Bio Engineer Archive

I'm a young novice chef, but I do want to comment on this thread. You should indeed sell your items for what they are worth. There are always gonna be people who will rip everyone off, and there will be some that undersell their wares.

Gathering meats and hides and other items takes a fair bit of effort. Certainly far more than running harvesters. Getting the quantities of these materials to make factory runs is far harder than jsut making a few individual pieces. Most of the costs of an item are material costs.

Now if someone wants a schematic made up and they have all the materials you need, then certainly set a price for that work. This would be your "value added" price. I'd charge the amount of "profit" you woudl have made had you made up the crates yourself.

Message Edited by ArthurDentOnBria on 02-16-2004 08:50 PM

The thing is, you can talk all you want about who works harder, who expends more resource, who expends more effort, or skill points, or however you want to argue it. But the bottom line is this:

Chef makes brandy w/o BE additives: 200 power

Chef makes brandy w/BE additives: 400 power

Chef charges x for brandy without BE additives. Chef charges 2x (or even 2.5x) for brandy with BE additives.

If we, as a BE are getting << x as payment for that tissue, then we are not close to realizing the value we are bringing to the arrangement.

You are right, and You should charge more but remember that it takes 5 factory runs for the brandy and one run for the bio that u make......if you really feel like you are getting a bad shake then please don't make them, But we both know that all that takes to make is 25 meat and 55 organic.

Now if you want to charge more for the stuff, thenmake the things that require the milk and berrys, or better yet make the stuff thats needs Dom meat, because we all know that meats is just to easy to find.

Estan,

I think you're missing the point Arthur is trying to make

ArthurDentOnBria Writes:

Chef makes brandy w/BE additives: 400 power

Chef charges x for brandy without BE additives. Chef charges 2x (or even 2.5x) for brandy with BE additives.

Ok, with the 200power chefs are charging X. This is based on the material and time required. With the 400power the Chef is no longer putting in any more effort. He doubles his cost doing no more work then adding in the BE mod.

As a BE, when it comes to my mods, I expect 50% of the overall increased profit of my mod. So, if I was making you these mods I would tell you, if you charge 30k for a crate of 10 reg brandy and 60k with the brandy, I want 15k PER 10 food mods or 75k for a crate of 50.

I agree with what ArthurDentOnBria is saying here. I too dont need the money. It comes down to the principle that I am not going to basically "give" some chef a HUGE profit increase at my expense.

Only exception is with guildies with which I do provide free schematics if they have the resources. Everyone else better kick in some cool credits if they want this MBE to help out

Message Edited by SomeUser on 02-17-2004 01:08 AM

Heck, I would pay 45k per crate of medium nutritions with a decent percentage *if I could find any at all*. Some nice Master BE made a schematic for me with stuff I provided. I offered 25k for the effort he made it for free. I had to search for three days until I had found that nice chap. 45k for 500 meat and 1500 Flora Food is actually not too bad for 1 factory run I'd reckon. I wish I could sell Artisan or Architect stuff at that rate

Would I prefer to buy the stuff in crates? Heck, I would. Not for the exact same amount I can charge on top of the normal food price though because that would mean I'd be better of saving me the hassle of finding and *moving* the friggin stuff.

And please keep in mind that those 300k per crate prices are for Vasarian Brandy (and on the 'old' servers) *only* as far as I can see - and we can use BE tissues for *all* of our products now. The price on Brandy will probably come down in a week or two anyways.

"Ok, with the 200power chefs are charging X. This is based on the material and time required. With the 400power the Chef is no longer putting in any more effort. He doubles his cost doing no more work then adding in the BE mod. "

This is actually incorrect in a few ways.

The tissue must be combined with water to make the additive, creating another factory run.

To make BE tissues viable profitwise a Cask must be used. 2 more factory runs of trim(if you are a tailor) or buying 2000 trim. Without a cask the price comes out to about 100-125k a crate, which is barely higher than what a lot of people are charging for regular food.

While I don't know if it is still enough work to justify the price, it is more work than what you have stated.

Also does a price a BE gives usually include delivery to my vendor?

The BE basically has to buy the meat, collect the resources(nothing more than a chef does, actually less as the ingrediants for the most common tissue are very generic), and make the schematic and sell it. 1 factory run. I totally agree the BE should be paid for the time, but if your making a case as to how much of a share the BE should get based on work involved, that case isn't very strong.

The amount of time for a Chef to complete a crate of Food without the additive compared to the time for a BE to create just the tissue is far from equal.

Numen,

You're right, there is a couple of other costs to factor in. Let's try some numbers here. Let's say it's a 10 crate order (a very small order) and you are charging what seems to be a very very low price of 300k/crate for your BE'd brandy and 150k/crate for non-BE'd brandy. Let's say you pay your BE the very high price of 50k/crate for the tissues. So your markup on the BE'd brandy is 100k/crate. But as you pointed out, we have to figure in the other costs. Cool.

The additive chef components are unexperimented components where quality of materials doesn't matter at all. I don't have the material requirements for them, but lets say they have a value of 1k/crate. No, hell, let's be insanely generous and say the have a value of 10k/crate. Also, as you said, let's assume that the chef has to pick up these tissues. Assuming the worst case, let's say he has to travel from yavin to dantooine. That is 3 hops, maybe 12k in travel expenses plus something for his time, lets call it 20k, which is 2k/crate for this very small order. So now that brings the markup on the BE portion of the brandy down to 88k/crate (or 880k for that small order). How do you justify that 88k/crate markup? And I think as you can see in my numbers, I've assumed best case all the way for chefs. There seem to be few chefs that charge that little, markup that little, or pay that much for tissues, so the "Real" number is a lot bigger than that. But still, even in this scenario your markup of the BE tissues is close to 2x the price of the tissues themselves, and you net close to a million credits for ever 10crates you buy.

Message Edited by ArthurDentOnBria on 02-17-2004 09:06 AM