Chef Archive
Thread: What do YOU hate about dealing with those Bio-Engineers?
This is quickly coming down to a numbers game. What some people still fail to realize it isn't always just about profit.
If someone asked me for a schematic I would probably tell them no for 50k. I think my time and effort are worth more than that. Noone else can decide what my time is worth. 50k is nothing to me, as is the credits that I would probably be losing by that person not buying whatever product I'm making for him from me anymore.
Credits aren't the end all of this decision. That person that offered me 50k for a schematic, IMO they are just using me if I made it for them. If 50k is nothing to me, I have to at least assume the same is true for them. Very few newbies as for schematics.
This argument will continue forever unless for some reason the devs decide to do something drastic to foods that remove this dependency.
FreeRadical42 wrote:
Lozareth wrote:
FreeRadical42 wrote:
Lozareth wrote:
When a chef asked for one, I'd point at the 400-600 crates of supplements on my vendor and he'd go "Yeah...so can you make me a schematic?" which makes me wonder why I wasted all that time creating the supplements and stocking the vendor. To put it another way, why are you wasting your time stocking your food vendor? You could be out there selling schematics, man! For me, it's not about what to charge for a schematic. The price of any product is always up to the seller and the choice to buy or move on is always up to the buyer.
The fact is you can charge whatever you want for the supplements that you make. It doesn't matter if Chefs want to buy schematics. See, you're forgetting an element that is key to any capitalist economy. If no one wants something, no one will buy something. Easy to understand, and simple to plan. There's a huge reason that I don't do runs of Corellian Ale or Karkan Ribenes or any of the other crap that people don't buy- it's because people don't buy it. People buy BE schematics, and when they do, they're looking for a fair price. A lot of BEs are unwilling to supply this fair price- that's their loss. Chefs will take their business elsewhere where they'll find someone who does make what they want. If you don't want to sell supplements, fine. But don't complain about how much time you spent making them- I spent a lot of time making some of the best Havla on Gorath but then they changed how CM throw times work and now it's just for docs looking to speed up their buffs, pretty much. I'm not complaining about the time I spent making that, and neither should you about your supplements. Just find someone to sell them to at whatever price is comfortable for you.
This isn't complaining, it's giving one example of why the requests for schematics is making supplements even harder to acquire and making BEs even rarer.And if this quote isn't taken out of context, you see that I did something about it by picking up chef myself and using the pricing scheme chefs want BEs to use on supplements on foods instead. Whoo, boy, did chefs complain then.
As I pointed out in later post, using the same logic as above, why do you even make food when you could be selling the schematic for it? On top of this, the majority of chefs want free schematics and as soon as you name a price, they turn away.
Message Edited by Lozareth on 08-02-2004 02:56 PM
Message Edited by Lozareth on 08-02-2004 02:58 PM
That is plainly unreasonable of them, if the majority of chefs actually want that. You'll see in an earlier post that I actually pay for runs of my stuff because it's more convenient and I still make money.
The reason I don't sell schematics is because TKAs don't come up to me asking for them. If they did I wouldn't ask for even 100k for the schem. But as it is, it doesn't sell, so no one pays to make it. You restated your question in response to this answer before, so I'm spelling it out plainly. There is a demand for BE schematics. There is no demand for Chef schematics. For this reason, Chef's don't make schematics.
