Artisan Archive
Thread: Resource Pricing
Flatfingers wrote:
It turns out that there is asimple and highly effectiveway to deal with price imbalances: information.
Suppose you really wanted a yellow thraggle prawl, but you also wanted to find one a competitive price. You visit the nearest prawl shop, and find that the owner is asking 53K for yellow thraggle prawls.
If it's hard to do comparison shopping (as it is now), you might go ahead and buy that 53K prawl... and then get annoyed when you visit the prawl shop one town over and immediately find a yellow thraggle prawl for 14K.
But what if pricing information was readily available? Instead of taking the first price you found (and possibly paying way more than the average asking price), what if you could pay a small fee to search all the vendors on your current planet, or (for a more significant fee) search all the vendors on your server for the item you want?
Easy access to price information drives down prices by insuring price competition amond sellers. When you know that buyers can easily find out if your prices are higher than average, you're motivated to keep your prices low... or you risk not making sales.
Naturally, if buyers are lazy and don't want to take the time to search for good prices, then prices will remain high. But why shouldn't laziness be expensive?
Soinstead oftaking some heavy-handed approach (like price controls)that, while intended to reduce prices, has other undesirable side effects, why not work with human nature instead of fighting it?Give buyers the tools they need to find the best deals, and prices will come down naturally because sellers will competefor sales.
--Flatfingers
this is understandable and could be a good system....However, supply and demand plays more of a role in the price of things. The fact that any particular item cannot continuously be made if the resources are not there to make them means that those resources will cost you a particular amount. What those resources cost you are at the descretion of the seller.....if it cost you 100 cpufor the resources (remember those resources can't be found anywhere else...say like a good guality of rainbow gems for good t21's....those are extremely rare resources to find in high quality), then in order for you to recoup your monies and make a profit, you have to sell the finished product for more than what the resources cost you in total or you will go out of business.
The reason I say this is because the smart people harvest their own resources and it's a big task to get the best quality of everything, but certainly possible (with cross server trades). THis means they are not paying anything other than power and maintenance to run their harvesters.....you certainly won't spend 100 cpu harvesting your own resources.....most likely these are the powergamers who can do this or those that simply don't have a job or real life responsibilties and can play all day, every day.
Now if you don't have the time to invest in harvesting your own resources, then you must buy them if you wish to get into the market as a seller any time soon and be a viable option for people to buy from you....or you'll spend twice as long waiting to gather resources if you play at a casual rate. Since it's costing you lots and lots of money to buy resources, You can't afford to drop your prices too low.....but your competitor can drop his prices as low as he wants because it cost him practically nothing to get the very sameresources you had to spend millions for, he can still make a significant profit with little risk.
See if you can't harvest those rare high quality rainbow gems to make t21's yourself(hey maybe you were on vacation or simply didn't play the game when that particular resource spawned).....say you buy 50k of them at 40cpu so you can make crates of t21's or supply your guild or to make money or whatever your reason is.....that means you'll spend 2 million credits just to get one resource to make your guns.....that's not including the other resouces you need to either harvest or buy. Do you think the person who harvested those rainbow gems spent 2 million on harvesters? I don't think so.
now when you make the t21 to sell, you have to make sure your price is high enough so that you make more than what it cost you to make them.....and if your competitor can price his low since he didn't spend 2 million on one resource and only spend 100k to run his own harvesters.....he can sell his for nearly half the price you sell yours for......now at this point the person who gets the most sells will first be the person who advertises the most and gets his vendor the most attention and has the best quality items....there are simply too many vendors in the game now to be running from planet to planet search each one. So eventually once the word gets out that your competitor is selling his t21's for half of what your selling yours for with the same or better quality....will you be willing to lower your prices then?......the correct answer is no, because you simply won't make a profit if you do and if you were to drop your prices, then you definitely go out of business soon.
Your only alternative is to spend hours, days, weeks maybe even months searching for cheaper ways to get the same resources as your competitor has. The only thing you would have in your favor is the lazy players that rather run to the closest vendor and buy whatever they have regardless of prices becuase it's too much of a hassle to competitive shop......but in the long run, word will eventually get to those lazy people that someone else (your competitor) is selling the same product that you have for half the price and with how hard it is to make money in the game now, the smart players, the players that want the best item for their time and investement will stop buying from you because it just doesn't make sense to spend more for the same item you can get for less somewhere else (unless you continue to be lazy).......
