The game is being exploited by multi boxing programs. These programs are used to run 15 to 20 accounts per computer. They then use a third party program to automate one of the accounts and then the multi boxing program sends the same mouse movements and keystrokes to all the other accounts running on the computer.
This method was used to create tons of credits from treasure hunting lockbox missions which are now fixed but the exploiters just moved their hundreds of accounts on to the next best thing which are slicing lockbox missions and vendoring the items. The slicing lockbox missions give them about 40% of the profit that they got from exploiting treasure hunting lockboxes.
The following changes must be made to fix this.
(Fix number one)
Remove all credit generation from crewskills. Crewskills should generate items not credits. This way it is impossible to cause inflation.
(Fix number two)
The timing on crewskill missions should be increased, at least for new crewskills. When the new grade 10 missions are added to the game they should require around 20 minutes for every grade 10 mission at maximum affection.
The developers who made the decision to massively reduce the mission times did not understand that the system was designed around a time gating of the crewskill items. Developers who made the decision to reduce the time gate by around 95% and did not understand that it was designed this way on purpose to protect the economy and the value of crewskill items.
(Fix number three)
One change that would make it harder for the multi boxing program is to randomize the order of the missions in the crewskill mission window. This would make their method more difficult since it relies on all the game accounts showing the same options on each screen when they open the crewskill mission list.
The crewskill mission list used to be in a somewhat random order because in the past not all missions were available all the time. The developers who made the decision to change this probably did not understand that the randomness of the mission list was done intentionally to prevent this sort of mass exploitation by multi boxing programs.
(Fix number four)
Swtor only allows one account to be connected per computer at a time. Anyone doing otherwise is using a third party program to get around this limit and violating the EULA. Every computer in the world has something called a mac address. The developers should notice things such as multiple accounts running from the same mac address at the same time and flag them for investigation. They would soon discover that almost all of them are bots.
If the developers monitor this they would start noticing things such as 15 different accounts all connected at the same time with the same mac address means 100% that this person is exploiting the game.
Multi boxing programs is also the method used by the credit spammers to level up characters to spam on the fleet. Noticing and banning multiple accounts connected through the same mac address at the same time would eliminate nearly all credit spammers.
Normal players would not be affected by any of this because they only connect to the game with one account at a time.
In conclusion, it looks like what has happened to the economy of the game is that the original developers of the game made some good decisions about how the crewskill system should work to avoid exploitation by multi boxing programs. The original developers probably intentionally added things such as long timers for the missions and randomness of the order of the missions to prevent exploitation on a mass scale.
Different developers came along years later and tried to give the players what they were asking for and made major changes to the crewskill system without understanding why these systems were designed this way in the first place to protect the economy and the value of crewskill items. Even a seemingly innocent change such as displaying all missions in the mission list in the same order had a huge negative impact on the economy as it makes it perfect for a multi boxing exploiter to take advantage of it to create massive inflation.
