[GW2] Crafting Cost

Crafting Costs: Even Scarier Behemoths

EDIT:  Update 1/2 - instead of using GW2wiz, take a look at ErrantQuest for crafting guides.  Much cheaper.  For cooking, Xanthic has a dynamic cooking guide (always chooses the cheapest route).

One of my favorite features in GW2 is the ability to level a new alt entirely via crafting.  Since each crafting discipline gives around 10 levels of experience, it is possible to level a character to 80 by advancing through each crafting profession. Leveling a new alt takes hours, not days.

In the early days of the game, this was fairly inexpensive. Alternating between crafting, story quests, and hunting down skill points, I was able to level 4 alts to level 80 for about a gold per crafting discipline. Recently, I've become interested in leveling another character via crafting, but wondered how crafting costs have changed since the early weeks.

To track the cost of crafting, I used crafting shopping lists from GW2 wiz and price data from GW2 spidy.

Here is the cost of each crafting discipline over the past few weeks:

Armorsmith, leatherworking, and tailoring have all dramatically increased in price over the past few weeks (and are much more expensive than I'd remembered!).  Breaking down each craft by materials cost, the culprit appears to be the fine (blue-quality) crafting materials:

While gatherable components (metal, leather, cloth) have held steady in cost, fine materials (scales, totems, blood,...) have risen at an alarming rate.

The rise in crafting costs is distributed fairly evenly across all tiers of materials, though Tier 5 goods have increased in price more rapidly than Tiers 1-4.

For the curious, over the past week, here are the average prices of leveling each crafting discipline:

armorsmith   artificer    huntsman     jeweler 
       7.80        8.69        9.30        7.59 
    leather      tailor weaponsmith 
       7.23        8.65       10.06 

This leaves cooking as the cheapest craft to level (estimated at 1g!), followed by leatherworking, jewelry  and armorsmithing.

Personally, it looks like I'll be leveling any new alts the old-fashioned way!

The Great Server Migration

Thought I'd share a visualization of how the SWTOR server migrations have shaped realm populations. Here I'm just taking a look at realm status (1 for light, 2 for medium) over time, by region and type. Short story: origin servers are ghost towns, destination servers are hopping (but that much was clear already).*

Slightly cooler story: even before the migrations, as far back as April, destination servers had higher populations than the other servers in their zone / type. There is one exception. Until just days before the migration, The Swiftsure averaged a higher population than The Bastion (which ultimately became the destination server for West Coast PvP servers). Makes me wonder why Bastion got destination status. Rounding errors between status and true population numbers? Server hardware?

I also went ahead and re-collected data on posting volume on the PvP forums. Activity - in both posts and views - is definitely down from earlier in the year. Curiously, while 1.2 saw a remarkable increase in activity on the pvp forums, the 1.3 release had almost no effect. It looks like a focus on the server migration drew posters away from the forums around the roll-out of that feature.**



*The gap in data from the start of April comes from my failure to backup a week's worth of data and then getting a drive failure.
**The white band around May 5th is a day of data I'm missing.

Voice of the Player: the PVP Forums

Mos Ila: Honorable Mention, Hives of Scum and Villainy

The PVP forums may be the most wretched hive of scum and villainy in the galaxy, but there are always a few holdout posts that I find helpful, or even inspiring.

What about the din, though?  Can something be learned from the countless threads of complaints, anecdotes turned into truths, and general hatefest?

I ran a program to download the approximately 32,000 threads posted to the PVP forums, taking the first page only.

Most threads are only active for a day before they no longer get replies (75%).  After a week of activity, only 5% of threads remain active. The median post gets around 5 replies and 240 views. There are a handful of notable outliers - including one post with around 330k views (a dev thread from Jan 18 that gave an update to Ilum's pvp).

Just from this activity, its immediately clear that 1.2 brought a dramatic increase in forum post volume. With the general renewed excitement over SWTOR with 1.2, this is a good indication that the volume of posts matches interest in the game. Posting is something that complements play time, not opposes it.

Class Warfare: calling down the nerfbat
What about the ever present cries for nerfs on the forums? Is the rise-to-power of sent/marauder reflected in forum posts? The stunlocking dominance of ops?

For this, I'm not going to do anything super fancy, just a simple search through the first 10 posts in each thread for mentions of each class (accounting for things like spelling mistakes, or clear references to a class via a popular spec, like 'concealment' matching to operative, or 'galactic overlord of awesomeness' to sorcerer.) I'll also combine the Empire and Republic advanced class mirrors, and reference them by their Empire names.

Looking at the percentage of threads that mention an advanced class, I'm actually astounded just how well that worked. The fights between operatives and sorcs, followed by the overwhelming numbers of sorcerers, until the rise of marauders with 1.2... its all reflected in the volume of mentions of each class on the PVP forums. In contrast: powertechs, snipers, and juggs are all but invisible.  Assassins have made a respectable rise, one that I'd expect to continue, given their impressive on-demand cooldowns and burst.

From this, I'd say forum chatter is a reasonable way to capture community awareness of issues.

Topical Applications
Next up: I sampled some of the other issues that players raised for discussion on the forums, looking mostly at pvp zones, exploits, and some quality of life issues. Again, for each category, I'm looking at word counts, accounting for things like misspellings and including related words.

