Architect Archive
Thread: Return of the lowballers !!!
Dayln wrote:
Actually that is what I sold them for before the patch, I have been so busy supplying buildings and houses for cities that I have had no real time to upgrade all my own harvestors to 13 yet ( I did get a couple done ), I hope to this weekend if business slows down a trickle, I am paying to much at .3 and less a unit now.
Same thing here. I built a town of 30 houses and the city hall over the player city patch (about 30% smalls, 20% meds, and 50% larges), as well as just finished an order for twenty 13 KGH heavy minerals that another architect asked for. I'm looking forward to relaxing for a few days now.
Which has turned into another business for me. I found another architect in my server that does significantly more business than me, has more capital than I do, and will pay my costs to buy my deeds. It's pretty much a guaranteed sale. I just offer what I make in his vendor. No schlepping, no maintaining vendors, none of that. I quite enjoy this partnership.
Har!
Pawlin wrote:
This thread scores a 82 on the Useless Architect Pricing Debate scale. If someone would take off their shoe and pound it on the table yelling "I will crush you" then it would push it up over the 90 mark.
I didn't read the whole thread so if this was brought up before I'm sorry.
Once upon a time on the Bloodfin server there was a guy named NIXX, one day out of the blue this person showed up in the city of Coronet and for lack of any other reason or better words to explain it he just started making life miserable for anyone and everyone he could.
He started off with me by first asking me questions about this or that acting like my friend and asking for free training which I gladly gave to him and thenBAM! He started undercutting my prices by 100's of credits, first it was BP's then it was everything I was trying to sell. I would set a price and then he would all of a sudden start selling the same thing for 100's of credits less (remember back then we were not selling things for 1000's of credits yet 
).
Anyway I soon move from the city out to my shop HQ and he moved on to other people in and around the city to harass and do the same thing and then one day he was gone, POOF not to be heard from again? No one knows if he left on his own, got booted from the game or if he just rerolled his character because no one would do any business with him any more? I do know that in his case he would undercut anyone at any time just because he liked to do it, he was an evil one that NIXX.
Mrbledsoe Saidso
BetaZoob wrote:
Harric, are you just clueless? It's profit, ALWAYS profit - if I sell it for more than it took me to make it. If it totally cost me 10k to bring up a heavy harvester deed (counting energy for factory, harvs, credits all around) - and I sell it for 10,001 - I made a profit. Doesn't matter if I could've sold those resources for 100k. I STILL MADE A PROFIT. Brainless here -- seems to apply to you, for your inability to understand the word "profit".
I couldn't really care what the resources could sell for. If I wanted to go into the mining business, and bother with watching the fluctuating demand of resources and their prices, I would.
Frankly, matching selling-per-unit prices on resources against deeds for architects is a very weak way at trying to set down price-fixing for deeds. That's the whole reason it came about, because nobody could agree on pricing. This ridiculous 3:1 rule came into being.
Me? I base my sales on my profits. I couldn't care what other architects are selling for, outside of the fact of two rules:
1) I sell at a profit. I will not sell a deed for less than it took me to make.
2) I will sell cheaper than architects near me, to get more business to me.
Actually a good business model WOULD have all the resources , there costs on the open market and there net worth LOL ...Beta please , I understand that being in grade school you might not understand this .. What business would MAKE a product and sell it as cheap as the resources are sold for on the open market ??? Answer IN REAL LIFE they wouldn't , so spare us your retoric on what YOU feel is the right answer when your clearly thinking with a 4th grade mind .!
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Agree.
People selling a crafted item for what the market sells raw resources for is laughable. To only look at your immediate cost of resources (assuming .3-.5 cpu) is not a "good business model". It is moronic. Your starting price for cost of resources should be assumed at 3 cpu. Why? Because if you run out of resources and need to fill orders, what are you going to do, tell your customers "too bad"? That is BAD BUSINESS. You always have to assume the worst, and price accordingly.
