Bio Engineer Archive
Thread: A non BE thinking about becoming a BE because of CU
Kivrin wrote:
GrandMoffMoosemillion wrote:So, is BE the new mega-money maker? Will dedicated wholesaler BE's command their servers with an iron grip?
I don't think so. Personally I think there is going to be too large of a target audience and BE's will either focus on creatures, meds, or tissues with a little bit of crossover.
One of the reasons tissues aren't that prominent and BE isn't that lucrative is the amount and type of resources required for the additives. As you're probably aware Bullmoose, 20k of HQ Meat and 70-90k of HQ flora on Ahazi doesn't come cheap, especially when you're competing for the same meat that our successful chefs are. 50+ cpu for meat is past the breakeven point for selling additives for me.
That's not a dig at the chefs or prices or anything. I'm just saying that aspect's not going to change. And with an influx of BE's I don't picture it getting cheaper. People will just use it to complement their other profession (Doctor or Chef, etc.), guild, or pick an area and focus on it.
I do feel people coming in from the medical crafting business will do pretty well for a while. With a mass of resources and an army of guildmates collecting meat you potentially could become an iron-gripped BE, though in its current incarnation it'll be a tough position to maintain.Message Edited by Kivrin on 04-07-2005 10:18 AM
Im not so sure they will do well as Tissue selling BEs. A lot of the Doc stuff is expensive, specialised resources like Avian Meat. Personally I wouldn't be using 300cpu Avian meat in a run of BSNs
The stacks they have now will be good for the med stuff, but the whole tissues game is the exact opposite of what they do at the moment. Doc buffpacks are buy for high, sell for higher...Tissues are buy for as cheap as you can, and still get a small margin. I don't think a lot of Docs will bother...Where it does matter, is that docs might start selling Schematics for tissues.To comment on another poster who said above somehting like 'schematic selling goes both ways'...yes we can sell Doc schems to people, however it isn't likely to be very plausible as we would be selling to end users who don't have stacks of resources. Where Chefs benefit from getting Schematics is that they already have Meat/Flora/Factories and the knowledge of what constitutes good resources. They are balancing our skill points against their stack of resources.
It's ironic that a lot of chefs ask for schematics so they can ensure a constant supply of tissues, but the very reason we can't ensure a constant supply is because we don't earn enough money to stockpile when bidding against a Chef/Doc.
AnomallyX wrote:
For many of us I'm sure, our money is coming from tissue sales, and maybe the occasional pet. I know personally I don't care too much for the idea of making meds. If something were to happen to our tissues (taken out, or made obsolete/worthless) then I would at least consider making some of the meds, but I'm the type of person who doesnt like looking for good resources, I think the word I'm looking for is....Lazy.... yeah, that's it...and Cheap too!
The CURB will be an eye opener for many people. I can realistically see how long-time career BE's are driven out of the professionby the influx of "money making" dabblers. Career BE's don't have a lot of liquid assets. Here is a generalized breakdown.
Chef tissues
- Chefs have a gob of money. They are also, typically, sitting on a lot of resources.
- BE pre-reqs after the CURB will only be medic. The scout requirement goes away. This frees up more skill points for chef/BE dabblers. The option to dabble in BE just became that much more attractive for a chef.
Medical supplies
- Doctors, like chefs, have a gob of money. The are also, typically, sitting on a mountain of high end resources
- Doctors get to respec their skill points on the day of the CURB. They INSTANTLY become 0004 BE/doctors. No grinding, no nothing. No need to ever purchase a medical supply from a career BE.
- Doctors bring their skill mods with them. Boom! A Doctor/BE outcrafts a master BE right from the word go.
Pet meds and tailor tissues
- A doctor, with the inclination, can take 0404 BE and outcraft a master BE because of the skill mods.
- A chef, with enough money, can buy a medical skill mod and outcraft a master BE.
- A doctor/chef with a skill mod can max out the effectiveness of a pet med and add more charges because of the additional 2 experiment points. Their pet meds become better than a master BE's
I can see a dabbling chef going to a master BE every once in a while and saying, "Here little schematic monkey. Make me a full run INN schematic and I'll throw you a bone."
Without a medical skill mod, the only thing left for the career BE's are pets. No skill mod will ever make up for the pet crafting knowledge the career BE has. That's pretty much it. I've painted a bleak picture here butI believe it is a realistic picture all the same. I hate skill mods. They create a have and have not society. Even more so, the skill mods drive people like me from the game entirely.
