Architect Archive

Ouch.

*Waves*

That's my auction on Wanderhome. My target is not the everyday miner,rather it is the high end crafters, who need to pull every scrap of that wonder mineral when it spawns. I think that they will pay a premium to save big money in the long haul. It makes sense to me, and if these do turn out to be rare then the buyer/s will be very happy campers in the long run. The first bidder in the auction is a highly regarded (at least by me:smileyhappy crafter, ex-weaponsmith now armorsmith. To them it's the special spawns that will make their product stand above the rest. That's what makes a BER14 so much more attractive than a BER13.

"Sell high for the benefit of the Architect community" - Now here's a man I can respect!

All too often I hear from in-game customers asking for custom built Architecture "I have seen it for xxx cr on another vendor". I wonder why anyone would sell astructure for 1.8 resource CPU apart from to kill the market? The sheer amount of time it takes to build a run of components outweighs 3cpu already in my mind.

I enjoy the roleplaying/crafting,but undercutting kills it for everyone.

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Manipulative wrote:

As far as I know, on Shadowfire there will be very, very few of these. I was able to make a schematic that will allow me to make 32 total BER 14 heavies (I wasn't well prepared with gen turbines). It was pretty hard to make that schematic, requiring the very best steel our server had ever seen, if you didn't have skill tapes and/or were Mon Cal. It took me 6 attempts before I succeeded.

Many of the big architects on my server that I talked to, simply didn't have the resources. They gave it a go, but failed. One architect reported a success, but then "lost" his schematic. And one other architect reported that he had made a schem, but no quantity was mentioned.

So based on my network of master crafters (probably over a hundred), all of which were looking for a means to get these, it would appear that the number of BER 14 heavies on my server will be very, very limited.

Personally, I have 20 lots available for harvester placement. Reserving 3 lots for fusions, I can personally use 17 of those heavies. So, I will have 15 available for sale. I had to trade 5 of them already, to get enough of the steel, which leaves me with 10 available for sale. I will probably auction them off, with a minimum bid of 1M. My normal price for a BER 13 heavy is 185k + 3% city tax (190k net). Yes, that means I will charge 5 times my normal price to own one of these babies. Shadowfire's richest people are all resource collectors, with literally hundreds of millions of credits. One of them will surely step up.

I personally think of this a lot like the best weaponsmiths on my server do. I recently paid 3.5M for one of the very best T21 rifles our server has ever seen. I can buy a pretty good T21 for 35k. So I paid 100X for about a 20% improvement. If I sold one of these harvs for just 1M, that's only 5X for a 10% improvement. Most importantly, though, this improvement is to one of the most precious commodities any of us have: Lot usage.

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back to the thread topic.

I don't make heavies so this is not for my benefit, but I would suggest something like a 50-100% premium.

My reasoning (in no particular order) is:

1. You need to get some worthwhile benefit for the effort put into making these.
2. Think of how many failures you had before you got there, OK so you probably still got 13s, but you used your VERY BEST resources.
3. This is a limited offer, limited quantities available.
4. a special product deserves a special price
5. In the aftermath you will want to sell BER 13s again, or even now alongside, sell 14s too low and you trash the market for 13s
6. You should sell high for the good of the Architect community, you will drive struggling architects out of business if you sell too low, since they cannot make these and cannot realistically compete with you but still need to make a profit at the 'lower end' to survive.