Architect Archive

Pawlin - time to bring out your "Generic Pricing Debate" post again.

The idea of some sort of union, trade association, etc seems to come up about every 1-2 months - I know this is at least the fourth one I've seen since I became interested in Architect.

One key thing to remember is that a very small percentage of players read these forums, so even with every single architect reading this signing up for such a thing, it will still have lousy penitration into the marketplace.

Aside from that, the idea is pretty much a bad one from my perspective. I think there are two major reasons for this:

- unlike the physical world, people are here to have *fun* as their primary activity. It may be that person A has a definition of "fun" that includes amassing a huge fortune. It may be that person B has a definition of "fun" that includes making lots of stuff and giving it away to people. Those are both absolutely valid definitions for those people, and I'm not going to "judge" either one of them if their definition doesn't match mine.

- Like the physical world, there is so much more to a business than *price*. Yes, any crafter needs to understand their *cost* and it's relationship to the *price* that they sell goods for. The *only* relationship that matters is that in the long run price must be greater than cost - period. More importantly, there are many different things that people value - prompt service, full vendors, bulk discounts, good roleplaying, free advice, etc. My business model is low-medium volume, lots of free advice and prompt service, and full vendors. I charge at the high end on my server. The guy down the street is high-volume and low price. There are customers that prefer buying from him. There are other customers who buy from me. Both of us are having fun playing the game however we want to.

ye i see your point but i am not just about the pricing aspect of a trade association. i was think more along the lines of helping ppl within it with advice good resource spots bulk purchasing power for newbies etc etc at the end of the day i think it may enhance the feel of the profession to be able to join a player association that only has architects init ... just a thought and all points of view are welcomed thx ..soul

If you want to have a place where new people can get advice on the Architect profession, you found it right here.

If, on a single server, you want to get some people together to share waypoints, resources, production capacity, etc, then that's great. Think about your idea a bit and post in your Galaxy trade forum looking for business partners. Think about what you are willing to bring to the party first though, otherwise you'll just look like you are looking for a handout.


Good luck.

If you want to setup something on your server then I think there are 2 main ways: Guild or Association.

ONe way to go about it is to setup a crafting oriented guild or maybe even an architectual oriented guild. Either way the guild could include folks that aren't pure crafters or pure architects. If you teamed up miners and crafters then they could work together. Any business oriented goal would have to be specific to a server in question. And a guild is the main way to setup a group of people to cooperate.

Another way to do it is to try and organize an Architect Association on your server. You could at the least have the goal of fostering cordial business relationships between architects on the server. This way might be easier to get people interested in because many people are already in guilds and wouldn't want to leave them. However, it might be hard to get people to cooperate. Kettemoor has an association of Miners who generally cooperate. Not sure what all they do but it doesn't include price fixing and it does include sharing referals for excess business.

I wouldn't even tryto setup price fixing or regulating a minimum price. It just won't work.