Architect Archive
Thread: Old Heavy Harvsters are worthless now!
"Ok, I hope your not one of my customer's on Lowca, if you are, your price on ore just went up to 6 cpu from it's 2cpu price since you guys are charging from 200k to 500k credits for the new heavies. You want to screw me over, I'll screw you over back, don't worry about it. "
You see, you are the middle man. You mine and sell resources to crafters.. architects. In turn, these architects take your ore, and make you the tools to continue your mining.
You could get away with the "you screw me, I screw you" if there was a certification required to use a harvestor. But, because ever Tom, **edit**, and Harry, non crafting and crafting proffession can use them, you are SOL. Why?
You need the architect for the mining tools, but the architect don't need you, because everyone in the game can use extractors. Make too much of a stink, and said architect will do a .. "Why pay mr miner for ore, when I can make the extractors, and mine the ore myself.. ohh yeah, since I am an architect, I can make the best ones possible for myself... I knew I should have stopped giving my money away!!"
Cut out the middle man. I know I do, and have noticed more and more others doint the same. I see allot of auctions on the bazaar go for the full seven days. I guess crafters are tired of giving away their profits to miners.
Because of the very attitude you show here(you have a problem paying a good price for a non degrading money making machine, that you will run for a few days to pay it off, then everything after that, is gravy), I(and many others)have developed an unspoken policy.
If I see some BH, commando, pistoleer, with multiple pets(with commando bh ect, and 2 pets there are not many points left for crafting), come into my shop, asking for harvestors, I enquire as to what their trade is. When I conlude it is a combat class, just looking for mining equipement so they can increase their "phat pile of credits", the price I give, just went UP... big time. I refuse to sell something cheap, to a person that is going to plop their miners down right where I need resources(usually close to a city where creatures are not quite as deadly.. I have no combat skills), and never use a single one to make a single item.
A RL analogy.
You are like a gas station owner, threatening an oil company,with agas price increase
The onlyperson you are screwing over is yourself.
Ohh, one final thought/question. Why is it, that the almost all of the posts that concern a harvestor change that would cause it to be repurchased are never from the..
Weaponsmiths
Tailors
Armorsmiths
but instead come from the..
Pistoleers
Bounty Hunters
Commandos
??????????????????????
You cannot compare new mediums to old heavies.
I think there will be a resurge of harvester orders as people that are happy with 7 extraction rates can replace their old money/power hungry heavies with mediums and still have the same rate they were getting before. It's cheaper for them to mine the materials now and thus could have an impact on resource prices down the road. Just think, for the price of one OLD heavy, you can get about 3 mediums. Now that is 1800 power and 2160 credits per day savings on just replacing 3 heavies. I know it don't sound like much but it adds up.
Now, the NEW heavies can go up to 10 so, the people that want the absolute maximum for their money and basically mine for a living will like the new ones and will be eventually replacing them.
The NEW heavies still hold an advantage over the NEW mediums.
You can't compare the new with old except to say they are better.
By keeping the old harvs at the old rates, they allowed people to convert over at a pace they can handle. It didn't render everything totally obsolete in one big patch like they had previously started out to do.
Just think, while it may be 6 months extra boost to our business, it will give them time to come up with other stuff. People are already wanting to upgrade but I am not selling them anything new and explain to them I don't want ot yet because it all may be reverted back.
Until we find out for sure what is what and how all the new changes are going to settle in at, I won't make and sell new ones except for myself.
It is NOT hard to make the improved harvs. You get 1 metal (steel) and a HIGH UT and experiement on the harvester mechanism, ore mining unit, light ore mining unit, etc. and that's it. Once you make it, put it in the factory and be done with it.
Just think also how easy it will for your customers to switch to mediums for instance. At 3000+ resources for a mineral and no factory required items, you could afford to make a schematic of the harv and just mass produce in a factory for cheap.
I won't be selling mine at any higher than I normally do unless it gets hard to find good UT steel. That's the ONLY difference in the harvesters.
You HAVE TO compare old heavis to new mediums, because they are interchangeable - they both produce at 7/minute. Do the math, and you'll see that heavies are now virtually worthless (I admit that someone with a few k credits, offered a heavy for almostn nothing, might well buy it and run it, so "worthless" should read "virtually worthless", that is, under 5k credits each):
Player A keeps his old Heavy Mineral harvester, and runs it for a month.
Maintenance 2160*30=64800 Power 1800*30=54000*1(my estimate on the value of power is 1)
Total spent 118,800 credits
Player B buys a new medium harvester and runs it for a month.
Maintenance 1440*30=43200 Power 1200*30=36000*1=36000
Total spent 79,200 credits
Savings in a month buying a new medium = 39,600 (BTW - this leaves out the extra re-deeding costs of heavies).
