Mining, Are You Serious?

Alright, just off the top of my head...here's one thing I think you guys are doing horribly wrong. By "guys" I mean the collective group of crafter/gatherers in this discussion.

What I keep reading is that you're going out and spending tons of time gatherering and minning and then to actually make something you're wasting all these resources because they get destroyed in the process and because it costs A LOT to do that, and because you're constantly trying to build up your skills. I get all that, but what I can't figure out is what exactly you're trying to make? Who are you making it for?

If you walk up to me and say, "Do you want a +7 Halberd?" I'll say no. Not because I don't have the money to purchase it, but because I don't want it. I have no use for it. So if you put that item on the public vendor it immediately costs you 20% in taxes, and if you put it on your private vendor, no one that would want that item has any idea it's there. That's the part of the "business" I think you guys are royally screwing up.

Why not do this? Go find someone that wants you to make something, draw up a contract that says something like "You deliver 50 maple wood and 400 silver ore and 50 wax" and I'll make you an X for 25k. Now would that make you profitable? I'll bet it would! At least more so than you are now. So why aren't you guys doing that? Why are you so hitched to a public or private vendor? Talk to people, find out what they need and make it once you have an agreement. Make them cover the costs of the resources needed. Set a reasonable price for the item, don't try to gouge them. And then keep your end of the bargain, and you might just have your first repeat customer!

Someone else said it earlier in this thread, but it's so true. The public vendors are more like pawn shops. How often do any of us go shopping in pawn shops in real life? It's not a bad way to make money, but because customers can't count on getting exactly what they want there, many people aren't going to go there. But some people will because they're looking for bargains. They don't come to the public vendor looking for a +7 Halbred. They go there looking for ore and obsidian crowns that they expect to be there. If they want something special they will go to a shop that has those types of items. They want selection, and they're not going to get it on a public vendor. Even on a private vendor that's probably going to be lacking. So if you can't afford to have a giant inventory of whatever you're selling, you should offer custom services and wait to create things until you know you already have a buyer.

I have a Rock Maple Staff. How'd I get that? I went to a person that was capable of making it and we agreed on a price. He made out quite well, and I didn't have to train in any of those crafting skills. I like the staff so much I put in another order for more!

 

You yourself have stated you can't be a crafter without being a gatherer. Why are you saying you don't think that's true? It's 100% true. You are gathering to get a crafting pool.

The raws are worth more than that. 100 silver is selling for 10,000. Why would someone give you over 40k worth of raws for 25k?
No-one would ever agree to that (that I know). Contract? What?
I wouldn't have the audacity to ever ask someone to do that. The time investment alone is insane. The only way anyone would agree to such an crazy idea is if they were ignorant of the actual time & effort involved in harvesting.

 

25k AND the raws.

I'm not training in gathering. I'm not making gathering part of my life or career choice in the game. There's a huge difference. I'm not wasting all of my crafting pool on gathering. I'm gathering to increase the pool. Once you start trying to do too much you're just wasting points. If you're GMing forestry that's a bazillion points you just wasted that couldn't gone into whatever you cared about. That's my point. I'll bet I've spent far less time gathering than anyone else in this thread has.

Instead of trying to prove me wrong or use my own words against me, you should try listening to me for a change.

 

You can't increase your crafting without a massive pool, which you can't get without very high gathering skill. It takes over 30 seconds to harvest a single tier 5 resource with no skill, and you'll almost certainly fail every time. How are you going to increase your pool to the hundreds of thousands or millions you need to increase your crafting, without increasing your gathering?

 

How am I doing it right now? Well without giving away all the specifics because apparently it's magic, I'll tell you that I haven't really seen a node in the game that was below a 52% chance of success. That's better than a coin flip, and while I know some people freak out every time they don't have success and think it's a personal affront to their existence, I don't have that problem. In fact I don't even care if I miss 4 or 5 times in a row (which occasionally happens to me). You see, you actually get more experience for being successful on harder nodes than you do being successful on easy nodes. So while you may get X experience for gathering on nodes that you have a 100% chance of being successful on, I might get X +10 experience because I'm risking more. The end result is that I get quite a bit of crafting experience. I don't get 500k everytime I got out, I get far less than that. But because I'm not training in what I'm using, it goes a long way, probably much further than what you're experiencing.

All because I'm focused and I'm not trying to be everything in the world. I'm just trying to be the best enchanter I can be. Which is not that great yet when you compare it to something like blacksmithing that takes a lot more experience to masterwork. However, all you guys are probably trying to masterwork every type of armor and weapon. I wouldn't do that, I'd focus on one thing and try to be very very good at just that. I'd hone my skills to provide a crafting skill of value that I could leverage to make a steady income and be the foundation of whatever business I was in. In my case, that's enchanting. As they will almost certainly expand the enchanting skills over time, I'll have to make decisions about what type of enchanter I'll be. Will I be one that specializes in bladed weapons? I don't know, I'll probably end up doing blunt weapons because then I can continue to enchant my own staves. That will mean that I if I want to expand my business I'll need to work collectively with other players that are good at enchanting the other types of armor and weapons that I'm not good at.

