Is the Remote Trading Outpost Bundle Good Value?

I'm not the biggest fan of the Cartel Market, but it helps to keep the game alive and is relatively inoffensive when compared to the monetisation efforts of many other MMOs. While I can't recall buying Cartel coins for real money more than once in the past decade, I do occasionally buy things with the CC I get through subscribing and completing Galactic Seasons. One item that caught my interest when it was announced was the Remote Trading Outpost Bundle first presented during the dev livestream for 7.6.

I'll admit that the fact that the devs who talked about it were super funny certainly helped to pique my interest, but primarily I was curious about the concept of a decoration bundle that came with a built-in quest. I think we haven't had to buy anything story-related from the Cartel Market since those cubes with the Shroud diaries. (I'm not counting the HK-55 chapter since subscribers originally earned access to that as part of the normal content release cadence.)

Now if you're worried about "having" to buy this bundle for the story... don't. There's no voice acting and nothing's tied to any existing story content, it's just a little side mission utilising the new comlink interface and tied to the bundle itself.

However, I did think that this made for a nice bit of "added value" to the decorations, which was the primary reason that I bought it - curiosity about just what was going to be included. So I'm writing this post for anyone else who might be wondering.

On opening the bundle, you are given 82 decorations of various types and sizes, plus an item that starts a quest. If you do so it will instruct you to place the Neglected Spire Basin decoration, which is basically a broken fountain, in one of your strongholds and to interact with it. As you identify it as damaged, you're given the option to contact the manufacturer about the problem, which leads you to a terminal on Mek-Sha, where after going through some of the expected red tape, you're eventually being assigned a repair droid to fix the basin (and seemingly everything else).

When you complete this quest, you're rewarded with another 86 decorations, a pet, and another quest item. This follow-up quest starts from the same Neglected Spire Basin, as even after it's been repaired, it turns out to have a baby dianoga stuck in the pipework. The new mission asks you to learn more about dianogas on the fleet, again using the comlink interface, followed by a trip to Hutta to gather some items to lure the dianoga out. Once you've successfully done so, the second mission is completed and the baby dianoga also becomes your pet.

As with many virtual items, it can be hard to assess whether something is good value or not, and if that wasn't tricky enough, decoration bundles are even tougher to judge because they are pretty much guaranteed to contain some items that you don't care that much about. Still, just by comparing the Remote Trading Outpost Bundle to other items on the Cartel Market, at least some conclusions can be drawn.

At 2500 Cartel Coins, it's a bit pricier than most decoration bundles, which more commonly run between 1300 and 1800 Coins. However, those other bundles also usually contain only around 10-30 decos, so the fact that you get more than five times as many decorations for a price increase of less than 40% is insane. And that's without even attaching any value to the little quests or the two pets. (Pets are usually another 240 CC each.)

The only caveat as per Swtorista (I didn't think to check this myself) is that all the items are bound and can't be sold on the GTN. The quest also isn't a legacy unlock, so while you can move the quest starter item around between characters of your legacy, once it's completed it's done, and you can't repeat it on another character, though the two pets themselves can be unlocked in Collections.

So in my opinion at least, this bundle is great value for money if you're into decorating at all and have some CC to spare. You can see a full list of all the decorations on Swtorista's site, but I particularly like the fountains/basins and different types of lamps.

If you have to spend real money to get the required CC, I'd be a bit more hesitant, simply because I don't like that the pricing of 2500 CC is just a bit more than you get with the 20 dollar Cartel coin bundle (which buys 2400 CC) and I'm not a fan of those kinds of upsell tactics. 

Still, I consider that a relatively minor niggle, and overall I've got to give this one a major thumbs up. I've only used some of the decos so far, but the pets have certainly gotten some comments! I'd be happy to see more "value-added" bundles like this in the future.