The first plot nicely captures the rising attention given to Ilum, and its eventual irrelevance. Alderaan - the least innovative of the warzones - also gets the least attention.

Regarding bugs and exploits, mentions of bots and hacks are relatively infrequent - and steadily decreasing over time. Hopefully this is a reflection of the developers getting a better handle on the situation. Lag and bugs, however, remain persistent issues.

I'm glad to see that despite all the attention given to 'unsubbing' threads... they're rare. Like, people spend more time talking about powertechs rare. Premades and stunning, though - they're frequent issues.

But forum goers are weird!
For ages, developers have noted that players who post to the forums are 'different' and don't really represent MMO players in general. I think that makes intuitive sense.

But that only goes so far. Again I'll look at class balance. But this time, I'll divide posters into four groups, based on the number of posts each forum-goer made in my sample.

Post Groups	1 post	2-10 posts	11-100 posts	101 or more
Individuals	10,802	13,009	3,220	218
Posts Made	10,802	51,010	88,336	40,286
% of posts	5.7%	26.8%	43.9%	21.2%

Even though individuals who made 101+ posts are less than 1% of the population, they make over 20% of the posts in my data.

But those who post often are no different from those who post infrequently. Whether looking at those who make one post, or more than 101, the trend is still there. Each group is currently discussing marauders most frequently, was talking about sorcs before 1.2, and largely ignores the powertechs. It is definitely the case that the trend is smaller in the one-post group, but it is still there. 

Class balance concerns are relatively even across each group.

Forums: Windows into MMOs.

I'm pretty impressed with just how rich a source of information the forums can be (particularly given that this took... all of a couple hours to run, once I'd downloaded the data). 

But this was just what struck me while playing with the data. If you've got a pvp-forums related question, hit it up in the comments (or email) and I'll see what I can find.

The population numbers behind server status

All too often, I find myself pointing players to TorStatus to get a picture of what SWTOR's server population looks like.

Trouble is, knowing that a server is 'standard' (code 2) doesn't tell you much about the game experience. If a server can be 'standard' with 100-500 players, that is a different world than if the same code means 1000-3000 players online.

To settle this a little, I set up a monitoring program to alert me when a server changes its status as listed on SWTOR.com. When that happened, I would log onto the server and /who everyone within level brackets until I'd collected data on both the Republic and Empire sides. I did this just over 100 times.

From this, it looks like the cut-points for each server status are:
Light >> Standard:  500
Standard >> Heavy: 1500
Heavy >> Very Heavy:  2250-2500(?)
Very Heavy >> Full:  3000

There are a couple ways to use these cut-points to give context to the TorStatus numbers. For example, in April, servers were listed as 'light' 65% of the time. But players aren't evenly spread across the servers. While the highest population servers were 'light' under 30% of the time, the bottom 46 servers are listed as 'light' 90% of the time or more.  This means the bottom 46 servers spend 90% of the time with less than 500 players on both sides (combined).

As a side note: the average server status figures for the last 3 months (and a bit of May) are:

Average Server Status by Month

February	March	April	May
1.49	1.38	1.29	1.19

The drop from February to May (a 20% decrease) closely matches the drop of subscriber numbers over the same period (from 1.7 to 1.3 million: a 25% decrease).

Note:  I'm doing some checks to examine whether those cut-points are stable over time, and do more to pin down the limits on the 'Very Heavy' status. That, combined with a few crazier statistical models, should help to put actual numbers to the server status figures.

Beating a sliced horse

Slicing is back to normal!

The most recent patch notes (for 1.2.2) note:

Premium Slicing lockboxes now yield the correct amount of credits.

But there is no way I'm just going to take that note at face value. And neither are the forums - several threads are dedicated to discussing whether the patch corrected the issue. To help sort out the issue, I collected data on another 400 grade 5 and 6 missions since 1.2.2, and reran my earlier analysis.

As shown in the first plot, the average earnings of all missions have reverted to their pre-1.2 levels. Premium (green) lockboxes now properly earn more than their white counterparts:

Note: this doesn't mean that every single time a lockbox comes back, it'll have a profit. Most of the grade 5 rich missions I run are losses - they're only profitable because crits return blue boxes which are extremely lucrative, and more than make up the loss. In general, any particular slicing mission can be a loss: several missions in a row can lose credits. Its only in the long run that slicing earns credits.

[EDIT:  realized that some folks are curious about 340 mission discoveries post 1-2.  I haven't seen much, if anything, in the way of differences from my earlier post on the topic.]

Now hopefully they leave slicing missions alone for a while...

That's no thread...

This week's feedback request is definitely a poll in disguise:

"What planet in the Star Wars universe do you want to see in Star Wars: The Old Republic that is not currently in the game?" (source)

Hmf... I want to see the breakdown of responses too!

I collected all the words used on the first 67 pages in response to the thread, and searched them for the just over 3600 planetary entries in the Star Wars universe listed on Wookiepedia. This gave approximately 1700 recognizable suggestions for planets from 670 different posters.*

Voting early and often, huh?

Here are the votes, as either a count of planetary mentions or weighted by the number of planets listed by a poster (ie, mentioning two planets gives each half a vote, three planets gives each a third... etc). I've also dropped planets that got less than three mentions (another 71 planets).

Be sure to click to enlarge!

