Bio Engineer Archive
Thread: Galixie Bazaar function all crafters should be aware
Kalano wrote:
Hahahaha. Ok, thanks for the laugh.
I must totally disagree on your final assumtion. You know where considered the crafters who love to craft. Also, the really good crafters will have a bit of a storm to weather, but soon all the low ballers like you said, will be out of resources and tired of 24/7 crafting.
You're right. those of us that love this profession will stick around and weather the storm. however, what you are missing is this: People WILL lowball to make sales. Eventually, they WILL tire of it, and leave the profession. BUT - once they leave, some OTHER lowballer will come into the profession and lowball. It will be a SERIES of storms to weather, not just one.
The crafter who uses exceptional resources will always charge more for several reasons. 1) The resources are more likely expensive to buy and are more valuable than 2 credits. 2) They will not want to craft 24/7 so higher prices reduces the amount of demand. 3) They will charge for the quality of the item, not the amount that went in, it takes time and energy to make the best, so the price will reflect it also. 4) Most low ball items are not very good items, most come from factories and well, SW has limited factory so it won't be in high bulk, plus, not every player will buy crap.
Yet we also WILL be affected by the change. Doing some testing with resources, i find I can use "good" resources and get fairly close to the results a "great" resource will give. If the difference is only 1k Mass - Will your customer choose your 500k Master level ship, or your opponents 1k mass lower Master level ship at 400k? You also forget to add in those who don't pay for resurces, but exclusively mine as I do. I can get MY resources for .8 creds every day. Means I can make the SAME ship as you buying the resources at 3cpu. I can price MY chassis at 3cpu, yourt STARTING cost for resources, and make profit.
Many players don't buy the crappy gun unless they have no cash and its the only thing they can get for the level of combat they are able to do.Heck, i would love to have Kryat scale weapons but my toon is no where near the wealth and skill to get such weapons. Same with ever crafted item. With a ship, you really got to decide a lot of things when you put stuff in. You got concerns with mass, energy consumption, speeds, ect.... I don't see this destroying the crafting professions at all.
Oh, and one other thing, if all the crafters quit, don't you think someone else will suddenly see a big opening for easy money if there is no one providinga product? come on, its an open economy, not socialistic, and definatly not communistic.Don't cry wolf before thinking about it all first.
First, I should clarify: this could help a few shipwrights while in general our profession will be much less screwed than any other. It would be a Sisyphean task to try to handcraft enough ship parts to keep up with the galaxywide demand, and anyone who tried to do that on a daily basis is going to burn out like that. Imagine I just snapped my fingers there because you can't actually hear me doing so. So there's no way a single shipwright can lowball everyone--and once he runs out of his daily restock, do you really think all the pilots out there are just going to wait till he comes back on tomorrow to replenish his annoyingly priced wares? Sure they're not. They're going to buy from the rest of us. Business will still be spread around by the fact we have a hard and fast limit to the amount of items a single shipwright can craft in a day.
Meanwhile, if your stuff is the best, suddenly everyone knows it. As long as they have the credits to do so, people always go for the best while they neglect the almost-but-not-quite-as good product next to it. When it comes to the crafters of the best stuff, it's exceedingly rare for them to act as extreme lowballers, as they know just how hard it is to collect all those uber resources and put them together the right way. And when it comes to us SWs, we have to buy ton after ton of resources from other people just to keep our stuff in stock, so prices are always going to be propped up by how hard it is to avoid paying high prices for uber steel, for instance. Sure, there might be a bit of pricecutting between the top handful of SWs on the server, but they're not going to have to deal with the guys pricing their components at 2 cpu, because those 2 cpu components are simply not going to be in the same class as the guy charging 10 or 15 or 20.
So if you're among the best, you won't have much to worry about--and it's possible that, for everyone who's been buying from their guild shipwright or their buddy who they think is just great, they'll take one look at your actually awesome blasters and shields and etc. and suddenly become a lifelong customer. I don't really WANT that to happen, I already make tons of money and would rather other shipwrights had plenty of business themselves, but I do think opening up the bazaars this way would would open peoples' eyes to the difference between their SW and a good SW. There's a ton of myths and misinformation about JTL still, it's just too new to be all figured out the way the ground game is, and this change would educate people in a hurry as to what makes for a good part.
