My initial analysis of unit cost intentionally omitted Wealthy Yield missions.  The reason that I made that choice was affirmed this week when I dove headfirst into this rabbit hole at the expense of completing any other significant content during the week.  There are so many variables that calculating the fair value of the mission discovery item for resale or as the baseline for the unit cost of the resulting materials is very difficult.  There is an understandable interest from the community in learning more about this mechanic within the crew skill system, so as promised and teased this week, here goes nothing…

Mission Discovery items are critical results available from Lockbox Slicing missions, but you can obtain this critical result on missions all the way down to Moderate Yield Lockbox missions unlike the critical result crafting materials which only result from Bountiful Yield and Rich Yield missions.  The mission that provides a critical result Mission Discovery item will also include a Credit Box that varies based on the yield level of the mission.  After a lot of research and number-crunching I came to a very interesting result; based on my current best understanding of the mean credits received from the credit boxes the most accurate unit cost to use for the Mission Discovery item is zero!

How can that be possible?  It seems irrational, but the mean credits received from the Large Reinforced Transparisteel Credit Box as a result of Rich Yield Slicing missions is so significant that it is profitable to run the mission even if it had a critical chance of zero.  In fact, if you run all of the yield levels of the lockbox missions simultaneously, the mean value of the credit boxes you would receive would exceed the cost of running the missions.  However, the Rich Yield level is the only one that is “in the black” and the margin is so large that it makes up for the net cost of the other missions as well.

There are a few takeaways from this realization:

1. Not matter what is going on, you should always have your companions running the Slicing missions in order of the yield scale.  The Rich Yield mission is literally free money, so always have it running.  The value of running the others is going to depend somewhat on the rest of the analysis of the Wealthy Yield missions so that we can assign a value to the Mission Discovery items.
2. The remainder of the Wealthy Yield mission analysis will be approached from the opposite perspective since the unit cost to acquire is non-issue now.  We only need to account for the 5,830 credits that it costs to run the Wealthy Yield mission itself, there is not an additional cost to acquire unless the Mission Discovery item was purchased on the GTN.  We will also be able to quantify the fair value of that Mission Discovery item based on the value of the materials received from the missions.

 Wealthy Missions (Part 2): Unit Cost of Material Results is already mostly finished, so check back this weekend for the next part of the analysis!

– Andrew | SWTOR Economics