There is a quote from the The Unit Cost Building Block that deserves its own attention:

“It is a big time sacrifice to only run Rich Yield missions though since only one is available at a time for most materials, so the Bountiful Yield missions will almost always be run as well, even though the unit cost is elevated, because time is still the biggest investment in this part of the economy.“

The biggest reason that not every person that plays SWTOR, or any other MMO, decides to be involved in the crew skill, or crafting, part of the game is the time commitment.  There’s a certain level of quirkiness required to log into a game 2-3 times per day just to send your companions off on crew skill missions, but for many of us it is an integral part of the game.  Since the point of this blog is to bring numbers into such discussions though, let’s quantify that time commitment…

Rich Yield missions take 51m 27s to complete without a companion efficiency bonus and Bountiful Yield missions take 49m 04s to complete without a companion efficiency bonus.  Therefore, building on the yield calculations already completed for the unit cost, the following can be derived:

The first observation that becomes apparent is that even though the unit cost of the Grade 11 materials varies, the units per hour is uniform across the group.  The second observation is that it takes a lot of hours to build up a large supply of these materials, even if you have multiple alts running the missions simultaneously. The model assumes that both missions are being run concurrently to maximize units acquired per hour, which is why the units per hour are additive instead of an average.

The notion of units per hour is the natural corollary to the unit cost as the building blocks of analyzing the economics within the game.  The full tables for the blue, green, and grey materials will be added tomorrow to round out the foundation for more analysis to come.

– Andrew | SWTOR Economics