Architect Archive
Thread: Pricing guidelines... think about this before you say no.
Current conditions for Architects:
increased vendor cost from 1/hr. to 15/hr.
cost of a house for crafting stations, vendors, etc...
cost of your stations, storage, etc..
Harvesters increase for heavy production. (crap imo)
Factory Structures
Ticket prices to go from planet to planet, and city to city
Non-tangible expenses:
Time to survey, do harvest runs, etc... any time not spent crafting or selling.
Laws of Supply/Demand. If the demand is high, the supply will be low, because the price is high. If the supply is high, the demand will be low, and therefore so will the price.
Now, considering all of these factors, and a few I am sure I left out, us architects are finding it increasingly difficult to keep up prices when there are so many of us charging too little to cover our own costs.
Having been an architect now since release, I have endeavored to find the best way to price. I am sure there are going to be many of you out there who will disagree right away, but think about it before you say no. It just makes sense to me economically.
Resources:
Priced based on either oq, hr, sr, or ut. the higher the value of these factors, the larger the price.
Base prices: 2-5 if it's a scarce resource, 10-50 or even 200 depending on the exact resource. (I know that there is no iron to make Ubese armor, or at least very scarce lately) It's all a feel for how much you can get for it.
Structures:
To reward skill, as well as to make some profit (we all want to make profit. If you don't, you aren't a businessman), we need to start including some of the variables into prices, so the easiest way to do this universally is to check the complexity rating for each structure. So....
take complexity divided by 5, add 5 to that number, and multiply the result by the number of resources required.
e.g. City Hall = 88k resources
complexity = 50
50/5 = 10 + 5 = 15
88k x 15 = 1.32 million
This scheme may seem a bit high at first, however, think about this.. our only reward for going up in levels is that we can make higher difficulty items. Other classes get to kill bigger things, or get better creatures, but they also get paid for more when they sell their services. If we don't charge more, then we are not actually getting any additional benefit for our hard work grinding out Arch. other than the ability to make the stuff. Who cares about that? If you get paid exactly the same for each type of structure you make, then you could be selling personal minerals all day long and, if the price per resource is exactly the same, make exactly the same amount as if you sold city halls, or tents, or heavy minerals, etc..
Remember the laws of supply/demand. When there is a huge supply, we ALL will lose, cause no one will want to pay our prices for anything. They will always be able to go elsewhere and get it at a cheaper price. If the demand is high, we charge accordingly, and get what we are due. If we don't, there will become an overabundance of the structures, bringing the price down again, and therefore, we all lose....again.
If we all followed the same guidelines, even if it's not these ones, we would all benefit. I just believe that I deserve to be compensated for my hard work to get to Mast. Arch. not just getting paid exactly the same per resource as I would if I made a ton of little personal min. and put them on the bazaar. I've got too many **edit** other expenses to cover to be doing that all day.
I hope some of you out there rethink your pricing structure. I use this as closely as I can every day when I sell my goods. Lately, I've been finding it increasingly difficult to sell because people keep trying to outbid one another.("hey, i can get that for 50% of what you charge, and I might be able to find it cheaper if i wait") If there was one standard that closely matched across the board, we would all be getting rich, and doing it for much less work than we are now. I, for one, would be all for that.
Magpie on Shadowfire
I am getting paid for the work I do, and making millions of credits,currently around a million cr a week.
IfI can make that kind of money at my business why cant you? ( or maybe you can, if so, good for you )Im not the problem, my busienss works. I dont work all that hard, I dont have a vendor, I dont sit in town and spam what I am selling.
Business is competition, repeat that to yourself.
If I have no Idea how an economy works why is my busienss so sucuessful, how come I am not loosing money. I can tell you the reason.... it is because I DO know how an economy works. I am however guilty of taking advantage of some other architects that dont.
thaesia wrote:
and as far as i'm concerned dayln, your pricing scheme is what's stopping us from geting paid for the work we do. IMO, your an ignorant of economic principles. Simple as that. Your way will do you the "get rich quick" scheme, except it isn't very quick, nor is it very rich. you get paid small amounts for a bunch of work, alot. Why not work half as hard for twice the price? Because you have no idea how an economy runs. That's my opinion, and it's nothing personal to you.
What this sounds like is you blame other architects for your inability to make money. I've made 4 PA halls and 30+ houses in the last 48 hours.. businessis NOT a problem here. But I suppose, if I weren't quite the believer in capitalism, and my skills at attracting customers were lacking, I'd probably try to shove some "new pricing guideline" down everyone else's throats too..
I'm guessing the person who started this thread doesn't know about the SWGCraft.com harvester calculator that shows that, even with average-BER heavies + fusions, the break-even price on resources is around 0.4 CPU.
Dayln wrote:
I am getting paid for the work I do, and making millions of credits,currently around a million cr a week.
IfI can make that kind of money at my business why cant you? ( or maybe you can, if so, good for you )Im not the problem, my busienss works. I dont work all that hard, I dont have a vendor, I dont sit in town and spam what I am selling.
Business is competition, repeat that to yourself.
If I have no Idea how an economy works why is my busienss so sucuessful, how come I am not loosing money. I can tell you the reason.... it is because I DO know how an economy works. I am however guilty of taking advantage of some other architects that dont.
