Bioware’s Damion Schubert has jumped into the debate over the Slicing skill and it’s financial returns. He’s pretty succinctly nailed the issue to the wall and unapologetically states things needed to change:

Let’s get the obvious thing out of the way – slicing was giving too much money, and this needed to be corrected. A bug snuck through launch that resulted in some lockboxes giving out far more cash than our magic spreadsheets said they were supposed to give. The end result was that our economy was getting flooded with credits, which risks causing massive inflation in the economy. Players were abandoning other crafting skills for slicing which was causing the problem to feed on itself. Economic issues are tricky – once you let the horse out of the barn, it’s pretty hard to coax it back in – and it’s important that the dev team jump on these issues as quickly as we can.

Once we corrected the issue, the math started to fall into line, which is to say the metrics of our economy started to match what we expected slicers to have. It’s important to note that, while slicing was always meant to be a little more casual, and less wedded to the other crafting skills than the other gathering skills, it was never meant to be a Magic Money Machine. Slicing is still profitable, I promise – the metrics are showing that slicers still do quite well – but it’s no longer profitable to the degree where you were a moron if you chose any other Crew Skill.

Are we done balancing? This being an MMO, you’re never done balancing, and we will continue to monitor Slicing and the other endgame skills to ensure they are fulfilling their stated purpose inside the game mechanics, useful to the players who choose them, and healthy contributors to the economy as a whole. It is not unlikely that all Crew Skills will get further adjustments once the game and economy has matured and metrics points out a strong need. Once this happens, I promise we’ll make a better effort to let players know the rationale of the changes we’re making as we’re making them.

It’s a bit hard to disagree with the approach if the data was showing an exodus to slicing as a skill. Do you agree?