Artisan Archive
Thread: Artisan not worth it, too much idiocy all around.
If I own a gas station, I could see the gas for a dime a galleon. I would sell out in hours. Does this make me a successful businessman? Does that make the person selling gas for a dollar a bad businessman?
Selling below cost is not good business sense since you cannot sustain a business this way. You can do this as a temporary special but to sustain this means you need to pay more into the business than you can make from that business.
The part I find confusing is how someone undeselling the poster can ruin a PROFESSION. It can make his business not profitable but even then he has not lost money. he still has his resources and the vehicles deed he crafted. Eventually, the bad businessmen will run out of cheap resources or capital and prices will rise. If he cannot survive one bad day then there may be a problem with his business.
Vehicles were cheap because people have huge stockpiles of cheap minerals. People cannot see the HAM of the vehicles so fly-by-night operators are able to create poor quality vehicles and sell them for low cost. The real businessmen will wait out the glut and when prices rise will sell their high quality vehicles.
I'd say go ahead and try. What will happen is that another large resource supplier will buy all of your stock, mark it up, and resell it on their vendor. But you don't care, right? You're making a profit - who cares if someone else is making money off of your work. BTW, if you do this, make sure it's on Shadowfire or Ahazi and be sure to send me the waypoint as soon as your vendor is up. Thanks.
fatboy76 wrote:
Actually I think ill start selling>900 OQmetals on your server for 3cpujust for you, troll. At .28 thats not a bad profit margine that I would be happy with. And you know what, because I would be making a profit you could cry grief all day long but the only thing you would be able to do is lower your prices.
I'd say go ahead and try. What will happen is that another large resource supplier will buy all of your stock, mark it up, and resell it on their vendor. But you don't care, right? You're making a profit - who cares if someone else is making money off of your work.
Ha...if everyone actually went out and did this, there wouldn't be *nearly* so much whine-posting going on in here. If Artisan Bob is happy with a 'mere' 1100% mark-up on his resources, why should that bother anyone else? He's earning a comfortable living, probably doesn't have a lot to spend it on anyway, and is probably enjoying the game, knowing that resources/finished product/whatever, at 3cpuare *guaranteed* to sell, as long as enough people want 10cpu for similar goods. He can go off and potter about in a POI or something for the rest of the day.
Artsian pwnz0r, on the other hand, selling at10cpu isn't nearly as assured in most cases, and so has to work a lot harder to make the sales, particularly if he has just bought Artisan Bob's entire stock at 3, hoping to somehow 'punish' him for an imaginary transgression of some sort. But thenArtisan pwnz0ris going to be earning a lot more money if he does pull it off. It all averages out. More work, for more cash.Artisan pwnz0rmay prefer that style of play anyway; business over crafting.
What I can't understand it the incandescent rage that seems so common here about it all. If you don't want to work as hard for your money, sell your stuff for a lower price. If you do want more money, then you'll need to put some effort into convincing the customer that 'your stuff is better, because...' Experiementing, Superior Stats, Availability on Demand, Out of the Way Markets, and so on. Pretty much everyone knows the Cost-Out-Of-The-Ground nowadays. It's your job to convince the customers why they should pay more than that. Just bulk dumping crates onto a vendor most likely isn't enough anymore.
But really,Artisan Bob probably couldn't care less what happens to his stock after someone buys it; to use, to make more money, whatever. He'sbeen paid, quite quickly too, probably gets moreof a kick out of making things than selling them anyway,and has moved on long after Artisan pwnz0r is trying his third starport forecourt of the evening. Artisan pwnz0r on the other hand, has 'owned the 3cpu n00b' and is now looking forward to giving some inexperienced passer-by the shaking down of his life with the cheaply bought stock. He's probably enjoying himself too.
Seems to me the only people who aren't having fun are the ones coming here and crying their hearts out about the woes of a self-regulating free-market economy. Maybe Bountyhunting might be less distressing? The point is, if you set your own goals, and don't worry about what 'everyone else' is getting, you'll probably be less dissapointed in the long run.
(And yes, it is self-regulating: The original poster has effectively been driven out of business by the undercutting lowballers. Maybe they aren't 'idiots' afterall? Supply goes down a little bit. This keeps up and supply will eventually meet demand again, and prices can climb once more.)
Your stupid assumption is that they are selling at a loss, they arent. They arent buying resources at all. They are extracting them for less than 0.3 a unit and selling at huge profits.
The poster has been driven out of business by businesses that were better than his, happens in real life all the time. He could not compete with a better business.
Point number 1----I look at the quality of the vehicles that are all around me and I laugh at all the people that bought such worthless vehicles. They bought thier vehicles off some guy spamming at the starport that they were selling them for 5k or some incredibly low price. I just laugh at all the undercutters. I see swoop bikes and speeder bikes with around 1000 hitpoints. I know the ones I made were no less than 90% and all have well over 2000 hit points.
Point number 2---- I dont even try to compete with the undercutters. Are they making credits? Yes they are. I am sure they are happy with thier newfound wealth. I have a philosophy in Real life that I apply to SWG that I want to share with you that have quality materials and quality products. WIth my real life business I have people tell me that my prices are too high all the time. Does not bother me one bit. As a matter of fact the people thatcomplainthat my prices are too high let me know that that person is not my target audience. In other words I dont want them as a customer. I garantee they will be slow pays or complain about anything they percieve as a flaw and want some kind of reimbursment. (I have even dropped/fired customers many times when I see that they are going to be a huge time sink for above reasons and take away from my customers that have come to expect excellent product and service from me.) For those that think I charge too much I let them have a taste of the companys that compete against me for at least a year. The next year they are back more that happy to pay my higher than standard price for my higher than standard product and service.