But look, I'm not going to spend any more time making it look like I approve of these changes when the truth is I hate them. They'll be nice as a consumer--for a while--but they'll swing through the crafters like a wrecking ball, making 90% of their lives miserable, and eventually enough of the good ones will drop out so as to make my choice as a consumer more limited that it was before. SWG's economy may be its greatest feature, and the damage I can see a change like this doing is almost impossible to predict.
All I'm saying is that due to the particulars of our situation--our lack of factories, massive, massive resource requirements, etc.--shipwrights are far better suited to weather these economic storms. The 30K resource reward isn't touching us, either, but have you guys been reading what some of the docs and armorsmiths and such have been saying about that one? You'd think it were the end of the world.
But not for us. Not due to that reward or this change or just about anything else that might come our way. The underlying system of our profession lends shipwrights a resiliency none of the others can match, one that, perhaps, the devs should consider extending to some of the other crafters out there.
TomoRainer wrote:
By the way, I don't think our low prices stem mostly from competition. I think they stem from an economy of scale here: try to justify it to your customers all you want, but if we tried to charge 285 cpu for OUR products, I think we'd spend some very long days staring over our cobwebbed stock of 997,500-credit level 7 blasters. I can charge 60K for those, a mere 16 cpu, but the fact I'm selling so many resources' worth of equipment at once will make me a very rich man in a very short time period. In fact, it has.
Weaponsmiths charge 6K for a VK that takes 60 (or whatever) resources because a) 6K isn't anything to a consumer who can easily get a single mission at that rate and b) even at that tremendous cpu markup, they have to sell 10 of them to match the gross profit us shipwrights make on that single level 7 blaster.
Basically, it's worth our time to sell for 16 cpu but not worth a weaponsmith's time to sell for less than three times that much. Meanwhile, even with such cpu differences, it's realms cheaper for a pistoleer to outfit himself with three or four different pistols than it is for a pilot to kit out his TIE Advanced.
That's the main reason our prices are low. It isn't from the competition. It's because we're different.
fully agree
- If you allow someone to buyfrom player vendorsremotely then you pretty much have to deliver it to them remotely. If not, then you are going to wind up with situations of people buying things from vendors then not being able to pick them up. There are a many ways people could grief you if you had to pick items up from a vendor:
- merchant puts down the vendor and puts one thing up for sale. Once you buy it, the merchant destroys the vendor.
- you buy something from a vendor in a player city. If the merchant doesnt like you he can have you city banned and you have to deal with the city militia just to pick up your item.
- you are faction-aligned and unwittingly buy an item from a city of the opposite faction. You can't get past the faction scanners or npcs to get your item.
- you buy an item, only to find out that the vendor is 10000m from the nearest shuttleport.
- I don't know how many merchants are "Pure Merchants". I think most people with merchant skills are crafters that are using merchant skills to sell their wares. If thats the case, let merchant skills become obsolete. That frees up a lot of skill points for uscrafters (BE/Image designer anyone?)
Cheers,
Withm Freysen
Master BE
TomoRainer wrote:
By the way, I don't think our low prices stem mostly from competition. I think they stem from an economy of scale here: try to justify it to your customers all you want, but if we tried to charge 285 cpu for OUR products, I think we'd spend some very long days staring over our cobwebbed stock of 997,500-credit level 7 blasters. I can charge 60K for those, a mere 16 cpu, but the fact I'm selling so many resources' worth of equipment at once will make me a very rich man in a very short time period. In fact, it has.
Weaponsmiths charge 6K for a VK that takes 60 (or whatever) resources because a) 6K isn't anything to a consumer who can easily get a single mission at that rate and b) even at that tremendous cpu markup, they have to sell 10 of them to match the gross profit us shipwrights make on that single level 7 blaster.
