Mining, Are You Serious?

Two things....

1. Your point about production xp is understantable but not actually the way you should be thinking about it. The problem players have is that they're trying to do too much at the same time.

If you're a miner and you're chopping wood, ok fine. But don't train in chopping wood. Just chop the trees down and get the crafting xp. I do it all the time. I have a 1 in forestry.

2. If you hired all those people the prices would be higher, so that's a business problem, it doesn't mean you can't solve that problem. But this is a theoretically question because to my knowledge no one is actually trying to hire people, are they? You don't think there are people in this game that would LOVE to roleplay a guard?

Lazarus Long sits on his front porch all day talking to people! This game is full of people that want to fulfill a role, go find them and hire them on the cheap!

 

The current economic system in this game, in terms of reward vs. effort, reward vs. risk, etc. in no way approximates real life. Nor do I think it is meant to. Its not even apples and oranges, its apples and something that isn't even fruit.

Based on the effort/time used to acquire materials, the current price trends of those materials, and the amount of those materials needed to make sellable commodities, being a pure 'producer' is not viable - you do not make enough income producing to buy needed materials to keep producing and afford all of the production costs (fuels etc.). Not only that you have to level up the producing, meaning that you're going to go into quite a hole making stuff that isn't resellable at all before you can even start making desirable products.

While I will concede that it would be possible, say, to sit in town all day, buying low and selling high, or buying low and going elsewhere and selling there, and make a profit doing it to fund crafting or whatever else you want to do, this still isn't being a pure crafter. This is being a crafter who spends 90% of their time being a merchant and hauling things back and forth. I suppose this may appeal to a small percentage of people but most people don't want to spend all their game time this way, especially for such small profit margins compared to just going and killing something.


@ your other post

I'm talking from a pure efficiency perspective.
When you add in the role playing element, sure you might find people who aren't trying to maximize the productivity of their online time. I mean, I spent 3 hours once sitting at a fashion show earning nothing whatsoever and it was a great night. It would be great if there was more of this. But when someone goes out to achieve something, be it making money, levelling something up, acquiring gear, etc. it just seems the reward vs. effort for different paths are really out of sync.

 

Who's selling me all the ingots then?

You guys need to think outside of the MMO box there. There's so much potential for COOL business ideas it's not even funny. This game is exploding all around you with the most awesome NEW business opportunities. Open your eyes, it's staring you in the face. Really, it's amazing stuff.

 

I agree with you to a point. But I would say that's due to factors like low population, complete lack of customer awareness of where to find good items and how much they should cost.

You don't start a business and immediately have success from day one. Look at the bookstore's in Central Brittany owned by Womby and Vyrin. They have to build a customer base, they have to build an inventory, they have to build awareness. This is going to take them months! You guys have been playing the game for a few weeks.

It's not a typical game, the point isn't to do everything yourself, yell really loud that you have a +5 Broadsword for 110k and then some guy whispers to you and a trade happens. This is a lot more complex than that, and it's going to be so much fun for the people that get it.

Please, I beg you, think about what I'm saying and what you want to do and if you want advice and counsel I'll be happy to help if I can.

 

No, the problem isn't that players are trying to do to much. They are stating pretty clearly themselves that their problem is that it's very time consuming to build a piece of gear from scratch. I don't personally think it's that bad, but that's beside the point. It does take a long time to craft things, and the total time needed to craft something doesn't go down much, if at all, because you involve more people in the process. Even if you had a perfect assembly line of specialized workers to perform each task involved, it would still be pretty time consuming to make the nicer gear pieces.

This thing about hiring workers isn't relevant to this problem at all. You're basically just saying that you could make money by doing nothing and either under paying for work or over charging for goods. I wish you all the luck in the world if you make this your future business, but it has nothing to do with the time investment required for crafting gear.

