Bio Engineer Archive
Thread: The problem with Meat
Well, if you pay 100 cpu for meat, you are the sucker. Holo grinding has slowed stuff down, but come on. Pick up scout yourself, and go hunting and harvesting. If you don't want to do that, then be willing to pay what the hunters ask for, or find friends to get it for you.
You are paying them for their time. I can go spend 2 hours hunting avian meat, and get about 4k with two other people. That translates to ruffly 400K in credits. But that is from Doc's who charge a lot more than what they use for buffs.
The economy works that way. If you need high quality meat and don't go yourself... then think of it like this... someone else needs to make a living too... their giving you an in demand resource that they spent playing time to get... and skill points... Why should they be shortchanged, they have to pay for the end product somehow. And to be honest, if you end upbeing asked to pay too much, explain your prices will go up, they may drop theirs.
I'd very much like to see a resource reduction in Chef tissues, and even Tailor tissues. There's no way in heck we're going to be able to keep up with demand once this next publish hits, even if we drop everything we do and resource hunt all the time.
Petition, anyone?
I have to agree with Arthur that even the concept of 60cpu is ridiculous. I hunt my own a lot (asa MCH grabbing 10-20k of meat is no problem) or, if I'm in a hurry, do a quick bazaar run and resource vendor trip around one or two nearby planets. I have never, ever paid more than 10cpu, rarely pay more than 6cpu, usually pay 3cpu or less.
The issue isn't with the schematic meat requirements, its with ridiculous resource prices on your server. At that rate these guys are making 15k+ for a single high level mob kill (YMPs are easy to kill and yield huge amounts of resource, for example).
Message Edited by Sooty on 02-04-2004 04:07 AM
One thing that I did was spam that I wanted to buy any quality of meat at a large quantity and the more the quantity of meat the more CPU I would pay. So if someone had 10k 200 quality meat and 3k HQ meat I told them I would buy all their meatat higher CPU for the LQ stuff and lower CPU for the HQ stuff...the main part was moving the meat for them. When I was done I ended up paying 100k for 15k HQ (900+) meat and 25k M/LQ meat (anything less then 900). My success rate for above mentioned strategy was only like once a week or less but when the opportunity came around it was well worth it...getting large quantities ofHQ meat at 5cpu is well worth all then money spent.
I found getting meat nearly impossible.
I managed to keep afloat by buying anything under 3cpu (in stacks of 45+, that's how desperate I was) on the bazaar, but that was few and far between.
I gave in and took up a combat profession, Teras Kasi. So while I'm hunting Quenkers on Dantooine for xp/credits, I manage to get decent amounts of meat at the same time (50 or so per quenker)
Without a combat profession, it's nigh impossible to get meat without paying outrageously high prices.
PA hunts are also a good source. I've also traded other resources for the creature resources, usually at 1:1 or 2:1.
It's a long hard road, paved with meat, and the souls of failed BE's.
My guild is so incredibly helpful to all the crafters, from Architects to Droid Engineers, from Combat Medics to Chefs, and yes, even Bio Engineers. 
All it takes is for one of the crafters to find out what meat is good, email the guild, then the hunters are out harvesting for all the crafters that use the meat. I currently have three guildies that are always helping me, and they put whatever stacks of meat or even EGGS on one of my vendors for 1 credit.
If you have good people in your PA, then it will be your main source for meat. Just send an email asking for meat, and since lots of people are already doing missions, they would be happy to just harvest meat for you.
Meat resources were much easier to come by before the stupid hologrinding began. Over the past two months I can't even reliably find hunters in my guild any longer, as they've been dropping theirgrauls, lightning cannons and vibroknuckles in favor of slitherhorns, carbosyrup and pleated skirts. My pet stim vendor has been empty for almost three weeks because the last three cycles of wild wheat on my server has sucked, and I haven't been able to acquire sufficient quantities of Dath insect meat on my own. I'm pretty close to giving up on the crafting aspects of BE, due to the difficulty in acquiring creature resources.
I agree that buying meat for 60+cpu is crazy, I dont do it, but other than through friends/PA getting meat is very difficult, I am lucky I belong to a large PA and do get alot of meat/organics for next to nothing, but that is still nowhere near the demand that I have. I go through about 30,000 - 40,000 of animal harvested resources (well I used to before I dropped Ranger with my alt)a week, divided across five different types or meat. I am not going to ask my PA to make it there full time job to harvest meat...and that is basically what would be required.
I am still waiting to hear a good reason why meat harvesters would be game breaking, assuming they are given the right restrictions, i.e. only usable by Rangers, etc.
First on meat harvesters. I hate the idea, honestly. We have those in the US, they are called cattle farms. The raise cows and slaughter them. For an effective, realistic, even in Star Wars since, type of meat harvesting facility, it wouldn't produce vary much very fast. Collecting meat takes an actual hunt and I like it that way.
Second, meat isn't hard to get. We, myself, and 3 others, went to Endor for about 3 hours last night and came back with over 40K Wooly and about 50k Insect Meat. All of which is to be "GIVEN" to our guild mates. We get stuff in return down the road, and we had fun killing stuff. I got some good DNA while we were out, and we just had a blast wandering the planet.
Our PA isn't huge, at least not huge in as much as active members, but we are very close. Meat will likely not drop in price for quality stuff, but of course outside of Avian I don't charge much for anything, maybe 10-15cpu for high quality stuff...
GunShy wrote:
I am still waiting to hear a good reason why meat harvesters would be game breaking, assuming they are given the right restrictions, i.e. only usable by Rangers, etc.
You've heard one, you are just choosing not to acknowledge it. Anything that reduces the number of hunters and turns rangers into ranchers is going to hurt BE's badly because nearly 100% of our sales are in some way tied to people going out there and hunting. Also, increasing the supply of tissues by a substantial amount will cause the market to be flooded with them eroding our profit margin. The demand for BE tissues (the clothing ones) is finite and shrinking. Not a good time to be putting tens of thousands more on the market.
What I've yet to hear from you GunShy is why you believe having meat harvesters is superior to increasing the yields of rangers hunts and a reduction in the materials needed for chef tissues.
Either get in a PA or open a new account and make him and combat type. Also set up another computer so you can play the your two accounts at the same time. This will increase the harvest. But will play with your sanity.
Does anyone think they removing the AT-ST from PvE contributed to this meat harvesting problem? Because my Master Commando with 2 AT-ST's could leave a path of destruction like you wouldn't believe. Meat came very easy. Now my level 31AR1 10K Blurrg does agood job buthe takes a beating.I wasteso much time healing him. Just a thought. I really miss those guys.
Thanks