Artisan Archive
Thread: The Price Control Thread
Not wanting to start a price riot but todd i think 8.6 / unit for resources is highway robbery. A personal harvestor mines at a cost of about 0.49 per unit at 60% so at 8.6 /unit you are getting 16x cost for markupI don't care how rare it is the cost to mine it is the same. Bazaar i sell at 4-6 credits / resource depending on current rates in area ( i try to stick to local going rate but will never go over 6) when people buy in bulk from me i sell at 2.5-3.5 and from my vendor 4.0
I sell all my quality 200 - 900 stuff at same rate. If someone asks me to SPECIAL ORDER them a specific something then price goes up 50% for the trouble and resources needed to shift production to that resource.
my 2 cents worth
BTW STOP SELLING FRIGGIN CDEF'S ON THE BAZAAR!!!
Iam so sick of seeing crappy cdefs (over 8000) and not enough good weapons. (and don;t tell me that 50 - 200 credits for a cdef is worth the time of listing them. do a kill mission make 1100 
I accidently removed one of my old vendors to put in an NPC vendor (NPC vendors have a MUCH lower maintenance cost than Terminal vendors(and most likely droid vendors)do). Apparently I stillhad a 500Fiberplast Akasha had bought in it. Oops. I felt kinda embarassed. I reimbursed her for it. That's not theworst part, though...
Apparently Akasha had trouble with the new NPCvendor this morning before the daily server maintenance. She bought several thousand resources, but couldn't retrieve them. I'm not sure whether she had relogged at that point or not, but hopefully she was able to retrieve them after the server reboot. I'll find out shortly when I log in.
Anyway, if you're at Akasha's shop and facing her front door, turn right until you see a house three awaythat hasthe door facing towards you. That's my shop. I found it really handy to advertise my prices on my House's sign.
Gandark/Arit VanSchlek-
Haha, don't worry about starting a price war. I also stated that I believe raw material costs are AT LEAST double what I think they should be. I am hoping this is a result of a new economy forming and people are trying to see what the market will bear. But, unfortunately as long as there are buyers for those prices, people will sell. It is a pity. I would also like to see the prices come to half of what I stated in my model, if not more. I think the inflation is way too much at the current point. There aren't many indicators we can take from the game that the designers have given us for pricing raw materials or crafted items. The few I can think of are:
1) Maintenance Costs of harvesters and power units.
2) Power to consumption ratio of harvesters.
3) The cost of mission completion.
4) The cost of a shuttle (planetary or interplanetary).
These are the only (that I can think of off the top of my head) things that the game designers gave us to work from to figure out costing methods for the player economy. Now, I don't own any harvesters or power units so I can't say what it costs to run these versus what kind of output ratio is obtained, so for me to come up with a new model is tricky, but based on what you say:
0.49 credits/unit at 60% efficency is pretty good. I don't know if you factored maintenance costs of your power unit and the harvester in there as well? I want to play with these numbers and see what I can come up with. I really think the economy is bloated.
I do agree, and I hadn't brought it up yet, about pricing discounts on higher quantities.I wanted to get a consensus on the basic economic model first. But this was definately something else I have worked on. I have a big spreadsheet showing quantity discounts for people like architects and the like that use zillions of raw material.
So no bones about it friend, comments are what I asked for, and in fact I agree with you, I was trying to show how the current market prices could be reflected in an economic model.
Good Day!
i run windowed mode with 2 monitors and one has SWG the other has my excel spreadsheet showing current resource counts, harvestor production, counts on bazaar and vendors, sales on all, orders upcoming and processed and totals after orders so i know what i can and cannot promise someone, and all i have to do know is put in order numbers (units) and it figures up cost per and totals and if i can fill it now or later etc etc.
i use a simple quantity pricing
2000 3.5 /unit
4000 3.0 /unit
8000 2.75 /unit
16000 and up 2.5 /unit
Whew, I thought I was the only one nerdy enough to have a spreadsheet of costs! Haha. Now I don't feel so bad to know other people are doing it.
I like your quantity pricing. These are more of the prices I would expect to see.
First of all I always experiment on the things I put up on the bazaar. Primarily this is because when someone see's a weapon with my name on it I want them to be impressed at the quality. I take pride in the equipment I produce.
