Disappointing to have to sell basic crafted goods to merchants at a loss

Crafting a simple red dye requires 15 apples and 2 coal. Even assuming that I find 15 apples lying about and don't have to buy seeds and grow them myself, I still have to spend 12 g per dye on the coal and even more with failed attempts. A cloth merchant will only pay me 8 g for the finished dye. It is very disappointing.

 

Heja but this is the way they build the "economy" .
I dont want to disagree in general, but i think this boat has also already sailed like the things i want to change and you say this is not going to happen

I'm undecided.
If i can sell crafted stuff for profit to NPC everybody would be rich as hell.

 

Much of the time at the moment I craft and sell at a loss just to grind crafting level. I try to gather as much of the materials as I can to take the edge of the losses, but some of the npc prices I've had to take for swords and armour I've had to dump are very hard to take.

Some of them are nice items too, there's just not enough demand for mediocre gear. I have to accept it right now as I'm committed to GM certain crafting skills and hopefully when I can make really nice items and if the population grows, I will be OK.

I tend to look at my overall cash ballance. Even dumping some nice stuff I generally trend upwards in terms of available gold, so, I can live with that. As Stun says, the model requires a player Market to make profits. Dumping crafted items on npc's for a profit would probably do something nasty to the economy and gold inflation.

 

It would be helpful for the Crafters who have limited resources to be able to sell wares to the npcs at the break even or slightly loss depending on materials were obtained. This will allow new guys/gals to catch up as well.

 

One is "forced" to contribute to economic destruction. Make about 100 chest armors, waiting for successful exceptional rolls, masterwork rolls, enchantment rolls. It is not exaggerating to say it will cost north of 100,000 gold end up with a chests full of armor you don't want. Choice is to destroy, sell to npc, or try to sell on vendor. Selling to NPC will bring a pittance in gold and create a chance that your work will end up in the loot tables destroying any chance that you will be able to sell like items on your vendor. The player who needs armor is happy to receive the items in his loot, but he will not be buying for awhile. Salvage is a joke because an item you have created has cost you thousands in mats and time. A plate chest will give 1 to 80 or so scrap with minimal value. Still this is the best choice for the economy because you will not cripple it by giving the items up to the loot table for "free". All training crafters should salvage or destroy all their incidental creations. This is a huge loss but at least it will save the market for those items you wish to sell.

 

I think @Aldo has a great point. Although it might be kind of cool to find out someone looted an item you created, chances are the item looted was of nominal value. And, the majority of the time it will be something that the recipient will likely just sell back to a merchant anyway.

The more I think about it, the more I believe adding player crafted items to the loot table is a bad idea...

- Crafter/seller doesn't get fair compensation for resources used to craft it
- If the looted item is usable, it prevents a sale from a crafter trying to make a living
- Most of the items I've looted from bags have low durability and cost more in repair kits than it would to make it myself
- If the looted item is junk, it gets sold back (again) and adds more gold to the economy

I'm not seeing any real benefit other than a possible "cool" factor of getting something with a makers mark. Even then, there is nothing distinguishing factor that says whether the item was looted or simply purchased... so there is no way to prove if you looted it or bought it. Actually, it's really only "cool" if the original crafter finds out you looted one of his/her items.

 

Unfortunately this sadly is the case.
Npcs should give a bit more for things with masterworks/enchants on them really and we should get gold/ silver scraps back for each successful enchant / masterwork on an item.

 

yea it wouldn't be so bad if we got silver & gold scraps and gem fragment back.

 

Yea, I have over 1000 chain armors in storage waiting for them to eventually do a salvage pass. It would be a shame to salvage them now. I wonder how all this storage affects load times and server load?

 

Crafting is one of the BIG dissapointments in the game . Theres so many issues with it that havnt been adressed in years . Everytime we seem to get something new with crafting things just get worse and worse. I could make better items when they used to be destroyed by masterwork or enchants then i can now .

They made the enchant pool so wide and rolls so bad , the losses with crafting are unberable to most people . When enchanting most common rolls are 16 focus, 8 focus or weapon durability ... you get fails at 87 % - 4 times in a row on an item..if you want attunement on a wand you barely get 1 attune enchant every 25- 50 enchants ... If you craft 100 armors high chance you only get 10 exceptionals because you made the components before that and they get added to your 27% exc chance. The leveling progression for crafting is nonexistent . If you level enchanting from 100 to 130 you get maybe 1-3 attunement on a wand for your effort. ... and in the meantime we drop shrines ingame that give you 100 attunement ...so i cant get 5 attune on a wand for years spent leveling because would be too much but we can have NPC structures that gives 100 attunement ???

