Chef Archive

I've been thinking about pricing alot lately, and since gettng master last night its about all I been doing since my facories aren't working right. Anyway, I came up with a system both me and almost all of my customers agree is fair. I DO work with crates, even with them bugged as they are now, not making stacks. I charge for resources, time spent with components, and general effort I had to put into that particualar item to get it going. The prices are based solely on resources and overhead (factories, harvesters etc).

For example, if I were to make the almond krispie things, which take 10 resources at an average of 4.5 market cost on Bloodfin per resource I'd charge roughly 120 credits for a single use item in a crate, makinga crate of 25 cost 3000 credits. If it were a master chef item which required many components, the base charge would go up accordingly (I don't have a method for this yet, but its usually 100-200 credits per factory run for components. once factories are stable I'll probably see how much it actaully costs to run the components and charge accordingly).

This is how I work crates. Yes, the prices are lower than most Chefs would agree to charge, however, the crates almost always sell, and you can always adjust prices later on for more popular items.

For extra revenue, I will make stacks by hand. These are done exactly as crates are done, except I add 100-500 credits per use after the first, depending on the skill required to make. So an entres II stack would be the base + 200 x (stack size - 1). Anda master chef item would be base + 500 x (stack size - 1).

So far these prices seem to work well so I plan on keeping this the same way until I or someone else thinks of a better way.

Charging 1500 for items like tat sunburnm BoH etc is fine if you are on a server where you can get awy with it.

Personally, with spices going @ 500/600cr, foraged foods for a lot less, the most I sell ANYTHING for is 700cr a stack, and even then, sales trickle in unless I fill Bestine Bazaar with sunburns - they sell out in a few hours.
Even at those prices, people complain "thats not long, spices are 10mins and docs buff me for 2hours" - how the hell are we supposed to compete with that ?

Its called Market Forces.

If you can charge 3200 for sunburns, charge it. If you can only get 600, then that's what you have to settle for.

All servers have their own scale of economy, so you can't really compare across them.

Whatever, I'm not a troll. I charge peoplewhat I would be willing to pay for our worthless food. If other people are willing to pay 1000 credits per use for your trash, it's only because they have so much money that it doesn't matter what you charge them. For me, I make enough money to get by. I don't need to buy anything new, just maintain what I have.

Yeah, sunburns are so worthless I'm surprized people will actually buy them from you at 100 credits/charge. I have to pay people to take mine off my hands.

I just decided to go with 10x the resources it takes to make the item... these prices turn out to be VERY fair in comparison with spices, the uses I give people, and their buff rates.

This means my Ormachek with 5 uses goes for 500cr. If it has 6 uses, it'll still be 500cr. It uses the same amount of resources, so I cannot fathom charging people by uses just because I chose to click a few extra buttons for some more uses on an item.

*shrugs*

I talked to other chefs on my server and they all agree with this pricing scheme. I don't want to push them out of business, but I also don't want my prices so low that I A) don't make a profit and B) log on every night and have to restock BY HAND all of the items on my vendor and barely make enough to purchase more resources.

Resources on our server go for about 5 to 6x per for the good stuff. I have several harvesters and my factory to maintain. When they announce how sales tax will be handled on vendors... I'll have that to cope with as well, which means tacking on extra prices to my vendors to handle the tax.

Sunburns are the exception, of course. And ormachek is not entirely useless, because it gets rid of the side effect of sunburn.

Foodist I don't want to get into a flamefest or argument with you, but pleaseif your *not* a troll, don't post crap like that about other Chef's.

We have MANY quality buff foods that have great applications in the game. The problem is you have to be willing look beyond the 'buff list' numbers and look at the inner working of stats in the game.

I'm in complete agreement that a +100 Constitution buff just doesnt look impressive to me. And for a large chunk of the player base, its not impressive to them either.

However, to the person thats 50 Constitution short of being able to put on his nice set of armor, its worth a LOT.

In order to be a successful Chef & businessman, you have to understand the interplay and intracacies of stats and how different types of players need different types of foods, and market yourself and your foods accordingly.

Its true that as a Chef you will never be like the Shaman from EQ that everyone seems to want us to be, able to buff huge stats for long durations. If thats the reason you got into the profession you might as well drop out now.

If however you wanted to get into it to be a merchant, and sell product, then this class has lots of potential.

--Ssauron

Yeah our food is good for helping folks put on armor. I know this full well, as I sell huge quantities of food to an armorsmith friend. It's also good for pets. Very few of our foods are good for what they're supposed to do, though, which is to provide buffs to players.

Two types of businesses, depending on how you play. You don't charge your prices on depending on how much you put into it, you charge your prices solely on the basis of what people are willing to pay. Usually people who do this just want dough and have their own concerns.

The other type is the one where people like to have steady customers and like to help them out. They only charge what they need to charge, get less satisfaction out of the money and more out of being a friend to a steady base of customers.

-- YP

Well I finally uploaded my new prices if anyone wants to critique them... my big basis was mostly 10x per resource. I charge a little more if I get a good amount of servings on a popular item and I charge slightly less for HAM-buffing items since they don't seem to be popular.

http://members.cox.net/liv/menu.html

I don't see anything wrong with charging per charge rather than per resource - a weaponsmith will up the price on a weapon with higher stats, becasue like food with higher charges, it's rarer and more desireable.

A weaponsmith or armorsmith that sells pre-sliced gear will charge more for an item with a high value slice, even though it still takes the same WUK/AUK to do it..

It's all about added-value to me. I spent a lot of time, money and resources on obtaining master chef, so I expect to gain some compensation for that in terms of what I charge. Docs on my server will pay 10credits per resource for high quality organics, and they need only one of the four stats to be high (OQ) - to make the best food we need all four stats, so I can't imagine selling anything for less than that..

Hmm I have no trouble finding decent organics for 2-3 cr.I never pay more than 5.Docs can overpay if theywant, that's got nothing to do with me. Also, I have these little things called harvesters. Quite handy - I generally get resources out of them for half a credit per.