Repair Cost Adjustment

[Arlee]

Originally Posted by SWTOR

Hi everyone,

Thank you all for your feedback on the changes to repair costs introduced with Game Update 1.7. Upon review, we agree with you that repair costs did become too high with this latest Game Update. To that end, we will be making a change to how these repair costs are calculated, starting with our next scheduled maintenance. Repair costs will now be calculated based on the combined value of all the mods installed in the shell, excluding the value of the shell itself. Players will see a noticeable reduction immediately after the change goes in.

Additionally, we’d like to apologize for the inconvenience that we introduced.

As a thank you for your patience during this time, we will also be reducing ALL repair costs by 50% once the aforementioned change goes in with the next scheduled maintenance. This will last all the way through until early access to Rise of the Hutt Cartel launches.

Your feedback is important to us, and we hope that this resolution alleviates the repair costs concerns. Thanks again for your patience.

(Source)

[Deleted]

Good. It was stupid how lvl 50+ shells were inflating repair prices beyond any reasonable limit (I wasn't affected much since I only use 2 Tionese pieces ATM, the rest is lvl 30-ish orange shells, but people who used full Tionese/Black Hole/Dread Guard etc were hit really hard)

What I don't get is why 50% repair reduction is supposed to only last till ROTHC. Unless it will simply make repairs ridiculously cheap (next to none) as a way to make up for high repairs since 1.7

[RoninaThorstone]

So forcing people to do an insane amount of dailies a week to keep up with repair bills wasn't "fun and engaging" for the community? I am shocked and disturbed!

Also, yeah. Till the expansion? That's concerning. They are either going to further inflate credits per value which will be even worse for the CM and unlocks like artifact authorization.

Extremely concerning.

[Kelimbror]

Extremely concerning.

Had similar thoughts actually. Wasn't sure why that change was even pushed to live as simple math would have shown it's going to be problematic for just about every ranged of player other than people who primarily play the GTN for their 'content'.

That's the problem with putting all of the potential sinks as cash shop items, having an overabundant supply of them available from gamble box addicts which drives the prices down very low, and having the credit cap for F2P be so low. It puts a weird net on the GTN, not really allowing prices to inflate to remove excess credits from individuals.

Honestly they should spend some more time developing the legacy and more sinks for credits instead of funneling everything through the cash shop. Just more proof that the bottom line is more important than the player experience.

[Deleted]

We may agree they went a bit far on this gold sink, but having something, anything ingame to prevent or at least dampen mudflation is a good thing. I can make ~250k/day by pvp-ing very casually and I'm sure there are people making tons more.

[RoninaThorstone]

We may agree they went a bit far on this gold sink, but having something, anything ingame to prevent or at least dampen mudflation is a good thing. I can make ~250k/day by pvp-ing very casually and I'm sure there are people making tons more.

But that is the problem. There's four components to the "economy" of swtor.

First, there's earning power. As you say, players in swtor have strong, relative to sinks, earning power.
Second, there are "sinks" like ship travel, flight paths, repairs, augmenting, vendor trade materials, skill trainers, crafting trainers, ect.
These two are controlled by Bioware through credits per quest and the prices from the sinks.
Third, the player generated market which self adjusts prices relative to earning power / sinks.
Now, when they added the cartel market / GTN they added another, fourth, dimension where F2Pers rely on it to get unlocks ingame. This paired with the credit cap is problematic. What happens when a few quests grant 350k credits? The perceived effort in getting those credits will not be worth more or equal to an unlock like artifact authorization.

While I find the "free market" idea behind the CM/GTN interaction interesting, the credit cap makes it so that the EARNING POWER needs to go down so that the value of credits increases.

Another aspect to this is that by making dailies the primary source of credits and increasing sinks you create a tread mill for players. Some people are NOT going to enjoy that.

edit: Honestly, I bet that they are trying to kill the CM/GTN trading system.

[ariakul]

After SWTOR implemented this "fix" to raise repair costs, this was the only mmo in existance (that i recall) to where you prepped by running missions to pay for repairs during the raid.
All other MMO's you prepped by getting mats to make buffs and potions, etc..................

