Artisan Archive

For the price it takes to mine the materials, including the power for the haresters, I can sell them for 4k and still make a profit. not sure where everyone is coming up with 30-40k, unless they are buying the resources for 3cpu and then need to turn around and make a profit.

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nefarious wrote:
For the price it takes to mine the materials, including the power for the haresters, I can sell them for 4k and still make a profit. not sure where everyone is coming up with 30-40k, unless they are buying the resources for 3cpu and then need to turn around and make a profit.

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I'm sorry, could you show your math please?

Isnt it like 8-9k in resources? 6500 ferrous 1500 non ferrous or something?

It costs at least 4k to run the harvestor on an 80% spot for the 2 days to extract 10k in resources, thats not figuring the power costs or the cost of the harvestor...

I'm sorry, could you show your math please?

Message Edited by nefarious on 04-28-2004 12:18 PM

Flynn, what's the BER of your harvesters? On average, the most it costs me (MA, working towards MWS, and I harvest my own resources) is about .25 cpu to harvest my own resources...at that cost, it only runs me 2k creds to produce a vehicle requiring 8k resources...4k for such a vehicle is therefor 100% markup. In real world economics, that is an astounding profit. Having managed a retail location for several years, and now as the owner of my own business, I would love to have even 1 product I sold that made that kind of profit margin. Even batteries-arguably the most profitable thing any store sells-only have a margin of around 70%. I am a very casual player...but by no means am I hurting for money. I have yet to sell any of the weapons I make (WS 0-4-0-4) for more than 10k, and the only weapons I sell for over 6k have been pre-sliced for customer conveinience. I have 2 houses (1 small, 1 medium) and 5 venders, plus 3-6 harvesters I pay maint on at any given time...and rarely do I ever have less than 300k creds on my person, not counting bank funds. I do not charge for weapon repairs...they are a cost of doing business. And brisk business I do, selling on both my own venders and the galactic market. Why, do you ask would I 'shaft' my fellow crafters in this way? Why would I not take advantage of every sucker with a few credits in his pocket and fleece every gunslinger of every credit I can wring from them? Well, word of mouth sales are good, dear reader. I personally got sick of paying 3-20 cpu (common cost of resources on the galactic market for Flurry) for resources that only had 1 stat above 600...as a WS, I look for Mal, OQ, and Con ALL above 600-800 for the weapons I sell...individual parts use other stats, but I go for the best of those stats as well. Its insanity to pay those prices for a resource that has say, 900 OQ, but only 120 MAL and 35 CON. If you must gouge your customers, at least make the resource worthwhile and not just any old crap you happened to find in high concentrations. I'll happily continue to undercut, undersell, and profit handsomely from volume sales every other crafter on Flurry, if it means that prices might someday fall into a more realistic pattern, instead of the greed oriented setup that they currently have.

Kabukkyypra

Come visit my shop on Flurry, located in the city of Halcyon on Corellia

I just recalculated the numbers using a 75% spot for power and a 85% spot for material and that further reduces the price down to 0.15cpu for a total of 1200c for a swoop. This is why the garages will have no impact on my play style and the only money sink is still the harvesters.This is mainly why I went artisan, and my friend went WS, we were tired of everyone charging outrageous prices for anything.

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PrincessThea wrote:

Has anyone considered that Labor costs are a factor ....

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We don't get paid to work in SWG, we pay for it.

I worked long and hard to reach Master Artisan, and it sickens me to see people selling swoops for 6k.

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Jayces wrote:

What's you are missing is greed and the broken economy.

In an ideal world it would work as follows.

Miners would supply resources at 1 CPU.

Crafters would buy this and sell items at 2CPU.

Voila problem solved.

Unfortunatly although the above is profitable , for many it's not enough profit. Add the fact that people want to do as much as they can by themselves you then end up with topsy turvy market. For example the weaponsmith who runs his own harvesters for power, resources and makes the items.

Also with credits being so ridicoulously easy to come by those who have lots will pay stupid prices for things and then force the prices up becuase people think that is the norm and also because they can sell at that price.

On the other end of the scale you have those crafters who have so much money they can afford to sell at a loss thus pushing others out of business.

