Architect Archive
Thread: Why we get such rediculously poor credit/resource ratios
When I first started producing Small Houses and saw how little money I was getting per unit of resource compared to other Artisan professions, I totally bought into this argument.
A week later, I am can produce Medium Houses & Harvesters. I have been selling lots of small houses for 10-12k (the most I can get for them on Eclipse - I get lectured by uninformed goobers when I charge 15k). I've sold 1 Medium House for 65k, and innumberable Personal Harvesters in the Bazaars for 1250-1500 each.
Quite frankly, I'm rolling in dough compared my my DE & Weaponsmith friends. In the last few days since my operations have swung into full gear, my harvesters are not only self-sustaining, but I've got almost 200k sitting in the bank. Selling my Deeds for the prices I mentioned, I have more business than I can shake a stick at (and there's TONS of Nov Arch's on Eclipse) and making a very healthy profit.
I don't agree with these pricing complaints anymore. You guys aren't doing something "right" I think. And for the record, I don't belong to a PA ... I'm a single unaffiliated Architect.
--Haji, Eclipse
--Novice Architect/Sharpshooter
Hey dacton, I never thought to sell the harvestor deeds on the bazaar.... doh! haha
That would be a pretty good market I think. Sure beats grinding on crafting stations... 
There are several things a profession's profit margin can be limited by:
> Resource input: Architect is resource-intensive. Have you had many days when you still had piles of materials left over and didn't know what to do with them? Have you ever seen a pile of Ore on the bazaar and said "nah, I don't need THAT much"? Once you get large harvesters this probably isn't so bad.
> Resource quality: There's no benefit for using "premium" materials, which means you don't need to pay for the 5+/unit materials on the bazaar, don't need to shop around as much, and so on. There's no reason to experiment, and the only reason to look for an established Architect is to make sure you didn't buy a relabelled harvester or something.
> Labor requirement: Architect does not seem to be labor-intensive, in the sense that you have a relatively small number of combines per day. One completed item for you might use up 100 times as much material as for a Chef, which means he's putting in 100 times as much effort to work through his materials. How many hours per day do you actually spend doing the combines?
> Uniqueness of item: It's not just the stats, every Small Naboo house looks like every other one from the outside.
> Customer Demand: Houses aren't a necessity, they're a luxury, like clothing. Weapons, on the other hand, are a necessity for many people. Furniture is even tougher; it's a luxury that requires another luxury first. Someone won't buy a chair until they have a house, which means you won't sell anything until someone has a good amount of money stored away.
> Repeat business: There really isn't. Once I've bought a house, the only reason to buy another one is to go bigger, which means a higher maintenance cost. Moving a house is a hassle, since I have to pick up all my furniture, so this just won't happen. Since houses don't have a "quality" to degrade, I don't even need an artisan to repair it for me.
The only way I'll ever buy a Large house is if I can get half a dozen friends to chip in together, which ends up costing you, the Architects, business.
> Customer base: Every class can use a house. It's not like a Weaponsmith where only a small fraction can use the specific item. The only real limit are the planet-specific houses, but even that's not too bad since there are only three varieties.
> Customer distance: People are willing to travel far for big-ticket items like houses. You can have your shop be off in the boonies, and they'll still come from other systems to buy if the price is right. A savings of 10k or more on a single item is easily worth a round-trip ticket and a little running.
The point is, with a relatively small amount of clicking you can go through thousands of resources, making an item with a good chance of being sold, and without needing to spend days searching for high-quality ingredients. How many houses can you make per day, and how many hours does it take you? Now look at that benchmark of 500 credits per hour. It's not just an arbitrary number; in theory, the relative populations and market prices of all classes will converge on some rate, and that seems to be fairly close.
Under those circumstances, I don't expect the price of a Small House to stabilize anywhere over 10k. And don't say "so go buy from someone else then!", because I did: I have three houses whose TOTAL price was below 10k. Whether you like that or not, it's still how the system works right now: charging 50k for a Small House simply won't work because it's always in a new crafter's best interest to charge low.
This isn't helped by the sheer number of people who chose the profession to help out their PAs. Sure, they'll give up eventually, but by that point their entire PA will have the buildings it needs, and you'll have lost a pool of active customers.
Also, the bazaar costs on resources aren't stable. The number of people with access to large harvesters will increase, which means prices will drop. We're just not at the equilibrium yet. Before they tweaked maintenance costs I'd have said 2 credits per resource, now who knows.
