Very upset at the lowering of whiskey profit! Unbalanced Now!

Discussion in 'Crafting & Gathering' started by odyssey2003, Mar 14, 2021.

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  1. odyssey2003

    odyssey2003 Avatar

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    It takes a lot to make whiskey as you needs wood , ore, barley, jar of yeast culture, LOT taxs, seeds, water and other things and all this takes months before you actually see a return. NOW it takes about 8-9 months to see a return and that's IF you don't miss a watering!

    There are user that now are making millions per day with NO initial cost or effort so why are the whiskey makers profit being cut ? I got over 20k barrels but I can assure you that I don't even make 1/2 Million a day.

    One could say if you don't like it just do something else right? Well what am I suppose to do with 20k barrels? scrap them ? how about all the effort it took to make them and all the money for the ingredients ?

    Another thing is that I have been at this for years! don't people who work on something for years deserve something for their efforts? well how about just being fair then because right now it does not see fair to me that after years of working on this the price gets cut to a point where if I miss 1 watering I am in the RED due to the profit margin being so low and that's after the initial 8-9 month waiting period.

    This is not balanced.

    At the moment I see no reason for anyone to start investing in farming for barley or whiskey other than a few for users whom might use it for the little perks it gives when ingested but once again for us that have been doing this for YEARS what are we suppose to do with our investment not to mentioned all the time?

    PS: The calculations was on the following:
    1: Wood at 120 per piece
    2: Copper at 20
     
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  2. Sarek

    Sarek Avatar

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    Whiskey should have been the top level fire buff consumable, would have created a real demand for that fire water.
     
  3. odyssey2003

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    Even if the whole community used 4 per days that would not make much of a dent in users like me that have been creating barrels and barrels since the last wipe ( years ago )! A guildie made a speadsheet detailing cost versus reward and we see little reason why it was cut the way it was in the first place! Devs say there was to much revenue but I fail to see this when compared to the initial cost, current cost and effort! Like I mentioned I have been at this for years, does that mean Time and initial cost does not factor into anything ?

    I just made about 3-4000 more cask, it took me over a week to do at 10 hours a day and about 1.8 million in mats! I Will not see any profit now ( with the new devs cuts ) for about 8-9 months!! and that' if I don't miss any watering's making barley. now to me that does not sound balanced to me compared to what others are making doing other things!
     
  4. Sorgin Txakal

    Sorgin Txakal Avatar

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    My analysis on whiskey profit margins indicates that what you should be upset about was getting duped into overpaying for wood or that you didn't take the time to gather it yourself.

    The biggest variable cost in whiskey brewing is wood, and if you bought most or all of it, then you can't really be that upset about a long term ROI.
     
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  5. FrostII

    FrostII Bug Hunter

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    @odyssey2003
    Because I neither make nor consume whiskey ingame, I have no idea what you are referring to.
    What did Catnip do that has you so fired up ?
     
  6. odyssey2003

    odyssey2003 Avatar

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    @sorgin, well My initial cost is not the biggest factor here actually but even if I was to calculate that the amount of farming of wood I would have had to do is still time which is money/gold! ( no matter which way you slice it ), ( although I did use it as a part of the subject ) its about the time and effort versus reward. even if you remove the wood and ore price its still off balance in IMHO as the reason for the cut is not justified when comparing it to other avenues of making money in this game. it would appear that certain things does not seem to add up here as far as what other avenue can do ( as far as money earning ) as far as what whiskey users are making versus the need for the cut in profit that has been made!

    If we remove the initial cost ( which I am actually ok in swallowing ) we are still left with the cost of production which includes ( barley seeds, jar of yeast culture, water, lot tax's, ) and if we miss one watering we end up with HALF the crop which really cripples the revenue now to a point of being in the RED or very close to it since the profit margin is so low now. and if don't miss a crop well its a revenue but not that much considering the initial cost and OR time and the time to farm the barley and fill and the barrels then empty them. it takes a decent amount of time to do all this but yet now the reward of doing so does not seem to fit in comparison to many other avenues.

    So My issue is why was this cut so necessary ? when so many other avenues make either more or the same revenue?

    Another thing is , when the devs make mods/NERF in a skill tree they give the users a way to Freely undo the tree with no loss of XP so that users don't feel cheated on the effort/XP they invested into the Tree . YET they make this change which is something some us users have been working on for years with no way to roll back the losses.

    We feel they should relook at the changes they made, as for now we feel unnecessary cheated in something that some of us have been working on for years.
     
  7. odyssey2003

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    @FrostII , its because of modification to whiskey prices that we get from selling whiskey to npc vendors! they nerf 40% of it. which really digs deep into the revenue. its only until me and guildie decided to do some math on the subject that we realize how much it impacts us. that 30-40% Makes a huge impact when you add everything up.

