Artisan Archive

I use a spreadsheet too... But the method of my madness is slightly different.

There is no such thingas price fixing, except in Altus, OK, and nomatter how much the artisan trades talkaboutthe average price ofevery possibleitem, therewill never be a fixed price in SWG. Here's why:

In deciding theprice you set for your sales, there are several things you need to take into account.In producing an item it takes a crafter's/surveyor's time, money, energy, and often other resources that themerchant doesn't produce on his own, therefore more time, money and energy in finding those materials-- these are the same costs thatapply inRL.As a rule, the player that uses harvestors to gather resourcessets the*planet standardvalues* for all resources because hehas realistic value where the majority of players who walkthe planet for good veins of the resource and gather by hand cannot see the statistics of his operation. (notice that the majority of those players that put small containers of resource on the market for exhorbinate prices are the players that spent five RL hours walking a vein and gathering resources by hand, therefore they believe their resource has some intrinsic "I spent all day..." value.-- the fact of the matter is they are not taking into account the major producers' set value on their planet.)

The set *planet standard value* (psv) is the baseline foreach equation in determining your own setprice. To determine the PSV, you take allthe Instant Sale listings for a particular resource (you have to do this for each resource in a crafted item too!!!), find theunitnumber with the most hits (i.e. for one resource there could be more 500 units listedwhere in another resource there are more 200 units listed, and you must take the time to find the unit number that is listed most often).Total the costs for each listing, and divide by the number of listings, then devide that by the number of units, and you have per unit Planet Standard Value. PSV isan average. Example.

Listing for Ore

500 u for 4000, 300 u for 500, 180 u for 500, 500 u for 2500, 500 u for 3000, 100 u for 1000.

In this listing the most often listed is 500 units-- there are three of them for 4000, 2500, and 3000 respectively. So we add the prices and come up with a total of 9500. Divide by the number of listings (3), and you get a total of 3166. Divide this by the number of units (500), and you get a PSV of roughly 6.3 per unit. The PSV is your baseline.

If you charged the PSV, you would probably not sell very much ore, and you would run the risk of going under pretty fast because you haven't taken into account your time, money and energy, which for every player is verydifferent! PSV is JUST the baseline!

Now, look at your mineral harvestor (if you have one) over a period of time. How much money does it take to run your harvestor for a 24 hour period? In that 24 hour period, how many units of ore are you getting? Do the math. If you can't figure this out, do it the hard way, dump your hopper, let your maintenance pool run out put the credits in to fix the damage, and then put in ten credits and keep track of how many credits you putin until you get 24 hours of use, look at the clock to see what time it is, and come back at exactly the same time the next day (voila, you now know how many credits it takes to get 24 hours of use and if you dump your hopper, you will see how many unitsyou get in a 24 hour period).For everyone, these numbers are going to be different!

Let's use an example: to get 24 hours of use, I have to pay in 1000 credits to my maintenance pool. In that 24 hours, I get 3640 units of ore.

BUT WAIT! Now you have to determine how many units of ENERGY the harvestor requires to run in a 24 hour period!! NO, don't run through the process again, just make sure you are zeroed out on mantenance pool AND energy before you restart your harvestor! So now our example reads:

24 h use = 1000 C maintenance, and 600 energy to get 3640 units of ore.

AND guess what, Now you have to run over to your Energy harvestor and do the same experiment to determine how many units of energy you get at what cost... same experiment without having to put energy in.

The energy example is: 3000 c to get5000 u of Energy in a 24 hour period.

Now you determine how much it costs you to produce a unit of energy. 3000 divided by 5000, which equals .6 credits/ unit of energy. (yes point 6 or 60 cents)

Now you can do the math for your mineral extractor. Multiply the cost / unit Energy by the number of units of energy it took to produce in that 24 hr period (.6 * 600 = 360 credits).Add credits in energy (360) to the number ofreal creditstheharvestor used (1000), and you have total cost or production in a 24 hour period. 1360 credits. Divide thecredits by the amount produced (1360 by 3640 =.37 per unit REAL COST-- round up to .38 to account for all those little numbers behind the point when you do your division because there will be...).

For the example it costs .38 (point 38 or 38 cents) to produce each unit of ore.NOWin order to recoup your costs, you know that you have to charge at least38 cents (Cents NOT credits)perunit. Remember that the average rate (psv) for ore in the example was6.3 credits per unit... there is a VAST difference between 6.3 credits and .38 credits. If you were to sell your ore at cost, just so you couldkeep your operation running, it would be 3640 (theunits you have) multiplied by.38 (what it takes to operate-- your overhead), which is 1383 Credits (notice, the number is REALLY REALLY close to the amount of credits it cost you to run your little operation for the 24 hours... huh. imagine that!). If you were to sell at average (6.3), it would be 3640 (units you have) multiplied by6.3(the PSV), which is 22932 credits. HUGE HUGE HUGE difference.

Now lets look at the difference between cost and PSV if you were to sell only 500 units of the ore you extracted. At cost it would be 500 (what you are selling) multiplied by .38 (cost), which is 190 compared to PSV which is 500 multiplied by 6.3, or 3150. Yep. Still an ENORMOUS difference. Obviously, you can't undercut the rest of the artisan community and operate at cost (that would be stupid because you might be lynched by the other artisansand you wouldn't be able to afford to live). However, if you see, by the numbers, howmuch the artisan communityis ripping off the rest of the planet... ouch.

Now obviously, everyone's numbers are going to be hugely different.The amount of money you put in, compared to what you get out dependsentirely on the percentage of resource you set your harvestors on. A good artisan can afford to charge 2 credits per unit and still operate their franchise and live a very comfortable life.(not to brag, but I can afford to visit every planet in the galaxyten times a week and still operate my franchise... that's because Itook the time to do myjob properly in the first place.) Takea surveyor out to some of these areas where you see twenty harvestors, and you might be surprised to find that they are sitting on squat forresource percentage. They are charging you 5 c per unit at the bazaar because they HAVE to to live.

