Artisan Archive
Thread: Quality Item Price Board
I appologize if this has been previously posted. I just couldn't find it. I have been expriementing with my goods and have done well to find the best materials for various items. I am only an Engineering III, but have been getting very successful results.I have checked the Bazaar for items such as scopes, barrels andmuzzles. I saw scopes going for under 100 credits. I was disappointed because I thought the results that I was getting should have been worth much more. So I set mine between 125 and 200 credits each. Someone in my group bought one of mine (which he didn't have to do) and told me mine were the best power ups that he had seenin the Bazaar. I asked him if the prices were adequate and he told me that he thought they were way under market for what I had produced. He said that he saw some going for 500 cr that weren't close to what I had created. I certainly didn't see those when I had checked. So, I don't want gamers to think that I am dumping products on the market and I certainly DO want to get what my products are worth. The problem is that at times I can't tell just by looking at the Bazaar, what are valid prices for goods. Are there any price guideline boards anywhere that could help me to decide what is a good price for my quality goods?
To be honest, there is no set values for quality items in the bazaars. Shoot, I sell powerups with a 76% effectiveness increase at 50 credits, and don't sell them nearly as often as I'd expected. On the flip side, I saw that someone posted a CDEF Rifle that has a damage factor of 22-55 (which I can make) for 2000 credits. Would you buy that rifle?
Charge what you think you wouldbe willing to pay for that item. That's the best way a businessman can factor in how much to charge for his/her goods.
My only way of figuring out prices was trial and error. At first I priced my powerups too low, and they sold in very quickly. Next time I placed them on the Bazaar I marked it up a bit. Rinse and repeat until they sold at a decent rate.
Problem with standardized pricing is that depending on where you are - prices will be different. Coronet is packed with artisans, so prices there are lower due to competition - you can charge more for some items depending on where you are.
That is very true, but EQ there were sites that had weapons, armor, etc. pricing boards that were based on the servers. You just checked your server for the going rates on things. People just reported what they had recently sold items for and the board kept adjusting to any new data that was submitted to it. As I said they would be guidelines, not hard prices.
Not that I know of but we can start our own. Ever heard of the "Big Mac Index" ? It tries to measure the value of currency by what a big mac hamburger costs in a country. We could start the same with a scope.
It requires 10 units of resources to make. I calculated a price for my scopes as follow:
Price = No.Resources * Resource cost + quality modifier + bazaar cost.
Depending on the quality modifier I sell them from 110-200 credits.(It may wellincreaseabove 200, I'm still at Eng III).Now If we can decide on a fixed formula for our quality modifier we can make that a standard.
Example : A scope with +16.84 Mind cost will score 2.5 on the quality modifier.
I think this will pull prices closer together since people could only compete on resource cost.I have started to sell scopes using this formula and it seems to work ok.
Ok, I don't have all the detail on me since i'm at work now. But how does this sound :
We each do 10 scopes using the same material. (All scopes must be experimented.) We then write down the stats of each scope. Even keep the ones that had critical failures during experimentation. We then post the stats of the 10 scopes we made here. Let's do that for a start.
Ok, I believe I have been using Carbeosnefi and Miavveam to make scopes. I will make 10 of those and report back here.
Another thing that I notices had to do with how things get "lost" in the shuffle of the bazaar interface. I was making carbines of a particular quality and found a reasonable price for them to move in my city. All of a sudden three on the bazaar failed to sell, so I stopped making them and moved to something else. A second day went by and they didn't sell. I got to thinking about how bad it is to find things on the bazaar. I withdrew them and put them back "in the system" at the exact same price. All three sold within the hour.
Kinda stinks because I had to pay for them to be posted AGAIN and lost 20 credits in the deal. But, watch out for this. Seems like your stuff can get caught in the "black hole" of the bazaar, never to be seen by anyone shopping for it.
For devs that are reading this, this should be a top priority. When someone looks for something in their region, and sorts on alpha EVERYTHING SHOULD SHOW. They should have to go page after page to add things to the same part of the alphabet.
Also make sure you look at your markets, Kor Vella is the worst market in my opinion and my best market is *edited*. Just work at it until you find your niche.
Sadly, for the lower level items (items that do sell for under 100 credits normally) you have little choice but to "go with the flow of traffic" and set the price to the highest or maybe if you're lucky slightly over the highest price if you want it to sell. For higher level Artisan items, like bone armor, I've found that if I jack up the resistance high enough (in many cases, doubling it through experimentation) you can charge FAR over the standard amount. I also put something in the seller's comment box when posting such a sale to draw the eye.
For other items like clothing (I am looking to go Tailor) I've done some testing with prices and have been very surprised. I looked over the tailor boards and saw that they can sell suits for several K. I found that even the lower level items (like casual pants) that I could make at first sold for 300 credits or more. So this is one of the few situations that I've seen where the lower level items actually sell for decent prices.
The bottom line is that if people want something badly enough they'll buy it for whatever price. Especially now that some are already walking around with astronomical bank accounts, getting what they need/want really has no price tag on it - they'll get it no matter the price.
Hope that helps!