Let's talk fair crafting and gathering pricing...

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Tahru, Oct 9, 2017.

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  1. Vladamir Begemot

    Vladamir Begemot Avatar

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    o_O ..... not relevant? Your original post says you would have had to sell your piano at 250,000 gold, a horrible exaggeration, almost 25x more than actual crafting cost.

    @GrayFog and @Elay have already taken this incredibly obvious fallacy as a fact. Called on it, you drop the number down to 30,000, which still is 3x more than crafting cost.

    You literally would have doubled your gold if you had just bought all the mats and sold at the price you did, 20,000g. Yet you're complaining about it.

    And now you're telling me NPC prices in the calculation are swinging it by tens of thousands? For what? You can't buy Iron from NPC's, you can't buy wood from NPC's. Are you buying really really really really expensive coal somewhere? Like 1000's of gold per piece?

    My reply is totally relevant, I run furniture stores. I can buy wood for 40, iron for 45, mechanical parts for 25, garnets for 250, craft a Grandfather clock, sell it at 40% markup, and everyone along the supply chain has made some gold and is happy, and the customer still got a fair price.

    I don't even have time to go harvest the parts myself because of the amount of crafting and restocking I have to do. Your assertion that you cannot buy materials and have it be financially viable is 100% off base when it comes to deco and furniture.

    If you were talking gear I would agree, with the exception of crafters that have people who come directly to them and buy super high end sets.
     
    Last edited: Oct 11, 2017
  2. Rhiannon

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    I agree with Vladamir as I too am a merchant, dealing in non-armor crafted items. Mostly clothes, rugs and dyes. I charge 3x of my actual cost if I gather/grow everything myself so I guess that's 66% markup. I do that to calculate in when I miss a watering on my cotton plants, have to buy water because I'm too busy to pull my own and to counter some items that I can't gather myself and do have to buy like maple and tree bark (don't get me started). I do have to pay taxes on my flagship shop and I do hit up the Oracle everyday for gold to pay those taxes. Soon, because my businessman husband has been bugging me to do so, I will start watching my sales and see what kind of business I'm doing. As it is now, I'm having to completely craft/restock my merchandise on a very regular basis, probably go through all my crafted items monthly. I know I'm not losing money.

    I know we are still balancing. I recently figured out that one piece of a clothing set was way out of wack (anyone want to pay 15k for a fancy merchant shirt?) so I posted about it in a couple of places, tagged Chris AND have submitted a question about it for the upcoming telethon.

    I was a UO player from November 1997 until last spring. I watched that economy grow and develop. One thing that helped it was a 3rd party website that let people register their vendors, listed all items and prices and automatically updated. So when I wanted to price something I didn't know what it was valued at, I could go see what others had it for and usually priced mine less than theirs. I suspect we'll have things like that eventually.

    The economy is still in infancy. We haven't even launched yet. So I encourage the gloom and doomers to take a breath and help solve the issues constructively. The developers are depending on us to help them get this thing balanced.
     
  3. kaeshiva

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    Since day 1 crafting has never been profitable - with a very few exceptions early on, such as taming collars or scrolls - consumables, essentially - it is impossible to craft anything in the game that you can sell for more than you could just sell the components for. To speak nothing of the hours and hours (and HOURS) of refining time and fuel costs. Some furniture you can still make money on, but furniture has a finite demand - and in most cases, you'd probably still do just as well selling the materials. Crafting gear even less so, because of the substantial losses implicit with the RNG and breakage, if you actually priced a piece of gear at the material value it took to achieve we'd be seeing gear - not even top end gear - in the hundreds of thousands. That's just the way it is, and that's the way its always been, its been complained about repeatedly and I don't think its likely to change.

    The main problem is that the only 'faucet' by which money enters the economy is via fighting. Kill kill kill loot loot loot sell sell sell. A crafter must do this even more than an adventurer if they want to finance actually making stuff, let alone levelling up and cranking out junk that nobody will buy.

    I'd suggest what we really need is a paradigm shift. Think about it - why are NPCs buying up infinite amounts of rusty crap? The only use for these should be scrap. Increase value of crafted goods - it makes a lot more sense that a blacksmith might buy crafted swords or daggers to add to his inventory, than buying up junk. This way, looted items would need to go through the 'filter' of production to actually be turned into money creating a dependency between adventurers and crafters and perhaps, someday, an economy.

