Star Wars: The Old Republic II: Hutts don't have feet!

[GungHo]

In more important news, the GTN for both factions (and the currently dead neutral GTN) will be merged (at some point "soon", maybe 1.3?) into one big neutral GTN system, which I think I'm a fan of. It makes it harder to corner the market on a particular good, but I'd rather have the increased selection and customer base.

I like the idea as well. It also makes the on-ship GTN a better buy, as it's a neutral market.

Yes, there are more people who can undercut, there are also more people who can snipe the undercut product and relist it at the inflated price. Larger market means more people doing so. The only people who really benefit in such an environment are the sellers. The buyers get screwed. A lot.

I hear what you're saying, but it also means that I have a better chance of finding the things I want in the first place. On servers with large faction imbalances, the GTNs are dead for the folks who roled on the less populated side (usually Republic). Given that drops and quest rewards aren't always sufficient, being able to fall back to the GTN is nice.

Of course, my personal response to the GTN dearth is really to rely on my crafting alts. Right now, I'm finding my Artifice and Cybertech alts to be very useful. I can afford to buy the odd barrel once I'm swimming in oranges.

At least ToR doesn't have an Auctioneer style add-on. Man that thing was terribly easy to abuse to drive up prices.

Auctioneer was a crutch and didn't let you do anything you couldn't do with a calculator or Excel. Probably its biggest help was that it broke up stacks for you and let you post large sales via macro, which was great on a Sunday afternoon after you'd gathered things all weekend and needed to get off to go eat dinner and watch 60 Minutes.

The average price tool was crap because, like you said in a later post, it didn't factor out outliers.

It was also good at finding the lowest per item price on the market when I actually needed to buy materials. SWTOR already gives you the per item price... that was actually one of the few good ideas they had for their GTN. Sure, I could do it in my head or with a calculator, but it's nice just being able to hover your cursor over the price.

As someone who has just started one, any tips?

If you're going to solo, consider putting your initial talents into cover screen (tier 1) and balistic dampers (tier 2). It seems counter-intuitive to put things into defensive talents, but early on you'll get knocked out of cover often and Kaliyo isn't good at holding aggro. You can also toggle in and out of cover to build your defenses, which is nice. You can respec out of cover screen later.

If you're not, then don't bother with the defensive talents and go for Marksmanship and Steady Shots. Marksmanship will improve your performance against bosses. Steady Shots will improve your overall DPS.

Don't bother with Heavy Shot or Demarcation. The knockback and slow seems nice, but it really doesn't do a lot for you no matter whether you're soloing or grouping, since crowd control doesn't usually do anything against bosses and those are the people that will tear you up when they're on top of you. Heavy Shot will really piss off your Tank if you're grouping. No one likes knockback.

That should get you through level 20.

What are everyone's thoughts about the current marauder/sentinel rage going around?

I think people will discover what everyone else who actually used one for awhile figured out. They're more fragile than Inquisitors/Sages or Assassins/Shadows and they have only one viable spec. The only thing that is possibly more vulnerable than a Carnage/Combat Sentinel is a Sniper/Gunslinger that doesn't know how to use hard cover.

Someone did this back in the everquest days, but it was never given any serious consideration. I remember it being a good read though. There was an article about the study in Wired magazine if memory serves me correctly.

It wasn't an academic/professional study and honestly "back in the Everquest days" there were very few examples of true online economies. Nowadays, that's not true and it might be worth someone's time, especially if a game ever comes along that trades currency and commodities for real money. I imagine the biggest hurdle for viewing it as a real economy is that everything is owned by the software vendor. If real ownership is ever passed along, though, and the vendor supports a true market, then that view would change immediately. There are some very real legal consequences for any one ever attempting to do so, however, so that may not happen for another decade or two, if ever.