Artisan Archive
Thread: Vehicle Base Costs (3cr, 5cr, 7cr per unit) & prospective retail costs
Nice post. The actual cost to produce the vehicles will range greatly though. There are alot of people who mine their own resources; some more efficiently than others. Those of us who do mine for ourselves will be taking home alot more than a 33% mark up at these prices.
If we were to agree that a 33% mark up is a fair price and therefore should be the set price, I could charge as little as 2.6k for the swoop bike taking 8k resources (are you sure the swoop bikes take that many? I thought the X-34's needed the most), since my resources cost me .25 credits/resource on a high average. Now if I were to sell for that price, I would be an undercutter as far as the market goes, but it's still the same mark-up that you describe.
It all boils down to how much it costs us to make an item vs. how much someone is willing to pay. People who mine their own resources will have an easier time making their profit margins than someone who only buys resources.
I'll be sitting outside a starport first day just asking for offers. I don't feel bad getting what the market will offer, and I'm not going to sell for less just so we don't get called gougers. I'd be willing to be that if you sell something for 3-5 cpu on the first few days whoever bought it will turn around and sell it to someone else for 250K, right in front of you, ask the CH's who had this done to them with mounts.
"Otto Sells Speeders! PST with Offer!" along with my r5 named "OttoSellSpeeders"
Just my 2 cents but Vehicles are very different from Mounts. Although the vehicle information has been a bit confusing and has changed quite a bit there was a limit to how many mounts a CH could have at a time. It did not appear that a large number of CH's understood how to prepare for mounts so there was a limited supply of mounts initially.
Ther are a large number of people preparing to sell vehicles so there will be a large amount of competition. That being said you have to concider what the value of the raw materials are on your server not just how much it cost you (actually you really don't but I hope that you get my meaning). If you sell high quality vehicles for a lower CPU than you could sell your raw materials for that's fine but you are not maximizing your profit.
Yes this is a game and maximizing profit is not how everyone maximizes their enjoyment of the game. Some people will give them away for free and some will charge as much as they can. Both are valid playstyles.
One person selling for a very low price will not destroy the value of vehicles but it may seriously limit first day prices vs long term prices. If you are looking to get rich an item made with a low end mastery and high resource cost will not make you buckets. Some will get lucky but with the number of people hoping to do so I'm not soo sure. You may be the person to sell to the multi-millionaire who will pay 500,000 Credits to be able to shout FIRST!!!!.
Remember this is a game and although it does have economic aspects to it it is not a real system. Have fun and quit being soo bothered at how the other guy has fun. Are you being affected? Maybee but you may just not have been being as savvy as you thought you were. If you find that you bought a large number of valuable resources and the bottom drops out of the market sell the resources at a later date or use them to make something else that won't necessarily make you rich quick.
All that being said I feel that the prices initially stated in this thread are reasonable and are generally in-line with my own thoughts.
The person who dies with the most toys wins.
You gotta think. If you went to say, Wool Worths and bought enough denim to make yourself a pair of jeans. When you got home and pulled the fabric out of the bag would turn in to a pair of Levi's? NO (they have to be sent to another country where 8 yr. olds will make them at a quarter an hour but that's another story...).
Listen son, there is a lot of junk that goes down between acquiring resources and hot rodding across tatooine on your new swoop bike. I had to spend time leveling- that means crafting, surveying, harvesting and selling goods- to get enough skills to be allowed to Master. During all of this I had my ass handed to me by Swoops, Rag Tags, Slicer Hounds, Vrelts, Grubbers, you name it. Most of my possessions are decayed to hell and don't forget the hours I spent outside of the starports on Coronet and Theed begging for pupils in order to gain my Master Artisan title. These are not little things-
Also, you need to factor in how a person came by their resources- If you bought them for 5 cpu you ain't doing no one no favors selling things (anything) you craft with them at 5 cpu. Hell that's what we call a waste of TIME son. You need to make back what payed out. An ignorant Dewback would tell ya that. If you got the resources yourself then bully for you. Do the right thing and charge for the hard work of trying to hustle up the best for your costumers.
Another thing you gotta consider is the fine details of the schematic, kid. Yeah, yeah, it SAYS you need "X" amount of ferrous and "X" amount of Non-ferrous. But they don't tell ya that 1/3 of that Non-ferrous HAS to be Aluminum and 1/2 of that ferrous HAS to be Steel. No one knows for sure if the schem is going to be as straight forward as it was on Test Center. If you spent your time collecting 100k of Copper for your non-ferrous and the reciepe calls for Aluminum- well,- put your math hat son, it don't add up.
My formula will be based on materials used, price of my skills/time, quality of product and demand. That's right DEMAND. But not in the way that your thinking.
You see, those of you taking advantage of the situation and hocking Swoop cycles for 250k are "killing the goose with the golden eggs". Yeah, you'll find some dumbass that'll buy them off of you. Once! These vehicles decay fast. REAL fast. That means people are going to have to buy them again and again. Not to mention the urge to try all three. You price them out and a person is going to know she got took and she ain't coming back for repeat business (most likely on ANYTHING sold with your name on it). They'll know you would sell water at a forrest fire.
