Artisan Archive

I make a healthy profit on resources selling at 3-4cr/unit. Maybe the problem is you are pricing too high. Do some calculations to see what your break even price is, and then look at what you are charging. Take a look at the market and see what others are charging. You can make a good profit selling your resource at a lower price than 6cr.

I can certainly see both side of this thread. But in the end if it were easy to "level" any class why not just start the game as a class at the max "level". That certainly would retract from the gamplay experience and learning involved in the process. Ive had the game since the day it came out and when I looked at the poll and saw the distribution of the intial starting characters I almost decided not to go artisan because of the amount of people that chose to play it. But then I thought back to a DAoC experience. . .spellcrafting. The day it was released everyone with a butthole or opinion was crowded around every alchemy table you could find skilling, a week later there seemed to be less there. You check the boards now and of those 500 people that were fighting for space around the tables only 4-5 actually saw it through to grandmaster level. So Im fairly confident that this will be the same scenario. Do I get frustrated at times with the profession? You bet your sweet cheeks I do, but I know Id get just as frustrated with say a marksman and grinding away killing mobs all day, only to have my frustration reach its zenith by thinking. . .well maybe I can kill this yellow con critter only to eat it and waste an hour getting wounds/fatigue healed, running to my corpse and retrieving my goods and going back to somewhere that was a lil safer. As far as the market is concerned I think it will eventually fix itself, at some point when guilds are rampant many artisans will have their hands full just supplying guildies with the goods they require and not have much time to explore other markets. Just something I do that you may wanna try is going to a bazaar and doing a galaxy wide search on an item Im currently making. . .lets use DL44's as an example. Well youll usually find the market somewhere flooded with said items. So dont put your items up for sale there. . .it may be well worth the credits you spend on travelling to go somewhere that ppl are playing but the demand for goods arent being met.

Another thing is to just relax and take it slow, and ignore what other people are doing. Not ignore their pricing or any other competitive issues, but who cares if someone else is two tiers ahead of you and has a shop set up already. I for one am not ready to incur the maintenance of a shop yet. And the most important thing I think is your attitude, as in rl markets, customer loyalty will make or break you. The way you interact with other players is going to be a huge factor in repeat business and word of mouth.

On to resources. . .yes this is a sore spot with many players I think.Alas I know I get frustrated finally finding a sweet spot for resources only to go back 48 hours later and finding that my honey pot has been depleted of the resource I was harvesting lol. But its all part of the game, be prepared to spend MANY hours searching for the perfect spot to lay down your seeds. I cant tell you how many times I died one day searching planet to planet for the quality of resources I wanted to provide the people I sold to with good items.

And finally the apprentice xp, I couldnt agree more with the statement in a previous reply as to it coming in waves. Just do your thing at a crafting station or wherever you may choose to craft and it will come, you may want to yell every now and then, but I for one get pretty disgusted at ppl that spam 50 lines in a row that their teaching such and such skills for free. Most of my apprentice xp has been from shuttleports and someone asking if I could teach them a certain skill. If you see an artisan somewhere you may politely ask if they have any needs for training atm. Its all percentages, and the percentage isnt very high now but if you stop trying I promise it will be lower.

I think it would be good if each step of the artisan tree had a little niche where they could sell things. One issue is that a lower skilled artisan is competing against a higher skilled artisan and he can't win. The higher skilled person has more experimental points and will pretty much alwasys pump out a better item.

6 credits for a resourse! If you can't produce resources for 1-2 credits you are doing something wrong. A harvester costs 720 credits a day in mainenece and uses 600 power. Even if you bought power at 1 credit each, you would spend 1320 credits per day. Even on a 35% spot you can gather about 1000 units in a day and nearly break even. A wind generator on a 35% spot will produce 2160 units of power per day at a cost of .66 credits/unit.

I think the economy seems good. If you're a bounty hunter, and you want a scatter pistol, you have to get it from a weaponsmith. If a weaponsmith wants to make a scatter pistol, he/she has to have an architect build him/her a factory in order to make two of the same blaster power handlers. So if someone becomes a bounty hunter, and they want a gun, that effects architects. It's actually good from what I have seen so far.

I'm not really sure the idea of master artisans flooding the market with high-quality low-cost items is valid. Personally, I haven't seen a lot of high-quality stuff on the market (and I'm talking about powerups). You can tell what was cranked out and dumped on the market, and what was actually crafted and experimented. There is all kinds of +6% crappy powerups at the bazaar in Coronet City where I sell my stuff. But I charge more for my +25% and +30% goods and they DO sell. I don't worry about all the crap I see for 20 and 30 credits, people probably do actually buy that stuff but the ones who know what they're doing buy mine. And I've been told by higher up artisans that the reason they don't make powerups at a much higher quality and sqeeze out the little guy is, it's just not worth their time for the little amount of money they can make. And the slow trickle of XP they would get from dumping, give me a break! So, yes there is a middle-level niche. I've found it.