Architect Archive

You need to stop whining about low-priced houses. I personally know that running my harvesters costs me less than 2cr per unit if you take the time to get a high concentration of the resource, and use medium or large harvesters with a fusion generator for power.

Those of you saying that resources cost 5cr on the baazar are stupid. You should be mining your own resources, or setup an agreement to buy in bulk from a miner at a decent price. If you OVERPAY by buying off the baazar, then of course you need to rip customers off by overcharging to break even. They (myself included) put them up there at insane prices because there is always some idiot who will overpay for something just because they're in too big of a hurry to mine it themselves.

Even better yet - do a few missions to cover the cost of the maintenance on the harvesters. Then your resources are basically free (only a time investment doing the missions). And while you're running around doing the missions, you can survey for better resource concentrations. Don't you realize that maybe these low priced sellers are doing something like this so they can sell for less and still make a profit? The architect scene is WAY too overcrowded, so people will come up with a more ingeneous way to outsell their competition.

I cannot stand all the threads that try to convince architects to stick to the same bloated price structure. What you're trying to do would be illegal in the real world. It's called price-fixing. The record industry has already been sued over this twice.

There is NO quality difference between architects, so why would any consumer want to pay more when they don't have to?? I've seen architects who are SMART start to figure out other ways to sell - by adding in furniture, selling parts to other architects, etc.

In real life, the national average is that over half of all business startups fail. Why should a player-run game economy be any different? The overpriced whiners who have no creative thinking will get burned out and quit, while the more cost efficient, craftier ones will succeed.

And don't give me the arguments about critical failures. If you're mining your resources at <2cr per, and selling at >5cr per, then you're MORE than making up your losses, so don't give me that BS. A 25% failure rate at FINAL ASSEMBLY would appropriately dictate a 25% increase in base expenses, raising the the base cost of about 1.75 - 2 to 2 - 2.25. A large Naboo house is 37334 count. Multiply that by 2.25cr per unit gives you 93335 credit cost for a large naboo with critical failure factored in. Now you see why people can sell at 110k - they're making almost 17k in profit on every house sold. Add in the fact that the customer will come back to him because he had the best price, and they'll make even more off of the furniture. So, they will end up making probably 25k in profit off of every customer. Sure, you're not making millions, but why do you need to? What the heck would you spend that kind of credits on anyway? Remember that is PROFIT, so you're harvs and everything are already paid for.

Oh, and I almost forgot - someone will post here about factory maintenance. come on - don't nickle and dime here - you get the point of my post don't ya? If not, let me sum it up in one sentence:

Low-priced architects will not 'go-out-of-business' like you think because they have lowered their costs, and are using smarter selling tactics than you are.

Flame away - I have the personal shield generator warmed up and ready. :-)

CyberDeity,

Could you please come over to my house and:
pay my rent
pay my electricity bill
pay for my game
pay for my subscription
play it for me

and then, and ONLY then; will I let you decide what I'm going to charge.

Thanks for the suggestions though.

Thank you - drive through.

I know quite a few architects out there who jacked up their prices because they know that skilled players are capable of doing 10k missions on Dathomir solo. Because they know this, a normal 8 or 9k house is now 20k.

Cyber,

You have completely .. and utterly .. missed the point

It is NOT that you can't make some money selling at 3 - 3.5 cr/unit, you can do that and be profitable.

But why on earth would you even want to think about it ? You can sell the raw resources very quickly at 4cr/unit, no risk of failure, no factory time, no crafting time. Why pour hours into making structures only to sell them for less then you can sell the raw materials ? It doesn't add up

Its not that archs are buying ore 5:1 on the bazaar, its that they see no need to sell a large house for 80k when they can get 180k just for the raw resources and no wasted effort

Oh, don't get me wrong here - I'm not trying to make you charge a lower price.

I'm trying to extinguish the people crying that they cannot sell any houses because the customers complain about the high prices.

If YOU can sell a house at that price, then MORE POWER TO YA! It's a player-based economy, and there WILL BE people who are not as concerned about price, and would rather not waste time trying to shop around. A perfect example of this is the weaponsmiths. People are charging killer high prices because people are paying it. If noone would pay it, they'd lower the price until they found that 'sweet-spot' of maximum profit vs quantity sold.

Thanks for the reply, but you missed the point. Charge whatever YOU feel like, but don't complain about no buyers. :-)

He's completely missed the point. /agreed.

I'm buying resources for 2.78 cr/u in 200k quantities at a time. If i wanted to make phat l00t I'd just sell em on the bazaar for 5cr/per and be done with it.

I'm not a "miner" by profession. I'm an architect. I shouldn't have to "mine my own" resources. As an architect, my lots should be spend on MODEL HOMES so that I can show my customers the different floorplans before I craft them.

I shouldn't have to run missions to pay for my harvesters. I'm supposed to be an ARCHITECT. If i wanted to run missions, I'd pick up a blaster, turn in my master architect title and go to dathomir. What boggles my mind are these people saying that I should run missions so that I can sell my wares for below market value.

You people realize what you're doing right? Working two jobs, just to pay for one. Doesn't make much sense does it?

OK, here's your answer on why resources sell high on the baazar - because of availability. I can guarantee you if you all flooded the local baazars with resources, the overall selling price would drop. This is basic economics. There is always a graph of maximum price vs quantity. Architects are at the bottom of that right now, Weaponsmiths are at the top of it. You can't change that - time will.