Yes, heavy harvesters will still function, and yes, some player might well choose to buy new heavy harvesters rather than new mediums. That's not the issue.
The issue is whether anyone with at least a rudimentary grasp of mathematics would continue to run old heavy harvesters when new medium harvesters will do exactly the same thing for less power and maintenance. Anyone who expects to run their harvester for at least a month will save money by buying a new medium and destroying his old heavy, even if the new mediums cost nearly 40k! Or sell the heavy for 5k.
Look at it another way: you take the bus to work, it costs you a buck a trip. A new bus company starts up, running exactly the same route at exactly the same time, only they charge 80 cents a trip. Will you keep riding the old bus? "The old busstill costs the same.""It still does the same job it was doing." "You were happy paying a buck a ride before, why not now?" Well,you're not happy with a buck a ride now because there is a new, cheaper alternative. Even if you have to pay $10 for a "pass" that allows you to ride the newer buses for 80 cents, you earn back that $10 in a couple weeks. In RL, virtually no one is gonna ride the old buses, they are virtually worthless.
1 - Letting people make mediums that function just as well as old harvesters means that old harvesters are virtually worthless. They cost you so much more to run that nobody who does the math will use them.
2 - Making structures that the people who play SWG have paid hundreds of millions of credits for into virtually worthless junk is, IMHO, a monstrously bad idea.
I think many architechs are also forgetting who the architechs business is. Miners buy almost all of the structures made by architechs. IT is a closed circle system. Miners get you materials which you fashion into tools which they use to get materials, ect. While many people can sell other architech items, the only demand will come in harvestors, since nothing else changes in the professions. You can hike the price out the roof, but ultimately, you hurt only yourself. It may seem like an idea that miners will have to re-buy all the goods you built them, but again, they will probably comply and your cost will probably go up, but if you think the cost that people now have ingrained in them for these goods is going to change much, you are really not looking at how people work in a economic model. Not to mention that someone will always undercut you and post it to the world thereby stripping you of business repeatedly.
This change will in the end only hurt this profession, it may seem like a nice break now, but in the future it will do nothing to change the current lack of market, and it will make people even more selective about who they buy from.
Griswel wrote:Omdatha - I really don't understand why so many people assume that "we" make things this that or the other. The market in SWG may be a bit crude, but it's still a market, and prices are determined by market forces, not "us" or "we".
The fact is that at any rational price for mediums (20k for a 3500 resource medium is unsustainably high, btw), heavies are utterly without value now.
"We" can't change that, "we" don't simply choose prices, no matter how much people would like to believe that "we" do.
[Ask yourself: if I can make A) 50k profit on a few items, or make B) 100k total profit selling more items at a lower price, which will happen? A few guys trying for A just means that the guys trying for B have an easier time, and still end up richer. It's a market, one architect complaining about another architect getting rich by selling more at a lower price is really just pointless, but you see it all the time. There is no "we".]
Where do you get that 20k is unsustainably high? At this exact moment, with the experimented harvester thing still being new and its future uncertain it is indeed difficult or impossible to sell a medium for more than maybe 15k, but that will change once we know that a rate 7 medium will indeed stay a rate 7 medium and not revert to 4 one day.
I do agree that market forces play a part but I don't think it's entirely market driven simply because this isn't a real economy. The money supply being infinite in particular changes the dynamics considerably...I'm a lot more likely for example to spend my entire bank account since I know that if it comes down to it I can always run a few missions for cash. Plus in a real market-driven economy this problem with harvesters being worth the same or less than the raw resources (the "3cpu problem") would not occur; nobody in a real economy builds stuff with no margin. The reason this happens in game though is because the real wealth of the game is in XP; people who grind and sell below cost do so because they feel that the XP they gain doing so makes it profitable for them, even if it isn't financially profitable.
In any case, as someone else pointed out, trying to compare old heavies and new mediums is not what anyone should be doing. You need to compare NEW heavies with new mediums, in which case the new heavies still have value. The value is being able to get the MAXIMUM amount of resources possible from a given number of lots. I've heard of heavies at 11 which is a hefty increase over 7, enough that the extra resources you can mine will outweigh the additional maintenance cost.
The "old heavies are worthless now" is largely coming from folks who don't like not having the latest and greatest. As I've said in previous threads, an old rate 7 heavy made two months ago is still a fully functioning rate 7 heavy now. You aren't "losing" any money by not upgrading to a rate 7 medium, you're simply no longer running at optimum possible efficiency. In fact everyone should be happy with this, because before this once you got to heavies you had nowhere else to go to increase your profit, short of adding more lots through use of multiple accounts. Now you have new options: you can upgrade to uber mediums and increase your margins, or upgrade to uber heavies and increase your sales while keeping margins relatively constant.