Secondly I consider what it takes to aquire the money to buy my goods. It takes a fighter class about 15 minutes or so to roll a mission and complete it for 1000+ creds. Therefore I have no problem selling my CDEF's for up to 1000 creds and power-ups for up to 250 creds. Having a good weapon is inherent to their success and that weapon will bring them many many times more money than they spent for it.
Couple complaints though...crafters, please don't put crap up on the bazaar. Yesterday I repaired a D18 pistol for someone that was 20-42 or something like that. I can make cdefs better. Another complaint is to the buyers out there. Look at stats, don't assume that your scout blaster is automatically better than a D18. Be smarter.
On buying resources...I usually only buy from the bazaar resources to GXP grind with because a lot of the stuff is 500 or below quality which just sucks. 1000 Fiberplast which is 100 quality should not be the same price as quality 999 stuff. Be nice to us all and differentiate before you put it up and adjust your pricing accordingly.
I have 6 customers ordering between 4000 and 16000 resources 2 - 3 times a week so it helps keep track of it all.
And also another thing i do is when someone buys from me at the bazaar i add them to friends list. then weekly i send out a newsletter by selcting all in friends and hitting mail. then i go to word and copy past my newsletter in and wallah instant sales pitch and usually 1 or 2 bulk orders. Plus your name is out there.
Also i have a referral incentive so that any existing customers that refer someone get a 5% kickback on order (good for word of mouth advertising) and everyone likes an extra 500 - 1000 credits for doing nothing
Btw anyone on Gorath wanting to start some PA or has a PA that needs me
oh and my shipping costs i charge for one way (since usually i drop off stuff in bazaar while there to make up the rest) so usually 600 credits up to 1500 credits
Great thread going here! Justwanted to add...
I do make, post and sell and will continue to sell CDEF's. I am currently a novice weaponsmith and can only make a D-18. Basically there is no interest in them. After making them, I don't see their value. Myfully experimented CDEF isof consistently better quality than the D-18. When I put D-18 on the bazaar myCDEF pistols always sell first. When you are a novice artisan and weaponcrafting you don't have any other weapon you can sell. My CDEF pistols, carbines and rifles sell pretty consistently. I only put up my very best and sell about 80% of them.
What I do agree with Gandark on is that *low quality* CDEF's don't belong on the bazaar.
While the lack of any NPC economy has its ups, it also has its down - a reference price being one of them
While harvesters etc do give you something to work from it terms of overheads, the begining artisan (or the mobile one without harvesters) is without this 'rule of thumb'. On the one hand this could be seen as an disadvantage, however they only effectively have to charge for their time (assuming they personally collect all the resources) and as such this allows them to effectively sell anything on the bazaar at 21 credits and still make a profit (granted no one probably would).
I believe the system was intended to work with more experience characters producing high end products requiring high volumes of resources (and thus harvesters - giving a baseline of cost), with the low end items being produced by the less skilled players - unfortunately I dont believe its working in this fashion
While I appreciate that its a free market system, and that everyone wants to move their product over someone elses, I dont see the point in radical price cuts (50% or more) on items that are already moving well (i.e. no sale more than a day old), if the item is moving then the consumer has accepted that price as fair and is in enough demand that everyones product will move sooner or later, with marginal price cuts moving the goods sooner
What radical price cuts do is leave the consumer unwilling to pay anything more (thus driving the price down) and result in such little returns that artisans probably wont continue to support that market (thus eventually the demand will exceed the supply and the price will go up again) its a very boom/bust cycle.
The situtation isnt helped however by the curent bazaar interface. Its very difficult to locate certain goods, the lack of the radial menu/examine function is such a big departure from the rest of the game interface that mose people wont realise you can double click, the ability to falsely name certain items at creation (deeds spring to mind) with no indication that the item isnt whats advertised and the price cap (I'm not so bothered about the item cap as it stops players just listing junk) make the bazaar far from user friendly
...well, yeah, there are spawning red guys, and they are quite annoying, but on the up side, they are usually animals, which will never kill you, and when not, if you are making the bank, you can afford to pay a group of marksman/brawler-types to come out and kill them off for you, while you do what needs to be done... and sometimes if you move very, very slowly, they won't attack you at all and you can stand right next to them. This takes much skill though.