Now, I didn't say that 10k is a GOOD price to stabilize to. But, for it not to work like I've said, I think a few changes need to be made. Since no criticism post should fail to provide suggestions, here are mine:
1> Experimentation and quality need to be important. Unfortunately right now the only "variable" part of housing is the maintenance rate. But how about we add a few more? Number of lots could depend on quality a bit (useless for small 1-lot stuff, but large houses that take 1 or 2 lots less than before could be VERY popular). Maximum access fee, number of people on the admin list, speed of healing when declared as a cantina, whatever. Even better, "terrain tolerance": the amount of slope/vegetation/rocks needed to block construction could vary, so that a heavily-experimented house could be built in areas that stock ones wouldn't work. Anyone who's ever tried to place a house would LOVE to buy one with that feature.
It's even better for harvesters, since you can have power drain, maintenance fee, and output all depend on quality.
2> There need to be more types of buildings. That way, the player who bought a house from you will come back to buy a shop or cantina. Once player towns are in this will get better, thankfully.
In a perfect world, there'd be ways to upgrade existing ones. Add a second floor, add a storefront, whatever. But that won't happen any time soon.
3> Exterior customization. Variations in coloration would be nice, but even better would be a "yard". Have the house area extend a bit further out, and "terraform" the extra space. Flatten it a bit, replace the random brush with a lawn, whatever. Let the Architect add optional components like a walkway or deck or something during construction. Basically, make it so that my house looks better than a stock one, and you'll get more business. Right now, clusters of houses don't really look like towns, they just look like houses dropped in the wilderness.
4> Risk. One change that's been suggested many times is: if you have a critical failure, you should only lose items that weren't the result of a combine themselves. After all, they've already risked failure once. So, no worrying about losing all those walls if you fail a house combine. This'll lower costs, which'll lower profits, but it'll help your business in general by keeping your resource requirements more consistent. Maybe make it semi-random, so you might lose ONE of the previously-combined items.
5> Deeds should show the floorplan of the item and/or a picture of the building, NOT just a brown square. Right now if I see a house deed on a vendor I can't even be sure it IS a house, let alone what the house will look like.
One way to help fix this might be to let us have some house customization options, maybe colors, liek in the tailor line for the houses... not sure, but it woudl be nice ot have something
He may be decreasing the value turning it into a house, but if it werent for people making houses, resourced on the bazaar would rarely be sold, IMO. 90% of my customers are architects that i sell resourced to.
Spatzmaus wrote:
How many houses can you make per day, and how many hours does it take you
Housers per day,
Small House, 2 per day with 2 medium harvesters. Medium, 1 every 2.5-3 days. Large 1 every 4-5 days.
Hours does it take you.
Each of my harvesters get a bit over 2000 ore in 24 hours. Takes about an hour to run check all my harvesters. An hour hand sampling resources I need and dont have harvesters for (I am running 2 Steel, 1 Aluminum, 2 ore, 1 Carbonite Ore on another planet, 1 Solar, 1 Chemical) being Copper, Inert Gas and Reactive Gas. Probably 30 minutes to combine everything.
So I'd guess it takes about 27-28 hours to make 1 small house. 50-70 hours for a Medium, Almost a week to build a large.
I'm not saying it's impossible for an architect to make a little money. I'm saying it's impossible for an architect to come even remotely close to competing with weaponsmiths, armorsmiths, scouts that are selling their resources on the open market, or even newbie fighter classes. I agree with you guys that said an architect should improve the values of his materials, not depreciate them.
Architects arn't the reason 80% of the bazaar resource sales happen, large guilds that are PL'ing their architects are. No architect can stay in business by buying his materials, it's simply impossible.
I restate this again, in the hopes that some Dev is watching-- Make expirementation worthwhile, or at least give architects something to grind with. I made a newbie brawler on another serveryesterday eveningand ran missions with him. With a newbie brawler,I can make 10k faster than a novice architect can make a house that he'd sell for 10k, and I have nil overhead. This isn't right!
Xukan Fallenhorse
Scylla
Master architect, retired from commercial architecture.
No PA
Spatzimaus wrote:
> Labor requirement: Architect does not seem to be labor-intensive, in the sense that you have a relatively small number of combines per day. One completed item for you might use up 100 times as much material as for a Chef, which means he's putting in 100 times as much effort to work through his materials. How many hours per day do you actually spend doing the combines?