You wouldnt charge 100k because your not asked to make a schematic. So basicaly your saying is that you would 1 give up buisness of 20 crates of brandy for 100k, 2. Belittle your profession. 3 allow the person you made the schematic to resell that brandy for 1million credits in pure profit. now look at it from this point a view. You own a restaraunt. You have a secret recipe that keeps the customers coming back for more.Now i come in and pay you $100 for a slip of paper with the ingrediants list on it. Now by selling for that $100 you gave away your customer draw and your profit. Thats bad buisness sense anyway you look at it, but looky looky you got a crisp $100 bill for a slip of paper. The reason there is no demand for chef schematics is because the people buying your products are busy fighting, they dont have the time or resources to make the brandy. If they wanted to make brandy they would be a chef. Now crafters on the other hand have alot of time to divide up. Chef's pop there stuff in the factories and have time to run around searching for things. Im a BE and a Chef and i have time to run around looking through vendors. If you find an empty vendor then mail the owner. You dont get a response then no biggy. I currently have a vendor stocked with 80 crates of BSN's(+84) and i cant move them yet when i afk spam(contained in which is the BSN's and cost) i come back to tells and mail of can you make me a schematic. No point for me to make the tissues anymore so ill use them for Brandy or other foods. So you wonder why there are empty vendors. The reason why BE's are bombarded by chef's for schematics, because chef's are lazy and expect everything to come to them. I tell sooo many chef's that if they want to get the ingrediants for the tissues and sell it to me ill make them for them at a reduced price. No one has taken me up on that offer yet. I saw another post in this chef forum that really upset me. This person new to being a chef wondered what medium additive he needed for brandy and where to get them. Now the posts after that said oh you want BSN's and you go get meat and flora and go to a BE and get a schematic made. No one said oh you buy them off of a BE, it was you get the BE to make a schematic. Poor class indeed.
Biytor wrote:
FreeRadical42 wrote:
Farctory costs a negligible at best. To explain profit margin. If it cost me 1.2 million to make a full factory run, it will cost you 1.5 million to buy it. 300K profit for a few minutes work. If I make a schematic that costs me 0, it will cost you 300k to buy it. Again 300k profit for a few minutes work. Where's the difference? Other then I flip the switch on? Also why would I want 50 chefs banging on my door, bitching about price all the time. When I have one that gives all the bussiness I need. You want Tissues, it will cost you over what my partner gets them for. (All numbers a fictional, as final price depends on availability of resources)
The difference is that when I pay you the 1.5 million I am paying for:
1) The supplements
2) The time you spent gathering the resources for the supplements
3) The time you spent having your factories tied up by making the supplements
Now, in all reality, 300k isn't *unreasonable* for a schematic. It's overpriced, but not wildly. What really bugs me are the BEs who put price tags of 1 mil on their schems.
But let me go back to a phrase you used before- chefs want to "have their cake and eat it too." It would seem that *you'd* like to have your cake and eat it too, also. You'd like to do 1% of the work that it takes to make a full run of something, but make 100% of the profits. Ain't gonna happen.
More:
The convoluted logic of this entire statement is interesting but still wrong. Your knowledge dictates your payrate, your work ethic dictates your longevity. An MBA won't make anything working outside his field, but he will inside it. So it still comes right back to paying for knowledge not labor. Labors cheep, knowledge isn't.
And your longevity determines how much you get paid. If you work for five minutes, you get paid for five minutes, whether you have an MBA, PhD, BA, BS, MD, or GED. Chefs aren't asking you to work outside your field. They're asking you to provide a service that requires very little effort compared to other services you can provide. The least you can do is offer a fair price. You do a lot of math in the next few paragraphs. Let me do some math for you here- if you spend five minutes making a schematic, and no other costs are incurred, and you make 50k, or 100k, or 200k on it even, you have profited completely. You have put nothing in, sacrificed nothing, lost nothing, and made money. No cost, total benefit. Whereas only 69% of each crate I sell is profit for me, 100% of each schem you sell is profit for you. Unless of course you think that the time you work matters. In which case you're agreeing with what I said before and contradicting what you said above.
More:
My prices aren't much more then any other BE on my server, but for my partner (A steady stream of bussiness) they are lower then the average costs. Chefs need to get prospective on this issue, not the BE's. BE's don't run the huge profit margins Chefs do. I know, as I'm also a chef and run anywhere from 70% to 100% profit all the time and am considered cheep at my prices. I can sell a full factory run of Bandy for 4 million at 100K a crate. So 1.5 mill for additives and another 500k of the Chef items (Massively over priced on these, but I'm making a point) that 2 million out of pocket with 2 million in profit, Thats 100% profit, and thats for decent brandy with good amount and duration. So is it as a BE you make 25% profit or 100% profit as a Chef. You decide (Numbers rounded for clarity) Greed is whats driving this arguement, and from what I've read,Chefs are a very GREEDY lot.
