Architect Archive

This is taken from another thread, but I wanted to give it its own spot.

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 (or standard cpu for your server). 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.

It's sell for about3-4 cpu or don't sell anything at all. People aren't going to buy 11kg heavies for 200k.It's relatively cheap toeverything else but those things won't move. Atleast not quickly when others will offer for 100k. I'm selling my old ones for around 120k. If they move pretty fast I'll slowly turn up the price. At 12kg I'll list for 140-150k when I've stopped making for myself. Can just barely make 13kg and 1 failure and I'm out of luck.

There is big pressure from customers
I regularly have to argue with people about prices for houses and harvesters. Sometimes I offer them to make house for free if they can bring me all resources. Shard where I play has very high prices for raw materials (6 cpu for junk ore) so usually they understand that it will cost even more than my price.
But some people are just bold. 2 days ago one of them told me that I MUST collect resources myself and keep prices low (like 5K for small house).
The problem is that general public is bad educated. And what is worse: they don't want to know about our problems.
Being an independent crafter I feel it very well.