It's a tough world in SWG and from an ecnomocial stand point, pretty bizarre

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Are you joking? Selling resources for 1cpu is NOT profitable. And why would I bother to sell resources for 1cpu when it takes me .4cpu to mine, not counting travel or the cost of buying the harvs in the first place. And what about all my hours of hard work surveying, sampling, redeeding, traveling. You're forgetting, communism is a great idea but it doesn't work.

Besides selling resources, Im a doc and I sell stims. 2 cpu for items? Rediculous. I spend money on factories, and a lot of time. Prices depend not only on how much things cost, but the value of the items. Stims may only take about 64 resources, but I always use advanced componets (require hard to find resources) and my stims are very good. I can't keep crates of 4 400/30 stim Bs in stock for 6000 cr, and that's about 20 cpu.

Actually, selling resources at 1cpu would be profitable but not very much, but as long as we have holo grinders who pay any sum for resources so they can level as quickly as they can then you get inflated prices.

Back in the early days of release and the end of beta it was common to sell most resources for 1 to 1.5 cpu. If you had an extremly good resource with 800+ to 3 or more stats then you might get lucky and get 4 cpu. To be honest I was a bit shocked at how much the cost of resources have gone up since the hologrind started. Publish 10 cant get here any too soon and once it does things will settle down to a resonable level.

And yes Im a Master artisan and I was very carefull about the extra resources I bought to travel up the ladder, I refuse to pay more than 2 to 2.5 cpu for "grinding" resources. In a stable server envirorment I would say 3 to 4 cpu figure for a finished product would be about right depending on the product. That would put the swoop around 25k to 28k in price.

The underling problem is the lack of distiction between different craftsman and the fact the items will never decay period.Vehicles should be able to be permantly customized and some of those things should effect how the vehicle preforms. We should be able to add a stoarge feature to a land speeder at a cost to speed. A swoop should be able to be skinned down even more making it even faster but it decays quicker, a speeder should be able to have tools added to it like survey tools or even new tools to make scouting more effective. My crafter has a landspeeder, why? because IMO it fits in character, a crafter needs to have something to lug around all those resources and items. We should also be able to tinker with all the stats of the vehicles to an extent not just hps. Right now if crafter a makes a swoop and crafter b makes a swoop using the same resources then both vehicles are identical even if crafter A has lots of items and buffs to make his crafting experiments better. So crafter A tries and sells the product for 20k but crafter B sells his for 6k and B gets the sale. Now if we could experiment on speed, maintence costs, hps, and maybe even manuvarbilty then crafter A and B can both sell the swoops because at that point people will be paying for the extras that A's has.

One final thing all items need to decay reguardless of maintenance. I dont care if its vehicles, clothes, harvester, factories or houses. Maintance is only to keep things working at top preformance but eventually they should be replaced lack of maintance should hasten that decay and it should not be reversable. Take a vehicle for example, with good maitance (not letting it get below 75%) it might last 6 to 8 rl weeks. If you have a tendency to let it start getting down to where its smoking and repair it it might only last 4 to 5 weeks and if you let it get even lower where there are sparks and flames all the time it might only last a couple weeks. Harvesters should be the same way, personals a max of 4 to 5 weeks, mediums, 6 to 8 weeks, heavies 10 to 12 weeks. Factories about like heavy harvesters. Houses should be the only exception to the rule but not really immune, they should have to have major repairs or decay permantly.

Sorry I got off topic a bit there SWG has come along way since release and I feel its now starting to progress after the SE I think the devs really need to look into the crafting side of things again. Vehicles are nice but lets face it once everyone has one there will never be a need for someon to buy another one and we will be in the same boat as architect.

It's not just hologrinding, it's basic econ. Millions of credits enter the economy every day, far less then that are removed. If a crafter can charge 20cpu for an item and people buy it, he will charge 20cpu for it and he won't mind paying 6cpu for the resources.

1-2 cpu is ok for grind steel, but what do you think the value of high quality dolovite iron is? It spawns once every 1-3 months, and higher quality spawns are less frequent. Dolovite is used to make advanced doc componets for buffs, good stim Bs, and others that are always in demand. Good dolovite can easily sell for 10cpu which is fine, because even at that price docs can still make a huge profit of buffs and other meds. High prices for resources like dolovite having NOTHING to do with hologrinding because no one grinds with it.

Don't even pretend that every resources is worth 1-2 cpu.

undercuttign is great is it not? As a Smuggler I feel your pain.