I have long come to believe that some people in the team creating the game really hate crafting... i have no other explanation as to why we are ''blessed' with such a terrible system.

The player driven economy is actually NPC driven economy ...you cant craft anything in the game anymore without paying NPC's outrageous amounts of gold for materials ..weather you need coal, wax or curing salt ...once you start on the path to crafting you should expect to spend to NPC's tens of milions of gold on these materials... and what will you get in return for all this spending ? Huge amount of crap gear that no player would buy ..hence resulting in a huge loss because selling to NPC is not really an option ... It costs like 20k gold to make a bronze chestplate and NPC pays you 500 gold for it.

Everywhere you turn you gotta compete with NPC's prices or give NPC's huge amounts of your gold ..

If youre a farmer and wanna make a decent living in the game you cant ... because you got NPC that sell the same stuff you grow and they have it in infinite numbers... and you need to buy stuff from NPC for farming ( Seeds ..water , planting pots ...) so what choice you have to sell your farmed goods ? you sell it back to NPC for a reduced price and make a 10-20k profit maybe . Thats not a player driven economy .

Seeds should be reserved from the crops you harvest or from plants you harvest out in the world... water should be easier to harvest not clicking 10000 times to get 10000 buckets of waters .

Brewing is the same thing - gotta stop by NPC and buy mats for the barrels buy mats for the ingredients ...and god knows what R56 will bring in terms of TIME LOSS for brewing.

Why do we have an NPC driven economy ? Because theres the struggle of trying to maintain a value for gold coins . Has it achieved that goal ? Ofc not its just delaying the inevitable . Gold value has always went down and it will keep going down ....the economy model is just wrongly built .

The main focus of the team for crafting anything ingame seem to be ....to make sure NPC's sells those items and how high should they charge for them so people have as bigger losses or as less profits possible.

All this results in huge prices for crafted items ..because you gotta cover the gold loss on others that failed. So a new player coming into the game sees this beautiful item on vendor for 500k- 1 mil gold and he likes it , hes prolly thinking im gonna go farm some gold so i can buy it but when he gets on a map and sees the monsters he kills drop 15-20g ... i can only imagine the frustration ..ofc he will never know the losses a crafter incurs to make that item because he will not stick around to find out.

We were promised a solution for all the junk gear we craft , a way to mitigate some of the losses we take when crafting .... That was suppose to be players selling gear for better prices to NPC's and that gear would show up in loot table . But instead of getting increased prices for player crafted gear ..we got increased prices for NPC raw materials ( curing salt jumped from 2 to 8 coal from 2 to 4- 6 and so on )... Basically we got the stick but not the carrot . Chris stated in a youtube stream he will increase prices for crafted gear like 4 months ago ..what happened ?

Whats changed when the crafting system moved from items destroyed when masterworked :

- A wider pool of enchants , bad rolls pop up more often then before...more garbage items then before.
- A whole lot more failures when enchanting/mw = whole lot more materials spent to make one good item... that results 9 times out of 10 in more garbage items.
- Higher prices for NPC's raw materials ( coal wax salt...).

With the new system you end up spending alot more gold then the previous system ... is this an improvement ? All these changes are a preview for whats gonna be coming next ... ability to reroll enchants or masterworks ..yes i know it sounds like a good feature to have ...but judging from the past ..everytime we seem to get an improvement it actually ends up being worst then before.

How do i see this reroll system working in port view ? They gonna widen the pool even more and for every time we reroll to get that one good enchant we gonna spend ALOT of something. That means we gonna spend even more to get one good item then the current system.

To summarise i dont think everything we craft we should be able sell to NPC for profit . But crafters should have a choice, like i can craft this with the materials i have and make some gold profit or i can craft that and take a chance at enchant lottery maybe i get something good to sell to a player...right now we only have the latter option which results in alot of gold loss.

 

Its gonna bring a shitstorm of epic proportions https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/brewing-numbers-port-hates-money.135320/

It now is a Loss of about 20g per barrel to sell wine / beer unless you gathered all the water for planting and brewing then the profit is less than I could make with cotton / regs to players and not worth the massive effort / moneysink.

 

Difficult to argue with that @Elrond, and you should know man.

Its all a bit depressing though, I wish the Devs would publish a blueprint for crafting, at least give some hope something may get looked at at some stage.

 

I wish that too ..seems everything in the game is opened for discussions with the team ..but when it comes to crafting all we get are rumours or people wishes.

 

This isnt a problem with the game systems, they were designed properly with the expectation that you would be able to sell them to players at a profit.

