Business And Economy Archive
Thread: The Great Depression, SWG Style
Reevan wrote:
more Jedi - Less people need crafted Armor or Weapons = higher prices, its simple to figure out
Actually, fewer people buying weapons and armor means less demand for those items, so their prices should go down (assuming the supply remains steady).
Prices for most crafted goods are pretty much the same as they were when the game launched, and some prices have even dropped. Even the prices of many loot itemshave dropped. Remember when No Division posters were introduced? The first ones sold for millions of credits. Now you can get them for a couple hundred thousand credits, maybe even less if you're willing to shop around a bit.
Armor is one exception to the price of crafted goods dropping. But there are a number of reasons why armor is so expensive. 1) The resource requirements have gone up drastically, especially the hide requirements; layered armor requires even more resources; 2) the way armor crafting is structured now, it's hard to make largefactory runs of armor, thus limiting supply;3) there are a number of bugs that have plagued armorsmiths since the CU went live, including a factory bug with armor coloring which makes the factory production of armor problematic--hand crafting armor means reduced supply.
The only thing that might cause some kind of economic crash is if enough crafters leave the game. In a player-based crafting economy, having sufficient crafters is vital to a healthy game economy. If too many leave, then players won't be able buy the gear they need to adventure, and prices will likely increase. Ordinarily rising prices would attract new crafters who want to cash in, but with the bevy of persistentcrafting bugs,combined withthe general dumbing down of crafting after the CU and the dramatic increase in viable looted weapons from RotW, potential crafters might be discouraged from entering the market.
Of course, if this scenario ever did happen, I'm sure SWG would waste no time introducing NPC merchants to pick up the slack, citing the lack of crafters as their justification.
Slim Vargo, Corbantis
SimDroid wrote:
The problem with making easier ways to make money is that everyone will have more money, including the rich people - thus driving up prices even more. Instead, there needs to be more competition to drop prices, and perhaps even levy some kind of tax on the rich people... a luxury tax perhaps?
More competition would drop prices, but why would we need a tax on rich players? Rich players aren't driving up the prices of common items, like swoops or laser rifles. Rich players buy rare, high end items, which are going to be expensive no matter how we fiddle with the economy. Taxing rich players won't bring the prices of premium pearls or krayt weapons down to where "middle-class" or "poor" players can afford them. All it would do is punish successful players--and probably drive them out of the game.
Slim Vargo, Corbantis
Eerif wrote:
Lack of crafters due to the constant crafting bugs affecting us ingame means less competition, which thus drives prices up. Not because crafters are greedy, but because in order to maintain a fully stocked vendor, one needs to raise prices to try and keep stock until you can get more stuff on the vendor. It's all about sanity.
That is the closest to truth you can get.
Lack of crafters means a lack of supply. The few crafters left either go nuts trying to keep their stock up, or they raise their prices to reduce the sales.
The big reason for this is a consumer will not revisit and empty vendor. I don't do it, and i am mostly a crafter. If the vendor is regularly empty, why bother visiting it a second, third, or fourth time to see nothing in it. So, either the crafter spends all his time gathering any scrap of resource and crafts non stop, or he simply raise the price till itreduces themarket demand so his vendor will always be stocked.
If you want prices to go down, get more crafters crafting. That increases the supply to meet the demand instead of decreasing the demand, which in turn, reduces prices because merchants will compete to make a profit. Someone will always have a better product for a lower or more resonable price than the next guy.
What is causing crafters to stop crafting? BUGS, lots and lots of BUGS. Why? Cause everyone wants to be a top dog and BUGS make you feel so far less. The CU really did hurt crafters, a lot of them respected into a combat profession instead of sticking it out. The publishes since the CU has brought in more BUGS that have hurt crafters a lot. The more work and effort from BUGS makes the general crafter go crazy and pray for a fix. So far, the fixes are far and way to few between. There is also the fact that the developers (LA, SOE, and who ever else is in the mix) decided to change some things and put in a Expansion that left crafts out on the porch instead of inviting them to the big party. Till the crafters get some majorly needed love, i wouldn't expect prices to decrease at all, but rather continue to increase on all demanded items. For items not in demand, prices will still drop to a point of approximatly 2cpu (per my opinion of the standard) and then disappear from the market when the last of the crafters of said items stop production entirely.
That in a nut shell is how i have heard, understood, and belive isthe whole story from the crafters perspective.
EdOWar wrote:
SimDroid wrote:
The problem with making easier ways to make money is that everyone will have more money, including the rich people - thus driving up prices even more. Instead, there needs to be more competition to drop prices, and perhaps even levy some kind of tax on the rich people... a luxury tax perhaps?
More competition would drop prices, but why would we need a tax on rich players? Rich players aren't driving up the prices of common items, like swoops or laser rifles. Rich players buy rare, high end items, which are going to be expensive no matter how we fiddle with the economy. Taxing rich players won't bring the prices of premium pearls or krayt weapons down to where "middle-class" or "poor" players can afford them. All it would do is punish successful players--and probably drive them out of the game.