ArthurDentOnBria wrote:Lloyd,
The main problem with your calculations is that you are not calculating typical profit margin. What you are calculating is profit margin above value of materials (and I have a little quibble with pricing any flora at 15cpu, but I digress...), and there is a big difference. For most people, it is perfectly reasonable to expect that they will harvest all their own flora (thereby reducing their actual cost to like .5cpu for the flora) but for meat they buy. Therefore their actual profit margin is much much much much higher then your figures indicate. Substitute 15cpu with .5cpu and you'll get a much more accurate figure in terms of actual credits earned.
I disagree...I was TRYING to use the maximum possible value of the resources...and heres a little quote from my post:
"for resource prices I used server prices of 15cpu MAX for a VHQ flora, 40CPU for a VHQ Carn meat and 5cpu for non-quality dependant, and 10cpu for water...which I believe is more than fair. (If you are using harvesters for your flora, the price works out at less than 1cpu so your profit margins sky rocket.)"
The flora/meat gathering isn't specific to Chef...thats being a Miner or a Ranger/Scout. I was looking for the absolute minimum profit margins I could find to prove that 100% profit is the absolute lowest a Chef could make...in fact from my calcs, its nearer a 200% profit min
Compare that to BSN at the same prices, and I make 50k off an entire 1000 item run instead of ...In other words with the lowest profit on the ahrissa...which was 113k a crate(4.52mill per run profit MINIMUM)...chefs earn a MINIMUM twice as much money as me on a crate of food, than I do on 40 crates of BSN...thats 80x my profit...Do they do 80x the work?
I would suggest for someone looking to make a ton of money with BE...dont bother...all the profit is in cutting corners with harvesting flora and meat...the value of the nutrients is about the same as the server prices of meat/flora.
Hehe, actually, you know why my number is low? Because I *do* fish while I get mollusk (plus chat with friends). That's why I'm an inefficient mollusk harvester-guy
Oh man, that reminds me, I owe an aquarium-building guildie a backpack full of fish skins. Doh!
Dorelli wrote:
No you see here's where you're wrong Arthur. It is a little known fact that you can actually FISH at the same time as harvesting mollusks (stopping every so often of course to stack those shellfish babies since they don't auto-stack becuase if they did we might have AFK harvesting). YES, you can FISH - thereBY almost .... let's see - one fish every say 10 minutes ... is that optimistic???? so not DOUBLING but yes ... you can harvest MORE than just shellfish - an optimal use of time of course mwahahaha.
And actually to beserious, I'm harvesting shellfish right now as there is a fantastic spawn on bloodfin at the moment - I can get about 10 units at least every 10 seconds for a total of 1800 per hour of each type so I'd not say it was as bad as 500
But that unstackability makes it pretty boring and you cannot count on a good spawn of it - that's for sure. Other than that, I agree with everything you say and ever HAVE said 100% .... yes ...whatever it was ...
-- Dorelli
Message Edited by ArthurDentOnBria on 04-07-2005 03:37 PM
GrandMoffMoosemillion wrote:
I have seen 87s go for 40-90k a crate. Thats a big difference. And if you have a shellfish harvester a BE can collect a bit of resources with minimal investment.
Message Edited by ArthurDentOnBria on 04-07-2005 12:12 PM
ArthurDentOnBria wrote:
You realize of course what a "shellfish harvester" is right? It's a tool you use by crawling into a stream and sample shellfish "by hand" with. You can collect maybe 500 units of mollusk per hour. Even if you turned around and sold that mollusk at 100cpu you are still only earning 50k/hr, and I could make double that running novice artisan missions.
No you see here's where you're wrong Arthur. It is a little known fact that you can actually FISH at the same time as harvesting mollusks (stopping every so often of course to stack those shellfish babies since they don't auto-stack becuase if they did we might have AFK harvesting). YES, you can FISH - thereBY almost .... let's see - one fish every say 10 minutes ... is that optimistic???? so not DOUBLING but yes ... you can harvest MORE than just shellfish - an optimal use of time of course mwahahaha.
And actually to beserious, I'm harvesting shellfish right now as there is a fantastic spawn on bloodfin at the moment - I can get about 10 units at least every 10 seconds for a total of 1800 per hour of each type so I'd not say it was as bad as 500 But that unstackability makes it pretty boring and you cannot count on a good spawn of it - that's for sure. Other than that, I agree with everything you say and ever HAVE said 100% .... yes ...whatever it was ...
-- Dorelli
Or tie fish and mollusk harvesting to the Harvest mod...
Imagine a stack of 100k fish.....