Wednesday, July 30, 2014

SWTOR's Massive Credit Sink

I think BioWare went into the plumbing business.  With the addition of housing (coming out August 19th!), BioWare also created a gigantic credit sink.  You know, a place to spend your hard earned money.  The prices are pretty high up there.  Let's look at what some things cost.  As always, Dulfy has the info.

The basic Coruscant and Kaas City house starts at 5,000 credits.  Ok, so far so good.  To unlock everything it'll cost 1.4 million credits or 3,550 Cartel Coins.  Just to remind ourselves, 2,400 Cartel Coins can be bought $19.99.  That comes out to 120 coins per dollar, making this cost $29.  Credit wise, it is a fair amount of credits.  Not unattainable, but still a high amount.  I'm fine with this.

Then there is Nar Shaada and Tatooine.  Nar Shaada costs 6.5 million credits or 6,825 Cartel Coins.  That's about $56.  This includes the free rooms offered to those who were subbed.  Tatooine costs 9.5 million, or 10,100 Cartel Coins.   That's $84!  Even if you wanted to just use credits, we are talking a huge amount.  

Did I mention Guild Starships will start at 50 million credits and go upwards of 130 million for all the unlocks?  All these prices are subject to change, of course.  It is still just on the PTS.

So the houses themselves cost quite a bit.  Now lets talk about decorations.  Here is where I really start to get worried about the credit sink.  You can get decorationsfrom doing just about everything, including crafting.  The way it works is crafters make Industrial Prefabs.  You then give the Prefabs to fabricator droids who make the finished product.  Tor-Decorating has a great list of what they require.

Prefabs require 2 artifact level materials.  This is all well and good.  The part I don't like is the Universal Prefabs.  This requires 1 of each of the 4 different kind of Industrial Prefabs.  Then on top of that, some items require several Universal Prefabs.  I don't even want to go into Dark Projects which require even more materials.

This should have an interesting effect on the in-game economy.  Artifact level materials are most reliably received from Crafting Missions.  These are the result of Slicing mission crits.  So we should expect a sharp rise in the cost of missions and materials.  I expect Prefabs to be quite expensive, especially when the expansion first goes live.

I'm actually a little worried it will put a lot of decorations out of reach for the casual player, not to mention Tatooine.  It could all be a boon to gold sellers though who do still exist.