Bio Engineer Archive

In a true market economy, things should balance themselves out. If meat costs too much but demand for the high-buff chef foods is in high demand then food and additive prices should rise to take into account the increased meat prices. Someone should always be willing to meet a demand that exists at whatever price, unless they are taking a loss. Eventually, the supply of loot will be to the point that looting would return less than harvesting meat. The problem is that this isn't an insulated economy and the devs occasionally throw new stuff into the game. For example, as loot kit items finally hit a low price, they threw new paintings and schematics in the game for people to loot.

Lloyd, I didn't miss any of that at all. You say that a free market economy never existed because of (reasons). Unfortunately, you're incorrect that they have an effect on the existance of the economy. Yes, they play a role in the in game laws of supply and demand but they have absolutely nothing to do with the creation of the economy itself. If it makes you feel better, consider alts to be family organizations or trade guilds where the members give each other very good deals.

A free market economy is one wher the market sets the price, free from controls or outside influences. As alts are entirely in game, they don't have an outside effect. Nor does a single character control what the rest of the market can do. Devs are the only outside influence on the market I can think of. A control on the market is an artifical limiter, for example, an import tax. We don't have those here.

There are somethings you have missed, however they have a negligable effect on your hypothesis.

The 'Free Market Economy' never truly existed because people are able to do more than 1 jobs by buying a second account. If 1 person performs 2 jobs, then thats a job not available for someone else. this 'powergaming' philosophy has affected the price of tissues, because it has slowed down the catastrophic impact on chefs by allowing them to become their own supplier.

Chef/BE gets the same profit as a Chef would in 'olden times'. A Chef who has to pay for a BE product suffers teh profit that that BE gives.

for Chefs, they have not been seeing a profit decrease, simply because they have been factoring the BE/Chef profits together.

With there being EVEN less BEs available, and the resources available shrinking furthur, they have/will start to see the impact on their profit and will ither a) increase prices or b) suffer less profit.

You haven't taken into account the alt chars, and this has had the effect of minimising the effect on chefs until now.

The second thing I feel you missed was the amount of produce people make. I have heard that the devs originally only intended factories to produce 100 items not 1000. If you take this into consideration (assuming its true) then it becomes apparent that the developers never exected people to be producing goods in these quantities. Armor was never meant to be used all the time (Just read the manual), buffs were never meant to be used every hunting trip and food was never meant to be consumed so much. This means that the way they planned the resource gathering is not in keeping with how they intended the economy to run, and as a result, have a shortage of labour intensive resources. (There is still a problem with harvested resources - hence lot swapping).

The effect of this is to drive the prices up. Why are Tailor tissues more profitable than Chef tissues? Because the resources needed for a crate (with a few notable exceptions) can be bought off the bazaar for pocket money. In Chef tissues, you are dealing with Mass Prosuction, and need to hire people especially to gather resources for you.

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Halthron wrote:
Lloyd, I didn't miss any of that at all. You say that a free market economy never existed because of (reasons). Unfortunately, you're incorrect that they have an effect on the existance of the economy. Yes, they play a role in the in game laws of supply and demand but they have absolutely nothing to do with the creation of the economy itself. If it makes you feel better, consider alts to be family organizations or trade guilds where the members give each other very good deals.

A free market economy is one wher the market sets the price, free from controls or outside influences. As alts are entirely in game, they don't have an outside effect. Nor does a single character control what the rest of the market can do. Devs are the only outside influence on the market I can think of. A control on the market is an artifical limiter, for example, an import tax. We don't have those here.

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But it does destroy the free trade by allowing 1 person the ability to do more than 1 job. From a business/economics POV you get 'Economies of Scale' and are operating a brilliant 'Just in Time' system that should not be possible. This is something that a 1 character person cannot do. This puts an imbalance in the economy weighted towards a 1 man organisation able to do everything...

If you think of it in a different way, 1 character with 10 professions is very likely to be better than 1 character with 3 professions. Is that not an inbalance? Alts themselves are internal, however the forces controlling them, people and external, and the size of those peoples wallets and time effects how well they do in game. This is an external influence on the market which means it DOES affect the 'free trade economy'.

Another way to look at it is anti-competitive business practices. When two large businesses merge, in the UK at least, there can be an investigation into whther it would cause an anti-competitive market. IE If a Pharmaceuticals conglomerate bought out another, or if a media company bought out a competitor. These mergers can cause an anti-competitive market by creating a monopoly, duopoly or an oligopoly. This allows the big sellers to price fix. The little sellers are so small that either they are priced out of the market with cheap goods, or they are so small that nobody notices that they are offering the same goods for 50% less. Monopolies and their relations destroy free-trade. this is exactly what is happening in SWG. People have alts to allow them to 'merge' businesses together. The person with the most time and money to put into the game almost inevitably creates an inbalance in the economy. With no one around to keep monopolies in check, and the price of entry into some fields being Prohibiting, due to expenses (12pt chefs, and the HQ resources needed for example) then it becomes pretty obvious that there will be Oligopolies at work, which by default destroy the free trade.