1> Experimentation and quality need to be important. Unfortunately right now the only "variable" part of housing is the maintenance rate. But how about we add a few more? Number of lots could depend on quality a bit (useless for small 1-lot stuff, but large houses that take 1 or 2 lots less than before could be VERY popular). Maximum access fee, number of people on the admin list, speed of healing when declared as a cantina, whatever. Even better, "terrain tolerance": the amount of slope/vegetation/rocks needed to block construction could vary, so that a heavily-experimented house could be built in areas that stock ones wouldn't work. Anyone who's ever tried to place a house would LOVE to buy one with that feature.
It's even better for harvesters, since you can have power drain, maintenance fee, and output all depend on quality.
5> Deeds should show the floorplan of the item and/or a picture of the building, NOT just a brown square. Right now if I see a house deed on a vendor I can't even be sure it IS a house, let alone what the house will look like.
I don't know about the labor intensive part. I counted up the combines on a medium house and it is 58. That's a lot of combines for one item.
For point number 1 I just don't see that being feasible. Let's look at a medium harvester. Say you build a medium harvester and it is the most uber harvester you have ever created. So you decide, man that was one hell of an uber harvester I should make it a schematic so I can sell 100 of them for 50K each. Then you realize, **edit**, I didn't first make the generator turbine schematic, oh wait, I didn't make the small structure storage module schematic either, or the structure module schematic, or the light mining ore unit schematic. **edit** so a schematic won't do me any good at this point. There's just too many resources that go into a single project to make experimentation worth any more than a one time use. Because of that I don't feel it is worth adding in. Furthermore, even if it is a lot better than any other harvester nobody is going to pay an extra 20K for it. I say leave experimentation to the weapon/armor smiths. There stuff is actually feasible to make schematics out of.
Point 5 I agree with. I noticed on a vendor when you go to details it doesn't say what the item actually is. That needs to be changed.
I don't think the economy is broken.
It's simply immature. There are tons of guys out there trying to advance, and they get stuck with hard to sell big items. Plus, there's less money in the economy than there will be in the long run.
Finally, there are always guys who think that the way to play is to charge silly prices for things (e.g. all your prices are whacked), because they believe that if they sell one item a week they should be able to make a good living.
The rest of us only want to make a decent profit on many items. IMHO I can make a nice living charging around 3xresources for things, even less considering I am also being 'paid' in xp. The more I sell, the faster I advance, that's worth a cut rate to my buyers.
IMHO people who try to charge 15 credits per resource used deserve to fail.
Griswel wrote:
The rest of us only want to make a decent profit on many items. IMHO I can make a nice living charging around 3xresources for things, even less considering I am also being 'paid' in xp. The more I sell, the faster I advance, that's worth a cut rate to my buyers.
...omg...
If one more architect comes here and sells himself short by saying that half the going-rate for raw resources on the bazaar is a reasonable price for architecture, I'ma be sick.
Yes, you're making exp while you build houses. Weaponsmiths make exp when they make weapons, armorsmiths when they make armor, fighters on missions, etc, etc, etc. The fact that you're getting experience does notjustify the fact that any newb with a harvester makes more credits/resource with greater ease than you do.
Xukan Fallenhorse
Scylla
Master Architect, retired from commercial architecture
No PA
Griswell whats the point in going to the trouble of becoming an architect and building materials into a structure if you're only going to sell it for 3c a resource. Like people have said you'd be aswell just selling the materials. However, I'm not going to blame you for hurting other architects with your cheap prices though. Its the market that dictates the prices and architects selling cheap shouldn't make a dent. If the market is there there should be room for profitable prices aswell. The market isn't really there at the moment though. Like people have said before me, the game is quite young and the economy (especially on my server, wanderhome) is in its infancy.
Its harder for people to afford big items than it is to pay 2x the resource cost for cheaper items like guns. I do think though as people get more advanced and wealthy the house costs will stabalise. At the very least the house costs will in excess of the raw material costs, whatever that stabalises at. At the moment on wanderhome it seems to be 5c a resource, but it is getting lower as more people start selling them. At the end of the day though, resources will retain a good minimum cost because of the reasonably static rates of maintenance on harvesters. Personally I don't really care what price houses stabilise at. What I do care about is it being in excess of what you would get if you sold the materials on their own. Its supply and demand though. If its the case that architects devalue the resources when they build them into a house, fewer people will go down the architect route and those who are left will be able to charge more. Everything stabilises and architects will make profit (I hope). We just have to wait and see whether its a profit thats worth the hassle or whether its so low we'd be aswell doing something else thats more fun.