I price my goods at a minimum of 5 credits per and have sold everything I have made that has not been for myself or my friends.

There are idiots on Valcyn that sell small houses for 10k and even less but if you want to buy a house from me then it is 15k. I am not hurting for business and use up my resources faster than what I can get them in so I have no reason to lower my prices. Right now I end up putting much of that back into buying more resources since I cannot keep up with what I mine and what two others mine for me. I am almost Master so there will be no need to buy resources once I am done and I will probably raise my prices higher.

Why anyone in their right mind would want to go through all that trouble for less than cost is beyond me. Oh well lol--you can sell your 6 small houses for 60k and I will sell my four for the same price. That just leaves me with two more.

Right now I am selling Mediums at 75k but will probably raise that soon as well. No reason to bust my hump trying to churn stuff out when people are willing to pay more for it.

Riekl has an extremely valid point. If it ever comes to a point and time that the idiots control the market then I will just sell my resources instead of crafting them.

Quadork,

I understand your disagreement with running missions to pay for stuff, but that is YOUR playstyle. You cannot force EVERY architect to do that. There WILL be people who do this, and will be able to undercut your prices. Sorry

And there will NEVER be a time when resources are so flooding the market that they will sell for much cheaper then what they do now. In case you haven't noticed harvesting resources can be a pain in the butt unless you are able to find good spots to put them. People are eager to do it now because they see it as a way to make fast money. When the prices go down and they realize they can do missions to generate money faster than they can mining they will stop selling resources. I would imagine 3 credit per would be a stable price on the bazaar and 2.5 or so when buying in bulk but there are very few people that would be willing to charge less for the time required to do it.

If you like combining your wares and selling them for market price more power to ya.

This is a MMORPG. Time is on most of the players side. They wouldn't be playing a game like this if it wasn't. NEWS FLASH: Prices will continue to decline. Time is what most of the people in a crafting have a surplus of. Love it.

As much as I'd love to beat you down with Spraystick Headshots, Cyber.. there's some food for thought in there.

Firstly, don't bother relating to the real world. In the real world there are minimum sell prices to now allow someone with greater resources to undersell the competition out of business. Something along those lines. Also, in real life, it would take someone more than 'a few contract jobs, all handled in one day' in order to make payments on a small house, much less buy them =)

That being said, I've always thought that the ecomomy was young, and since you can't kill anything with a house, it will take a little time to correct the pricing structure. The fact that you get a better cpu on resources right now (presumably going to grinders and smiths who sell at a much higher cpu on their items than architects tend to [for houses at least]) then you do on the final structures leads me to think that more and more architects will stop making structures after mastery. I am just now finding out that people will pay a much higher cpu on furniture (which I can easily build with resources that tend to be in higher concentration than ore). It takes me much more time to put together a large harvester, and I failed on one the other night. With the going rate, I don't stand to make enough money to justify my time and headaches. I will profit, and as long as my failure rate on final combines of composite structures remains low, I will profit favorably. But I will also spend my entire evening creating large harvesters or medium houses in order to do so. (Large houses can actually be more profitable I think).

On the other hand, I can spend a little bit of time loading a schematic and ingredients to pop out 20 tables, and then load some of the chairs I just produced into my vendor, placing the remaining items in their crate in some storage location in my house. I can then hang out with some friends, shoot a few terrorists, and generally have fun. That is, once I get out of the large structure business entirely.

I have also found it profitable recently, and a much more fun way to spend my crafting time then working on a large item, to go to a house, meet it's patron, and decorate their rooms as they see fit, arranging the furniture to create stylish offices and recreation rooms, as well as custom naming some of the furnishings to meet their need. For this I sell the furniture for a bit less than it's been vanishing on my vendor/bazaar for, and I add in more for my time and services. More profitable, more fun, and less resources.

So to un-digress...
This thread has gotten me to consider that one of the correcting mechanisms for the architecture market will be the lack of desire in producing houses and similar structures among higher-level architects. At some point, this will cut the supply down, and increase the price able to be charged for those who still produce housing, or who are trying to achieve mastery.

Guess that's all I wanted to say. 'cept that maybe most of your post was somewhat moot. You could have summed up what you said with 'its what people are willing to pay, so there's nothing you can do', since your discussion about the cost of resources applies to all crafting classes, and therefore does nothing to justify the cpu on their items.

Glug Bugalug'lug - Architect of Peace
Dealers of Death - West of Theed.Naboo.Lowca

Glug,

We're almost perfectly on the 'same sheet of music'. I'm trying to explain the laws of supply and demand, but apparently I'm not very good at it. You hit it right on, when you talked about too much supply. When people start getting out of the cutthroat housing market, the prices WILL go up. They will be harder to find, so architects can raise the prices to account for that. I also love your appreciation for furniture. I could count dozens of houses I've seen with less than a couple pieces (or none at all). In fact, one night I just wandered around looking inside open houses to see how people decorated them, and was severly disappointed at the lack of furniture to see. :-(

It'll get better. Everyone's in a BIG hurry to get somewhere, and most don't even know where that is. They're cranking out houses by the boatload at rock bottom for what? Sure ain't money! Just wait till the value of Endorian Wooly Hides goes thru the roof cause everyone wants Master Architect Couches that require them. :-)