 

I do both... I first clear out the Elysium mine, then ride the mine cart back up to the entrance, go back into the Twin Foothills, murder a bunch of bandits and loot their gear for selling, return to the mine (after enough time in Twin Foothills for the ore to respawn), clear it again, and then go to Etceter to craft with the ore I got. After which I make a trip to Ardoris to sell the junk I got from the bandits and to list anything decent I enchanted/masterworked on the public vendor. I then use the gold I make from the public vendor sales and the vendor junk to restock on reagents and the rest goes towards buying gold ingots at 120g each.

So far my masterworking and enchanting are at level 30. Which isn't too bad considering my limited play time due to work and the fact that I just started masterworking and enchanting last week. I managed to craft a really nice +8 carapacian cloth pine staff (exceptional) that I've been using ever since.

I think mining is, for the most part, fine the way it is right now.

 

That's the problem.

If you're trying to build it from SCRATCH it's going to take a long time.

When you want to buy paper, do you go cut down a tree yourself and refine the wood so that it creates thin sheets of pulp and then meticulously create a single sheet of paper so you can write a note for yourself? Or do you just go buy 1000 sheets from the local store?

The same exact logic applies here. If you're trying to do it all from scratch you don't get it.

It has everything to do with it.

You're only one player. You're complaining about the time it takes? Well wouldn't it go faster if two people were doing it? How about three?

Let's do this, let's compare two business models, the one you're complaining about that takes too much time and the one I'm proposing.

You have to travel to the mines, deal with mobs, mine until your mouse fingers bleed, and then get that ore back to wherever you live.

Meanwhile, I'm out killing stuff for 10k gold an hour. Or maybe I'm not doing anything and instead I buy COTO's and sell them for 1k each. It doesn't matter, the point is I'm not mining.

You then sell your ore where? If it's on a public vendor you're immediately losing 20% for the tax. If it's on a private vendor, why would anyone go there? How would anyone know it was there?

I go to a public vendor and buy refined gold ingots for 300 per ingot. I have now purchased 33 ingots. How many ingots could you make and sell with your ore after an hour?

Now let's say that I want to actually go into the mining business. Do I have to hire people for 10k an hour? No, because clearly not everyone knows or wants to grind for 10k an hour. I'll be they will work for 2k an hour. So that means I can hire 5 people to go out to the mines with me for 1 hour.

So now my 5 people (I'm just standing there - managing) are going to compete with you, doing everything? Good luck!

This is just a very basic logical explanation of how this works. I'm not trying to be a jerk about it at all. I'm just having trouble understanding why you don't see this. It's actually exactly how the real world works.

 

THIS!!

add to that 4 recipes cost 1000 gold, experimenting is ridiculous as gathering takes far too long and consumables are way to expensive!

You want a player driven economy but with all the time effort and gold I have to put into it, it's cheaper for players to just buy NPC stuff. And the buffs are a joke for the fortune I drop into making the item.

 

BECAUSE this is a game, not real life.

 

The issue is that because actually making ingots into a crafted item both costs fuel and produces a net loss, in order to afford to craft the next item the player is forced to earn money some other way to afford to buy the fuels/ingredients again.
The alternative is to go mine those materials themselves.
The system is designed in a way that it is encouraging people to do things themselves because you can't make a profit otherwise.

If I went and bought 1000 ores, and turned them into say, swords, which would cost me additional money in fuel and time in smelting & refining, I'd make a considerable loss.
There's no way around this; currently raw materials are worth considerably more than finished products. That's just how it is.
If I went and got my own ores though, then my only costs are fuel, which the sale of the final items would (probably) recoup.
It takes me five times as long to do it all myself, but at least there is profit in it. Sometimes.

 

No, sorry. Again you're not thinking about this in the right way.

Why is a crafter just blindly wasting fuel and ingredients? I know what you'll say, "To raise their skills".

If that's your goal then why would that be something that make money? It wouldn't because you're not providing a good or a service, you're literally burning up resources to artificially increase your skill level. I don't disagree that you should do that, I'm just saying that you can't complain about "the cost" when that's all you're doing. The world economy doesn't have a use for "guy aimlessly burning up resources". If it did then you'd get paid!

