The Item Modification feature ahs generated a lot of discussion in the Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) community after a few changes left it unclear as to how the system functions. In an effort to clear the air about the feature, Associate Lead Designer Emmanuel Lusinchi posted a lengthy message to the community to clear up some confusion that he feels the patch notes that he wrote may have been the root of.

Lusinchi began by clarifying what the new orange items in SWTOR are and that they are not in any way related to rare epic items like they are in some other MMORPGs, but rather the new identifier for fully moddable items. Lusinchi goes on to offer a brief history of the modding system and what has changed since its original implementation and why those changes were made to support his next point, which explains at some length why the system was refined and made a bit more focused.

So, to summarize: in the old system, you could not take any piece of gear, fit it with the best mods and keep it all the way to the end levels: a lot of the green gear did not have all the slots, the mods that could be obtained were for the most part... not good, and you could not extract better one from existing gear.



So... things had to change. Because despite all those warts, some of the players who tested the system really liked the concept: that a player could find an appearance they really like and work to keep it relevant all the way to end game. So, we knew we were on to something and we also knew the old system was just not delivering.

The changes made in a nutshell refined the number of moddable items and mod types, made removing mods possible, modding an item no longer requires a workbench, crafters can reverse engineer mods to try and gain schematics and a new orange custom item quality was created. My summary is cutting it really short and doesn’t do the full post enough credit, so if you’re curious about the item mod changes in SWTOR, head over and read the full post on the official forums.

Source: Associate Lead Designer Emmanuel Lusinchi Clarifies Item Modding