I love that Kashyyyk is at the top of the list - the vertical element could really add a ton of fun to SWTOR questing. I'd love to play with a charge or updated MGGS to move through the trees. A jetpack to ease the concerns of heights and pvp would be pretty fun, too.

Old KOTOR favorites (?) seem to make it to the top of the list - like Dantooine or the aquatic planet Manaan. I have to confess, I'm not a huge fan of aquatic combat in MMOs: that also disqualifies the highly-ranked Naboo from selection. Ditto with Mon Calamari... which might win the contest for the most comic name on the list.

I'm a bit shocked that Dagobah didn't make it higher than #11. Training sequence daily quests? Lift a drowned fighter from the muck. Now jog through the bog while carrying a muppet. The cave alone would be a phenomenal flashpoint / daily quest.

Though, I'm a bit surprised that the devs polled the audience on this one. The SWTOR universe has so much awesome in it, I'd figure they'd just run with whatever idea geeked them the most.

*Just a simple search with some corrections for basic spelling mistakes (Kashyyyk has 3 ys) / abbreviations. While its possible to map "wroshyr trees" to Kashyyyk / account for feedback that looks like "meesa not a fan of Gungans"... I'm mostly interested in the infamy of a planet.

LFG: How Many Make a Party?

In what I can only describe as fantastic news, it looks like a group finder is coming with patch 1.3 (via both the April 27th Q&A and earlier requests for feedback). Unfortunately, the initial release of the system seems limited to matchmaking within a single server (source).

But what about players on low-population servers?  Do they have the population to support a reasonable LFG system?

Ideally, Trion or Blizzard would hand me a large data set on player behavior, and I'd get to go to town analyzing segmentation in the MMO playerbase and its influence on the availability and fun of small-group content. Mmmm... happy data dreams...

Absent that, there is another way to get some insight on whether low-population servers in SWTOR can support a LFG system: SIMULATION!

The basic idea is simple: I wrote a program to generate test data given some assumptions about how players behave. I then ran that program thousands of times, with different assumptions about player behavior, to see how the results changed.

The 'Perfect' Balance
For example, suppose that SWTOR was a utopia - the holy trinity of roles was distributed perfectly across the lvl 50 playerbase: Tanks were 1/4 of the population, Healers were 1/4 of the population, and DPS were 1/2 the population. At regular intervals, one of these players (randomly chosen across the three roles) enters the que. Imagine further that players were perfectly patient, never ditching the que. Using this, I can set up 100 sample ques of 1000 players, and take a look at the average wait of each.

Egads! Wait times spiral off into infinity - and beyond!* As players enter the que at random, a surplus of players for a role develops, causing the wait times for players of that role to increase.

So impatience (or limited playtime) is a great thing for a LFG system.

Impatient Players
Now suppose that players are willing to wait patiently for some amount of time, and after their patience wears thin, they have a 20% chance of dropping the que for each extra minute they wait. LFG que waits dramatically decrease:

The surplus of players for a role gets evaporated by the que droppers.

But just how much (im)patience is needed for the shorter, more stable ques?

A little impatience goes a long way.  Even if players are willing to wait half an hour before they slowly start dropping, just that little bit of impatience lowers que times by about 10 minutes... and it does this without throwing too many players out of the que - 92% of players still get placed.

Distributing Time
So far I've assumed that players stroll in at even intervals. The population of a server doesn't look like that, though.
Server population peaks late at night, and disappears during the day (approximated by the plot on the left). The effect on the que is clear: que times shorten during peak hours - dropping to less than 5 minutes - shown by the smoothed averages in the top right plot.  Unfortunately, this comes at a cost: ques all but disappear during the day - only a handful of players get groups from 4am to noon (go to sleep!).

Tank Shortage
All of this leaves aside at least one crucial component of ques: tanks and healers tend to be rare.

To take a look at this, I'll run the same simulator, only I'll vary the percentage of tanks and healers from 1-25% (and all combinations).  For each of those 625 models, I'll look at the percentage of players queing that obtain groups, and look at the average wait time of DPS. I'll do this for a server of 500 players queing, 1000 players queing, and 10,000 players queing.  For ease of presentation, I'll assume that players are moderately impatient - waiting 15 minutes before they start dropping the que.

Moving from left to right across the facets, as the percentage of healers and tanks increases, wait times generally decrease, and the percentage of players getting groups increases (gasp!).

The most remarkable effect, though, is that just having a large pool of players to pull from keeps wait times down.  Regardless of the percentage of healers or tanks, wait times for a pool of 10k players stay around 10 minutes - about half that of the pool of 500 players.  Balancing the percentage of healers/tanks increases the percentage of groups that form.

Amazingly... if tanks are truly scarce, only 1 in 5 dps that que will get a group, which is absurdly low, so low that I wonder whether the tank shortage is smaller than most people suppose.

So can low-population servers support LFG?
Even on the lowest-population servers, LFG will help match players during peak play times

But on those servers, unless a large percentage of players are willing to play tanks/healers, wait times are likely to be lengthy, and a high percentage of players are likely to drop group in frustration.  (Expect some heavy forum QQ from those that do... but just remember that they're helping to keep wait times down for everyone else!)

As always, serve with a large heap o salt: there are a ton of variables I didn't model, or modeled pretty simplistically. If anyone knows a good source of data on players to help reduce some of that uncertainty... I'd love it.

What are SWTOR players searching for on Google?