Why is their "lowballing" so bad? Because people read their pricing on these forums and then assume that is what they should pay for the items all the time. Anyone else find it funny how well known the resource requirements for arch items are all known, but no one looks at the requirements for armor or weapons? Anyone else find it funny nobody gets mad at a weaponsmith for selling their wares for X cpu? Architects are the only profession that gets griefed constantly for selling things for X cpu.
The days of architects pricing things only looking at cpu NEEDS TO STOP!! You have to look at what benefit your customer receives from the item you craft. With houses, what benefit do your customers get? Not much. So they should be priced closer to what it costs you to make them (low margin items). Same for things like furniture. What about harvesters? They should be priced based on the income potential they provide to the customer!!! Run the numbers. Look at the output of a BER13 heavy or a BER10 medium over a week or two period. Assuming the person sells the output for 3 cpu (and that is a low assumption because they should be mining high quality resources that would bring higher prices that that), they pay for themselves in that time. The rest of the time, it is pure profit you are providing to the customer.
It is a fact that 98% of the players playing this game want to kill things. They don't want to mine things all day. The effect of this is people are willing to pay huge cpu prices for weapons and armor (10,20, 100, 400 cpu). I would never expect to get near that for arch items. But to sell your items for 3, 4, even 5 cpu is just sad. Is your playing time worth that little? Mine isn't. Reevaluate your pricing. You will help us all.
Well, it occurs to me the value is not what it costs you to make it, but what you can sell it for. If you can sell it for high price and people buy it, so much the better. If you can sell alot more of them at a lower price, and thus make more money, well duh.... you figure it out.
Personally, I kinda like the idea of selling structure components... sounds lucrative. 
toolman70 wrote:
BetaZoob wrote:
Harric, are you just clueless? It's profit, ALWAYS profit - if I sell it for more than it took me to make it. If it totally cost me 10k to bring up a heavy harvester deed (counting energy for factory, harvs, credits all around) - and I sell it for 10,001 - I made a profit. Doesn't matter if I could've sold those resources for 100k. I STILL MADE A PROFIT. Brainless here -- seems to apply to you, for your inability to understand the word "profit".
I couldn't really care what the resources could sell for. If I wanted to go into the mining business, and bother with watching the fluctuating demand of resources and their prices, I would.
Frankly, matching selling-per-unit prices on resources against deeds for architects is a very weak way at trying to set down price-fixing for deeds. That's the whole reason it came about, because nobody could agree on pricing. This ridiculous 3:1 rule came into being.
Me? I base my sales on my profits. I couldn't care what other architects are selling for, outside of the fact of two rules:
1) I sell at a profit. I will not sell a deed for less than it took me to make.
2) I will sell cheaper than architects near me, to get more business to me.
Actually a good business model WOULD have all the resources , there costs on the open market and there net worth LOL ...Beta please , I understand that being in grade school you might not understand this .. What business would MAKE a product and sell it as cheap as the resources are sold for on the open market ??? Answer IN REAL LIFE they wouldn't , so spare us your retoric on what YOU feel is the right answer when your clearly thinking with a 4th grade mind .!
Okay, then. You keep whining, while I keep selling. Seems to me, I'm the one who's fairly set, and you're the one complaining. Now tell me who has the better "business model" in a game, no less.
It's not why I play the game - to help you. I play to have fun, earn credits, get XP. End of story. I couldn't care how well you do as an architect.
your items for 3, 4, even 5 cpu is just sad. Is your playing time worth that little? Mine isn't. Reevaluate your pricing. You will help us all.
We all have different approaches, there is not a single approach that is the best.
I know that my approach works as I know several architects quitting on my server because they cant get any business at all, while I can just barely keep up with my business, with no vendor no advertising and no title of Master Architect over my head.
I never worry about "BER rates" in setting prices. I make the best harvesters I can and sell them for less than my customers expect me too. I have been too busy lately supplying city buildings, houses and PA Halls ( I have no idea why there is such a demand for more PA halls all of a sudden ) that I have not dealt in new harvesters since the last changes. But aI can tell you that when I do get back into that market I will make sure to delight my customers with high value products at low prices.