Slim Vargo, Corbantis
The reason I say to tax the rich players(and by rich I mean 10 mil + ) is because if they have that much money.... however few of them there may or may not be... most crafters will keep high prices with the hopes of a rich player finding their vendor. True, this applies to some servers more than others. This kind of ties in to the anti-competition on most servers too.
Example: player A learns player X has over 23 mil credits. Player a thinks "He's got way too much money I can charge him1 - 2 mil.for this semi-rare, but not hard to get item and he'll probably pay it." Player B sees that player A is charging 1 - 2 mil. for the item that he has and assumes that it is the going rate. So instead of trying to undersell player A, he matches his price or even goes higher in hopes of making just as much money because "that's how much the item is worth".
This is what is screwing everything up... not the lack of competition, but the seeminggalaxy-wide agreementof "this is how much an item is worth, so this is how much you have to sell it for".
Completely unrelated to the above post.... what are these crafting bugs that everyone is talking about? Other than the health bonuses not sticking to armor I am unaware of any crafting bugs.
Epofa wrote:
....
But, honeslty, almost all the merchants on tarq are empty.
....
SimDroid wrote:
EdOWar wrote:
SimDroid wrote:
The problem with making easier ways to make money is that everyone will have more money, including the rich people - thus driving up prices even more. Instead, there needs to be more competition to drop prices, and perhaps even levy some kind of tax on the rich people... a luxury tax perhaps?
More competition would drop prices, but why would we need a tax on rich players? Rich players aren't driving up the prices of common items, like swoops or laser rifles. Rich players buy rare, high end items, which are going to be expensive no matter how we fiddle with the economy. Taxing rich players won't bring the prices of premium pearls or krayt weapons down to where "middle-class" or "poor" players can afford them. All it would do is punish successful players--and probably drive them out of the game.Slim Vargo, Corbantis
The reason I say to tax the rich players (and by rich I mean 10 mil + ) is because if they have that much money.... however few of them there may or may not be... most crafters will keep high prices with the hopes of a rich player finding their vendor. True, this applies to some servers more than others. This kind of ties in to the anti-competition on most servers too.Example: player A learns player X has over 23 mil credits. Player a thinks "He's got way too much money I can charge him 1 - 2 mil. for this semi-rare, but not hard to get item and he'll probably pay it." Player B sees that player A is charging 1 - 2 mil. for the item that he has and assumes that it is the going rate. So instead of trying to undersell player A, he matches his price or even goes higher in hopes of making just as much money because "that's how much the item is worth".
This is what is screwing everything up... not the lack of competition, but the seeming galaxy-wide agreement of "this is how much an item is worth, so this is how much you have to sell it for".
Completely unrelated to the above post.... what are these crafting bugs that everyone is talking about? Other than the health bonuses not sticking to armor I am unaware of any crafting bugs.
Pricing varies generally in a server. How can you say for certain that "most crafters" will keep high prices? Aren't you confusing crafters with loot sellers? My experince shows a varying scale of pricing between most crafters from low to high. It's a nice theory, but can you give a real example other than hypothetical generic examples? Like for instance in my field, it has been much more common to lower prices due to competition than to raise them.
There is currently an experimentation bug brought on by Publish 20 which is preventing a lot of people from seeing their crafting results, so for people that can experiment different lines, they're not able to figure out how well or poorly they did in experimenting that line. There is also the resource bug where the stacks are not accurately updating the amounts in consolidated stacks. Then there are the pre-existing bugs that some professions have had for some time.
SimDroid wrote:
Completely unrelated to the above post.... what are these crafting bugs that everyone is talking about? Other than the health bonuses not sticking to armor I am unaware of any crafting bugs.
First off, the vendor search has been broken from the CU up until last publish for resources, meaning any good resources were a major pain to find. The death rate for crafters has shot way up since the CU, due to removal of buffs, and leaving the crafters at level 1. Tailor tissues are broken and do not work, artisan foods last 4-5x longer than chef foods, food and spice stacking changes so many times that chefs have just said to heck with figuring it out. Pretty sure the harvesting droid is still broken. I'm sure there are many more, these are the most major ones.
The biggest bug that they introduced was with the last publish. In fixing the ultimate pain in the rear vendor search bug, they couldn't let that go without giving us a worse bug. So they broke our UI. The UI for resources, experimentation, is broken and does not refresh on occasion. An example of this is to combine two stacks of 25k resources. When combined, it does not change the 25k value, showing it now as one stack of 25k. On the server side, the number is actually 50k, however since the user interface does not refresh, we see it as one stack of 25k. This is applicable to experimenting on crafted goods, making it very hard to include the stats of any item in the item name.