Those of you that sell bikes for 4cpu 'cause it's the right thing to do will get a hell of a lot of sales. Word of mouth will double or even triple your business. But I'm gonna reckon that by week two you will be sick of /tells about how so and so wants 3 of your swoop bikes for 24k and 5 landspeeders for 16k and can you cut me a deal for buying in bulk. Meanwhile you've lost 3 medium harvs cause you can't keep up the maintenece and all you do when you play is build vehicles. Yup. About a week of that and you'll be OUT.
Me? I got a couple of types of ferrous in varying amounts- with SRs like- 934, 907, 813, and 667. I got Non-ferrous with SRs of 627, 776, and 703. If the schems don't hard lock me out of anything I will be able to make a small amount of Swoop Bikes- (about 10-15). I'm thinking people will go nostalgic (Landspeeder) or speed (Swoop). For the best of the best made with the best material I will charge between 70-90k. If my customers don't like the price I will sell them the stuff I made with the lower-grade material for cheaper but I will tell them it's made with lesser material. The thing I think they will understand the most though is the HAM BAR. That above everything else will be the biggest ruler. I will also make some deals on the spot.
I don't think I will be looked upon as an **edit** for these prices and I don't care if you think I am. I KNOW they are fair. Especially on my server where an equipment factory cost you 435-60k, a Krayt FWG is 250k, and composite can cost you 250k-500k.
Do the math, kid. It's logic. Plain and simple.
Tevin Stargunner
Master Artisan
afkSawMountain wrote:
Well you say 33% in your world.
Actually the 33% is in reference to profit margins.
Your local store most likely has the bulk of thier common-goods set for a 33% profit margin.
When you reference items marked up 300% or more, then you are referring to the increase in costs beginning from when the raw materials are pulled out of the ground, fabricated, assembled, marketed, distributed, and eventually sold to consumers.
The only part the 33% plays a role in is the "distributed to consumers" part, and in reality that is all that matters because everyone in th chain gets a slice of the pie along the way.
If you buy your materials for 3cr/u from someone that bought those resources from a wholeseller for 2cr/u then there is your 33% from Wholeseller to Reseller for the materials.
But then those that spend the time to raise thier skills to do the entire process, can take thier resources that cost them0.25 cr/u to harvest, craft the resources into sellable goods, and market them on thier own vendors will stand to allways make the most profit, but by that time, you are more paying for thier TIME involved than thier actual item being sold. In the end, they may make a 66% profit margin, but that other 33% gets dumped right back into the harvesting/crafting process.
They even may charge more, because they feel like they deserve the credits.
I sure as hell would charge more if i spent all my poi.nts on Master Artisan, several Merchant trees, and very few combat trees (probably novice pistoleer)
scruffyone wrote:
I''m using high quality materials and I'm still charging only 4 cr/u.
Thats the retail of a low-end vehicle..... 
I pray to god i am not on your server. 
You will put me out of business since i have invested everything i have to resource gathering the past 2 weeks.
I dont maintain harvesters, i maintain buildings and merchants.
For those that harvest thier resources, i would understand that you have the ABILITY to undercut everyone else on the server, but it really sucks for everyone else in the field if you become the Wal-Mart of the profession because you had a head start.
Even if you think you are being nice for giving a price break by selling the highest-end products for the lowest-end prices, you are most definately not. If you establish that trend early on, you destroy the market by raising everyone's expectations to getting all thier vehicles for such low prices, when 99% of crafters cant afford to make them at that rate.
I certainly cant. If i buy the resources at 7cr/u i sure as hell cant sell the product for 3cr/u ....
Pfft, I wont sell for less then 10 cpu.
I can easily sell all my current resources for 5-9 cpu without having to risk critical fails and such.'
Will I get my vehicles sold at that price? Hell yes!
RadarLove2323 wrote:
Sorry, gents, but you're also forgetting that resource costs vary by server.
Not really. Prices vary because the harvesting communities have some servers further over the barrel than others.
I have harvesters on more than one server and they all cost the same to run. Resources are in about the same abundance (although not always the same quality) but honestly, you guys are crazy to let the people who run harvesters have more than 1.5cpu for anything.
Not that I won't sell metal at 3cpu if the market buys, but if I had to sell at 1 I'd still be profitable. And you wouldn't have to save as much to buy a mount.
Gerenth,
You may have Heavy harvestors and have a very low cost per unit, but you must remember that not all of us MA's have them. I only recently started playing so all I have are Personal Harvestors, so I can't compete with you on such low cost resources. Also, in anticipation of the vehicle patch, I've taken down my Wind Generators to put in more Mineral Extractors, and again, I'm having to pay about 2cr/Unit for that. I've got a couple of players that have rented me lots for extractors, but I have to pay them about 1cr./Unit plus Maintainace & Power.. so my costs run around 2-3cr/Unit when all is said & done, not counting my time. So forgive me if I'm going to be selling vehicles at around 10cr/Unit. Even though with my current resources I will only be able to make about 5-10 of them, that should give me enough cash to be able to finally afford the Heavy Harvestors that are selling for about 50-100K, Once I have the cheap resources, then I'll cut my prices!