Badly needed - great tool to quickly find groups, versus sitting on the space station with nothing to do while the group fills - not like you can keep running quests while sending chats in general in the fleet.

It would be a great benefit for people who want to continue adventuring while trying to find groups for Flashpoints - I created a custom channel on the Shadow Hand server called "Lfg" and will work on getting the word out but not sure how effective that will be. Just want to have the ability to keep working on quests while waiting for the flashpoint to fill.

Sorry - while I can appreciate the frustration (and I really wish the results were worse so the people impacted by this nerf would have more justification for need to reverse it)- my testing results are completely different: 34 missions from 3 toons - there could be some variance based on the difference in companions, the level of the experience from the mission (some are grey, green, yellow, orange), the actual level of the skill (varied from 400 to 150) and maybe some other X factor (that I am failing to consider) but here is how it is shaking out so far. Overall PROFIT 5.69% (1,575 credits); which breaks up: (a) Rich Missions LOSS 1.34% (-185 credits) (b) Abundant Missions PROFIT 8.78% (934 credits) © Moderate Missions PROFIT 25.45%(826 credits). By the way, the Rich and Abundant Missions produced NO schematics or mission discoveries, while the Moderate Class 2 missions cited above produced two. As I said in a previous post, my concern is more for the mechanic of Yield versus just the nerf. The low level toon actually seems most profitable but right now the sample is so low, I am calling that conclusion is anecdotal. I am going to give it a couple of days of testing and will post an exact breakdown of all of the factors, including my tracker.

Game economics actually follow economic theory fairly accurately. To put it into perspective, slicing was raw income without producing anything of value other than capital (with rare exceptions when it would drop a schematic or mission discovery). In developed economies this is known as capital gains. The reason for the nerf was that we saw inflation go through the roof (which is what happens when capital out values goods produced). The effect of the nerf (after things settle down) will be that inflation will decrease (people will think twice before dropping 10K on something, but will purchase the same item for 1K for example) so the amount of capital in the economy will go down. This is not a bad thing in itself but economics is complicated. There is another factor, which will cause some problems. If the fixed cost of production (the amount of money it costs for gathering missions of components for blue and purple items) remains the same, plus the taxes (the cost to train skills / buy things from game vendors) also remain the same, people will be less inclined to invest in crafting (they will need their money for important things like training skills or maybe the occasional purchase of a speeder), which will cause what basically is a recession and a lower GINI Coefficient (value of income distribution – more poor people and less wealthy ones but the wealthy will be much wealthier). Economic theory predicts that we will see more people willing to accept wearing slightly worse gear they get from quests, versus purchasing the blue enhancement just about every level, which will drive the production of the blue enhancements even further down, which will lower income for those crafters, make the few items produced by those who can afford to manufacture them more expensive, and so on. One way to avoid that will be for Bioware (which is the government entity in this context) to either lower taxes or to come up with some sort of a subsidy (which is what Franklin D. Roosevelt had to do following the Great Depression) to allow those with little capital to survive. This is actually very similar with what we are dealing with in the real world, where we saw a “booming” economy of capital gains and double digit inflation of the 1980s, followed by policies in the 1990s in an effort to correct that, and the global recession which has hit all of us in the late 2000s. While people might not like this and flame on it - economics is economics, whether you are dealing in Dollars, Euros, Yen or virtual currency. While I am not sure that we will see direct welfare (something like every player sitting below 20K in their bank receiving a game email with 10K credits) we have seen subsidies in other games through various dynamics (increase in legendary item drop rates in LOTRO and world node frequencies; grind obtainable purple gear in WOW; etc.). I am sure we will see either game wide subsidies in SWTOR to offset the economic effect of this nerf if it becomes needed, or even some subsidies for slicers like an increase in world slicing nodes. Unfortunately subsidies cause other problems (especially the displeasure of the rich, which could have obtained those things without the welfare), so it becomes a rather interesting balancing act. There is an old joke. What is the difference between an economist and a used car sales man? The used car sales man knows when he is lying. While I don’t think I will ever hear a response from the devs on this somewhat philosophical topic, I would love to find out if there was some internal meeting or discussion at Bioware, where someone pulled out their old college economics text book when considering how to address the issue of slicing (like I had to do when thinking about this) and what effect this will have on the game. I actually love this stuff so while I did lose some of my income I look forward to figuring out how to make what we have work. More of concern to me is the mechanics behind the nerf and how they will affect other gathering skills. For all gathering professions, the yield was an important factor on the quality and quantity of the return. This seems to now be broken at least for slicing. I am not sure about other skills at this point but am concerned about them. What I am seeing consistently is that the Yield (Moderate, Abundant, Bountiful, Rich, Prosperous and Wealthy), is no longer appears correlated to the return in either the amount of credits you receive from the box, nor the schematic / mission discovery. I have started doing some economic modeling and it looks like the amount of yield is no longer reflected by what type of mission you run. I could be wrong but I am not quite seeing the algorithm behind the returns for slicing, which are very apparent for other crafting professions. Basically - right now my modeling is based on a very small sample (34 missions from 3 toons) and there could be some variance based on the difference in companions, the level of the experience from the mission (some are grey, green, yellow, orange), the actual level of the skill (varied from 400 to 150) and maybe some other X factor (that I am failing to consider) but here is how it is shaking out so far. Overall PROFIT 5.69% (1,575 credits); which breaks up: (a) Rich Missions LOSS 1.34% (-185 credits) (b) Abundant Missions PROFIT 8.78% (934 credits) © Moderate Missions PROFIT 25.45%(826 credits). By the way, the Rich and Abundant Missions produced NO schematics or mission discoveries, while the Moderate Class 2 missions cited above produced two. Over the next couple of weeks I will continue modeling this with additional data providing clarity as far as the some of the variances that I described, but I would be curious to hear from the devs if in their opinion the yield mechanics are performing as designed or if there seems to be some flaw in game logic.

Actually - something is reseting them but the timer might be way to long. Today I was able to hit a node that I reported was frozen yesterday.

Yea - they really need to fix that.