Mining, Are You Serious?

Yet it actually was designed for that, and people are doing it.

I will gladly stop trying to enlighten you fine people then.

Please, carry on with your complaining and mopping. As you were!

*returns to counting his money*

 

This isn't enlightenment, its condescension. In every thread I've seen you post its been about regional economy, people are playing it wrong or they are all idiots.

I'm a blacksmith, finished products (for the moment) sell for less than the ore it takes to make them so I go and mine my own stuff. The things I craft when I sell them pays for my coal.

You can't honestly sit there and tell me I'm doing it wrong because I'm not using the economy.

 

IMHO, you are 100% correct, Brickbat, this is exactly what it means to me, too.

 

I didn't call anyone an idiot.

Yes, I can tell you you're doing it wrong.

Why would you sell stuff that doesn't have a demand needed to support your business? Why in the world would you do that? What successful business model ever started with the plan that you would sell cheaper than it costs to make your product?

The game doesn't allow you to just say "I'm a blacksmith" and get rich. It doesn't work that way. You have to be making stuff that people want. If they don't want it, don't make it. That should be obvious, but you seem to think that you're entitled to sell things just because you made them. That's not how business works.

I'm not trying to be condescending about it. I'm trying to tell you the truth. If that's your "plan" why would you think that's something that Portalarium should address? Why not ask them to make the NPC's buy whatever you make so you just automatically make a profit?

Look at Umuri and his Pet business. Do you know why he sells those? Because he make a profit.

 

Apparently you NEED to be able to both be a hunter AND a gatherer, if you go for the gathering thing. Otherwise it is going to be really really tough to gather anything worth anything.
Honstly, I think that system is really screwed up and a clear witness to the lack of innovation from the Game Designer :/

 

I figured out the problem.

We're in a PLAYER driven economy and there are a lot of people that just don't get it. In a typical MMO nothing is actually player driven, the economy is just a background for the themepark. You make something and you sell it to an NPC and say "look at me I'm a crafter!" The real "loot" if found on mobs and that's the stuff that goes for 4oo million k. But those people are traders, not crafters.

In a player driven economy there's actual supply and demand, that means there's actual winners and losers. That means that if you're really just going to play a blacksmith and there's no market in your area for blacksmithing then you are going to be poor unless you do something else. It doesn't mean you can't play a crafter, or that you can't play a crafter and be successsful. It just means that when someone shows up at your door and says "how's business today?" The proper response is "it's horrible, I hope something changes soon so I can buy myself a new hot tub." Then you wait for demand to pick up and you pay attention to what people want and you make that using your "craft".

What you don't do is go to the forums and say "make blacksmithing more profitable!" Because that's not how this works. It can't work that way. If the devs did that it would just make someone elses ability to make money through crafting less. Like cooks! Do you know of anyone out there trying to make a profit cooking? Me neither!

 

All games have supply and demand spikes. Sometimes people will craft items just for the skill ups and essentially dump them for zero.

Last time I played WoW, you could make a ridiculous about of money farming lowbie mats because high levels wanted to power level their crafting fast. And you can see this effect to some effect in any mature game.

There are all sorts of ways for NPCs to smooth out supply and demand by making crafting and gathering repeatable quests to burn excess out of the economy.

As far as I'm concerned, the games isn't fully launched in that we still don't know what the economy will do. The worst possible thing they can do at this point is make the game too easy, wrecking the economy for years to come. Most games at this stage have level caps and otherwise hold back the "Good stuff" so people don't get too far ahead while everything's being balanced.

 

There is no business model for buying ore and selling finished products as a smith because as I already said, the ore is worth more than the armour and weapons it makes so being a "pure crafter" isn't as achievable as you think it is. Either I need to become a fighter, kill mobs for cash and buy the ore or I need to mine it myself and becoming a miner / smith instead.

 

He doesn't have to worry, some venture capitalist will buy out his blacksmith business for a million gold, because internets!

 

I don't think you need to be a hunter OR a gatherer. I think you could be either one or both, it doesn't matter.

But you can't try to do it all. You can't be a one man economic band and expect to be successful beyond slowly making stuff for yourself. You need to work with other players if you're trying to make a "living" as a crafter.

 

I like that. I would really love to be just a gatherer and go for silver and gold mines. How do I do that?

 

You can make a profit as a miner.
You can make a profit as a killing machine.

So yeah, one of those. But I don't see where the smith part makes any sense until there's a market for that stuff.

 

Who will pay the final product prices required to purchase raw materials at anything close to the market rate? I'm not all that certain people would pay half.

Even at 75/silver (which is low by current standards), 5 ingots of silver = 20 ore = 20 x 75 = 1500 gold + 70 in fuels, for a random mastercraft with a 5% fail rate. Failing of course blows up not just the fuels, or even the ingots, but also the original piece of gear. So there's a lesser 'fail rate' here, where the item doesn't blow up but ends up with +15% damage resist or +10 health. Who is going to pay 1570g for those bonuses?

So the crafter now needs to guess how many fails it will take to get useful bonii and price that in. Let's call it 1.5 times for the sake of argument. Now the break even point is 2355g ... and we're talking 2.5% damage or 2% critical. These things are nice to have, especially when stacked on riskier second or third attempts, but that added risk starts raising the price even faster. And this is with 75g/silver.

 

You go to mines, gather ore, and then bring it back to sell it.

 

Is what you are really saying that the ore is worth more than the price of the finished craft when sold to an NPC? Because if that's the case then yes, BDF is right, and you really are doing it wrong. Very wrong.

NPCs are just the pawn shops/junk shops of this economy, to give you a pittance for that which nobody else wants to buy. They set the lower limit of what things are worth. It's just that at this time there aren't enough players nor is there enough liquid cash gold to support a player economy. This is something that only time can fix, which is why the last wipe was final, to give time for an economy to develop by the time of official release.

If you think that crafting works like harvest -> craft -> sell to NPC, then you might as well stop now and find a single-player game, because that's what you've been playing. SotA is supposed to work like harvest -> maybe sell to another player -> refine -> maybe sell to another player -> craft -> sell to another player -> item decay -> player buys more items.

 

I don't want to be a miner or a killing machine. I want to be a smith.
To be a smith I'm forced to become one of the others as well.

 

Not the NPC's at all. I'm talking about calculating the cost of the ores bought on the public and player vendors and selling the finished product on the same public and players vendors.

 

There's a difference between "doing some mining" and "becoming a miner". When the economy gets going, Portalarium wants you to be able to buy ores/ingots, do some smithing, and sell the result to another player for more than the cost of the materials.

Fine. And I'm talking about hey, look around, not only don't we have an economy going yet, we still have people who haven't even placed houses yet! Of course they don't have the gold to pay you a profitable price! This is not something that can happen day one.

 

Due to the amount of ore needed in most cases though there is a significant gap between "smith who does some mining" and a "miner who occasionally smiths"