You're speaking about profit in terms of how much you've invested and how much you get out of it. That's not a good way for someone to justify charging 300k for a schematic. You've put in five minutes of work and no money, and you make 300k. That's infinite percent profit. That's more than a chef could ever hope to make. You don't have to gather the resources, waste time making the additives, don't actually have to do anything but stick experimentation points into things and then collect your payment five minutes later. So to charge anything higher than 100k for your five-minute effort is a very, very GREEDY thing to do when that person will only be making 100% profit on it, now isn't it? Shame on you for charging that much.
Of course, I don't think there's anything wrong with your doing this. It's calling Chefs greedy for making a lower percent profit that I was pointing out. I sell my stuff at a VERY fair price, and often just give it away free. I know other Chefs who do this, and to apply a nasty label to an entire profession is just childish. If you've been able to sell a run of BE additives at 1.5 million, you've been very blessed with Chefs who aren't greedy, so you might as well be thankful and keep selling those runs. If you've sold schematics for 300k, the same applies.
For a run of Bivoli, my overhead costs tend to be 1-2 million with a selling price of 2.5 million. For a run of Brandy, considering how much it'll cost to make casks, your estimate is way, way off. In reality, when you sell me that schematic, you're making off like a bandit and you know it. Don't be "greedy."
Yet More:
Here are a couple examples to show you what I'm talking about.
You have a broken TV that needs repaired. You worked on it for days trying to figure it out and just can't get it to work. You call the repairmen to come and fix you set. His price is $75.00 to make the house call and 50/hour after the 1st hour. He arrives, and fixes your TV in 30 seconds. Now are you going to refuse to pay the $75.00 you owe him, becuase you think he didn't work long enough on the problem before fixing it?
He charged for the house call and provided the service. That's a reasonable price for fixing a TV. Charging hundreds of thousands of credits for a schematic is not reasonable. I don't see how your example applies.
And more:
You're car isn't running right and you can't figure it out. You take it to the mechanic to get it fixed. Just to hook it up on the machine and run a dio on it will cost $100.00 dollors plus another $40 an hour for the mechanic. Well it takes him all of 3 minutes to run the dio and replace the bad oxigen sensor. You still owe $140.00 plus the cost of the new part. Are you going to refuse to pay becuase you did get the amount of labor you thought you should have for the job performed?
Okay, so they charge because they have the machine and you don't. That's rather like a BE charging more for a factory run than a schem because he has to use his factory and that costs him money. The money for the mechanic is for the mechanic's time, and the way that that is calculated is by hours. If he works for a half an hour. That's how things work in the time job world -maybe not for car mechanics though. Car mechanics are a bad example because it's an industry where you'll get charged an arm and a leg for a routine job. If you say that being a BE is like being a car mechanic, then you're saying that you like to run the clock up and overcharge. Great reputation to associate yourself with.
And the last of it:
You get paid for what you know, not what you do. If you think thats wrong, tough. The only thing someone has to offer is their knowledge. Otherwise all you are is labor and their a dime a dozen.
And Chef's knowledge is more widely in demand than BE knowledge. That's the nature of the beast. So try to make what's fair instead of pretending that there is as much demand for a BSN as there is for +25 bivoli.
Distaste wrote:
FreeRadical42 wrote:
Lozareth wrote:
FreeRadical42 wrote:
Lozareth wrote:
When a chef asked for one, I'd point at the 400-600 crates of supplements on my vendor and he'd go "Yeah...so can you make me a schematic?" which makes me wonder why I wasted all that time creating the supplements and stocking the vendor. To put it another way, why are you wasting your time stocking your food vendor? You could be out there selling schematics, man! For me, it's not about what to charge for a schematic. The price of any product is always up to the seller and the choice to buy or move on is always up to the buyer.
