Chef Archive

I made all my customer's orders in stacks back when the food factories were spitting out single uses instead of stacks and I'll never do it again... My wrist still hurts, it was boring, tedious and not FUN

I would absolutely go for a stack only environment IF:

The stack sizes could be made as large as crate sizes (50+)

Here's why:

Let's say players play for 2 hours at a time (Not counting how often).

In the current system:

Skill Buff:
Average uses: 7
Average Duration: 20 min
Duration of Stack: 2 hours

Stat Buff:
Average Uses: 7
Average duration: 40 min
Number uses at a time: 2
Duration of Stack: 2 hours

So that's 1 stack per play session.

Just like no player wants to buy a gun that wears out after each time they go hunting, no player wants to buy the stacks of food they need before they go hunting. And storage without crates restricts the amount you can hold for later.

Only selling singles, I would be back to a struggling novice, barely able to pay my harvester maintenance.

SV asked who could turn a profit by selling stacks. My simple answer is: I wouldn't try. Since that's not one of the available options on his thread, I didn't respond to it. From a user standpoint, I can't see someone carrying and using food if it only came in stacks. It's too big a hassle to revisit a vendor constantly, not to mention the inventory space lost to carry 15 stacks of Brandy.

Food is a bulk-sale item. Selling by individual stacks is a niche-market system. The two are fundamentally incompatible.

Devil's advocate here...

There has been a lot of discussion of sales and availability of BE additives from those currently producing new products on test.

I liken it to a Wine analogy.

With each batch of wine produced, there is always a nice "Reserve" batch which is marginally better (but often 2x-3x more expensive) than the mass produced bottles. (Chianti Classico "Gold Label" Ruffino comes to mind...). Do you not buy the non-reserve wine and sit around waiting for the store to re-stock the reserve, or will you buy the mass produced wine, knowing it is good, but also try out the "Reserve" when you see it?

In the SWG world, most customers have grown accustomed to buying only "Reserve" quality foods and drinks. Under these new changes, due to availability, cost etc of BE additives, will people be dissappointed to not find crates upon crates of Reserve products? Can we survive making only regular wine in bulk and limiting our premium wines to individual stacks?

I didn't want to comment on the 'official' thread because I operate in a TC environment where there are at most 3 chefs who make food consistantly, but I'm reaching a point of needing to make crates simply to keep up with demand. There is one guy who always buys out all my Accarragm and Garrmorl about every other day.

And I've discovered in practice that you can't really consistantly use casks or barrels for all your crates. If you want 'bulk' you'll have to settle for small/large glasses which is really disappointing. I just can't get the trim in the quantities I need, and well, barrels are broken.

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Sykes wrote:

In the SWG world, most customers have grown accustomed to buying only "Reserve" quality foods and drinks. Under these new changes, due to availability, cost etc of BE additives, will people be dissappointed to not find crates upon crates of Reserve products? Can we survive making only regular wine in bulk and limiting our premium wines to individual stacks?

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I still don't plan on selling "reserve" quality food in single stacks. Maybe crates of 10 instead of 25, but never single stacks. They simply don't last long enough.

As a novice, I sold individual stacks only and had to run about a dozen missions a night in order to barely pay for my personal harvester maintenace and save for my first factory, which was a monster investment when your starting out.

Once I finally afforded my factory, I was able to make very short factory runs, sell those and reinvest the profits into buying resources to make a little larger factory runs etc. until i was finally able to afford the 150k for a heavy farm. It wasn't until I had obtained master and had 3 factories and 2 heavy farms where I can actually say that I started noticing a profit from my business and it was self supporting. It was a very long and arduous climb. I would hate the thought of going back down again to struggling for my very survival. i've worked too hard for that.

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Ezran wrote:

I still don't plan on selling "reserve" quality food in single stacks. Maybe crates of 10 instead of 25, but never single stacks. They simply don't last long enough.

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So can you survive like that with the way it is today? Will your profits still be there?

In retrospect to my original response, I will say I can survive under these conditions. I am in a unique situation though as I have 2 PABE at my personal disposal. One is even on Euro time and I rarely see him in game so he can produce stuff while I am offline.

Will I ever be able to produce enough "Reserve" quality stuff to run the little guy out of business? I certainly hope that never happens. There needs to be a median between what is out there today in terms of costs of resources and credits of BE products, and what we are really asking for, which is BE additives being available all of the time in the builk we want.

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sciguyCO wrote:

SV's question scares me because I can only see a few possible dev plans that would lead to it:

3) Food only being competitive with BE additives (by their nature a non-mass-produced commodity).

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