I have been studying the prices for architect items and I have been creating an Excel spreadsheet with reasonable prices, yet still allowing us to make quite a bit of profit.
I will release it on these forums as soon as I have completed it.
I'm guessing the person who started this thread doesn't know about the SWGCraft.com harvester calculator that shows that, even with average-BER heavies + fusions, the break-even price on resources is around 0.4 CPU.
I'm not for hight prices, just fair ones...
But what the SWGCraft.com harvestor calculator doesn't account for is the 3000 + credits it costs to redeed your harvestors. As long as you never move them, the calculator is great, but if you want actual costs...figure in the redeeding and you no longer have the average .4 cpu.
I don't blame anyone for lack of sales, cause well, I not lacking any. I'm backlogged on work every week. There are 2 of us in the shop, and we have 3 shops. We can't keep them stocked fast enough.
The point I was getting at was that, instead of working for exactly the same costs per resource, regardless of what it is your making, start taking into account the difficulty of a deed, and the skill required to make said item. Don't think that those complexity ratings are there just for their good looks or to show you how successful your chances of making it are going to be. It is an indicator for how much more you should be charging as opposed to making personals all day long.
I will continue to charge more for the complex items than I do for the small items per resource. I will continue to stay in business.
The only think I am pointing out on that thread is that when people start chopping their rates, others of us have to follow suit to stay in market. If we all sticked to our guns from the beginning and kept prices high, people would expect to pay more, and we would get more. We wouldn't get any less orders than we already do, just the value of the credit would be different. And you would see alot less people throwing money away, if they were forced to pay extra for the bigger items.
Thats all
so that comes out to nearly 1/2 milliion creds for a large house. I've never seen them go for even half that. Everybody else start charging these rates. There will be no competition for me anymore
I can appreciate that you've tried to take into account all the variables, but you've left out the most important. What people are willing to pay. They will pay reasonable prices all day and I would think you'd be left sitting on a half million dollar house.
At least it's that way on Corbantis
Megpie I like the idea but it wouldn’t work.
The economics in the game isn’t just driven by simply supply vs. demand. Its driven by how much am I willing to pay and what others have paid to get the same times.
There is no way on can even try to implement a price control at this stage and I have many reasons for that:
First reason, I know that there are some who are starting this game who never ask what others are charging or even look up on these message boards, because as of late I was one of them. I was charging far below what I’m charging and suggesting others to sell there stuff. It wasn’t till I hit Master Architect did I ever start making enough cash to be able to live of just crafting. I was constantly doing missions to supplement my own income.
Second reason, no one wants to pay a fair price for our products. Our products are so resource intensive that we can never charge the same price as other professions does per unit of resource. People are stupid and don’t realize what it take to make our products and even if they do they don’t see why we charge so much for it. People also don’t want to pay more then what they heard someone else by it for or for a price higher then it was in the market before.
Third reason, the introduction of new suppliers into the marketplace. As the days roll by I see more and more Architects, on the my server at least. With the advent of more suppliers means what again to our economics? It means more products going out there for the supply is much larger then it was. Those of with large pocket books can weather out the storm as we aren’t as depend on the daily sales as the ‘baby’ Architects are, there for we don’t sell cheaper and they do. There don’t keep much inventory, yet we do. As our pocket books get small and small we need that sale a lot more and can under cut the babies by such a margin that they fuss and fuss and the reason why we see so many people wine about being under cut, that’s my theory at least. From what I hear that close to 100% of the Holocrons that are out there tell people to become a Master Architect, I seen this as being one of biggest reason why, I have seen so many of them.
Forth reason, those of use who are establish no longer have the costs we once had. Several of use are have access to more then 10 lots. Throw whatever means we have attended them; we are no longer limited to smaller finite resources as others. We are able to mass produce are structures and we are no longer have to wait to for the big sale but just sell in larger quaintly then others to make the money. As we have access to large pool of resources to pull selling by 75% less then what others may charge we able to move 3 to 4 time the volume.
I never tried say we should try a price control in my previous posts, but stop using a simple CPU charge across the board. Why charge the same CPU when it things we have to make. Let me put a simple way so that I can’t be mistaken. When an item requires you to have more then just that skill to make we should charge more for it. Case in point City buildings, not only do you need to be an Architect, but to make it all your self, you need to be a master Artisan and top of that they must be identical. These aren’t time that just be wiped up on spot.
Maypie simply posting a formula isn’t what is need. We need to come up with a simple cost guild line that need to be kept up at the top of this form of a fair price. Those who want to undercut that price are going to do it anyways. A lot more then just a CPU need to be figured into those prices. Complexity, resources need (especial if suspect resources are need to make the item.), what need to make the item (personal crafting stations, ect.), skill level to make (to take into account for components that require a master artisan, a tailor, droid engi) and Extermination. (When it really matters to the final outcome.)
Eirn
Master Architect
Starsider
You can offset relocation costs quite often, if something you can also use pops up on the resource shift that takes away what you were mining. I've had some mines in place for weeks. (luck of the draw, yes.. but it's not as bad as some would have you think)