    Of course, if you're going to spend 1000g worth of ore to make say, a sword, you'd need to be able to vendor it for at least that much, or why bother. And currently you can vendor crafted goods for pennies.

    The reason resource prices are exorbidant is that it takes thousands of ore to make a half-decent set of armor, maybe, if you're lucky. This is not like most games where you can go chop a few trees down and make yourself a bow. In Sota, you must go and level several forests, kill a few dozen animals and then grind for a couple hours selling junk to afford the salt and wax you'd need to make a bow. And then you need to make 20 of them and spend another 8 hours mining gold and silver to maybe get some stats on it. Maybe. If you're lucky. And it doesn't break, in which case repeat.

    I don't think anyone minds investing time - days, weeks, months - to try and get nice gear. The immense amount of WASTE is what is frustrating. I'd have no problem spending weeks working toward a fantastic item if I knew I would actually be successful and also that the item wouldn't be junk after a week's use.

    The problems are:

    a) gear is disposable, so its unlikely you'll ever be able to craft high end gear and sell it for a profit - it simply doesn't last long enough and the percentages even at level 120 (5x xp of grandmaster?) are still far too low to do this reliably. You can crank out mid-level gear and (sometimes) get your money back, but almost never what the materials would have been worth. Anyone want to buy an amazing +15 whatever for the 500k it cost to make, if in 2 weeks time its on its 3rd major repair and close to becoming junk? Probably not. We embrace mediocrity instead, and use a +5 that when it breaks, we just make another.
    b) crafting is not integrated into the economy nor part of how money enters the game, it is simply a sink
    c) with recent changes to scroll, repair kit, etc. drop rates, even consumable-crafting is no longer profitable

    If someone asks me how to make money as a crafter, the answer is pretty simple - you don't. You make money as a gatherer, and you need to gather to get producer xp to level up crafting, since actual crafting gives you almost none. Unless we change things to either allow crafting its own faucet - ie, gather materials, make something, and sell it for more than the gathered materials - then this is not likely to change. I have never understood why the formula or value of a player's time, ie how much cash they can make in an hour grinding trivial mobs, has not been equalized into the crafting sphere. If a person wants to spend an hour murdering trivial crap vs. buying materials and making things and selling them, the gain should be about the same. However it seems any time there was an item where it was possible to make any money at all crafting - such as certain potions, wolf hats, etc. - it has been systematically stamped out, which is the completely opposite approach to what should be happening.
     
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  4. Xee

    Xee Bug Hunter

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    I craft a lot.. that's an understatement. I sell rather cheap compared to a lot of markets that I have seen. most gear I sell 1k per +1 so +15 would be 15k
    I am underpriced I know, and don't recoup the full market costs of the materials I put in. The issue I have is if I put the full price it will sit forever. If I use the 1k per level I sell more which keeps my crafting leveling going.

    I see people complain all the time about cost of items so I try to meet the customers ability to pay for these items. The downside it under sells what most people sell for at least in places I visited on the map. I could not justify selling a +15 wand for 30k+
    maybe its just me but I hate feeling like I am gouging people or taking peoples money lol. I guess I'm just not cut for pricing things.
     
  5. Vladamir Begemot

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    Wow, that's incredibly generous of you!
     
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  6. StrangerDiamond

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    Great post, once again...

    I guess the game is geared to favor organized guilds that like the rarity of high end items to make a profit through RMT...

    when I think about it its logical... its much easier for a guild to put all their ressources on a few crafters, and the rest be gatherers.

    It certainly is a major issue...
     
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  7. Ristra

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    It's seems like a lot of people are acclimated to a market that has a central auction house.

    With an auction house, the material costs will constantly lower because it's easy to underbid and sell your time. With localized selling, the way you sell your materials must be more creative. The prices for them will not lower very easily as people get attached to their prices.

    What will eventually dictate material prices is the ability to sell the final product and the need to grind levels with those materials. If a crafter can not sell the final product the prices will drop and if those prices do drop they will not pay nearly as much for materials.

    Then, because they are now not able to sell, the materials will lower.
     
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  8. Xee

    Xee Bug Hunter

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    I think come release or when I feel I have leveled up enough the costs will go up. I really suspect that once the gold/silver mine changes that we will see a lot of prices skyrocket when gold becomes a lot harder to get.
     
