40% Drop in Credit Prices, and Slicing Nerf Thoughts

SWTOR has been out for about 2 weeks now, and I'm emerging from the coma of racing to the level cap. It appears that the credit farmers have been busy as well, surely taking advantage of the early Slicing profits.

As I'm sure everyone knows, Slicing was nerfed quite hard this last Tuesday, and the profits from Slicing missions have dropped significantly. I know quite a few people that built a nice nest egg using Slicing from the get-go (I know I was), and money can still be made with it, but more patience needed. If you're sticking with Slicing for the long haul like I am, there's a great Google Doc made by pdfmacros hat breaks down the profitability of each Slicing mission, available here. You may shed a tear if you look at the pre-nerf glory days though.

So how is the exchange market looking? Here's the best prices I've seen today:


That's a pretty significant drop in only 2 weeks! The farmers are clearly working hard, and making use of every advantage they can get. Kind of puts the Slicing nerf in a different light, and its interesting to me that BioWare may be looking at this type of data, and acting on it, already.

The price per credit has gone from $0.00085 to $0.00048, a 40% drop! As you can see in the image above, the benchmark I like to use for credit value, the 1 Million Credit VIP Wristband, will now only cost $453.60! That's still about 2.5X the price of a Collector's Edition, so it's hardly worth spending the credits on at this time.

One thing worth noting in this game is that training skills, particularly riding, is awfully expensive. Using the current prices, the cost of riding alone is worth in the ballpark of $250. Is the top tier of riding worth it right now? Is the second tier? With only a 10% increase at each level, it may not be just for leveling up, unless Outlaw's Den is super competitive on your server and you need to run away/run people down frequently. After a recent run-in I had there, I dropped the 330,000 credits for Tier 3 riding immediately upon hitting 50, but that's entirely a personal decision.

Where these prices go post-nerf is anyone's guess, but they'll ultimately continue to go down. There's still some easy ways to make money in the game (Treasure Hunting seems to be the next big thing), and as more peole hit the level cap and start crafting high-end gear, new ways to cash in will be found. Speaking of that, time get back to REing some Mods. I've got a market to corner.