Google is an absurdly cool source of data on just about everything, whether it is essential information on how to survive a velociraptor attack or stunning images of the night sky. But when I saw that a WoW blog - a wow blog - had used it to to uncover some nifty insights into players... well... its time to take purple lightning to the problem.*

This data is for all searches that include the word "SWTOR" that Google considers related to online gaming. Google normalizes this data, meaning that the highest search volume is assigned a value of 100, and all other data is re-scaled as a percentage of that value. In this data, the highest search volume was on release week, so the current value (37) means that the volume of current searches is 37% of release week's volume.

Talk about a learning curve.

Classy Questions
As above, this is the normalized search volume of searches for the phrases "SWTOR (class)", including variations on class names (sorcerer/sorc/lightning mistress). These volumes have been normalized to the peak search volume - searches for sorcerer a week after release.

Some of the search volume data makes a bit of sense. Sorcerers and Assassins (the most popular classes) are also among the most frequently googled. I choose to view this as being well informed - our storyline is, after all, about the pursuit of knowledge.  Well... that or a love of ghostbusters.

But Gunslingers as the most googled Republic class and second overall? [insert obligatory snark about figuring out which way to point the gun]

It is also interesting to note that the Empire classes aren't always the most searched for. In some cases - like the Powertech / Vanguard ACs, more searches are made for the Republic mirrors. Its curious that Vanguards - the least played class - are the 6th most googled.

Search Phrases
The final chart I took a look at was the search volume for the top searched phrases associated with SWTOR. Here, I grouped similar terms, so "builds / skill tree / talent tree / talentplaner" have all been grouped.  I also dropped comparisons to MMOs (for example, searches for "swtor MMO" were dropped).

I don't find it too surprising that PVP (even apart from PVP gear) comes out on top for SWTOR searches. It is an easily accessible and highly rewarding form of content that tends to attract players interested in gaining the advantage. Both pve and pvp have complex gear systems, and I've definitely googled the difference between gear sets more than a few times.

But gunslingers?

*Seriously, awesomeness at WoW Insider for a fun reason to play with Google Insight Data.

Slicing for Augments in 1.2

I just want to say one word to you.  Just one word.  Augments.

Despite data-nerding-out about lockboxes, they aren't my main source of profits with 1.2.

I've been selling augments on the GTN as fast as I can make them, and the profits are absurd. An augment that costs less than 20k credits to craft will easily sell for 60-100k on my server. I'm considering buying the legacy-unlocked neutral GTN...

With 1.2 augments are no longer obtained via slicing missions.  Instead, they are crafted by the following professions:

• Armormechs: Aim, Cunning, Shield, and Absorb Augments.
• Armstechs: Endurance, Surge, Critical, Accuracy, and Power Augments.
• Synthweavers: Strength, Willpower, Defense, Alacrity, and Presence Augments.

Getting the Patterns
These patterns are only found with crits of 'Sliced Tech Parts' missions. 95% of the time, these will give to 1-2 schematics, though there is a 5% chance of no pattern on a crit (ht to GnatB on the forums for observing this first).

The patterns teach a premium (green) quality schematic.  RE'ing the premium items gives a 20% chance to research a prototype (blue) schematic; the blues have a 20% chance on RE to research a purple (artifact) schematic.

Gathering the Materials
In what follows, I'm going to focus on the top tier of augments (the 22s). While 25s are listed on Torhead, these do not appear to be in game.

In addition to some base components from the appropriate gathering profession (arch for synthweavers or scavenging for armor/armstechs), the blue augments require 4 Subelectronic Data Module and the purple augments require 4 Advanced Neural Augmentors.

The bottleneck for crafting the top-tier augments is the Augmentors.  At the moment, these can only be obtained via the 340 mission discovery 'A Test of Intelligence' or crits on the Grade 6 abundant missions Mysterious Funds / Devoted to Duty. I've listed the returns from each mission in the table below:

	Blue (reg)	Epic (reg)	Blue (crit)	Epic (crit)
A Test of Intelligence	8	4	10	5
Devoted to Duty	4	0	6	3
Mysterious Funds	4	0	6	3

After running just over 200 of these missions on companions with 10k affection, I'm getting a 20% crit rate.

Since the missions cost 1,780 credits to run, at a 20% crit rate and 3 purples per crit, that is about 1068 credits per purple material, or 4272 credits in slicing materials per purple augment made. Adding the cost of the vendor mats (1600 credits from vendor, 600 credits if gathered via a crewskill) and the AH price of the gathered components (around 500 -1500 per component), that puts each augment at around 9-17k credits to craft.

Given the prices on my server right now (60-100k), that is a phenomenal profit.

What is the catch?
There are two downsides to crafting augments.

The first is time. Each slicing mission takes just over an hour to run. That makes for 7 hours of slicing missions per augment. With only 2 tech parts missions available at any given time (3 with the discovery), this works best with several characters with slicing (or, selling in low volume).

The second downside is that players can recycle their augments, removing them from their gear for 22k credits. Eventually, this may serve to limit the demand for augments.

One more upside
In the near future, the market for augments is likely to grow. Right now, using custom gear with augment slots means losing set bonuses on Columi and Rakatta gear. As more characters acquire Campaign and Black Hole gear, there is no downside to picking up an augment slot for better stats, widening the market.