Oh and on that note I should also point out that in a real economy time would play a factor. If I want to mine collectively at rate 70 I can do so with 10 new mediums or 7 new heavies. Depending on how one values his or her time it may "cost" less to only have to run out and babysit 7 harvesters vs. 10, especially if they are not all in one place.
Idon't think a comparison of the 2 makes sense for the multitude of reasons given along with the fact that previously there was no option to go bigger... people paid for the best... they got the best... now the best is different and if you still want the best you have to pay for the best again.
I do agree with Tigris that the concern should be the lowballers... yes, you removed the novice and one skill tree folks from the undercutting biz, but at the same time I can't tell you how many times I've been massively undercut only to find out it was a master architect doing it. A couple times I contacted them and asked why they would sell at the prices they are... their reason? almost every time it was along the lines of... well, I already have all the money I need so now i just set pricing so I can move product as fast as I want to. Now, unless it becomes A LOT more difficult to make harvesters with high extraction rates, (i.e. rare resources and such) whats the incentive for them to not continue selling at the lower rates?
Bolanos wrote:
PegiAlico wrote:It can stay this way because the comparison isn't between new mediums and old heavies, it's between new mediums and new heavies. It's just as easy to experiment up a heavy as a medium. Old harvesters will be outdated, I say good, let the miners buy new harvesters.
Really? let the miner's buy new harvester's? Ok, I hope your not one of my customer's on Lowca, if you are, your price on ore just went up to 6 cpu from it's 2cpu price since you guys are charging from 200k to 500k credits for the new heavies. You want to screw me over, I'll screw you over back, don't worry about it.
500k is certainly a blatant ripoff. 200k is a bit high but I say not wholly unreasonable; I am currently planning to price experimented heavies at about 150k. Don't know how this will sell but we'll see.
Incidently, in case you didn't realize it, building an experimented heavy with maximum possible rate requires very high UT materials (primarily steel), some of which may very well sell for 6cpu. All that is happening now is that architects are being brought into line with armorsmiths and weaponsmiths; that is to say we now need to shop for high quality resources like everyone else and pay accordingly.
Ropock wrote:
well, based on that you are saying once again, that you are pricing below what you're paying for the materials... 6 cpu to purchase material translates to 5 cpu per structure built? or are you using a varied price based on amount of materials used?
It's not that simple because of the 27,770 resources needed for a heavy mineral harvester you aren't going to be paying the same cpu for all parts. 15,400 of that is ore for example, and it can be any old ore even, so you should never be be paying more than 3cpu for that. If you paid 3cpu for the ore and 6cpu for everything else your cost is (15400*3)+(12370*6) = 46200+74220 = 120,420 credits. So at 150,000 credits that's a 25% markup which i do NOT consider unreasonable at all. Sure I could sell for 130,000 and sell more, but then all I do all day is buying resources, manufacturing parts and filling orders and I'd rather do at least a little other stuff like hang out with my in-game friends a bit. In other words my time has value and I include that in the price.
BTW until I can make more than 9 walls without babysitting the factory you will never see me make anything that requires factory-made walls without a hefty margin to make up for my time.
Ok, thats about what I figured but wanted to be sure I understood. I personally tend to be on the high side of pricing on my server... I don't make as many sales of items, but I'm more than happy with the way my business has gone to this point. In fact, once all this gets worked out and I start selling harvesters again, I was actually looking at a price probably closer to 200k, but pricing will, of course, be set by the majority of architects on the server, not by one or 2.
Oh, and by the way, no schematics require factory made walls so i'm not sure what it is you were referring to there.
Ropock wrote:
Idon't think a comparison of the 2 makes sense for the multitude of reasons given along with the fact that previously there was no option to go bigger... people paid for the best... they got the best... now the best is different and if you still want the best you have to pay for the best again.
I do agree with Tigris that the concern should be the lowballers... yes, you removed the novice and one skill tree folks from the undercutting biz, but at the same time I can't tell you how many times I've been massively undercut only to find out it was a master architect doing it. A couple times I contacted them and asked why they would sell at the prices they are... their reason? almost every time it was along the lines of... well, I already have all the money I need so now i just set pricing so I can move product as fast as I want to. Now, unless it becomes A LOT more difficult to make harvesters with high extraction rates, (i.e. rare resources and such) whats the incentive for them to not continue selling at the lower rates?
There isn't an incentive. That is why price fixing won't work. Some people sell low intentionally to oudercut people they think are greedy, and they will win in a market like this because the can match anything you can make just as effectively.