The fact is you can charge whatever you want for the supplements that you make. It doesn't matter if Chefs want to buy schematics. See, you're forgetting an element that is key to any capitalist economy. If no one wants something, no one will buy something. Easy to understand, and simple to plan. There's a huge reason that I don't do runs of Corellian Ale or Karkan Ribenes or any of the other crap that people don't buy- it's because people don't buy it. People buy BE schematics, and when they do, they're looking for a fair price. A lot of BEs are unwilling to supply this fair price- that's their loss. Chefs will take their business elsewhere where they'll find someone who does make what they want. If you don't want to sell supplements, fine. But don't complain about how much time you spent making them- I spent a lot of time making some of the best Havla on Gorath but then they changed how CM throw times work and now it's just for docs looking to speed up their buffs, pretty much. I'm not complaining about the time I spent making that, and neither should you about your supplements. Just find someone to sell them to at whatever price is comfortable for you.
This isn't complaining, it's giving one example of why the requests for schematics is making supplements even harder to acquire and making BEs even rarer.And if this quote isn't taken out of context, you see that I did something about it by picking up chef myself and using the pricing scheme chefs want BEs to use on supplements on foods instead. Whoo, boy, did chefs complain then.
As I pointed out in later post, using the same logic as above, why do you even make food when you could be selling the schematic for it? On top of this, the majority of chefs want free schematics and as soon as you name a price, they turn away.
Message Edited by Lozareth on 08-02-2004 02:56 PM
Message Edited by Lozareth on 08-02-2004 02:58 PM
That is plainly unreasonable of them, if the majority of chefs actually want that. You'll see in an earlier post that I actually pay for runs of my stuff because it's more convenient and I still make money.
The reason I don't sell schematics is because TKAs don't come up to me asking for them. If they did I wouldn't ask for even 100k for the schem. But as it is, it doesn't sell, so no one pays to make it. You restated your question in response to this answer before, so I'm spelling it out plainly. There is a demand for BE schematics. There is no demand for Chef schematics. For this reason, Chef's don't make schematics.
You wouldnt charge 100k because your not asked to make a schematic. So basicaly your saying is that you would 1 give up buisness of 20 crates of brandy for 100k, 2. Belittle your profession. 3 allow the person you made the schematic to resell that brandy for 1million credits in pure profit. now look at it from this point a view. You own a restaraunt. You have a secret recipe that keeps the customers coming back for more.Now i come in and pay you $100 for a slip of paper with the ingrediants list on it. Now by selling for that $100 you gave away your customer draw and your profit. Thats bad buisness sense anyway you look at it, but looky looky you got a crisp $100 bill for a slip of paper. The reason there is no demand for chef schematics is because the people buying your products are busy fighting, they dont have the time or resources to make the brandy. If they wanted to make brandy they would be a chef. Now crafters on the other hand have alot of time to divide up. Chef's pop there stuff in the factories and have time to run around searching for things. Im a BE and a Chef and i have time to run around looking through vendors. If you find an empty vendor then mail the owner. You dont get a response then no biggy. I currently have a vendor stocked with 80 crates of BSN's(+84) and i cant move them yet when i afk spam(contained in which is the BSN's and cost) i come back to tells and mail of can you make me a schematic. No point for me to make the tissues anymore so ill use them for Brandy or other foods. So you wonder why there are empty vendors. The reason why BE's are bombarded by chef's for schematics, because chef's are lazy and expect everything to come to them. I tell sooo many chef's that if they want to get the ingrediants for the tissues and sell it to me ill make them for them at a reduced price. No one has taken me up on that offer yet. I saw another post in this chef forum that really upset me. This person new to being a chef wondered what medium additive he needed for brandy and where to get them. Now the posts after that said oh you want BSN's and you go get meat and flora and go to a BE and get a schematic made. No one said oh you buy them off of a BE, it was you get the BE to make a schematic. Poor class indeed.
I had the opposite experience when I was a noob chef, and was told to buy additives off of a BE. This "schematic" thing is a fairly new idea, but a fair way to do business.Being a Chef is not like being a Chef in the real world. I don't have that special mix of 11 herbs and spices that make people keep coming back for more. In fact, all I have is the ability to make the same food that anyone else with the resources I have could make. So if someone comes to me with resources asking me to make a schematic and offering 100k, I know that he can just take it to someone else and they'll take the 100k and make the schem. So either I pass up getting paid, or I get paid. I'd prefer to get paid in that case. If BEs can sell it, and Chefs want it, then why wouldn't BEs sell it? It's not as if selling schems belittles or dishonors being a BE. This isn't some ancient Samurai clan here. If you're selling things, you're out to make money. Otherwise you'd give it away free. And the way to make money is to supply what the market desires.