Those of you who insist on Artisans Guild price fixing are not taking into consideration that everyone's situation is different. I undercut you"so drastically" because I can afford to, because I did myjob right, and continue to do so, but I don't undercut you near asmuch as I could and still live the lifestyle Ilead.If I charged the 4 and 5 (and 10 for those "hard to find" items!!) credits per unit youcharge, I would be a millionaire, but I don't need to be because I realize that I'm going to sell first-- to you and your group of horders or to thepeople of other professions that can't make the money we do because they don'tdetermine the state of the market-- and I will still be sitting pretty while you are still complaining. I know I'll sell first and fast because I have quality and quantity to back up my prices that are "just wrong". I know Iwill sell first and fast because you ensure that if my items are on market for more than15 minutes, you aregoing to be buying it up and marking it up to try and turn a decent profit while you complain.You flood the market with "your" overpriced items, but the fact of the matter is, people still look for the cheaper listings... even you. I make exhorbinate amounts of money with my cheap prices, and you can't no matter how much you mark it up, because you may sell (when people like me just happen to not have anything on the market at the moment) but your overhead is ridiculous because you didn't do it right the first time.

To those of you still trying to figure out how to price your items, look at your cost compared to PSV (read guild rates), and if you aren't producing enough to charge less than 2c per unit (do the math for your items based on your price per on your resource containers) and double or tripleyour money, then you need to find a new spot to harvest, but don't ever charge less than 2 because you'll be yelled at by the people who can't.

Well, I am glad you guys can charge such high prices. Unfortunately, I live on Naboo in the wanderhome galaxy and sell for 1/2 to 1/4 what everyone else in this post is mentioning. Todds forumalas are great except they don't take account for player competition. And resources, really, most ppl set up macros and sample while they sleep, not to mention harvesters which are bringing me 2k+ resources a day.

I keep hearing ppl selling powerups for 200+ credits, I have had some on the market for 6days now priced at 40cr and they didn't sell. I want my items to sell within 24 hours, thus they are priced to do that. The faster I get money, the faster I can make more items, and the faster I get more money

Honestly, what I feel hurts the market is the crafting grind. At 500exp a pop, you have to make 66 bone chest armor pieces to go from Eng IV to any of the novice elite professions. I know there are at least 5 crafters in my city that I see all the time, and I am sure there are more....for ease, lets say 10 that have made Eng 3 or higher. So you have 10 crafters trying to get to a master profession, if they could get the resources needed(which is unlikely) that would be 660 chest pieces made in my town in a 2 day period. (although they could do it in 1 day if they wanted)

Now, lets say there is an equal amount of every other class in the town. (10 pistols/10 rifle/10unarmed...etc...5 starter professions each with 3 focuses...so at least 140 more newbs per 10 engineers although as I said I am sure there are more. At least half of those 140 are NOT going to wear armor either because of the encumbrance or it just doesn't fit with their main class(entertainers)...so, at most you have 70 ppl for every 10 engineers...70 ppl aren't going to demand 660 chest pieces. At most, they will demand 140...but thats even doubtful.

This will even out at some point when there are more elite crafters making higher end items. BUt there will always be more crafters than the market can bear unless something is done with how the exp is handled. Right now, the UXP to me is negligable, when I estimate how long it will take me to get a level, it isn' even a factor.

The 3 things that would help on oversaturation of items would be higher exp per item, higher UXP per used item, and a greater variety of items. These all have their downsides though, higher exp per item means that they would have to raise the resource cost to craft items to keep the leveling speed at the same rate. Higher UXP means ppl will want to sell their items more for exp than money, thus selling under cost(although if the cost of things are raised...this won't be so wise). Having a greater variety is actually good, there should be more items of similar stats that just look differant.This won't decrease the amount of items of similar stats, however it will afford the customer to have a more customizable gear set instead of seeing 660 bone armor chest pieces running around, you will see 330 bone armor and 330 studded leather(same amount of hide, but replace bone with metal).

As for price, lowering the amount of items is the biggest way to control it. And adding an extra gear set provides more value to the items.

Billnlu and Zanthus-

Great posts! I am so glad people are really talking about the mathematics behind this. Billnlu, wow, you have quite a formula there, but it is very solid. Probably what I would have done had I had a harvester. I had heard about these really low unit costs while running harvesters, but I had no idea how low they were. Now granted you may have to move your harvester every resource shift, but still, like you say, to charge at least 2cr/unit (I think you said that) more than funds anything you need to do. Then there are the spawning red guys that I keep hearing about when you go out to empty your hopper, how annoying.

And Zanthus, thanks for the critique on the formulas. Now, my formulas are easily scalable depending on what kind of monies you want to figure out. I based mine on (overall quality of material)/1000 because I really had nothing else to base it on. It would be easy to change my multiplier to come more in line with the numbers we are talking about.

If I change my multiplier to cut the prices, very simply I can now show the same exampes I have been doing all along: my average price of ore dropped to 2.69 credits/unit (for about 15 different kind of ore) from 6.79 credits/unit. Wow, big difference! So, my figures are easily scalable, since I figured this would happen. Hehe. The ore that I have found, plugging it into this new multiplier, gives me ore that is 3.45 credits/unit.

Anyway, this is a great discussion everyone!

Badina-

I think this thread has turned into more than just price control, and more into how prices should be determined. No one is talking about really "controlling" a price. To do that, you would have to be the only one or in a consortium of like individuals that has a single resource that people want. The way the SWG universe is created that would be near impossible.