Since I harvest only on the high levels, I've only had to move one harvestor once, and then I only had to move it a few meters. (the downside to having to move them is that you have to make sure the maintenance level is full to it's level, or you lose it. That's just a matter of checking the status before you "destroy" it and paying in what is necessary. AND if you pay over this amount, you will lose the credits you overpaid when you move it. Those really aren't big issues.)
Even if you aren't using harvestors,you can still look attheplanetary value to determine what everyone else is charging on average. You will cut your time in the field if you find the 90+% levels for the resource you are surveying (and make sure you waypoint them so that you can come back to the area for more when you run out). For a hand collector, the main factor is Time, not money. Harvestors are really better because you are freed up to do other things you wantto do in the game.
Through hand collecting, still use the PSV theory, but ask a few harvestor owners to tell you their costs to produce to get a rough idea on that particular resource. That will tell you what the resource is really worth, and then you can decide what you are going to charge based on that, but it will also take a lot of shouting to harvester owners, and if they figure out that you "drastically undercut" them, they may not speak to you anymore.
If you are strictly making items from the resources, not selling resource containers, you still have to figure out what the item is really worth,but this will take a lot of research to determine actual cost through the resources themselves, and some items use a lot of different resources.
One thing that is absolutely necessary is to find out how much it costs your other professions to live. A medic won't be able to buy your fiberplast at 5 c because they are already having to pay 5-10 c for their organics. If you charge them an arm and a leg for the resources they need to make their healing supplies, they are going to charge you an arm and a leg for the healing when you come in banged up because you ran into a pack of red guys and vice versa. (no pun intended.) The only self-sufficient person, is the person that spends their skill points to learn every profession. There is no wrong in this, but they aren't buying anything from anyone, so they don't factor into any equation.We are the backbone of the economy. We have to either live within the means of our fellows, or suffer their high prices too, but at some point the prices get so high that no one can keep up.
You have to realize that our professions mimic RL. If oil prices get to far out of hand becuase some sheik in UAE gets a little more greedy than normal, it causes a recession (OR the government decides to use some of its reserves to keep the economy in check. OR we go straight into a depression, dependent on how far out of whack everything else is at the time). SWG is an economic major's dream because it affords an opportunity to study the economic model from the perspective of each class and each general professionon an individual level without the subject of class coming into play. I know that sounds strange, but in RL there are so many factors that go into the economic discussion (race, sex, religion, parentage, everything really). In SWG it is just the basics, and it becomes apparent that the only reason the economy ever becomes imbalanced is because of greed-- the desire for more. We all started out equal. If you took the basic supply versus demand statistics in SWG, you can see exactly where we fail in RL. And then if you saw the statistical information when you first signed on to SWG, and overlaid it with RL studies based on income, race, religion, etc, you see that they have it set up to look at whether or not youat your income, education level, etc are making the same decisions as the people who control the numbers in RL and the effects that your decisions compared to theirs have on the economy. It's the perfect opportunity to study the real world in so many different ways.
Aside from the economic aspect, you have the chance to see the interactions of the different class levels (based on the statistical info they asked you for when you signed on) without any knowledge between players of real life information, so it makes an incredible sociological map too. Really, the only things we know we have in common as far as the game is concerned, are the professions we choose, factions we choose, and the fact that we all love star wars. It's an incredible model for study, and I hope that someone takes the time to study all aspects of it.
An now I have gone way off tangent, so I'll shut up....
I don't think you are on a tangent, I think you are right on the money with a better example than I gave with the bread. It is a great socialogical experiment and I think prices will eventually calm down. I really think this craziness is the game getting all started up.
Like you say about the self sufficent person who learns all the different skill trees...I started out like that, but am starting to realize it takes too much time to do everything for myself, and I am actually hurting the player economy by not picking one thing. I really thought I wanted to be an artisan, but I am thinking otherwise. I am not going to give up all my 4th level skills in the artisan tree, but they can aid me in other ways as I move up through another profession perhaps. Who knows, I may stick and be an artisan. That is what is great about this game...but I digress, this thread is about pricing.