If I apply what I am reading in this thread to my real life business and my SWG business adventrues then According to the undercutters that keep posting here, I am a moron and a bad business man. Well this moron and bad businesman is laughing all the way to the bank in RL and in SWG.
For those of you MA's that make quality vehicles, hang onto them. You will still get your fair price for them when people realize that most of what they bought were low quality. There are pleny of people in this game with credits to burn and they will seek you out for your high quality vehicles. And dont worry about the folks that were undercutting you this week. They will be on to the next big thing in game where they think they can find a quick credit and will not get in your way becuase they know they can not compete against you. Because while they present what seems like a reasonable arguement as to why they are selling things so cheap, the truth is that they are cheapshot artists just trying to defend why they are ruining the market so they can make few more credits before everyone catches on to them. Time is the great equalizer.
This all reminds me of drivers syndrome.
Anyone that drives slower than I do is a moron, anyone that drives faster than I do is a manaic!
For me I dont worry about the OVER-cutters at all, I sell my products at a great value for my customers and they come to me for all thier needs. ( which still making large profits )
Vrischika wrote:But really, Artisan Bob probably couldn't care less what happens to his stock after someone buys it; to use, to make more money, whatever. He's been paid, quite quickly too, probably gets more of a kick out of making things than selling them anyway,
Yes That is what I would think. However I have been banned from a vendors store *BECAUSE* I was buying her product and reselling it. Now the fact that I am an importer/exporter didn't seem to matter. She told me that she did not want me gouging people (mind you I never got around to mentioning my meger markup
). She did not want to arange a partnership where I would buy her entire stock from time to time at more that she was selling on the vendor. Hmmm. Kinda like a lot of the posts here as far as the economic sense. I moved on and found a different source that (so far) seems much like Artisan Bob.-Indene-
I think there are a couple of problems going on here:
1) Vehicles are very simple to make. Throw metal into your crafting tool and go. You don't even need a crafting station, they're just good for experimentation...which doesn't show in the final product at point of sale, but DOES affect the quality of the end result. So people can sell shoddy vehicles for any prices they choose.
2) Materials are theoretically infinite. It costs just as much to mine 1 shock metal as 1000 shock, and you can sell the vehicle created for just as much. You can create as many harvesters as you have plots and run them on a spot, and get as much materials as you can until the resources shift. So if you have a lot of harvesters, as people have pointed out, you can even make a profit at 1cr/unit, selling for less than 10k cr. This means that the supply and demand doesn't exist at the materials level but at the crafting level, and as has been pointed out, it's not really that hard to be Master Artisan. I'd originally done it as a lark but never gave it up. There hasn't been much call for birdcages, let me tell you
As for the people that don't understand how 'a little undercutting' can ruin the profession....well, we're not talking about 'a little undercutting'. Right now we have a bunch of people looking to make a quick buck. When sales cool to maybe a couple of sales per day, they'll move on to other things. The people that are in it for the long haul will be left with the expectation that they should be selling their wares for 1-3cr per unit, at a loss for those that are choosing to use their plots for factories rather than harvesters, and with no compensation for labor or expertise. THAT is what people are complaining about.
I guess maybe vehicles should not be made by one of the base professions, even if master, because that profession is used for so many other things. Either that or the amount of materials used need to be cut down even more.
Anecdote: I had someone on my server asking me if I knew where they could buy a vehicle for 5k. Is that what expectations have sunken to? You can barely get a badly damaged vehicle repaired for that much. I finally set her up with someone in my PA who was willing to let a kaadu go for 5k...probably because of all the competition from the vehicles.
My opinion: vehicles should be uncommon. If people are complaining about the one-vehicle slot, saying they want the right to have all three, and it is a COMMON belief, then the balance is off. When TVs were first released, not everyone had even one, nevermind one in each room of the house.
Ok, I've ranted enough here
Business is competitive, if you dont want to compete, dont try to run a business.
I do agree that they are way too easy to make however.
That said, it's awfully hard to 'compete' when my 90% vehicle is sitting beside your 20% vehicle with no visible difference except after the sale, especially if the buyer doesn't realize he got screwed, he will just assume vehicles are a ripoff and not buy vehicles again, especially when he finds out they are harder to maintain than a small house.
All these undercutters are flooding and saturating the market. Once everyone on your server has a vehicle, especially as you can't run more than one at a time, see how easy it is to sell them at ANY price. Mark my words.
Ferraris will always be more expensive than Fords. But people know Ferrarri's are higher quality, and status symbols, and thus will pay more. Right now, to the buyer, there is no visible difference between my swoop and yours, except what they discover after the sale: when the 20% one falls apart a click outside the city they bought it in.
You are assuming that low price dealers are all selling bad units, think again.
Imagine the horror if they are selling high quality units at an afordable price to please thier customers becasue they dont pay the stupid price of 3 credits a unit for good materials.
Dayln wrote:
If the "morons" are running a sucuessful business and you arent, what does that make you?
Agreed. I get so tired of poor merchants/crafters/business managers screaming 'undercutter' when someone comes along that can do it better and cheaper.