Artisan Archive

Well there are plenty of good supply-side economists here. But what you are ALL forgeting is that price should not be set soley by production costs. Demand plays an equally important role in setting proper price levels. If it were just supply (as it seems to be in this case) then whichever crafter has the most resources at the best price will sell items for a lower price than the rest of us. You know why? Because he has to sell more units total. That is price setting in supply-side economics, and that is what you are saying.

What you mean is that you want a more stable price that will be closer to the profitable price for more crafters. That guy with tons of cheap resources will become an outlier and he wont matter in the setting of the price. But you have got to factor in the Demand. And frankly demand sucks in SWG. This is due to many of the game mechanics, which simply dont require resale and replacement of items. Demand for resources is high because of hording and hologrinding. That is why resources are getting expensive. Demand for vehicles, on the other hand (sorry to bring vehicles back into the picture) is not. Most people will buy a vehicle and be done. A few repairs here and their. But that repair money goes into a sink. Poof, its gone. Conversely customization kits dont last long enough and arent worth the money. So demand for them is low. It works both ways. When the DEVs get something right finally we should see proper demand levels surface, and THEN we can start to talk about selling things at per unit costs.

Resourcers are competing against people that do missions. One guy doing missions can pull in about 100k an hour. A resourcer selling at 3cpu is making 100k a day.Resourcers are trying to keep up with the combatants money making. This is why resources are overpriced.

I can pull radioactive out of the ground at 0.08cpu, therefore the 2.4-2.7 or so that I sell it for is a pretty bloody big profit margin. I have to do that though if I want to keep up with the combatants and/or buy the resources that I can't collect myself because I'm too busy doing power.

Someone that converts their own produce into a finished product can easily sell for less than 3cpu... because it just doesn't cost 3cpu to make anything in the game,people just like to pretend it does. Sure if you buy your resources from someone else, or need to because you want it in bulk, then you pay more, and your products cost more.

I've said it before and I'll say it againSWG Economics is backyard economics. It caters to people that make individual items, not those that make huge production runs. There is no efficiency increase as you get bigger (economies of scale)...in fact your efficiency decreases because it becomes harder to acquire the raw resources in bulk to actually produce in scale.

Therefore the little guy with his small shop might not have the turnover that you do, but he's more efficient, can produce less items more cheaply, than the guy running 10 factories who needs to hire lots of buy resources from other people. Hence there are people that can produce items at 1cpu or so and make profit and break into the market without screwing themselves over.

Then there are the masters with their big factories that complain about being undercut because their production costs are higher than that little guy handcrafting everything.

Economies of scale in reverse.

Toran,

Thats very true, the incentive is for small scale crafting. Perhaps there is something the Devs can do to help economies of scale out here. I mean come on people, they may tell us its a free-market, player run economy, but if it comes down to nuts and bolts it IS a command economy, the Devs can step in at any time. What our job here is, is to figure out what they need to add/subtract/or adjust to achievethe proper economies of scale. Someone above discussed the need for a reworking of the merchant profession. Perhaps with a merchant revamp, which could allow merchant many more opportunities to control the market thru useful skill mods, would give the master crafters a market to sell their factory runs at prices more closely resembling their costs. Low end crafters who are simply hand crafting smaller or lower quality items would have the bazaar and the /shouts in front of the starports, while master crafters would need a merchant friend who can really move a large runs of high end items. This would help those crafters who feel they are currently being cheated because of undercutting. Think about it. We dont by cars and trucks from Chevrolet, we buy them from a Chevy Merchant (dealer in our universe) who buys them from the manufacturer. Merchants on a particular server would and should be more attuned to general price levels in their galaxy. This way price levels will begin to level at a point that reflects both supply and demand.