5601

Well, after spending all day yesterday seeing what the nerf did to slicing I’ve come to the conclusion that it isn’t worth it anymore. Profits are very, very slim to breaking even running the highest level missions. Which means no more crafting at all for me until I can find another way to make money.

By the way, is it just me or is the auction house GOD AWFUL? Seriously, they won’t let you just search for the name of what you’re trying to find? You have to actually define 3 categories before it’ll let you search? It’s even worse when you’re not even sure what category the item you’re searching for is in. Ugh.

5602

Not just that, but it’s actually impossible to search by armor category. You can’t, for example, see a list of all heavy armor waist items. You have to show all heavy armor and then just page through, manually looking for belts.

The UI is consistently bad. It’s not just the AH.

If you have your bank and inventory open, and you right click on some crafting mat in your inventory to send it to your bank, it won’t join a stack already present in your bank. It will just make a new stack.

If you close your bank window, your inventory closes too, no matter what. So if you have inventory and bank open, and you ctrl-right click on a moddable item in your bag to modify it, the modification window closes your bank, which closes your bag, and then the mod window closes too. So you’re left with no windows open because you wanted to mod an item.

Do you know how to split a stack? Hold shift, left click and hold the mouse button down on an item, and then drag your mouse in any direction. Yes, drag. That’s how you split a stack.

If you rebind your jump button from the default of spacebar, the loading screens that say “press spacebar to continue” don’t work correctly anymore. Really.

You can tell your companion to go sell all your useless junk, but there’s no button on the npc vendor window to do it. You have to either send your companion out to do it (even though you’re at the vendor already) or just click on each one manually.

You can’t tab target something that isn’t in line of sight from your character. Which means behind a light post, at the top of a hill you’re climbing, etc. Your camera can see them, but you can’t target them without clicking on them with the mouse.

I could go on and on. It’s a huge mess.

5603

Two things - Slicing being profitable is based almost solely on grabbing the “free” boxes out in the world now. The lockbox missions now provide a way to level the skill rather than a source of income, as the amount of time it takes to run the crew missions are not worth the profits if you consider that your companion could be, for example, running an Underworld Trading mission and pulling back 2k credits worth of metals in half the time the slicing mission would have taken.

This really does suck for people who didn’t get in on the money train, as I think it would be painful to try and level slicing as it is now. Purple slicing missions are what give you purple Lvl 50 Augments, and I’m sure that those will be worth something when people are trying to get fully decked out. I’m half tempted to just buy out the GTN of all of them now - I see a bunch people have dropped out there for only 2k. It’s possible I’m missing something though, as I don’t truly understand how Augments fit into the high-end gear logic of this game.

I’m probably making as much money off of day-trading the GTN as I did slicing. The interface is so god-awful that many people just go with what the default price of everything is rather than try and hunt down what the current going prices are. I’ve made tens of thousands of credits now just buying default priced items and reselling them for what I know they’re worth. Slicing is just more profitable since you could be making money adventuring while your companions rake it in, while using the GTN requires physically being there every so often to manage things.

5604

Augments will only go into crafted gear that was a “crit.” When a Weapons or Arms crafter gets a crit on a recipe it will create an augment slot. Given how expensive/rare some of of purple mats are for high end recipes and the relatively low crit rate for creating arms/armor with these augment slots, I’m not entirely sure how widespread the demand for augments will be.

Since I have slicing at 400 I am loathe to drop it now that it has been nerfed but I’m also not that interested in running slicing missions right now either.

5605

Re slicing sadness:

Meh. I have 350k without anything to spend on at level 39, without slicing. I’m leveling cybertech without feeling poor. I could crank forward to 50 without doing any crafting at all, just using solo mission rewards as equipment. So maybe I could have 1M if I was doing slicing; I’d still have nothing to spend on…

5606

Ryan, I’m sure that the end game gear will have augment slots, so I would be willing to bet people who min-max their characters will want a purple augment for it.

That said, since you can remove mods from items (and I assume you can remove augments, though I’ve never tried it) I would assume people would get two or three purple augments for level 50 play and just recycle those when they get new gear, assuming the cost to remove the mods isn’t prohibitive.

I’ve never been so torn on crafting skills. I dropped Underworld Trading for Slicing just a couple of days ago. So while I don’t have a ton of cash, I do have around 100k at level 31. And I’m starting to find slicing nodes out in the wild more and more, so it feels like it’s a net + to my income. However, I’m at the mercy of the GTN for any blue and purple Underworld Trading metals, and I do love doing the crafting (spent about 20k this afternoon RE-ing green mods and armor to get blue versions of them for a bunch of lower level items). So I’m really feeling the lack of having UT.

5607

I hit the cash-wall while leveling my Cybertech (on my BH) and Artificing (on my Sorc) skills. I was trying to grind out the skills to get the base + support skills high enough to make level appropriate mods/enhance/gems of blue/purple quality. I was able to get a ton of desh, silica, and rubat crystals from farming nodes, but I was leveling faster than I could raise my skills and had to start running scavenge/arch missions. And, of course, there is no way to get blue/purple mats except to run missions (or buy them from the terribad BTN).

So anyway, I had to start a second bounty hunter just to get Mako and run slicing missions for cash. I will admit that the money was probably too good. Running missions as I leveled, I was at 160k at level 20, and that’s with sending at least 50k to my other crafters to support their habit and leveling armstech/investigation to 240/400 each.

After the nerf, I’m still running a lot of slicing missions. However, I’m only running the tier 2 - 4 missions, rich/bountiful only, and I’m doing it mainly for the other crafting missions. I’m making a very small profit from the lock boxes, but have been able to make a decent living sending the missions to my other folks, turning the supplies into mods/barrels, and selling the results on the GTN.

