Bio Engineer Archive

Quoth Spazzers,

> Schematics shouldn't be tradable but that's an old topic.

Given the choice of either buying 1.2m credits' worth of resources, loading them into my factory, sitting around waiting for the factory to finish, emptying my inventory so I can pick up the finished goods, taking them to a chef and selling them for 1.6m credits or selling a schematic for 400k credits, I know what I'd rather do.

Ah but some people are giving schematics away for free! Tell you what, I can give 40 crates of BSNs away for free if you want. Maybe we should ban all trade.

Message Edited by Spazzers on 09-16-2004 03:28 PM

> Selling schematics takes business away from those that
> actually put in the time and effort to make them.

Selling completed products also takes business away from people who put in time and effort to sell products at a higher price. Everyone takes business away from someone. So what? That's how the market works. If your goal is to make money then you need to sell things, not let someone else do it.

As for the person who makes the full run, nothing stops him going to the chef and saying "Don't buy a schematic. I could give you these crates right now so you don't have to wait for your factory to make them." The smart chef will gladly accept. And that's taking business away from me. But again so what? It's market forces.

I'm not advocating giving schematics away. That's just shooting yourself in the foot. But you can do it if you want. A Master BE should be free to sell his services at any price he likes. What's wrong with selling a schematic for the difference between raw material cost and finished article cost?

> Crafting tissues is one of the things a bio-engineer makes. If you don't
> want to craft the tissues and run them off in a factory then make animals instead.

I do make animals. They are much more interesting. I find tissue crafting to be tedious. However I grinded up a whole tree of schematics I didn't want and if someone wants to pay me to use the knowledge I gained then why shouldn't I accept? Believe me I'd rather have the 14 skill points back and delete all tissue schematics from my datapad. Since I can't do that without surrendering the Master box and losing the associated advantages, I might as well profit from them if someone asks me to.

I am no better than you and you are no better than me. We are both Masters. We both have the same skills. What we have different is a way to market our products. You want to be the salesman who sells finished articles. I want to be the consultant who charges for his expertise. We both make similar sums of money from our sales so let the market decide who to deal with. The chef wants 40 crates right now? He goes to you. The chef wants to leverage his buying power to get all the resources required and cut out the middleman? He comes to me. They're just two different business models. Only I'm not pushing to get your way of working removed from the game.

By the way it isn't me you need to worry about. I sell maybe one schematic every two months. I don't market them aggressively because as you hinted, I'm better off with pets. A "pure" tissue-crafting BE makes much more than I do from the tissues line. A chef asks me "do you make additives" and I say "no but I'll do you a schematic for 400k." If he declines I refer him to Acrod.

Let me state it again: I DO NOT advocate giving schematics away for free. Never mind the fact that it's debasing, as a capitalist I'm alarmed at the lost profit opportunity. The only reason I posted is because I don't like to see people trying to get game mechanics nerfed or removed because they don't happen to play that way.

> > Maybe we should ban all trade.
>
> This is just argumentative and doesn't deserve a comment.

I tried to put as much thought into that comment as you did into "Schematics shouldn't be tradable."

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ArthurDentOnBria wrote:

I agree wholeheartedly with Spazzers. They went to great lengths to make a system where each person is limited in the scope of things they can do by skill points. And they went to great lengths to try to inter-weave the dependency between different classes. Then they create the ability to circumvent all that by trading schematics. It seems like a horrible oversight to me, and I've yet to hear any justification for this ability. And there is of course nothing like this on the combat side. A master carbineer cannot trade me a special carbine that I can use to go wail on a lair of gaping spiders and get the dath insect meat that I need as if I had all his abilities. So why in the "f" is there schematic trading?

I guess it goes back to... give a fish a gun, and he's going to shoot himself in the fin.

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I think the problem isn't just that schematics are tradeable...its that all the BE items that are subcomponents for other professions are relatively easy to make (not from a resource standpoint...but from the fact that they only have 1 line to experiment on). if the tissues were as tricky to experiment as...oh lets say ABPH's (advanced blaster power handlers...weaponsmith subcomponent for their weapons)...the BE's willing to sell schematics probably wouldn't be able to provide the same quality as the ones that put in the time to test out different combiations of resources/exp point allocations...

not saying that being able to trade schematics should be allowed...but just that even if they weren't allowed, people may simply pay extra for the person to run over to the factory and put in the schem too.

I sold schematics all the time.

Non guildies would get them for 200k+ or something I wanted that was the equivalent, guildies would get them for 100-150k or something I wanted that was worth that much.

And that, of course, was me being nice. But I pretty much never sold a schematic to someone who wasn't a friend, so you can give me a break for being nice I'm sure.