Basically, it's worth our time to sell for 16 cpu but not worth a weaponsmith's time to sell for less than three times that much. Meanwhile, even with such cpu differences, it's realms cheaper for a pistoleer to outfit himself with three or four different pistols than it is for a pilot to kit out his TIE Advanced.
That's the main reason our prices are low. It isn't from the competition. It's because we're different.
To a point, I agree. However, the EXTENT that we have underpriced our goods is what I take to task. Someone out there decided that Weapons are worth a good deal of credits, since they are absolutely needed in their profession. The same thing holds true to our products. Without a chassis (After all components can be had through loot), plain and simply, people aren't gonna fly.
While it's true we need to control costs to make our consumers happy, and our profession viable - I totally disagree with the thought "We use more resources, so we make it up in end cost". An excellent crafted weapon that is damage sliced can literally go for millions if it is the best- Yet, we will NEVER reach those types of plateaus. My product may have 5k more mass than yours, and literally be THE best ever made - But, i will NEVER be able to add a premium, because it will not sell.
We have given our consumersa "base" price for Chassis for example - My server it's 3 - 5cpu currently. I make wonderful chassis - In most cases far better than my competitors. But, UNLIKE weapons that have a Max Damage that people will look at and drool, we only have Mass - And through looting and good combinating, we can always max our ships. Mass is subjective. So, on Radiant, Master level ships sell from 450 - 500k, PERIOD. My point is, by limiting ourselves as we have done (And I am every bit as guilty as the next guy), we can't differentiate and sell a Premium chassis.
I am now, and always WILL be of the opinion that a Master Level ship, regardless of it's resource use, SHOULD cost at least a Million credits. 1) it is the penultimate ship Pilots can use. 2) It is a STARSHIP, not a weapon. From a RP point of view alone, a ship capable of sustaining your life while in space is inherently more valuable than a sharp object, or a gun.
We are guilty of doing exactly what the Architect profession did to itself. We will find the same problems with the proposed new system as every other crafting profession. The ONLY edge we have is that we do indeed need to use Quality materials, and can charge a markup on them, albeit a small one.
I think you are giving players far more credit for seeking Quality in our products than they deserve. I could be wrong. But I do see lowballers killing the profession for us as well.
I do agree that our components are still underpriced for the resources we put into them--I literally cannot afford the best iron or copper for my stuff, not if I want to make a profit anyway, and that's just too much disparity between us and weapon/armorsmiths--but the fact we are able to sell so many resources' worth in one item is the major factor in our relatively low prices, I think.
Another contributing factor is pilots aren't yet as common or as sophisticated as ground-based fighters and so the demand for the truly awesome crafted ship stuff isn't high enough to drive our prices up. If people continue to learn more about JTL, particularly the serious PVPers (the guys who really jumpstart the demand for uber gear), we may be able to start charging more, but right now, people just don't see the same value in a blaster that's 5% better than the competition as they do in a T21 that's 5% better. (I also think comparing the prices reached on extreme damage sliced weapons to our standard crafted stuff doesn't really work, as those high slices add another layer of rarity to an item and thus drive up prices a lot.)
Of course, I think part of that lack of high-end demand is due to the fact ship gear just doesn't carry a relative difference in value equivalent to the increased amount of resources we have to put into them. A Mk IV Blaster may take 1000 times as many resources (literally, lol) to craft as an FWG5, but that doesn't mean the value difference between an okay Mk IV and a great Mk IV is 1000 times as great as the difference between an okay FWG5 and a great FWG5. I'm having a hard time putting this concept into words, but I hope you get the gist of what I'm trying to say. The sheer amount of steel (for instance) we have to put into our stuff demands that each point of that steel doesn't carry the same absolute value it would in a pistol.
Halthron wrote:
Aleskander wrote:
3. People won't be walking into your mall and have to wait for all the decor to load (is this bad?)
I don't see this as a bad thing. I actually see it as good. How many times have you been on Dath and run out of brandy? Leave the stims at home? Have your swoop destroyed by a nightsister that knocked you off it?
You'll still have to go pick the stuff up.
Yeah, I just saw the post by Tiggs about the change. The original post said it would auto deliver.
