Out of Pod Experience

Kill me but I like star wars... My first serious MMO was SWTOR hence onec in a while when they get new expansion or something I'll sub for month see what's what and unsub again.

Last night they managed to do the impossible and crash the entire in game market in few hours.

As you may know the SWTOR servers are many shards based in areas of the globe, each server got an economy of it's own with in game market where you can place item for sale.

Since SWTOR went freemium people could pay real $$$ money and get tokens called Carrtel Coins in order to purchase skins and boosts and other unlocks from in game store.
one of those items are packs which dropped among other things:
1. Reputation items - this increased your reputation with a vendor which granted access to rare items.
2. Certificates - a virtual coin required to purchase this items.

Few months ago an expansion called Strongholds was released and added Decorations and personal housing for players, as some kind of activity.

Last night a new Cartel pack was released with this item:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8KuYr5eGyA

Contraband slot machine.

you pay 500 credits (not really much in game it's less the mobs drops on first planet on lowest level) for a token to play the machine... minimum you get is another token if you didn't win anything.
Then...
the machine drops:
1. Reputation Items.
2. Certificates.
3. Jawa Junk tokens.

what are jawa junks?
there is a decoration of a vendor from which you can use this green\blue\purple tokens to get ANY crafting material in the game except for 2 which only drop on high end max level raid.

so what happened? since yesterday all crafting materials prices dropped up to 70% and keep dropping.
Crafted items made by players dropped in price as well.

Market is crashing.

And that's how you crash in game economy.. you hand in free stuff, money and materials without any mechanism to remove the excess ones.

My head hurts.

True,
but entire activity scale of Crafting, materials procuring and selling and "Conquest" is now null and void mostly and out of the game unless you are masochist.

I've had an account with SWTOR since the headstart and play on and off based on when new content comes out. Might have to resub to the game now just to see this.

I don´t think it was intentional, only shows the current level of QA and Development in the game.

Even CCP fails to iterate on some of their items and we have a very "tightly" controlled economy here, add to it people that fly ideas out of the blue and this might happen, or they knew and just wanted a short term cash boost for X or Y regardless of the outcome.

I must say economics as a subject matter has been increasingly interesting to me as the years pass in EVE Online, fascinating game this one. Only game I see with a long term survival rate just because of that. Many other games out there just let you play a strange form of single player hybrid with social online aspects.

Single sharding is and will always be one of the many cornerstones of the game.

somehow without any knowledge of the game, I have no idea what's going on in your last post

in short TL;DR
I used this machine they added to invest 2.5 million and in return I got around 10 million.

translating the amounts to eve it's like investing 2.5 bill and in 4-5 hours of nothing but right click on a box in safe personal home space no one can get into I made it 10 bill.

you can reset the code now with 1-time password.

Wasn't me, I unsubbed from that shitshow of a game not too long after it launched.

It was a shame, really. It had potential.