Happy credit hunting.

NOTE:  Take a look at the cost of the [Augmented] custom gear on the GTN - made via crit-crafting an orange item. At least on my server, even the lvl 11 oranges are going for 50-100k if they have an augment slot. (Another remarkable profit - since the items cost ~3-5k to craft each).

Crafting in 1.2: Update

I'm using the image because it is awesome.  Oh, and as a reminder that the event ends April 24th at 2AM CDT.

Stephen Reid has confirmed that the changes to slicing lockboxes in 1.2 were unintended.  Another update confirmed that they're working to correct the issue.  *Happy Dance*

Someone has successfully reverse engineered a Black Hole implant... and they're BOE!  I'm definitely using an alt to gather some Black Hole commendations and slowly build up a chance to get the pattern.

I've RE'd a campaign relic. It lists a 20% chance to research a schematic. No luck with the pattern yet, but the RE gave a Synthetic Energy Matrix. The crafted version is rumored to be BOE, but I've yet to see an image of it.  Now to go gather another 200 Daily Commendations.  #yeahright

RE'ing campaign gear (the shells) requires that it have an armoring in it - any armoring will do, including a level 10 armoring.

Birthright and Inheritance kits (legacy armor) can be found on crits of 340 mission discoveries! So far, I've seen them with Diplomacy, Slicing, and Treasure Hunting... but that is only because I haven't run any Investigation or Underworld Trading missions since the patch.

UPDATE:  Oh wow, I just got a Birthright item on a crit of a Grade 6 abundant mission. (My first after running 300 of them.) Woah.

Slicing Lockboxes Post 1.2

[EDIT 5/7/2012:  Patch 1.2.2 corrected this error. See the analysis here.]

Yup, it is time for another slicing post.

It looks like 1.2 had a few undocumented (maybe even unintended) changes to slicing.  Over on the forums, a few posters have been noticing some pretty dramatic losses and changes to the grade 5 and 6 missions - particularly the rich missions.

So I returned to my army of slicing alts, and collected data on 400 Grade 5 and 6 slicing lockbox missions with companions at 10k affection, and then compared those results to the data I'd collected before.

From the data, its fairly clear that patch 1.2 didn't change the earnings from Moderate missions.  They were profitable before the patch, and remain an excellent source of credits post-patch. Abundant missions had their returns reduced slightly.  The most striking change comes from the Rich Grade 5 missions - while still profitable overall, this is because a few high-earnings missions offset the losses from the majority of missions.

These curious results come from the double-RNG nature of slicing returns.

Each lockbox has two attributes that determine its average yield:  its level and color.  Grade 5 missions can return level 42, 44, 46, and 48 lockboxes.  Grade 6 missions always return level 50 lockboxes.

Before 1.2, green lockboxes returned an average of 160% of the credits of their white counterparts.  Since 1.2, green lockboxes are worth less than white ones - earning 80% of a white box on average.

Each yield of mission has a different color profile:
*Moderate missions return White lockboxes.
*Abundant missions return Green lockboxes on crits, and White otherwise.
*Rich missions return Blue lockboxes on crits, and Green otherwise.

This helps make sense of the original results. Because White lockboxes were unchanged, Moderate missions were unchanged.  Abundant missions were only slightly affected because they only return green lockboxes on crits (15-20% of the time). Meanwhile, Rich missions return green lockboxes on noncrits - now a generally a 1000 credit loss compared to the cost of the mission. They only remain profitable because blue boxes (average 6250 credit return) can offset those losses on a crit.

Overall: all slicing lockbox missions remain profitable in 1.2 (I'd definitely make and sell augments instead... but more on that later). Moderate and abundant missions now have higher earnings than rich-yield missions.

I do find it odd that they'd choose to deliberately target green lockboxes to nerf. Without understanding the reasoning, it feels more like a bug than an intentional change.

[EDIT:  caught math error and updated returns for green 42-48 lockboxes.]

Server Populations: What Difference a Day Makes?

In my last post on server populations, I noted that there was some support for the claims made by players on the forums pushing for server transfers. Low-population servers had very few players online, at levels that would make group-based activities exceptionally difficult. Recognizing this, the disproportionately large numbers of low-level characters on high-population servers hinted at players migrating to those servers.

But my data was fairly limited: just a slice of a handful of servers on one Friday night by /who-ing level ranges. As Shintar pointed out, there are reasons to wonder about whether Friday fits other nights.

So do the numbers hold up after looking at other nights?

Much like TorStatus, I've been collecting the server status of the SWTOR servers for a few months now. The above plot tracks the average server status for East- and West-coast servers for the past month. The shaded areas cover 'primetime' - 6:30 to 10pm within each timezone - and the black bars are the average server status across primetime.

Friday looks a bit like a weeknight, with similar numbers to Mon-Thurs. There are definitely fewer players than on Saturday / Sunday, where the evening playtime window is much wider. But from server status alone, it looks like a representative night.

But server status isn't population.

I re-collected the original data for the same servers, this time during primetime Tuesday. I'm primarily interested in three potential differences: (1) whether overall populations differ, (2) whether the population gap between high- and low-pop server differs, (3) whether the numbers of 50s differ.

Consistent with the server status data, the average population of a server varies remarkably little between the two nights (the colored vertical bars in the top left).