But I can tell you that if it takes the same number of materials and time for me to make a 10BER med as a 6 BER med, I would only make the 10 and would not really change the price much. ( the horror huh? ) The good news is I don’t really deal in harvesters much lately. And when I start too, the first thing I will do is find out what my customers expects.
I used to price by the resource, but that didn’t work as well as I thought it would. I now price by the average on my server. Take PA Halls for example. The going rate for a PA hall on my server runs from 250k to 320k, there are a few guys trying to sell at 500k, but they hardly ever sell any ( may be different on your server ). There is also a guy that sells them for 200k but he is a small outfit and so I toss out the really high ones, and the really low ones and it comes to between 250 - 320k.
So I sell mine for 240k ( planetary ) and 260k (generic ). My customers are delighted and send all their friends to me. I sell a lot of them, 3 this weekend.
Same with everything else I sell. I don’t make much profit on small houses as the going rate is already below 3k a unit. But I am still making a solid profit so I just sell them for a little less than average.
The trick to me is NOT to worry about how many resources go into it, as long as you are selling for more than 1 cr a unit your in a profit margin, I’m quite a bit more than twice that on my lowest profit items. The trick to me is to find out what my customer expects and to surpass it. This business is competitive after all.
That makes a customers that returns, and sends others to you.
So this particular "clueless" architect is making well over a million profit a week while other architects on my server are quiting because they cant make a sale.
Personally their mental block that does not allow them to compete is beyond me.
I agree with Chelm, no one on Eclipse is selling the high quality ore, steel and poly it takes to make these 13 BER at 3cpu, try 6-10 cpu. So... I don't sell um I find that ppl are willing to take the one less BER and get a 12 which is much easier to make for me and I can whip um out fast and they are grateful for the fast service and the lovely personality I give them to go with it. Can't beat that. It does beat knocking my brains out and wasting my life trying to find these uber resources.. and I make as much if not more than the ppl selling the 13's. I'm still thriving if not more since the patch. Just all in how you approach it and look at it.
End of the story is, everyone sells their items differently, and prices differently, what works for one person doesnt for another. Depends on the type of player.
I dont enjoy making heavy harvesters (since this last patch) i dont like the high risk involved with that much resources, and i simply wont make them at all.
On my server the 'lowest' price for architect materials you can expect to find on bazaar is about 3cr per unit, except for hides for furniture which is more like 6cr per unit. If you buy ore in bulk (hard to find someone selling this anyway) its usually 2.5 or 3 cr per unit still.
Now to me it does seem silly to sell for less than those cost price even if your havesting your own materials(i do harvest most of my own but i also buy extra material a lot due to extra demand) if i sell that low i may aswell sell the resources instead on the open bazaar, ive sold resources there before and any ore will sell for 3cr per unit on there FAST on Valcyn.
I will say the average prices i see on valcyn for architect items.
Small house 8k
Med house 50-60k
Large house 100k-125k
Guild Hall 200k
MedMineralHarvester 15k-20k (pre patch, not looked lately)
Heavy Mineral Harvester 90k-120k (pre patch also)
Factories 30k-40k.
MY prices are not the above, i run several vendors with my few accounts and if i sell for low prices i wont be able to keep up with them all, so as a consequence ive had to put them 'fairly' high, but that also means i can keep them well stocked (i like to keep a stocked vendor rather than filling orders, when someone buys something i replace that item on the vendor soon as i can, and keep enough stock on the vendor at one time)
My prices are (those in my city i make housing for cost price, small houses for free, but apart from that)
10-12k small (one small was more material forgot which)
75k medium
135k large
300k guild hall
45k factory
Medium Minerals 10 BER 45k (15k for pre patch ones)
Heavy Minerals 13 BER 200k (40k for pre patch ones /sigh, and not making these new ones till i can factory produce them)
My prices are higher than average on Valcyn i believe, yet my selling point is(will be once player city housing demand dies down) keeping well stocked vendor's. With my architect, tailor and doctor vendors.