Very happy they made this change fairly quickly. Kudos to them.

[Edge-]

They needed a gold sink, but didn't bother to look at how this method flopped with D3 implemented it some months ago.

Honestly, I think Blizzard did a great job with the Black Market AH in WoW. They need something totally optional for people that pulls huge chunks of credits out of the economy, and preferably a few smaller optional features to help keep the smaller guys from amassing too many credits.

The problem with upping repair costs if you've now made this "bleedout" feature mandatory, and that doesn't lead to happy campers. They need to keep it optional, and find a way to make it a compelling spend.

One day you'll grow up and learn from other games mistakes so you don't repeat them, BioWare Austin. One day you'll be big boy developers like all the other cool kids.

[RoninaThorstone]

One day you'll grow up and learn from other games mistakes so you don't repeat them, BioWare Austin. One day you'll be big boy developers like all the other cool kids.

Now YOU are being optimistic :P

I think they will shut down before wising up. And since they still have a lot of players (relative to what they've earned imo)... It might be a while before they wise up lol.

[Deleted]

edit: Honestly, I bet that they are trying to kill the CM/GTN trading system.

Fully agree this might play a role, possibly even might be their main plan.

A few comments on the four components you listed. One and two are obvious, skipping those.

The player generated market is as broken as it is in all MMO I ever played (minus Eve online). People lack information, understanding or both to price their offerings "correctly". You see a ton of people selling manufactured goods cheaper than the price of the materials used, especially the prices for the MK-6 thingies and starship upgrades are consistently much lower than the cost to produce these. It is also obvious that Bioware either employs no economist to consult them or is willing to prevent a meaningful (cartel market coins:credits) exchange ratio by pricing legacy unlocks and perks which can be acquired using either means completely inconsistenty.

The credit cap you mentioned is virtually meaningless. It just forces preferred players to exchange into a parallel currency (mandalorian iron or stabis) and incur minor losses doing so. In my 'main' guild (playing on two different severs) we have no problem supplying the handful of preferred players we got so for them it's no issue at all.

And to finish it off some personal opinion. I would miss being able to play the AH, it's already very limited compared to WoW; and making it impossbile to trade my pixels (credits) for more colorful pixels (mounts, pets, weapons) will not make me spend any RL money in the cartel market, it rather makes it less likely I spend money on the game at all. Secondly making dailies, combined with the reputation system, a more important part of gameplay will indeed piss some people off. Looking around in game, my uneducated guess is, people understand it as an alternative means to progress their characters and the (vast?) majority are going to accept if not even enjoy it.

[RoninaThorstone]

They needed a gold sink

They need to stop handing out gold by the hundreds of thousands. >_<

[Edge-]

They need to stop handing out gold by the hundreds of thousands. >_<

The quantity is irrelevant. It's the purchasing power that matters. SWTOR essentially functions under the same type of single denomination currency you see in Eastern games (Aion has Kinah, Tera used to have a single currency in the West but that was localized out, etc.). So millions of credits in SWTOR would actually turn into 10's/100's of gold/platinum in game with a multiple denomination system.

The quantity is simply a perception issue, not a mechanical/functional one. 100 gold/platinum in game X can have the same purchasing power as 500,000,000,000 whatevercurrency in game Y. Both have the same real value, with the only difference being how that value is displayed to users.

Since I'm not 50 I can't comment on this, but do they reward inordinate amounts of credits for certain activities compared to others? I'm not super well versed on the SWTOR in-game economy (only on general game economy theory etc.) so I can't comment 100% on how this plays out in SWTOR, only in general.

[RoninaThorstone]

The quantity is irrelevant. It's the purchasing power that matters.

I agree, but when a portion of your population has its buying power truncated by a currency cap, inflation of currency will effect them as their cap does not move with the market. So relative to the market, a F2P could end up having their maximum purchasing power halved if bioware isn't careful.

