.