As mentioned by several folks, the UI is horrible. The GTNs aren’t linked, which hurts my head; I actually have an alt stationed at the GTN in Kaas City just so I can list lower level stuff at a GTN where it may actually be purchased.

My least favorite series of events from the UI is a nit picky one but perfectly illustrates the flaws.

Putting a new mod into your companion’s weapon:

Open inventory
Open character screen
Click “companion” tab
Cntl-right click companion’s weapon
Watch inventory screen close itself (sigh)
Close character screen
Open inventory
Replace mod

There doesn’t seem to be pop-over windows, so it has to close windows to make way for other windows. That also means that if you happen to be working in the GTN when your companion brings something back, hey, you aren’t in the GTN anymore since the new window causes it to auto-close…which leads you to again navigate through that damn drop downs and flip back to the page that had that belt you were considering buying.

Love the game, but yeah, the UI needs a lot of work.

5608

I’m one of those people. Coming out of WoW, the interface for the GTN is truly awful. Bioware has also hamstrung themselves by not allowing user mods to compensate for the flaws in their interface. Pretty much every improvement Blizzard has made to the WoW UI since its release has come from the mod community.

Anyway, I was going to sell off a bunch of BoEs but I ended up vendoring them rather than use the GTN. It’s just too tedious.

5609

Even without UI mods, WoW’s auction house UI at launch was better than SWTOR’s GTN UI (and that was what, 7 years ago?). Even Rift’s UI is far better than TOR in almost every way, and it’s not the massive budget/time behemoth that TOR is.

Some more annoyances off the top of my head at work: no keybinds for inspecting players, for placing group icon markers (the lucky charms things), for trading with other players, for companion targeting modifier. Hell, you can’t even trade with a chat command as far as I can tell. You can only do it by right clicking with the mouse.

Toggled abilities often get untoggled when you die or zone; sprint or jedi knight stances for example. Your camera zoom level is reset every time you zone, but the game thinks it’s still at its old zoom level so if you try to correct it, it often goes in the wrong direction. Focus target frame disappears when you zone (but you keep the target). No way to see your target’s target, only switch to it.

Maybe I’m a complainer, maybe I’m expecting too much, but a lot of these things should be standard by now. Rift, a game which a lot of people seemed to think was poor, had almost all of this stuff out of the box.

To avoid being labeled Mr. Hater, I will say some positive things about the UI. Mission items get their own inventory space, and your inventory is a unified container that’s expandable with money directly. Those features alone are a big convenience.

I’m not disliking the game or anything. I’m simply shocked at all of the obvious bugs and oversights, particularly with the interface. It’s really embarrassing and sad.

5610

Ross, you’re completely correct in your points. I don’t think those are nitpicks, that’s a tangible lack of polish. iPhone vs bad Android implementation levels of difference. As you say, they are inexcusable because other games have done much better, much longer ago. To not simply be able to do item search by name? Item searches taking so long? Poor customization options for searches. That’s just GTN.

I think for many of us, however, it’s worth bearing with for the great BioWare stories. Of course, once those run out, all bets are off in my case.

5611

IMO the game by and large is terrific. But the UI is very primitive and feels very limiting. I was shocked that you couldn’t have more than two windows open at once or move them around – is this like 1990 for goodness sakes?

5612

Yes, and they allowed damn near complete customization of it as well. Virtually every piece of the UI could be resized and moved. SWTOR’s, as far as I can tell, cannot. It’s pretty ridiculous.

I’m having a hard time understanding why I can’t tick multiple points of interest on the map interface. By default, it just seems to show taxis. Even the minimap displays icons for everything nearby. The big map has more than enough room to show me everything by default and let me choose which ones to turn off.

5613

This, it’s so stupid having to cycle through all of them when you are going to different npcs.

5614

Depending on your companions… you can actually do some of the heroics. I am not sure why someone would want to play and pay for an MMO for a single-player experience, but you can do it. It works surprisingly well as there is still fun to be had in a group enviroment.

5615

I dunno, these quality of life things (better UI, GTN, toggles resetting at death, windows closing when opening a new, hotkeys, running to my hanger and then running to my ship…the list is endless) could be a gamebreaker for me long term. Right now, I’m engaged enough that I’m overlooking all of this but at the 2 or 3 month mark? If I’m irritated enough it will cause me to unsubscribe. It’s like having an awesome automobile, everything that you could ever want in a car, but there’s no cupholder. And no cupholder in a car is a dealbreaker, its why there is a cupholder now in every car you can buy these days.

If I do unsubscribe, I could be back if all this stuff is implemented but then I’ll be irritated about how far I am behind the curve. There just is no pleasing me.

5616

Some of these issues make me think there are going to console ports in the future. Weird UI issues show up in projects that feel made for porting or taken from another system.

5617

I would love to see an engineer talk about why this is never, ever coming to consoles.

5618

I don’t know about the other classes, but Juggernaut simply has WAY too many abilities to be played with a gamepad.

5619

I wonder if this has to do with the sharding(or whatever it’s called)? My friend tipped me off to this the other day when i couldnt find him in the same city, then he pointed out that we could be in different shards. It was - i was in 1 he was in 2 and once I flipped to the same shard, we were good.

Ive kinda hated sharding since DDO(and in particular the way DDO did it) - if your servers can’t handle the load, don’t put that many people on it…

Urge to revert to juvenile behaviour…failing…

5620

My greatest anger is still the fact that trying to talk to one of my companion’s is almost impossible due to the conversation icon randomly appearing/disappearing.

Maybe i will put my 35 Juggernaut on hold in order to mess with an agent healer in the hopes that they fix this seemingly MAJOR bug.