That's not correct. People just WANT to do it by themselves. They don't want to rely on anyone else and they've been pre-progammed by other MMO's to do that. Before you argue that I'm wrong, think about all the times you've ever worked with other players to craft an idem in an MMO. I doubt you can think of even one example, and that's not your fault it's just the way those games are designed.

The reason you're not making a profit is BECAUSE you're doing it yourself, as well as the fact that the game population is still small and the economy reflects that.

Right, don't do that!

If you go out and gather ore, just sell the ore! Don't do anything else. Or find someone that gathers tons of ore and will give you a discount because you'll buy it in bulk. Find someone else that has cheap fuel and buy that in bulk. Then find a buyer for swords. Find out what kind of swords they like and how many they need. THEN make your swords. You'll make a profit if you do it correctly.

Really? There's no way around it? How much do COTO's cost right now? Most people would say 1000 gold, but there are all these people on the public vendors selling for more than that. So where does the 1000 gold number come from? Perception. That's the most stable "low" price right now. So does that mean that the lowest you can buy COTO's for is 1000 gold? No. It just means that's the average lowest street price. You can buy COTO's for much less than that. I just sold 26.5k in gold for 40 of them (including the taxes it's like 715 a COTO). It took about a 12 hours for my work order to sell.

So why aren't you putting out a work order for cheaper supplies? Not so cheap people won't do it, but cheap enough that you can make a profit? People want gold NOW, so all you need to do is put a work order out that they will take. You may have to try your best guess and wait a little bit the first few times but you'll figure out eventually and there you go...cheap resources on-demand.

 

You do know that you don't have to buy recipes to craft the item right? You just need to know what to manually add to the table (exact amount of each material) and have the minimum required level to craft it. You'll discover the recipe after crafting it for the first time. sotacraft.com has many of the recipes on it.

 

I was getting angry myself at all the gathering skills and grinding for money. However when I think that their target is earning 3.5k per hour and then I think about each thing that I do that earns more than that is going to be nerfed. Each week I am pleasantly surprised that I am not nerfed yet. Don't get me wrong their target sucks. But thinking this way "thank port I am not nerfed yet", keeps me from rage quiting and just selling my account.

Honestly, If I hadn't spent so much money, this game wouldn't even be on my radar any more

 

Not complaining about the levelling up costs - just accepting them as the price of getting high enough to make something worthwhile.
You should have to work and put in time, effort, to get to high levels.
There really aren't any other options for levelling up crafting - make material-efficient 'waste', or make stuff people want to buy.
The stuff people (might) want to buy you're still not going to get what the materials cost you, even if you advertise and create awareness and all that. There's just not enough demand because everyone's either making their own crap or buying nicer stuff with their money.

The only reason I'm making a profit is because I'm doing it myself. If I bought ores, I'd be making a loss. Tested and proven. This is just a fact, backed up by basic mathematics. No amount of wishful thinking on your part is going to change that. Raw materials are worth more than finished products. Other games encourage you to do everything yourself, and so does SotA. This is evidenced by the series of nerfs we've seen over the past few weeks in an effort to make mining so slow and frustrating less people do it and more people buy it off the people who can stomach it or who have the extra 8 hours a day of play time available to them to do it.

I'm gathering the ore because I need the ore to further my crafting. Selling some of it to afford fuels is practically a necessity.
Name me one thing you can make and sell for more than you could have just sold the raw components?

Lets look at jewelry:
Rings: 40 ore + (at least) 20 ore to put a single enchant on it. Might be able to sell final product for 2k if its a decent enchant. 3k if lucky and someone's not got a ring at all and happens upon yours and not the 30 other people selling jewelry undercutting each other. Iron's selling at about 100 each, gold probably 70ish. That's 3400 in costs, assuming the item doesn't break, which even at grandmaster enchanter, it will 1 out of 20 times. Net loss.