Look at this in another way that uses the same logic. If you don't want to pay what the person charges, then he goes and sells to the guy who is willing to pay and you don't get what you need. If Chefs need it, and BE's make it, then why wouldn't Chefs buy it? This is a prime example of the faulty logic being used in most of this thread.
Lozareth wrote:
I had the opposite experience when I was a noob chef, and was told to buy additives off of a BE. This "schematic" thing is a fairly new idea, but a fair way to do business.
Being a Chef is not like being a Chef in the real world. I don't have that special mix of 11 herbs and spices that make people keep coming back for more. In fact, all I have is the ability to make the same food that anyone else with the resources I have could make. So if someone comes to me with resources asking me to make a schematic and offering 100k, I know that he can just take it to someone else and they'll take the 100k and make the schem. So either I pass up getting paid, or I get paid. I'd prefer to get paid in that case. If BEs can sell it, and Chefs want it, then why wouldn't BEs sell it? It's not as if selling schems belittles or dishonors being a BE. This isn't some ancient Samurai clan here. If you're selling things, you're out to make money. Otherwise you'd give it away free. And the way to make money is to supply what the market desires.
Look at this in another way that uses the same logic. If you don't want to pay what the person charges, then he goes and sells to the guy who is willing to pay and you don't get what you need. If Chefs need it, and BE's make it, then why wouldn't Chefs buy it? This is a prime example of the faulty logic being used in most of this thread.
Meplorium wrote:
Just for the record I was a BE before I was a chef. I picked up chef since I had a bunch of under used skill points on my Architect main. So my loyalities aren't either direction on this, but I do know both sides of this equation.
BEs are really shooting themselves in the foot. About as many people with 1 account have 2 accounts. They did a poll a while back on these boards. It was about 40/30 or so. With that said, after the jedi revamp most people will have two charactors on a given server, either with two accounts or an extra character.
The reason why BEs are shooting themselves in the foot is that they are about to become irrelivent, if most aren't irrelivent already, to chefs. The reason why BEs are shooting themselves and not the other way around, i.e. chefs shooting themselves, is that great food is not simple to make. Good additives are pretty simple to do.
After the flood on the new second characters comes around, we will see a lot more crafters of all types. However being a great crafter is pretty difficult for most. So I don't see the high level chefs taking a dive when that happens. I do see them all having a BE as an alt and the dedicated BEs either working with low level chefs that can't pay much or not working with chefs at all. The chef additives are really the cash cow for BEs and that is a lot of skill points just to make a few pet stims and non CH mounts.
Now I do both ends of the food making process. I can tell you right now the hardest part in the whole part is the distribution of food, i.e. selling the stuff or being a merchant.Making something is easy enough, getting someone to dish out 200k for a crate of something you made is another matter. The next hardest part is having the high quality chef ingredients to make the different kinds of food. The stuff that goes into the food is much more important than what goes into the additive. I can make good brandy with 82 power additives. I can only make bad brandy with bad fruit and berries.
The third most difficult is the meat. 10 to 20k of meat for a half run or full run of food. It is possible, if you hunt yourself for hours or if you get to the bazaar in cNet before the other chefs do. The difficult part there is timing. If you hit it just right, you can get a lot of meat fairly cheap.
Fourth I would put at making the last schematic. This takes many attempts and a knowledge about the food you are making. Food is not a max out one line schematic type deal. You need to know the market, what the food does and how to use it. Then you understand which numbers to hit. Why most people didn't bother with duration in their food at first and why many new chefs don't. A great chef saying, 'It's about not having a downer stupid'.
Fifthis the planning that goes into the food. Making sure you have all the stuff you need, organizing the factories and making sure you get all the sub components.