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Halthron wrote:

You're mixing free trade with competitiveness.

Yes, everything you said does apply toward modifying competition. If a player has a chef/merchant, doctor/BE and a TKM/Ranger, he has all the support he needs. He can hunt his own meat, make additives, and sell food for practically nothing. His only cost would be armor, weapons, transport and harvester/vendor maint.

But, nothing that player does will force other players to purchase from him. Free Trade is where anyone can sell to anyone else without restriction. Where one group is favored over another group. Case in point, customs taxes are a restriction on free trade. Two identical items, one costs more simply because it was made elsewhere.

I agree your arguments apply toward competitiveness but disagree they apply toward a free market economy.

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Yes but the two go hand in hand...Heres a snippet of the WTO(World Trade Organisation - www.wto.org) website:

Promoting fair competition

The WTO is sometimes described as a “free trade” institution, but that is not entirely accurate. The system does allow tariffs and, in limited circumstances, other forms of protection. More accurately, it is a system of rules dedicated to open, fair and undistorted competition.

The rules on non-discrimination — MFN and national treatment — are designed to secure fair conditions of trade. So too are those on dumping (exporting at below cost to gain market share) and subsidies. The issues are complex, and the rules try to establish what is fair or unfair, and how governments can respond, in particular by charging additional import duties calculated to compensate for damage caused by unfair trade.

Many of the other WTO agreements aim to support fair competition: in agriculture, intellectual property, services, for example. The agreement on government procurement (a “plurilateral” agreement because it is signed by only a few WTO members) extends competition rules to purchases by thousands of government entities in many countries. And so on.

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Zigabob wrote:

I was a ranger for quite a while before I decided to give BE a try. I found as time went by crafters (BE's, Chefs, Docs, AS's) became increasingly picky about the stats of the resources. It had gotten to the point for me that crafters would laugh at me unless I was selling resources with all stats in the 900's. I would harvest a bunch of 900+ meat and be getting 25-250cpu (very profitable)for it while meat in the 700-800 stat range I was lucky to get 4cpu (waste of time). Thus the business of profitablecreature harvesting became a "sit and wait for the next uber meat/hide shift". Thats one of the reasons I decided to become a BE. I had piles of mediocre quality meat that I couldn't sell for a half-decent price (10cpu I consider half-decent for medium-high quality). I am not making super awesome BE products from my mediocre meat, but all of it is selling well at around 10-15cpu (I charge 1000 creds for most of my tissues). Thats better than any crafter was willing to pay me.

So I guess another reason that there are fewer players out there selling creature resources is they have figured out that they can make more money buy converting their resources into products rather than selling raw resources.

Withme Freysen

Master BE

Ziga Freysen

Ranger/Rifleman

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I'm a little concerned about 1000 credits for tissues--or would be at least on my server. My break-even price for materials alone of BSN is 1300. After adding the cost of the schematic and maintaining a factory, it is probably just under 1400 which is my selling price at the moment for mediocre quality BSN.

I think the best way for you to set your prices is to figure what you could sell your meat for, then add the profit you hope to make as a bio-engineer. I had a guy on another forum tell me he was making a killing as a BE harvesting his own meat and selling his tissues at a price below what he could sell his meat for. I contended that he was losing money as a BE, but making a killing as a hunter.

When my prices were created, 10 cpu was the going price for meat, and it was drawing a lot of rangers. My prices represented a substantial profit, and I couldn't keep in stock. The problem is that while 1400 cr still buys a mediocre BSN, 10 cpu doesn't buy what it used to in general, because of rampant inflation.

A massive influx in wealth into the economy, both in the form of credits (mission payouts and space loot), and in the form of loot has created substantial inflation. There is absolutely no reason for a ranger to spend the day collecting meat at 10 cpu when he could kill Jantas at 30K a lair and have a shot at some very high-quality loot.

Meanwhile, high-quality meat just doesn't seem to spawn any more. The last great quality meat on Gorath was avian, which a bio-engineer has absolutely no chance of competing for pricewise.

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LloydPickering wrote:

Yes but the two go hand in hand...Heres a snippet of the WTO(World Trade Organisation - www.wto.org) website: <snipped for space>

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No, actually they don't. They can and often do but the effect doesn't have to be a net positive or negative gain. To continue the quotations:

Free Trade:

Lowering trade barriers is one of the most obvious means of encouraging trade. The barriers concerned include customs duties (or tariffs) and measures such as import bans or quotas that restrict quantities selectively. (source:
http://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/whatis_e/tif_e/fact2_e.htm)

Also, In very simple terms, free trade can be defined as the absence of tariffs and import quotas on goods. (more) (Source: http://www.unesco.org/culture/industries/trade/html_eng/question5.shtml)

From the same WTO page a bit on competition:

But success in trade is not static. The ability to compete well in particular products can shift from company to company when the market changes or new technologies make cheaper and better products possible. Producers are encouraged to adapt gradually and in a relatively painless way. They can focus on new products, find a new “niche” in their current area or expand into new areas.

Monopolism is a good example of a restriction of competition.