But the point is you don't need a "massive pool" if you're not trying to be a one man band. If you are trying to be a one man band, well then that's your problem, not the games.

 

Except that you have to be a one man band.
I'll say this as plainly as I can.

To craft you need resources and fuels.
You can get these resources and fuels by gathering resources yourself (free) and fighting mobs and selling trash loot (+income for fuels).
You can then sell your crafted goods for something, limited by demand and competitive undercutting and whatnot. So far I have yet to see a single example, in any crafting skill, where the final product sells for more than the material cost.
If you were just after money, yes you should sell the raw materials and buy the stuff you need and not bother crafting. If you want to level a trade because that's what you like to do, you need to gather and fight to supplement this.

Alternate method:
Buy raw materials from gatherers.
To do this you need income.
Its already established that selling final products costs more than the raw materials, therefore you need income from another source.
That can be anything - playing the market, buying low selling high, farming monsters, whatever. But you need another income if you expect to buy materials from gatherers.
The materials you buy WILL cost more than anything you can make out of them. Indisputable fact provable by simple mathematics.

If you're smart, you're crafting things that people want rather than just churning out random stuff hoping someone wants it.
You're looking at what people are buying, what people need, etc.
Even if you're selling something that's in demand? The raw materials used sell for more than the final product.
You can't sell it higher, because there's too many "one man band" types gathering everything themselves who are able to sell it a hell of a lot cheaper.

Now, according to Drocis, this is 'doing it wrong'. But at this present time in the game, due to the established costs of items both in resource quantities and npc pricing for fuels, as well as the amount of money that can be earned by killing, this is how it is.

What I will say is that the 'current state of the game' will change. Resources are at a premium right now because persistence is new and everyone's trying to level up.
As people reach desired levels in their trades there will be less pressure to "make crap" and instead the crafts will be used more when "someone needs something' or to maintain a carefully selected inventory if you want to run a shop.

Will that be enough to make buying materials and selling finished products viable? Possibly. We'll have to wait and see.

 

Selling them to NPC's? I hope that's true. Otherwise you'd have a printing press that could stamp out gold.

Players will pay you more than what it costs to make, they just won't but stuff they don't want or don't need.

 

Incorrect.

Final product pricing, on public/player vendor, are in almost every case, considerably less than the cost of requisite materials.

Players will buy the items they need at the cheapest prices available.
This is further exacerbated by "One man bands" who gather all materials (rather than buying them) selling for less than cost.

Therefore buying materials and crafting items to sell results in a net loss.

 

That's my whole point! The market hasn't stabilized and so if you're just randomly putting whatever you can make on a public or private vendor then you're not making a smart business decision. Do you know anyone in business that does that and is successful? Do you walk down the street and some guy comes out of the bushes and says "Do you want to buy a speed boat?" No, you have to develop a client base, you have to find out what your customers want, you have to develop a strategy.

Just making whatever you feel like making and then expecting customers to buy it with a profit margin that you made up off the top of your head is not going to cut it. It's not a game problem, it's a player problem.

 

You make a lot of assumptions about what people are doing.
I'm not crafting a bunch of random crap and trying to make money off it.

I challenge you to name me one item that there is sufficient demand for to justify buying the raw materials and creating a final product to come out ahead. Anything.

Or better yet, go buy 100 iron ores at whatever the 'average' price is and make something out of it that will get you your money back.
Silver is even worse. 100 silver ores is going for 10,000 right now. That's 5 masterworks. Even if all 5 succeed on 5 different items, you're not going to make a profit, especially if you consider the cost of making the item you're applying the masterworks to to begin with, some of which require HUNDREDS of materials.

I've actually written off 'crafting for profit' as a thing until the ore prices come under control. There's currently not enough demand for anything because everyone's doing it themselves.
If I'm after money, I farm money. If I'm after equipment I craft things to use.

You've said you're an enchanter. I'm an enchanter too. If the random number generator cooperates and I get decent rolls and don't break anything, I *can* kinda make a profit on jewelry, at least to absorb the gold cost. But that's mining the raw metal to amke the jewelry in the first place myself. If I had to invest 4000 gold to buy the ores to make a ring, and then another 3000 for the gold ore required to enchant it twice (based off of more or less what I see ore going for), I'll break it 20% of the time if you believe the percentages. Don't forget the added cost of mandrake root. Add it up. Just over 7k gold to make a ring, with a 20% or so break rate (based on 2nd enchant success of around 80% assuming you're lvl 90+ enchater).

Lets make 5.

Spend: 35,000 gold on base metal & gold ore
Spend: Lets say another 1000 on mandrake root and coal for the smelting?
Cost: 36,000

5 rings:
1 statistically will break.

4 rings left to sell

Maybe two of them will get 2 majors if you're lucky, you almost inevitably end up with a couple that are less than optimal, with minors or only health/focus choices (less demand).

Can I sell 4 rings, two decent, and two mediocre, for 36,000? Hell no!
I might get 4-5k apiece.