  9. Vladamir Begemot

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    Well, message me anytime you want to sell a +15 anything for 15k. ;) Same name in game.
     
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  10. Elay

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    Just to be clear, I didn’t take it as fact, it was an obvious exaggeration to make a point and I carried it on in my post to make a similar point.

    The fact is, certainly wit enchanted and MW plate armour sets, because of fails etc, the cost to produce a full set of greater than +9. Is way way higher than the achievable sale price.... my point was I’d make more money just selling all the materials and not bothering to make armour!

    But I want to build my vendor up so I stick with it, even making large losses on every piece I sell.
     
  11. StrangerDiamond

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    If at least the MASTERworks and enchants has a higher durability, their value would be better balanced, they are MASTERwork after all they're not supposed to break up in a week, or we should call it neophytework :p
     
  12. Vladamir Begemot

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    Fair enough. And when it comes to gear, I honestly don't think anyone is selling for the cost to make. Gear is insanely expensive if you are really tracking your fails. So yeah, 250,000 gold on a Meteoric Iron Chest Piece with Faustian blah blah blah + a lot might actually be fair, but it's not happening unless you know a guy.

    But not for a piano. :)
     
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  13. Tiina Onir

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    I think that probably depends on your definition of "Pure." While I do craft, I do it only for my own gear. Could that change someday? Maybe, but it's not something I'm planning on. The reason I don't get too deep into crafting for sales is that I feel like when you get to those high-level items, you're really looking at bespoke gear. Honestly, when what you're interested in is bespoke gear, it's easier just to make your own.

    The vast majority of my game-time is spent in mines, with some hunting excursions (gotta get those hides!). A significant chunk of it goes up on vendors. If the market rate for mats dropped, I'd stop selling them (indeed, I'd probably stop mining until they came back up); it wouldn't be worth my time.

    What I do think needs to be adjusted is the baseline price that NPCs will pay for gear. I'd love to see where what NPCs we see in game varies with what NPC vendors have been buying / hasn't sold on the public vendor. For example: hammers haven't been bought much? The price goes up, and fewer hammerers are around, being replaced by guys wielding (for example) daggers. Suddenly a bunch of people make hammers and sell them? the price falls and more NPCs use them. A particular goal here, is to give you a way to sell off those lower-tier weapons when your training without flooding the player market.
     
  14. Tahru

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    What are you spending your gold on if not crafted goods?
     
  15. Tiina Onir

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    Well, I've bought a few +5 tables, to replace the normal tables I have up in Bramble (Everyone feel free to use them. That's what they're there for!). I also have supplemented my own gathering ability by buying raw goods that were cheaper then I felt the were worth (some of which I mark up, some I use myself). I guess I'm one of those evil market manipulators.

    Honestly, those tables have been the biggie. Those things are expensive in IGG.
     
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  16. Lord Ravnos

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    I've bought all my gear so far from player vendors... I generally replace one piece at a time as I go along... but I haven't seen any significant enough decay to warrant replacing it based on decay, only based on "here's one that has more stats". Eventually that will run out and we'll need to possibly replace based on decay...
     
  17. Numa

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    This is the core problem right here, why simple furniture costs so much gold to buy ingame. The problem is worsened by the breakage due to failed enchantments/masterworking for equipment.

    Addressing this issue will balance crafting across the board. As will normalizing recipes so that simple ones cost much less than rhe 250g flat pricing it does now. Make crafting more accessible at the lower levels and give master craftsmen a fighting chance to recoup their costs.
     
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  18. Zapatos80

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    Crafted goods are simply not in high demand at the low to mid-end because the upgrades are marginal compared to the cheap stuff you can make that does the job (and the costs are astronomical compared to the cheaper stuff). As more people come to the game and the content becomes harder, there will be a demand for high-tier gear, where is where the profit is because it's damn hard to get there and takes a lot of dedication to crafting.
     
    Last edited: Oct 15, 2017
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  19. Numa

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    High profit margins usually come from customized equipment made from specs & requirements supplied by the buyer themselves. But for this to happen breakage & error margins for that specific individual order has to be predictable. That's why mastercraftsmen are mastercraftsmen - they can supply high end goods reliably and on time.

    Any person at the mercy of random circumstance while at the crafting table is called an apprentice.
     
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  20. StrangerDiamond

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    Completely agree... "neophytework" :p
     
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