    I had even forgotten to add the LOT Taxes actually and when I add that up is when I realized if I miss a watering ( which cuts the crop in half ) you end up pretty much in the RED. this just does not seem fair to me! or even welcoming to new players that want to get into farming. ( well At least not farming for whiskey anyways ).

    What worse is that I have been working on this for years and have over 20k barrels. If I decided to do something else what am I suppose to do with the barrels ? scrap them ? .. its not like we can buy a book of unlearning you know!
     
  8. Anpu

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    Sell them to players?
     
  9. odyssey2003

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    @Anpu , well if I have no choice then I guess I will ( take about a year or 2 to sell over 20k of barrels ) but honestly right now its certainly nerfing my will to play :(
     
  10. Barugon

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    That would be great if there were a global vendor search, so that people could actually see that you have them for sale.
     
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  11. Sorgin Txakal

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    Well, there isn't nearly enough whiskey demand to cover the production of players in game.

    Let's say I brewed 1,000 casks a month ~ 40,000 2-year whiskey.

    2-year whiskey lasts for an hour, so if I sold it to players who drank 4 a day, 4 days a week, I would need 2,500 players to buy whiskey from me and no one else.

    So, mechanically speaking, whiskey was never set up for making money off of selling to players as the primary source of demand.



    The question is, what is an acceptable profit margin from selling to NPCs. Time really isn't a factor, because 99.9% of the time the whiskey is just sitting there in its cask. So from a production of the whiskey standpoint, we're talking ~3 minutes per barrel to empty the barrel each month and time spent at the cooking station combining ingredients and refilling the barrel. The second part of the equation is whether or not it is worth it to farm your own ingredients, which @odyssey2003 is also looking at.

    So is ~3 minutes per cask worth the 100 gold per cast of profit you make per month now? Is farming your own ingredients worth the additional ~50 gold in profits you make per cask, or is it better to outsource farming to a guild/community large batch farmer.



    If you aren't counting the cost of the cask in the equation, which I personally think destroys the argument if you are arguing economics while disregarding start up cost and ROI, then you make a profit every month instead of waiting 4 months - 2 years before you first break even on a single batch.


    Edit: What irked me about the change was that I was looking at it as a supply chain I could outsource some of the components to guild members and we all share in the profits each month. Having 80 gold of profits slashed per cask essentially made me stop buying wood as the ROI got pushed out an entire year (from 15 months to 27 months) and now I am also looking into farming my own ingredients to make up some of the lost time.

    To me, this was not a move that would stop players from purchasing ingredients from NPC vendors, that was such a small fraction of the variable cost, what this change has done is make it far less appealing to involve any other players in a plan to set up steady income for the community/guild/etc. via whiskey brewing.
     
    Last edited: Mar 14, 2021
  12. Mylady ‘Gin Gin Darlin

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    Well if Chris removes NPC vendors like he mentioned then this will all be a mute point as you will be forced to move to selling to players anyway.
     
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  13. necronut

    necronut Avatar

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    If I play Tetris every day for 20 years, Tetris doesn't start owing me high scores.

    If I play World of Warcraft every day for 5 years, WoW doesn't owe me BG victories.

    If I spend -and I have- nigh on 3 years in SotA learning the ins and outs of the game, agriculture, brewing, and spend hours chopping down trees, brokering trades with other players, mining, and craft my own barrels... SotA doesn't owe me literally anything.

    SotA is however, the only game I've played where I meet people who think like this, and that's surprising given that I've been a gamer for 38+ years.
     
  14. odyssey2003

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    Ya if Chris does remove npc's then what? All us Whiskey users will be at a huge loss ( far greater than any other loss in this game ). Unless its just a few cases then it will not be so bad

    I got about 23k casks which took me years to build up and well How the heck am I going to get my money back on that? will there be a "Book of Uncasking" ! LOL

    I miss another watering and got 5 barley ? when I add it up with the seed and water it takes ( include the missing watering ) I get a cost of 3.9 per barley, at that point I would be seriously better off buying it from someone at 3.0+but at that price given the new prices drop why would anyone make whiskey in the first place given the time it takes to do and the wait time ? you can do just about anything else in the game and it would be more profitable with less of a time sink or possible lost! This is the unbalancement that I see here.

    It not the first time that I have a beef with the way the devs go about cuts.. instead of small cuts and seeing how it goes they do drastic changes and then end up going back and forth BUT in the meantime it upsets the players when it need not be that way.
    In this case though I believe the cut was too drastic and unnecessary and I believe they should retake a look at it and take everything into account and see if what they can do to make it better due to the consequences it has on the players like me and on the health of field of farming.
     