 

One thing I will agree with you on though - the problem is the players.
If everyone priced everything at slight markup from material cost, we wouldn't be having this problem.

 

Taming Collars.

Umuri and Dragon Tamer and others have made a fortune off making taming collars. They will likely continue to make money even after the wipe because they understand the way business works. @Umuri isn't crying about the coming changes either, he knows that the current system was over powered and unbalanced. So he's spending his time giving feedback to try to make taming interesting and viable while not being an economic problem for the game. He's not going to make as much money going forward because the game isn't going to REQUIRE people to use his product like it does now. But he'll scale his business to meet demand and probably (I'm assuming) begin to diversify this product line to attract new customers.

Recall and Teleport Scrolls. The BMC knows what it's doing. They undersold scrolls during the first three weeks even though they knew competitors were buying them cheaply and then reselling their inventory at a higher price. They wanted to make cheap gold to fund their other business ventures and thought long term instead of short term "no one will buy the rugs that I made for a profit". As time goes on the cost of a scroll may go up or down, they don't care as long as they make a profit and it fits into their long term plans.

There are other examples but those are two of the best ones.

 

Well yes, that's true. But in a competitive game and with people casually playing they're not all going to do that. Which does pose a problem.

The solution however is not to have the game just make everything so "required" that it has to be purchased and the seller doesn't have to think about it. I believe there's a profitable market out there for all the items but some are far more lucrative than others. So if your product isn't selling, you really have to ask yourself are you doing everything you can to make it work? If the answer is "yes I'm putting it on the public or private vendor at a small profit margin and it's still not selling" I would argue that's not enough.

@Qwark is making beds apparently. Well if I needed a bed and she had a shop that sold all the beds (including what's in the add-on store), I'd probably be willing to pay more for those than I would just randomly walking buy a vendor. Why? Because I'm not going to go to a bed store unless I want to buy beds. And once I get there as long as the prices are not crazy stupid I'll probably buy some beds. If the prices are good I'll probably buy a lot of beds. I have a Keep Lot with a 5 Story Basement, I need all kinds of stuff. But I'm not going to go to a public vendor and say "Ya know what I really need? A bed." and I'm certainly not going to go there and pay a ton more for it when I know that I see all kinds of those starter beds from the supply cache thing for 150 gold. Yet I will probably pay 1000's of gold for a bed from the add-on store. So there's your range. 150 to 10k depending on what the bed is. Is everyone going to pay the same as me? No. To some people a bed is a bed no matter what it looks like. You have to develop a business strategy that makes sense for your customers.

 

Two consumable items as examples.
Kind of making my point for me.

I see collars going for about 900-1000 and scrolls for 170-200.
Collars seem to have the best margin, costing about 600 in ores/leathers/fuels to crank out and selling for a few hundred profit each. In bulk this can be a fortune.
Scrolls require 100 gold investment just for the reagents (@ POT npc price). Unsure of value on 5 wood scrap, but it can't be a lot.

So, with the exception of consumables, crafting is not profitable. I think this is still a problem.

 

How many players want to run a business? Build an empire? Marketing, advertising, build up a customer base, do the whole economic-simulation thing?
I'm sure there are some. You clearly have the knack for it and enjoy the intricacies of it and there's nothing wrong with that.

Regular players, casual players, would just like to break even being a crafter, and you can't do that at the moment, unless as you've pointed out, you're cranking out consumables.
And if everyone did that, the market would be flooded with them and soon they wouldn't be profitable anymore either.

 

Did you really just tell me to give you ANY one example and then when I gave you TWO you said that it didn't count because they were consumables? Really?

 

I agree with you here, it's not going to be for everyone. But neither is Chaos Magic. Still, the reality that if people don't like it they won't play is very true and that's an issue I think we'd both agree on.

That's how supply and demand works...once the market is flooded the prices go down, way down, and people start selling something else.

Right now it's boom or bust as we have a low population and everything is new. You have some people that don't even have a house yet. So it's very hard to think about "what's the market for a bed" at this point in time. But it's also very hard to say "the economy is broken!" at this point in time for the same reason. The economy is still in development and will be for a very long time. The fact that "crafters" can't make a profit in this economy is 1. not true because people ARE doing it and 2. way too early to come to that conclusion.

 

I agree with you there - its too early to determine anything with so many things still being changed on a weekly basis.

 

Correct, this can build with time. Back in SWG eventually the crafters had people getting most of the resources for them. And we had people who were only resource gatherers, and they made plenty of money as well. It worked out very well, and the system here reminds me of it. The only difference being the scale.

 

Exactly. But it's not made very easy in the game. There should be something, some game mechanism that would better facilitate advertising your crafting skills, or whatever skills. Like a billboard or something, that permits advertising in freeform text.

Of course there have been clever and not-so-clever workarounds, like some players publishing books listing services (clever!) or listing items for sale that actually advertise some service (somewhat questionable). Then there are work orders, that have very rudimentary functionality (for example, no way to write free text to advertise your offer, just mechanical listings in numbers). In the end these are just workarounds, the advertising mechanics should be developed much further.