In the days of the World of Warcraft, I was rich, adorned with many in-game pixels of in-game currency. Very, very rich. Not quite Chinese-old-farmer-rich, but rich relative to everyone I was playing with. My secret was Inscription as a profession and a huge array of add-ons to manage thousands of auctions.

I come to SWTOR hoping to be rich again. I have been very interested in the economy and the trade network, etc., and haven’t seen a ton of information out there on it. So, I came into the game blind as to how it would work. Here are my (very negative-but-I-still-love-the-game) notes so far:

1. The “Galactic Trade Network” interface is terrible. You can’t go in and search, for example, on any one item without first picking the category and sub-category of that item. So if I want all of the “silks” in the GTN for synthweaving, I need to first select the “Crafting Materials” category and then the “Underworld Trading” subcategory. Very sub-par for finding things. This means that when you are about to sell something, it takes forever to figure out what the going rate is.

2. The GTN limits you to 50 auctions at a time. 50!!! I ran the Underworld Trading missions at least 60 times over the weekend and ended up with a stack of 75 Mullnine Metal (sp?). Those go for 250 apiece, at least, so it’s not like you can sell a stack of 75, or even a stack of 10 really. I need a ton of small-stack auctions, which eats up the 50 limit quickly. At the rate I am going, I will never be able to sell everything. I had hundreds and sometimes thousands of auctions going at once on WoW. This is a huge let-down.

3. You can buy consumables very inexpensively on the GTN. Stims aren’t that pricey either.

4. If you are running companion missions while working the GTN, prepare to be annoyed. Every time a companion comes back from a mission (ie, every 3-4 minutes for some skills, the time it takes to post half a dozen auctions or run two searches), the game closes one of your GTN windows in favor of the mission accomplished window. You get to re-do whatever it is you were doing.

Okay, so I am really, really disappointed with the GTN and economy aspects of the game. That said, I’m happy with one thing I’ve discovered: Slicing. Oh my, does slicing rock. I dropped Synthweaving for slicing at 11:00 pm last night. By 1:00 am I had leveled it to 95 and had earned about 6k credits. All for about two minutes of work total in telling my crew what to do. Slicing is the bomb and is going to easily make up for the crappy GTN.

Peace out.

Jaczor