  15. necronut

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    If you want to fix agriculture, go back to when the farmers whined about reagents.

    Devs doubled all reagent output, but there was no doubling of demand to justify this.

    You know what happened already, but just in case:

    All reagents are now worth 50% what they used to go for.

    So let's roll back the doubling of reagent output first, instead of making alcohol worth more because a few players spent years filling up on it and now expect to be rich just because. Alcohol was worth nothing before the buffs were added, where were these posts about ROI before the buffs?
     
  16. kaeshiva

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    I was irritated (if not surprised) at the whiskey prices nerf.

    Its the same thing we saw a couple years ago with people growing nightshade to make poison to sell for minimal, minimal profit, requiring a significant player time investment both in the growing and the crafting. Because people were doing it for the crafting experience, and the profit was pennies over break-even. That got nerfed, and people are still doing the exact same thing, except they are doing it and making a loss, because they are doing it for the crafting experience.

    Nearly every system that was:
    Take starting materials, + add player effort -> output end product worth marginally more than starting materials
    has been systematically nerfed from the game, over and over again.
    The message here is "a player's time investment is worthless" - which kinda sets a tone about the game as a whole that isn't favorable.
    That's what happens when you balance things off of spreadsheets without taking into consideration that to make that profit, it took 4 people 12 hours of "crafting table time" each in addition to a fifth person managing the actual crop growing. If we didn't process it, he was better off growing cotton, so it had to be kept up with. At the end of the day, the farmer would make like 1% more money than he would have just NPCing cotton, and the processors would get enough to cover the npc products and something like 5000 gold each. For 12 hours work. And this got nerfed!

    Making poison - or whiskey - or whatever it is that's your deal - to generate your income should be just as viable a proposition as fighting monsters and taking their stuff. It was already far less profitable (like, orders of magnitude less profitable) for the time spent, and it gets nerfed down from "marginally profitable" to "completely pointless", leaving us all wondering why we even have these systems to begin with since there's no consumption of these items except for npc selling them, and no way to generate the absurd amounts of producer exp needed unless you craft them. Its a deeply flawed system that just encourages waste. Kind of like all of crafting.

    The related problem is that well, making whiskey is pressing 1 button every what, 10 minutes? Its begging to be botted. So people bot.
    If you create a boring, tedious, repetitive task that can be done with a macro that yields profit, well...yeah, people will bot.

    Unfortunately, because of this, it means those of us who used to just like some light crafting while chatting with friends or roleplaying or even being somewhat engaged while doing our housework and coming back to the PC to set another 60 barrels going and answer whispers - its become pointless. I used to spend 8 hours a day "playing" sota while I was working - usually couldn't fight stuff because I might get called away, but I'd get my refining chores done, make some stuff for a bit of money, etc. then play properly in the evening. My playtime plummetted when the ability to do this began to be hampered 1) by increasingly poor game performance meaning I couldn't tie up my pc with sota / risk it crashing and 2) when it became a much less lucrative use of my time. So I stopped logging on during the day completely. And my overall engagement with the game dropped. I stopped seeing folks except in the narrow band of my evening playtime timezone. All the cooperative stuff we'd set up with farmers and crafters, with dropbox systems and al the funny "ledgers" and stuff we'd leave for each other - all stopped. Then a lot of the people stopped playing because the only thing to do is go kill stuff and a lot of us were never playing sota for the "kill stuff".

    Player time used to transform an item from a raw to a finished state should add value to that item.
    If it doesn't, then the finished item needs to have a purpose sufficient to create demand.
    If the only reason we can't have this is because "botters" then, I'd say we need to attack the problem instead of ruining things for everyone to try and frustrate bots.
     
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  17. Vesper

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    "We want a player driven economy!"

    Devs remove artificial, inflated demand for player crafted item.

    "To the forums!"
     
  18. that_shawn_guy

    that_shawn_guy Bug Hunter

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    In my experience, NPCs selling commodities/consumable should be a high priced gold sinks. There are players that would pay the higher prices for convenience of not having to go hunt around player vendors. I don't think we have enough consistent gold sinks as it is.

    For the items that can be created by players, I'd rather see these items have their NPC price raised 4x+ than just flat out removed. Black Pearl, for one example, could easily remain a gold sink. NPC should also stop buying these commodities.
     
  19. necronut

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    Amen. I'd add that I'd also like to see player crafted items become more competitive with artifacts. These things can be combined and, to borrow a Homer Simpson word, embigguned to the point of absurdity and it's made player crafted items much less desirable long-term.
     
  20. Barugon

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    Yeah, player crafted items are suck. I am looking forward to crafted belts though.
     
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