But the average masks striking differences between the two nights. On Tuesday, the higher population servers have relatively fewer players, while the medium population servers have relatively more players, slightly decreasing the gap between the servers. On Friday, the typical high-pop server had 4 players for every 1 on the average medium-pop server.  On Tuesday, this gap shrinks to 3:1.

Unfortunately, this trend doesn't extend to the lowest-population servers, whose small populations remain virtually unchanged - with on average 3:1 players between medium and low servers, and a 10:1 high to low player ratio.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the reset of the operations lockout on Tuesday sees relatively more players on their 50s for medium and low pop servers. High population servers retain an abnormally high percentage of low-level characters, most likely due to rerolling players.

As someone on a medium-pop server, I find these numbers comforting. The increase of 50s and overall population between Tuesday and Friday closes the gap between medium and high population servers, something I view as essential for server health.

But there is small comfort here for players on low-pop servers. Hopefully the uptick in the numbers of 50s on Tuesday is enough to coordinate group activities at endgame. But the bottom 5 servers don't see the same increase in overall players as the medium population servers, and the number of 50s online is still dwarfed by every other server.

Voice of the Player: Community Q&A

One of the more awesome ways that Bioware has chosen to interact with the SWTOR community is through the developer Q&As, where they solicit questions on a forum thread and then post responses. So far, there have been six of these: on Feb 10th, 17th, and the 24th, March 2nd, 16th, and the 23rd.

On March 30th and April 6th, instead of taking questions from the community, the devs answered questions they'd seen posed on the forums.

I think this change is really unfortunate - so I'm glad they'll return to the old format next week. The Q&A threads are a great way to take the pulse of the community. Just take a quick look at the words most frequently posted in each thread (as wordmaps)

I'm immediately struck by what I don't see - references to LFG don't make the wordlists (it peaks out at the 102nd most used word). Same with references to bugs, or topics related to bugs. Instead, the pattern that pops out at me is the rise of 'server' - typically as references to merges and transfers for the low-population realms.

A number of the discussion threads have mentioned the relative silence of the devs on same-gender romance options (sgra) - often claiming that it was the 'most asked question' in the Q&A threads.

Words related to SGRA are certainly frequently used in posts... but take a remarkable decline after the guild summit (March 5th) gave a clear indication that they were coming "this year". I think this is a really cool indication of how being clear and direct with an answer can ease community concerns (also, Daniel's handling of the question was brilliant.)

Meanwhile, questions about the legacy system have consistently increased... which isn't too surprising given that it is relatively untested on the PTS and that most of the information about the benefits from the system has come from third party sites.

I'm definitely going to keep working with the forum posts data... maybe explore the evolution of topics in a little more detail.

Companion Crit Crafting Bonuses

I detest seeing numbers I don't understand.

While I know that some companions have a critical crafting bonus, I began to wonder *exactly* how that bonus worked.

Per usual, google searches yielded contradiction, confusion, misinformation (lots of it), and speculation. I didn't find that satisfactory.

Clearing that up poses a bit of a problem. If the speculation is correct that a +2 crit bonus is an additional 2% crit... then that is an extremely small effect. And accurately capturing a small effect with statistics is tricky business.

To show this, I simulated the results of crafting batches of 200, 1000, 1500, and 2000 grey-difficulty items, evenly split across two companions with 10,000 affection (a baseline 20% crit rate). For comparison, one companion did not have a crafting bonus. The other was given either a 2%, a 5%, a 10% or a 20% critical bonus. I did this 1000 times for each possible combination.

Below, I've plotted the distribution of effect sizes that I found, and colored them by whether that effect was estimated to be statistically significant.

To have a reasonable chance of finding a small effect, it takes an absurd amount of crafting. Even after crafting 1500 items (750 on each companion), if a +2 crit bonus gives a 2% increase to the companion crit rate... I'd only have a 15% chance of finding an effect. (Note that there is an at minimum 5% chance of finding a significant result). Even worse: the estimate of that effect would be approximately 3 times the size of the true effect. To have even a 50% chance of finding any effect, I'd have to craft over 5000 items (at 45 seconds per item, that is just over 6 hours of continuous crafting).

Fortunately, there are two ways to improve my odds. First, if I use a companion with 0 affection, then it is easier to distinguish between the baseline chance of a crit (now only 15%) and the companion-specific bonus. Second, since larger effects are easier to find, it helps to focus on a companion with the larger +5 crit bonus. Taking advantage of these two changes improves my chance of finding an effect after crafting 1500 items to 71%.

I focused on two companions: Gault (10k affection, +2 crit biochem) and Jaesa (0 affection, +5 crit synthweaving). Each character had 400 skill in the corresponding profession. I crafted 750 items on each companion. As a baseline, I used companions without a critical bonus in the profession to craft 750 additional items. If +crit bonuses are truly percentage increases, then given the number of items I'm crafting, I should expect to see a bonus with Jaesa but not be able to distinguish Gault from the baseline.

That is exactly what I find. Because the effect is too small to capture with the sample I used, I don't find any effect with Gault (crit percent 20.3% with a baseline chance of 20%). Fortunately, I do find a bonus with Jaesa (crit percent 19.8% with a baseline chance of 15%). This combination of results suggests that the critical crafting bonuses are percentage increases to the companion's crit chance.

TLDR: The companion +crit crafting bonus is a percentage increase to their critical crafting chance.