Sixth and last I would say making the schematics like dough or alcohol or the additives. These are pretty easy to do. I personally wouldn't make a schematic for a fellow chef, I would send them to my vendor with the final product. However making schematics for other things is easy enough and I give them out for free, when asked. So the schematic itself isn't that valuable. Getting the stuff to make that schematic and what you do with that schematic is the hard part. BE's alienating chefs, especially if they buy additives from you, is just killing yourself. They will be getting a second character soon. Guess what they are going to do with it if dealing with BEs is so difficult.
Sleksheea wrote:
Well, the thing is... If BE's made a chef character, it's likely they would be unsuccessfull at making any more profit than they are as a BE if not less to none. This is because they would have to compete with old school chefs who have millions and millions of resources stashed away with uber uber stats. These chefs can make food sooooooo much better than a new chef without these uber specialty resources, and that is what the SWG player base wants... the best, and are willing to pay for it. Thus a BE turned chef is likely to fail, or be dissapointed. A chef turned BE on the other hand should have no problem as there is basically only 2 types of resource he needs to make suppliments, both of which he is likely to already have large quantities of. I use my own resources and a guild BE to make me schematics. I have 4 million flora and 1.5 million meat saved up just for suppliments at the moment. These resources yield 88 BSN's 118 INN's and 58 MSN's. I don't rely on other BE's to get me my suppliments because they can't handle my demand first off, and secondly they never seem to have the resources to make suppliments as good as I can get myself! And last of all, WHY should I pay a BE extra money for his product when I can cut him out of the picture and save so much money so easily? Ya, it sux for him, but it's not illeagle. It may be a flaw in the game but it's not an exploit. BE's can whine all they want about price of their suppliments, but I think they are forgetting how easy it is for a chef to just cut them out of the picture all together and the chef knows this.
Anyway it comes down to BE=Chef's Beeeatch!
I disagree, alot of BE schematics call for high quality flora. So many BE's already have tons of great resources available. I've also seen a few BE's who went chef and are doing quite well for themselves.
Sleksheea wrote:
Well, the thing is... If BE's made a chef character, it's likely they would be unsuccessfull at making any more profit than they are as a BE if not less to none. This is because they would have to compete with old school chefs who have millions and millions of resources stashed away with uber uber stats. These chefs can make food sooooooo much better than a new chef without these uber specialty resources, and that is what the SWG player base wants... the best, and are willing to pay for it. Thus a BE turned chef is likely to fail, or be dissapointed. A chef turned BE on the other hand should have no problem as there is basically only 2 types of resource he needs to make suppliments, both of which he is likely to already have large quantities of. I use my own resources and a guild BE to make me schematics. I have 4 million flora and 1.5 million meat saved up just for suppliments at the moment. These resources yield 88 BSN's 118 INN's and 58 MSN's. I don't rely on other BE's to get me my suppliments because they can't handle my demand first off, and secondly they never seem to have the resources to make suppliments as good as I can get myself! And last of all, WHY should I pay a BE extra money for his product when I can cut him out of the picture and save so much money so easily? Ya, it sux for him, but it's not illeagle. It may be a flaw in the game but it's not an exploit. BE's can whine all they want about price of their suppliments, but I think they are forgetting how easy it is for a chef to just cut them out of the picture all together and the chef knows this.
Anyway it comes down to BE=Chef's Beeeatch!
The "old school" argument can be applied to any crafting class. It holds no water. All anyone needs is a good spawn then just harvest the whiz out of it. Anyone can become a master craftsman in a very short period of time and churn out a marketable product that will sell. The only thing that would cause a BE to fail at chef would be they don't want to spend every second of their playing time crafting and collecting resources. Some people enjoy it and some don't. There are many chefs already that were BE's first.
Your not cutting out the BE from your picture either. You're taking advantage of your guild BE. I'd like to think you're compensating your BE for their skill. You can't get those tissues without the guild BE regardless of your uber uber resources. If your guild BE knew you were calling them your beeeatch I wonder if they would continue making schematics for you. I'd tell you to pee up a rope.
Spazzers wrote:
Oh, Saitek I have a fourth run cooking for you. The HOBO's actually do work if they are drunk enough.