Economy stuff: npc vs player vendors

I set up a vendor and tried to figure up what i thought a fair price for some basic crafted goods without advanced materials should be sold for. I tried to use what u could make selling components to a npc as a base value, and the prices many player vendors have been advertising is alot higher than this.

Suet used to have higher npc value and rarity, the base value for 1 yard of supple leather is about 1k, so if a product calls for 5 yards, thats 5k in just the supple leather component.

While thats understandable, i dont think i unerstand the sales of items crafted with basic materials costing 1500 or more. It seems you can make a profit selling alot of this stuff for under 1k (mainly weapons and smaller armor pieces).

So im under the impression that everyone is still either making their own stuff, or there are still huge money faucets out there keeping prices high. I suspect both, but im willing to bet most people make/find thier own stuff, primarily as a result of prices being set in the multi-thousands for everything.

So im still unsure.

I have an affordable basic-crafted equipment vendor in serenite where most items are available for around 400-500 gold. The prices were set based on how much profit i would make over npc vendors vs the time invested.

 

Currently, it seems like you can make more money alot quicker by crafting advanced components that sell well to npcs, and that could be part of the problem?

 

Also note that the goods that you see on the vendors in the world are the stuff that hasn't sold (yet). You don't have access to the data of what things have actually sold for.
So you are almost always looking at a biased sample.

For example if I put up Taming Collars close to the same price range as the ones I see on the Public Vendors they almost never sell.
While if I look on the ones left and set a price point 15-20% below that they usually sell the same day.

If I were a crafty crafter in a good location (which I'm not) then I'd put up several pieces of the exact same item at different price points. Then note how soon they sold and at which point they did not within my given time.

Absolutely.

If you can do X amount per hour selling to NPCs, then the stuff you place on your vendor needs to have a margin to match that going rate.

 

Yep. That's why I hate NPC vendors in general. But since that's how the devs want to manage the economy, we're stuck with them.

The answer to the OP is that yes it's a problem, but it's a problem (in theory) only because the developers are not actively managing the economy. Again in theory all the devs have to do is dial down the price the NPC vendors will pay for stuff and the problem is solved. A perfect example of that is arrows. It used to cost so much to make arrows that players couldn't sell them anywhere near as cheap as NPC's so no one bought or sold player arrows. Now that's not the case because players can make a lot more arrows than they could before and that drove down the operational costs so they could compete against the NPC's.

 

In context that is not the sentiment though.
Whenever NPCs have given "too much" for a specific commodity, the devs have nerfed the price given by the NPCs.

...and without the faucet of NPCs buying power the pre-alpha player economy would be non existant. Since the majority of people's gold are generated from selling rusty stuff to NPC's, not by looting gold from mobs.

 

I agree. Although saying the player economy would not exist is probably going too far. It would exist, it would just be different. We'd find our gold somewhere else.

If we go back to the arrow example though, the devs couldn't cut the price anymore because the price was already 2 gold per arrow from NPC's. They could've gone down to 1 gold per arrow but that would've made the problem marginally better, not fixed it. So they went the reverse and simply allowed players to make 100 arrows instead of 1 using the same components.

 

Sp

speaking of which, they did so for supple leather recently. Advanced wooden bindings may need a nerf as well

 

The first thing you need to ask yourself is: are those high priced items on public vendors actually selling? I would never pay those prices, would you? Of course not, so when the sale ends, they're either relisting the same item or its sold to an NPC automatically at the end of the sale period... So you never will know if it actually sold to a player...

The thing about pricing is: no one actually knows if it is far or not, so if it sells (like on a private vendor), you know 2 things: some actually stopped at your vendor, AND they thought the price was resonable to buy... If that happens 3 times, I would raise my price a little because no one likes to give their work away for nothing, if it still sells, then great... It's hard to judge because it's pre-alpha, so there's not a whole lot of commerce going on outside of the private sector...

All I know for sure is: the game suggests a selling price, which I automatically double... Which is what any NPC does in the game, they buy at half price and sell at double that... If I've refined it into Yards, then I may triple or quadruple it... And a finished item, well I'll try and look at any public vendor to see what similar items are going for, and make a judgement call... I try not to be greedy, but on the other hand, I don't want to give it away...

 

@SmokerKGB

The economy is wacky right now. Nothing in it makes a lot of sense. For example, when there's a wipe coming (like in R26 - yes that's confirmed by a dev) people spend gold on whatever without thinking about it. There's certainly examples of supply and demand that we can learn from in these releases but the actual numbers (like what's in the vendors right now) are pretty meaningless at launch.

 

Thats a thing i considered as well. People who have a lot of gold or no need for gold are making things and passing them out for free as well. This has been the first release where crafting skills really makes soem difference in your ability to make stuff, but even now, when you fail you aren't losing anything but cheap NPC materials.

Maybe if there was more of a loss (liek with critical failures, for instance) where you lose more than jsut the NPC baught fuel, or make it where the fuels are a basic, low-level gatherable, that could promote the buy and sellign of goods more.

I alsof orgot to mention that i have had no problem sellign crafting materials, but sellign finished products is very rare.

 

You need to sell arrows. You can still sell it at the same price as the NPC and hoist it off on some unsuspecting/desperate/lazy player. I felt so bad I put most of my arrows back to 100g except one stack.

 

Another good point. People want to try out crafting and need the resources but who wants finished products when there will be a wipe in 1 to 3 months?

I have sold off all my pledge items and been super rich in past releases, I wouldn't do that at launch. I'd wait patiently for good prices before selling, and even if I was super rich I would wait to find good prices when buying resources. Right now, if other people are anything like me they would be throwing gold away because it's just more convenient in the current environment. We'll see an economy of scale that makes sense at release.