Necklaces: Slightly better. Only need 10 ore + 20 for the single enchant and you could probably sell it for 1500-2000. Cost is 2400. Same deal with braking it. Net loss.
When you look at putting more enchants, your cost increases by 1400 per item (for the gold ore). I'm not even adding in the costs of coal and mandrake for the smelting/enchanting fuel. Your breakage rate also increases significantly.

Furniture?
I see furniture going for pittances, a fraction of what the materials cost.

Weapons? Armor?
Same deal, the amount of ingots needed when broken down into the cost per ore is significantly higher than what you can expect to sell an item for.

None of this is taking into account if you are paying tax to list on public vendors, either.
None of this is taking into account that you need to make hundreds of items to level the craft up in the first place.

The only way you can really make some cash crafting is if you get the components yourself (for free) by going out and gathering them.
I don't have a problem with this, I don't mind gathering my own stuff.
But being a pure crafter (ie not fighting) the premise is that you can't survive the areas you need to go to the get the stuff nor supplement your fuel costs/ore costs by fighting and selling loot.

Impossible? Probably not impossible. I will cede the point. You could spend 10 times as long watching the market selling things for pennies of profit, modifying your prices etc. to make a pittance. Or you could just go make 10k an hour killing crap. I don't know why anyone would choose the former unless it were for roleplay purposes but I suppose there are people who would choose it.

I actually have done this and yes I can get lower cost materials this way. Of course, I have to have the money to begin with to be able to buy the stuff or list the request. Which I got fighting stuff, not selling finished goods.

I'd like to see someone make a character, go to town with a handful of gold in their pocket and manage to be a 'pure' crafter without ever having to go kill anything or gather anything or level up adventuring.
I'm not saying its impossible, you could go town to town, spotting the deals, buying low, selling high, using your profits to slowly lvl up a craft and make things people want. You could be clever and find market niches and use them to your advantage. You could build up a merchant empire from nothing. It isn't impossible. I would find it terribly boring, and it would take exponentially longer to get anything done, but if that's what someone enjoys, great, have at it. I think the majority of people would not enjoy this.

 

Which is why I said "experimenting is ridiculous...." right after the coma.

 

Mostly because of my skill as a player and knowing how and where to level (for instance, I didn't do control points before final wipe), but after 3 weeks, I'm certainly not missing the XP bonus. On the other hand, producer XP is less unbalanced than it was before, so no more 1 million pool while taking mining to 60.

What? It's easy enough as it is now, and I don't even feel a need to take any harvesting beyond 80. And I don't do that log off scene reset crap, either. Imagine what it will be like when thousands of new players show up after "release"! If you expect that a master crafter should be able to easily mine all the materials needed to craft everything, then why should anybody else mine anything? That's not an economy, it's a single-player game. It isn't intended for everyone to become a solo ores-to-swords crafter, nor should it be.

And for those complaining about the cost of breaking things while trying to make that really awesome sword, maybe you aren't charging enough for such an awesome sword? Right now it can't be helped because the economy is still getting cash gold since the wipe, and even though there are more people playing, it's still not a lot, so there isn't a big market out there with cash gold to spend, so you really can't charge enough to balance the costs.

But if you're burning through breaking materials to raise your skill level, then don't complain about the costs. It's called "training", there is no free education here. And if you are crafting because you think that everyone is expected to become an awesome do-it-all crafter as a natural part of playing the game, then who would you sell to, if everybody else is also crafting their own stuff? Like BDF says, you need to choose a path. Mine has been to harvest stuff, mostly ores, then smelt using the scraps from salvaging the drops I get. After all, if item crafters shouldn't have to mine, why should they have to smelt, either?

Sure, it's fun to make the best sword ever, but you need to think like a business and think in terms of income. You need to have a regular product that you are selling to bring in money, and make a profit off of that. If you can make exceptional stuff every now and then, great, then put a bigger price tag on it.