Reverse Engineering: Stacks or Singles?

Many sleen were harmed in the creation of this post.

One of the most persistent questions with reverse engineering is whether it is advantageous to reverse engineer biochem consumables as singles or as stacks.

Some insist that one at a time is the only way to go. Some claim that stacking in 5s is the magic number. Others that it doesn't matter. A few claim that any stack gives a significant benefit. Still more threads give several answers at once. And then there are the many many many many (I can keep going for a while) threads of general confusion.

The difficulty is that reverse engineering is pretty crazy random. Just about everyone has a story about that one schematic it took FOREVER to discover (looking at you, Endowment Nano-Optic Resolve System...), or the one they discovered instantly. Each schematic can only be discovered once, and it isn't clear whether different schematics have different discovery rates, so no one character can easily discover the general trend.

To get a handle on the problem someone would need to learn biochem, craft an item, reverse engineer it in varying stack sizes until a discovery was made, and then drop biochem. Repeatedly.

Which is clearly insane.

...awkward pause...

Over the past few days I learned biochem, crafted Compact Medpacks, reverse engineered them in varying stack sizes until a discovery was made, and then dropped biochem. I did this 75 times.* I used stack sizes of 1, 2, and 5 medpacks.

The results are below:

Stack Size:	1	2	5
REs per discovery:	5.17	2.57	1.53
Items per discovery	5.17	5.14	7.63
N	42	14	19

Larger stacks led to fewer stacks per discovery, but more items used. While it took just over 5 RE attempts of single stacks to discover a schematic, it took me only 1.5 RE attempts of stacks of 5 to get a discovery. The downside: using large stacks consumed more items - in stacks of 5, it took approximately 2.5 more items per discovery.**

The benefit to REing in stacks is that it saves time. The downside is that it'll take (on average) a couple more items to gain the discovery. In a stack, if one item grants a discovery, any items after that item are essentially wasted.

I'm pretty amused by this result. Whether in stacks or singles, it takes about the same time to gain a discovery. Any way you like it, that's an efficient way to learn it.



*Well, I did this 106 times... but apparently there is a bug (feature?) where if someone else crafts the Medpacks for you, there is no chance of a RE discovery. I found this out after ~1500 medpacks were crafted and RE'd. (insert angry grumble here)
** For the stat nerd crew: the differences in means here are statistically significant.

Slicing Mission Discoveries

More than a few threads on the SWTOR forums express confusion over how common each mission discovery can be.

To clean up a bit of confusion, I collected data on 300 mission discoveries via slicing. These discoveries are exclusively from the Rank 6 Abundant/Moderate lockbox missions and the Rank 5 Rich lockbox missions. These missions were predominantly run with companions at 10k affection, though I did put the ship droid to work on a few.

Before gathering the data, I'd have sworn that the purple cybertech patterns or the investigation missions were the most common.

I couldn't be more wrong.

One pattern is immediately clear: the gathering mission discoveries (green) are much less common than the pure 'mission' discoveries' (blue).

The gathering crewskill discoveries are about half as likely as the mission crewskill discoveries. Since the pure mission crew skills each have two possible level 340 discoveries, while the gathering skills only have one, this makes some intuitive sense, and would imply that any particular 340 mission has a 7% chance of occurring on a crit.

So is Treasure Hunting the most common discovery (and biochem the least)? Nope - thats just the curse of RNG. Assuming that any gathering mission discovery is equally likely, I'd expect to see that kind of difference or larger about a third of the time.  (And about two-thirds of the time within the Mission discoveries.)*

I'm actually struck by how infrequently the Cybertech patterns drop. I'd have sworn that I was swarmed by them (ditto with investigation), but constantly in need of more Treasure Hunting missions. I'm also struck by the frequency of slicing discoveries - another mission I'm always running. Go figure.

*Stats-nerds: Pearson chi-squared test within each group.

Critical Missions and Companion Affection

Getting crits with Crew Skills just seems more and more important.

Not only do most of my slicing profits come from mission discoveries (found on a slicing crit) - but I'm also busy crafting items with augment slots (Rakata relics, lvl 49 implants...) and want some sense of how tough it'll be.  And come 1.2, I'll want some critically-crated moddable gear (weapon / vest / legs / helm), for a free augment slot - something that was confirmed in the Guild Summit.

So I was particularly excited to see this post:

Companion affection improves your crafting efficiency and crit chance. (Source)

To take a look at how companion affection influences crew skill crits, I ran just over 1000 slicing missions on characters with 400 slicing, using companions with a wide range of affection. Each point is a slicing mission, color coded by companion. Triangles are crits, circles are not. The red line is the predicted probability of a crit for a given level of affection, and the shaded region is its 95% CI.

In short: companion affection really, really, really makes a difference. While companions with no affection have about a 13% chance of a critical success, companions with 10,000 affection have a 20% chance - even without a bonus.

Curiously, mission yield didn't influence chance of a critical mission. Excluding bountiful missions - I didn't run enough to get a good estimate - all mission yields had approximately the same percentage chance of a crit, whether in the raw data (table below) or included in a logit model (with controls for affection, whether the companion had a critical bonus, and mission yield).



I did notice, however, that running lower-level missions while at 400 slicing (say, the rank 5s) yielded a higher chance of a crit than running the max-level missions (by about 1% - so take this with a mountain of salt).