[Arlee]

What I don't get is why 50% repair reduction is supposed to only last till ROTHC. Unless it will simply make repairs ridiculously cheap (next to none) as a way to make up for high repairs since 1.7

The way I read it, they are fixing the repair costs to scale better. The 50% repair reduction is extra on top of that the make-up for the mess-up which is why it is only a limited time thing.

[Edge-]

The way I read it, they are fixing the repair costs to scale better. The 50% repair reduction is extra on top of that the make-up for the mess-up which is why it is only a limited time thing.

Now if only we knew when RotHC was coming out...or even knew anything about it >.>

[WoWGoneBad]

Since I'm not 50 I can't comment on this, but do they reward inordinate amounts of credits for certain activities compared to others? I'm not super well versed on the SWTOR in-game economy (only on general game economy theory etc.) so I can't comment 100% on how this plays out in SWTOR, only in general.

you get anywhere from 11.4k -16k creds for the dailies in Section X Ilum and /I think BH daily area too the only place with low credit amounts is ilum that i remember.

there are a few 7k cred dailies in the game in those areas too but when you consider the speed of completion for said dailies you cna make 350k creds in bout 2 1/2 to 3 hrs between the turnins and trash selling.

so at 50 it is EXTREMLY easy to get a high amount of creds on a daily basis along with the GTN minigame

[RohanV]

I think you guys are overthinking the issue. It was just a straightforward logical flaw.

Repair costs should scale with the power of the gear which scales with level. However, armor shells don't contribute to gear power. Thus they should not contribute to repair costs. When they did contribute, it produced weird values when the armor shell was greatly different than your level. Bioware has just implemented the logical fix.

The reason they did the original system was probably just that the programmer/designer just didn't see the entire implications of moddable gear, and were just treating it more or less like normal gear.

[ariakul]

you get anywhere from 11.4k -16k creds for the dailies in Section X Ilum and /I think BH daily area too the only place with low credit amounts is ilum that i remember.

there are a few 7k cred dailies in the game in those areas too but when you consider the speed of completion for said dailies you cna make 350k creds in bout 2 1/2 to 3 hrs between the turnins and trash selling.

so at 50 it is EXTREMLY easy to get a high amount of creds on a daily basis along with the GTN minigame

What other MMO had you do dailies though just to cover repair costs for raiding?

In WOW, I went fishing and gathering resources to make food and flasks for our raids. I never once did dailies hoping it was going to cover my raid repair costs as prep work.

[notorious98]

An easy credit sink solution, to me, would be, let's say, 10 million credits gets you 100 CC. This is just an example and could definitely be tweaked and it would only benefit subscribers who are already getting free coins every month anyway.

---------- Post added 2013-02-20 at 02:09 PM ----------

I think you guys are overthinking the issue. It was just a straightforward logical flaw.

Repair costs should scale with the power of the gear which scales with level. However, armor shells don't contribute to gear power. Thus they should not contribute to repair costs. When they did contribute, it produced weird values when the armor shell was greatly different than your level. Bioware has just implemented the logical fix.

The reason they did the original system was probably just that the programmer/designer just didn't see the entire implications of moddable gear, and were just treating it more or less like normal gear.

To be honest, I don't think anybody is over-thinking anything. When the new "expansion" comes out and the gear becomes more powerful, the repair costs will also go up. How long before a F2P player can't afford repair costs due to their low credit cap? Of course, that's assuming any F2P player actually purchases the "expansion".

[Edge-]

I think you guys are overthinking the issue. It was just a straightforward logical flaw.

Repair costs should scale with the power of the gear which scales with level. However, armor shells don't contribute to gear power. Thus they should not contribute to repair costs. When they did contribute, it produced weird values when the armor shell was greatly different than your level. Bioware has just implemented the logical fix.

The reason they did the original system was probably just that the programmer/designer just didn't see the entire implications of moddable gear, and were just treating it more or less like normal gear.

So...one poor decision led to another poor decision? >.>

Why not tie repair costs to the modes in the gear, rather than the gear itself? If my understanding of the SWTOR gearing system is correct, that seems to be the more logical way to go about fixing the issue.