It's just that we still don't have enough players or cash gold yet, and not enough time yet for decay to kick in, to sustain a market for non-exceptional stuff, and too many players want to be top crafters and make their own stuff. Just be happy that you will already have those skills when the game finally gets subscriber traction.

(For those who don't understand what I mean by "cash gold", the gold that people pay you for stuff has to come from somewhere. If they got it from selling something to a player, then that other player had to get it from somewhere, etc. Where does it all come from? It's the gold that drops from monsters, the gold you get from selling items to NPCs, and the gold you get from doing quests. When the game wipes, that all goes to ZERO. Players have to get new gold in order to get enough for the player-to-player economy. It's been a bit slower this wipe for whatever reason, probably people focusing on land rush, but it's finally starting to move. In another two or three weeks it should be moving quite well.)

 

Um you have no idea what your talking about.

Let's start with mercenaries. Gold grinding I pull down 7k an hour.
So that would be the minimum a Merc would need to charge for non-pvp guarding.
In PvP zones, the ore is tiny compared to anywhere else and the risk will soon be higher so no profit to be had there.

Let's talk about miners no matter how much ore per hour they are pulling in, you would need to match that value to get all their ore. Basically you would pay more than fair market for the same ore, so hiring them is out. Cheaper just to buy the ore directly.

Let's talk about start up capital. Where are you going to get the gold for crafting fuel costs and paying for ore and paying for mercs?

Let's talk about xp, with no gathering, where are you going to get the xp to skill up crafting to unlock the recipes people might pay you to craft?

You could try to be a pure merchant buy here sell there, but currently there are more sellers than there are buyers. The only house vendors making sales are the Owls heads main road ones. So selling on the public vendor is going to cut your profits. It doesn't matter how low your prices are. There aren't any buyers because everyone is gathering and crafting. Why pay you when they can do it themselves?

 

@Xander Xavier
I didnt read any of the OP or this topic.

Im here to say, I really dislike your thread titles, to put it mildly.

(learntostartaproperdiscussion)

 

The nature of these games is that the pendulum swings back and forth. It always swings too far and then back the other way. The last 3 weeks have been Portalarium nerfing literally everything that we are doing a bunch of ...like grind XP, working skills up, like grind for Ore and other resources, like using Pets to accelerate ones performance up along the XP gathering curve (eg. the stuff everyone does in persistence). I and most people I know have not been doing anything differently this release from what we have done every wipe cycle for at least a year, nothing that has happened should actually have been a surprise. The reactive responses indicates to me that they simply have not been paying close attention to what we've all been doing for the last 18 months.

V/R Brickbat

Ps. I am not yet calling for a Naked Emote Dance Party, but if they are truly nerfing anything we do in mass it might just be called for to get that nerf to occur and essentially help clean up the decency of New Britannia.

 

I think bottom line is most folks want to play an MMO, not an economic sim.
While I am sure that very clever people can find niches and loopholes through careful observation can turn a profit for their efforts, I think things should be a bit more straightforward.

The game is not designed to support "pure" crafting, if it was, then npc merchants would buy crafted goods at reasonable rates to allow someone to craft/buy mats/craft/buy mats.
The economy is still in its infancy, and everything's new, everyone's gathering and crafting. This may change as the game ages making it more viable.

For example: Lets say half the people mining now are frustrated at how slow and crap it is post nerf so they stop mining. We'd see an economic consequence of this, at least in theory, with less availability and an increase in prices.
Mining gets more profitable again, so more people go do it, prices go back down.

Frustrated crafters may give it up and buy their gear from others - I've already seen this happening, with people finding it costing too much to raise the skill so they've stopped bothering. With less crafters making things, price of crafted goods should increase due to decrease in availability. Which might make crafting viable for income again.

This is the nature of a player economy. The flaw with it is that it is incomplete, with fixed NPC prices on fuels and regs and other ingredients the system can't evolve properly. The other giant flaw with it is that the economy is being inundated with money from an outside source - loot sales. And monster loot drop values and the problems with THAT are an entirely different discussion!