Reverse engineering is based on luck because of the random number generators (RNG) in the game. If you run across some bad luck, you could end up spending a great deal of money on your reverse engineering. If you have yet to experience it yourself, you need to read the story of this guy who wasted 20 million credits with a combination of poor Reverse Engineering luck and his own greed.
He’s written about the tale in a “what not to do” blog post so you don’t have to suffer his same embarrassing fate.
How I Underestimated SWTOR’S Reverse Engineering RNG from Mad Sith Assassin tells us:
When rank 27 gear released with Terror From Beyond, I wanted to continue the success I had before. This is around the time two fateful events occurred.
First, it became public knowledge that taking a crafted mod a player had made and inserting it into gear then removing it made you eligible to learn the schematic from Reverse Engineering it.
Secondly, my guild bled players at an increasing rate. I no longer had regular chances to RE leftovers from raiding when we couldn’t run a solid Ops group. You can probably see where this is going.
He then goes on to tell us how he made the terrible investment of buying up crafted enhancements and hilts from some of the very first successful players to learn them. Prices were high and it was easy to drop a couple mil in this area. He believed by getting them early, he’d be in the market for making more money.
The problem is, he ran into some very bad luck. Of his original purchases, he didn’t learn any schematics. There goes 20 million credits down the tube.
He continues to tell us his tale of misfortune and then recaps the mistakes he made here:
- I relied on my luck to continue
- I bought high and sold low
- I didn’t pay attention when we hit the tipping point from high demand to oversupplied
- My circumstances changed when I didn’t consistently raid anymore, but I didn’t adapt.
You can definitely learn a lot from this story, even if you have not made the exact same mistakes yourself.
Have you lost money on Reverse Engineering? How much?