The thing these people who sell schematics for 25k don't realize is how much that schematic is worth. How many grind hours and how much money and how much hunting did you do to get the ability to make that schematic that is that good? I know for a fact that BE is one of the hardest and certainly the most expensive of all the crafting grinds, so is all that time worth only 25k? Come on, seriously, it isn't like a chef comes to buy a schematic from you every day. At least they didnt' for me, but I didn't advertise. I generally only had one customer at a given time too, who would usually buy 2-3 runs of various types every couple weeks or so. Kept me as busy as I wanted to be, and as wealthy as I wanted to be.

Right, went on a tangent there, hehe. But back to the schematics, what I generally did was charge half of what my profit would have been to produce and then sell that many items, since they were saving me the trouble of going through all that work myself. Generally that was about 500k for a full run, so my schematic price for a full run would be 250k, but usually 200k since I am such a nice guy. If they were only planning on using a partial schematic, I would set the schematic for however many they expected to use it for, and I would charge half of what my normal profit would be for that many.

As for finding buyers for your stuff, it is not /that/ hard, provided you do good work. I personally would never sell an 85 BSN. The resources are too easy to get to allow your quality to drop that low. Most of my BSN's were about 87 or 88, occasionally I'd hit 89. But my price didn't change much, and both of the two chefs I had during that time, one who made arguably the best brandy on the server at the time, something like 430'ish (might have been slightly more, but it was a while ago so I gotta be general, heh) for 40 minutes at 49 fill; and the other who is very well known for his high quality foods, and both were very very happy getting anything that was 87 or higher for their additives. And of course 117+ for INN's, same deal. If your stuff is high quality, you don't have to do much advertising before people take notice. And if you set up a regular deal with the same chef it not only saves YOU a lot of headache, it saves THEM a lot of headache as well. And they appreciate that.

By the end of my BE career I was making roughly 1 million credits a week in profit off of one chef, and I never used a vendor for tissues.

My advice to anybody wanting to make money as a BE is to keep your eyes peeled for high quality, easy to get meat (like dath or dant carnivore) and buy/hunt as much of that as you possibly can. Flora you don't need to pay quite so much attention to, the best current spawn of flora food is generally good enough to make good quality tissues, just drop down a harvester or two and let it do it's thing. If a superior spawn shows up, obviously drop as many harvesters as you can, and hire others to collect it for you too. Then, find a chef, tell him what you can do and how much you charge, and offer to set up a continuous relationship. He simply tells you what he needs and you supply it. It shouldn't be hard to find a chef who will go for it.

And by the way, Chef's dig it when you deliver. I always delivered, since I figured the 1-2 million I was making on the deal was worth the extra 20 minutes to deliver it in person or drop it on his own vendor. And whatever you do, don't make demands of your chefs. Chefs are your CUSTOMERS, if you don't treat them well and aren't as accomodating as you can be they won't want to come back to you. Now, I'm not saying let some a-hole chef walk all over you, I'm just saying, figure out what limits you are willing to go to, and stick to them. Just don't tell your chef, or he may try to push those limits.

Basically, when it comes right down to it, you can get stuff to sell in one of two ways. High quality, low price, or high quality high service. I went the service rout, since it made everyone happy (chefs already have a ton of stuff to deal with to make their stuff, they don't really want to hunt down/make BE components) by cutting down everyone's work load. I didn't have to crank out run after run of BSN's and INN's and manage a vendor in order to turn a profit, and they only had to go as far as their own vendor to get the components they needed for their next run of foods. Everybody wins, and I actually do less work than I would have if I go above and beyond in service to the customer.

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furrycat wrote:
A chef asks me "do you make additives" and I say "no but I'll do you a schematic for 400k." If he declines I refer him to Acrod.

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Oh, and /agree with the rest of that furrycat.

Schematic trading bothers me no more than anything else. If people are suckers and allow chefs to talk them into undervaluing them, then it's just like some moron BE who thinks he "owes" it to chefs for some higher reason to only charge 35k per crate of high quality BSNs. You gotta deal, so get on with it.

Well, it's actually happening. He's now boasting (on Bria galaxy trade board) that he's made over 8M selling his BE schematics in only 2 days time, and he thinks it's hilarious how he's screwing over the BE's whodissed him by not giving him free schematics when he asked last week (before grinding out a BE-alt apparently).

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Spazzers wrote:

Selling schematics removes that competition or at best creates competition between schematic makers. In that light why would any BE make finished product? I can just sit outside a starport and spam schematics for sale. I could do that all day long and service every chef in my galaxy.No chef would ever have to purchase finished goods again.

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Message Edited by ArthurDentOnBria on 09-17-2004 09:40 AM