Aside from all of this, theres still the factor that a lot of crafters don't even care what their competitors are selling for....because it's a game and they just put whatever price they feel they can get for their items....and most likely the rich players will buy them because they know they have a gazillion credits and spending 50 million for a krayt enhance scatter is chump change to them.....they don't care until they are not a gazillionaire anymore, that's when they come out the woodwork and complain on the forums about prices.
For the honest players that are true to their professions as crafters and genuinely want to run a good respectable business, they care about competitors prices and the prices they are willing to pay combat professions for rare loot or miners for their resources.They pride themselves on creating a good customer relationship and that creates loyal customers. Honestly, those that don't craft have no idea that being a crafter is much much harder than being a combat profession and thus they don't understand how asking high prices for their loot or resources affect the economy and the goods that they buy.
So what you wrote is a great idea and I'd like to see something like this in the game, it surely will get used...but again, it won't change the economy because it takes everyone think the same way about their business for it to truely be beneficial to the whole server, otherwise you'll just have high end crafters selling to millionaire's and every other crafter will sell to the poor......but yet the poor and middle class (if they exist) want to be able to compete with the millionairs....they simply can't and so prices on everything goes up just so they can hopefully get to where the millionaire is at.
i
LOL. Its a clear sign that I troll these forums way too much.
Master_Mavric wrote:
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BTW pawlin I droped arch and took several months off the boards here. How, on my second day back, do i still end up posting on the same thread as you?...
but you also got to take into effect if you have it where on a weapon you give up damage for speed people would do the math and get the best damage-speed ratio where it acually has the max damage.
Only way to avoid this is to have it random.
Message Edited by Master_Mavric on 01-20-2005 12:38 PM
Pawlin wrote:Ok, the original poster said they are from Starsider.So out of curiosity I checked out the STarsider trade forum. And I find on the first 2 pages people advertising:These prices look fairly typical and normal to me.
Being from Starsider, and having done some personal weapon and doc crafting for myself, I can say I have never run into a resource that would be at 500 cpu. The closest thing we had to that in the past 6 months was two docs offfering 250cpu for Rori Avian, which isn't entirely rediculous considering how long it takes to harvest Rori Avian.
That said, most of the crafters that offer hunting contracts know better than to raise the price. On Starisder, raising your price will not get you any more of the resource than anyone else, because others will match it. Most of us have learned that it is best to just agree on a price and don't change it, because higher resource costs are just screwing us over.
An exmaple: Me and one other doc crafter were interested in a recent spawn of Dath Avian meat. There was an unsaid respect and agreement between us, so neither of us raised the price (nor did anyone else for that matter). We both ended up with well over 100k of the meat each in the short time it was in spawn. That is about 10 mil. Had we been raising prices, it could have gotten somewhere near 20 mil for the same stack of meat. Now why would we like to do that to ourselves? If we can keep costs low, we can keep prices low.
34234235 wrote:
Who the heck determines the cost of uber resources? I have seen them as high as 500 cpu on Starsider..thats robbery in my opinion. Its no wonder prices are high and the economy over-inflated. I am weaponsmith and someone asked why a DE-10 cost so much.. I responded with the schem aare around 150k-250k, the barrels 500-600k and them throw in power-handlers that may be enhanced with Krayt tissue at 60k a piece or more x2. After all that addd in uber resources and HQ Bespin and Polly cake and viola you have one expensive weapon!
I hate the supply and demand theory..we as craftsman should simply say to those combat types who get the schems and barrels lower your prices or we simply refuse to craft them. But I guesss if you have enough credits thrown at you to make it people will break down and the economy will always have high prices.
ah well...
Heh on Starsider as well. Not incredibly rich. I think though we're already seeing a tightening of the economy, even in resources, now that solo groups are gone.
I can understand Avian meat depending on Spawn, going up to 75 cpu. Harvesting that or getting missions for that is an absolute chore. (I blame the devs on that one. If you have a named resource that MUST be harvested at least make it a viable harvest or the ability for everyone to get missions for that meat type an option!)
Ok that rant done and sorry for the segwey... 
As for other types? No clue I can't bring myself to charge more than 10 CPU for something on my resource vendor. Alas the joys of plater driven economy I suppose. It gets hot and fast.