The *root* problem is there is not population in the game to sell stuff to.

Simple Economics 101, supply and demand. There is mass volume of supply and no demand to the point where there isnt even a base price set to sell stuff for. Selling to an NPC should never be profitable but at this point, if no one is going to play the game, they probably need to look into making it at least an even transaction eventually allowing us all to make our own stuff.

On the flip side, when it comes to armor and wep crafting, the time needed for a crafter to do this is so steep that we only have what 10 people in game who can do that stuff (make a +20 item) and you end up with 2 sides.

1) The great players who if friends with them will ask you for mats and they will craft you that stuff
2) The capitalists who sell them but since the demand and supply curve is so messed up due to low population, their prices can be all over the place.


Think about my situation. I am still in the process of selling off most my assets, assets that dont effect game play since I want to play this game but I jsut dont care about my old keep lot and decorating it. I keep stuff that affect my game play so Im still into armor and wep templates.

I cant even sell my huge list of ornates for 10% less then sale price in the add on store. Sure my duke pledge items wen fast and I scored a quick 20 million gold. But sales have been terrible now for a good 4 months. Right, even though the social engineers attack me as an RMT person (lol), my end goal is to sell off of the frivolous things and live out of my row house and have all the basics I need to play the game.

Root issue: population

 

This in my view is one of the flaws of the design ..you dont build something successful based on expectations only..you build it so it succeeds if only 5 players ingame or 10k. If the current economic system can be considered as ''failure '' with the current population say 300 players ...why should it function differently when 5k players ingame ? It will have a period of bloom till those 5k players begin to do what the first 300 did and then we would end up in the same spot .... unless we would get another 10k ....a system like that would need an exponential neverending growth which is impossible to achieve . But if you have a system that works with 300 players .....As long as the game keeps supplying infinte amound of goods on NPC's we will never have a player economy.

The first steps to adress some of these issues is to start removing NPC's dependency from the equation and start adding the stuff they are selling in the world ... allow the player economy to be controlled by players ..add wax nodes, salt nodes , coal nodes so on...and remove them from NPC's ... same goes for farm goods seeds planters so on... im a carpenter gm but i cant make a 20 bed planter ?..or im a farmer that cant farm seeds for his next crop and maybe sell the surplus ? Sometimes is good to mirror real life ...

 

If there were items that you could craft from merchant ingredients and sell back for a profit then there would be many people abusing it and the economy would be ruined.

 

If there were no merchant ingredients there would be nothing for people to abuse . The only reason is we have them is because they need gold sinks to help maintain a somewhat steady value for gold currency . How has that been working so far ? It hasnt ...Gold loses value continously ...

My advice for the team forget about the rmt value of gold ... change the current currency system into smaller denominations ..1 platinum = 100k gold or more..add copper silver coins. ..rehaul the whole currency system and increase gold drops ingame based on mob tier lvl . make every proffesion profitable the higher the level the bigger the profits . ... begin removing ingredients from npc merchants and start adding them ingame so people can farm them.

Make pvp areas where people can farm nodes of any type 5 times the rate a safe zone can be farmed. No need to worry about multiaccounting or bots anymore in a pvp area . If one pvp player can farm in 1 hour same amount a multi can farm on 5 acc in a safe zone... its a win for the game economy.

Gold value should be established by how much people buy from other players ...the more gold players have the bigger theyre spending power ...the less gold .... well we can see the results in the economy today...

 

I can't even find people selling the things I want to buy. I don't want to regularly dump thousands of gold on +12 equipment, I just want basic stuff that I can't get from NPC merchants, and maybe +1 to +3 or something like that and pay a fair price for it. If the stuff I wanted was actually put up and available at a fair price, I'd buy it all the time.

But the mechanics for the player marketplace aren't really structured towards encouraging that, because few people specialize and there is little communication between sellers and buyers to help facilitate players taking up a certain trade in the game and meeting actual player demands.

So I end up either buying from NPC merchants or trying to endlessly repair the stuff I already have, or go around fighting with broke equipment.

 

Then you shouldn't be able to sell anything to merchants either.

 

You will have no more gold losses when crafting if all the materials you use you can gather them yourself. And you should be able to sell crafted goods and make profits ... if you spend an hour making x item profit should be equal or close to spending one hour killing monsters and getting gold . Lets take Cotton for example why cant people sell cotton for more then 6 gold ? Because NPC's sell infinite amounts for 6 gold ..How do you compete with that ? It doesnt matter if tomorrow mobs will drop 10 mil gold when you kill them...the price is rigged so youll never sell cotton for more then 6 gold .... does that look like a player driven economy ?