TLDR: companion affection dramatically improves the chance of getting a critical success on a mission. Yield does not appear to matter. The class of the class of mission may have a (minor) effect.

One thing I should note is that I get ridiculously streaky crits across my companions (if one gains a mission discovery, the others are more likely to than should happen by chance). I'm still unsure whether this is a programming quirk, an artifact of the data, or what.

*For a look at companion affection and crafting efficiency, pdxmarcos on the forums has a great guide, and an excellent spreadsheet.

I just ran 1400 slicing missions

I was curious about the use of slicing as a source of extra income.

Printing money. What could possibly go wrong?

So I leveled slicing to max on 6 alts, running just over 1400 missions in the process. All these missions were run after the Great Slicing Apocalypse. Because I love data, I kept track of the results and plotted the earnings (reward from box - cost of mission) against the skill level of the character running the mission.

Aside from making a beautiful plot, with data like this people get really curious to know which missions earn the 'best' reward.

So between the Class (1-6) and Type (Moderate, Abundant, Bountiful, Rich) of mission, which is best?

[Note: for presentation, I excluded mission failures and truncated results with profits > 2000]

The problem with those kinds of questions is immediately apparent: whatever small differences exist across types, those differences are dwarfed by the huge range in earnings from each box.

For example, while the class 6 'Abundant' missions earn an average of 60 credits more than their 'Moderate' counterparts, this difference is entirely due to the increased chance for high-yield green boxes on Abundant missions. Those higher credit returns more than offset the additional cost for the abundant missions.

But because the returns from green boxes are so variable, even after running ~400 rank 6 missions, that difference isn't statistically significant.  (For the stats nerds: two-sample t-test, p=.19).

So while I feel that abundant missions are good returns, I don't have enough data to justify that claim. And I can say even less about the categories where I've run a total of 70 missions.

But what about mission discoveries?

Every slicing mission has a chance to return a discovery on a crit - either a cybertech crafting pattern or a blue/epic mission for another profession. Those discoveries are exceptionally lucrative - the blue Treasure Hunting 340s go for at least 20k on my server's GTN. Thing is, not much increases discovery chance. As far as I can tell, the chance for discoveries is equal across all yields of slicing missions: about 12-17%. (More on this later in a followup post.)

So what to do?

I view crafting systems as a game in themselves, so I typically have between 5-15 companions out on slicing missions. I use them to find mission discoveries, which I send to other companions to run to for materials to finance my little crafting empire (evil laugh here).

But even as a pure moneymaking system, slicing excels. I made an alt on another server, and continually send companions out on slicing missions, selling the discoveries on the AH.  At lvl 22, my alt has 30k from missions lockbox profits, and about 200k from selling mission discoveries.

Hitting Moving Targets

One thing I'm interested in is understanding how accurate any population rankings I observe can be (from the previous post).

Just taking a quick glance at TorStatus, its pretty clear that the population of any given server can be... well... lumpy.  Case in point:  using the same basic methods of TorStatus, but averaging the server status of all East Coast and West Coast servers (US) and across a month, the overall server population looks like this:

Not only would that be an awesome roller coaster ride, it suggests a few things about the populations of servers.  (Numbers in military EST.)

• Differences between nights aren't as large as you might expect.  I'm pretty sure that if I ditched the weekday labels, it'd be hard to match the charts to days of the week.  (Other than the Tuesday downtime.)  Saturday looks an awful lot like Monday.  And even though Sunday is the heaviest play time... it isn't by much.
• Time of night matters much, much more.  Just for example, the difference between 7 and 9 pm PST is huge on a West Coast server (22 vs 24 on the charts).

What does that mean? I sampled the data for the last post over three hours on Saturday night, so I'm understandably nervous that the time it took to observe the server populations could have an effect.

Too check this, I took a quick glance at how closely the data I observed matches to the listed server status, to get an idea of how accurate my earlier observations were.  First, looking at the status at the time of sampling (triangles), 15 minutes before (circles), and 15 minutes after (squares):

Thankfully, none of the servers I examined changed their status around sampling time.  Even better - only Infinite Empire (top left, green) shows a mismatch between the server status and the observed population, with more people than would be expected.

This also gives some idea of the cut-points for each server status - or at least a nice guess for where they might be, sitting at around 500 and 1500ish.  (Hopefully I can get a bit more data to pull that together.)

While the observed data broadly match the server status - the same can't be said of the rankings between servers over time. To show this, as I collected the data, I sampled two servers (Prophecy of the Five and Veela) at multiple times as I collected the data.

Because I'm drawing the data from different times, the observed total population of each server moves pretty dramatically across the scale. Unfortunately, this makes answering whether Po5 has a higher/lower pop than Mandalore something I can't tell with any confidence.

But instead of being concerned about server size... what about the balance between factions?  How much does that move over the night?

It shouldn't be any surprise that the server populations are smaller pre-primetime. Curiously, that doesn't seem to have any effect on the balance between factions, which doesn't show much movement between times.

TLDR:  Server populations are consistent across days, but change pretty dramatically over the course of the night. These swings make estimating the relative size of servers pretty difficult. Fortunately, these changes don't influence the estimated balance between factions.

-myth

*note:  as with the previous post, The Harbinger isn't a PvP server, its just there for a point of reference.