Chef Archive
Thread: Would this chef/BE arrangement be fair?
If you can double your money by using BE components (and you can, these things friggin rock), you still double your money whether he is making more for his work than you are. You are still makeing more than you would have been. If you resent the BE for taking time out of his day to make you some components, when he could be making uber pets and selling them for insane prices and making pet stims and STILL make more money than he ever would selling tissues even for the new uber foods, then don't buy BE components.
Of course, you go that rout, and find out that all your customers are perfectly happy paying 4x as much for food that is only 2x better, and you might change your mind. And if not, you will probably have to quit being a Chef for anything but roleplay value, or because you like to make cake *shrugs*.
Personally, I despise gathering meat, it makes me sick, I hate it, the system is stupid, and I don't do it. So, how do I supply my customers? I don't. I have one tailor I keep supplied in tissues and that is it, the rest of my customers are case-by-case-if-I-can-manage-to-get-to-you situations. Why? Because I want to have fun. The game itself sucks, so I roleplay, and I have fun doing that. It really is a blast playing the resident mad-scientist making crazy pets and whatnot.
So, I myself will only be selling chef food schematics, because I don't have the time to go out and gather what is needed to make the tissues myself. I already have two chefs on board with this. I believe I will sell for 100 per tissue, so your final cost per tissues 900 instead of 800, much better than paying 3k per tissue, isn't it? I know a lot of people who are more than happy to do it that way.
And again, on the 2:1 chef foods thing, it doesn't matter who works more, it is if you both still make more cash than you normally would have. Lets say you can sell unenhanced crate A for 50k, or enhanced crate B for 300k, if you have to give up 1 enhanced crate in order to make this work, how much do you lose? Nothing, really, you actually tripled your money. Because otherwise you would have had 2 unenhanced crates that sell for a total of 100k, and you lost out on 200k profits.
And some of those foods, if you guys are smart, you could sell for well over 500k per crate, especially the experiment and assembly foods.
Get smart here, don't whine that so and so is making more money, work out a deal so that you make more money than you normally would!!
Frankly, if you want to compare profit margines, a master commando with a droid and a little CH (I *think* you can still have enough points to get over a cl 23 pet in CH) with his uber pet can easilly make 100k an hour, probably more I don't know. And if he gathers meat while he does that and sells for 20cpu (which is fast becoming the new standard, ugh!!) he can collect 15-20k meat and make another 400k right there. That is basically 500k an hour, as long as he has a buyer (and between BE's, Chefs, and medics, he always has a buyer). And what does it cost him? A couple hours work to make up for his uber armor and uber weapons and uber pet.
So, don't go comparing professions, its retarted, and you'll just piss yourself off like I think you have done. Keep in mind that BE is the hardest and most costly crafting profession to master, give him some credit for his skills. It was also for the first 6 months or so about the least rewarding of professions, and they desearve their due. Chefs, you had it as bad or worse than BE's, and now it is your turn to have your due, and you are very much getting it. Don't turn sour grapes. If you don't want to make a profit on this stuff fine, but dont' whine and complain when others do. It makes no sense.
Well if your charging 40k for a crate I apologize. But your even trade only works for simple foods. Still your talking 70 easy to obtain resources per tissue since there all generic for the brandy. So 80 x 25=2000 resources per crate 40,000/2000= 20 cpu gross on your product.
But as I doubt your chef is making small glass stacks. Unless he runs a special run just to give you drink to save his profits.
If he's doing casks his total resource use is 270 ive added the trim resources in. So 270 X 25=5750 resources.
Nikii_Nightstrider wrote:
And BEs simply dont want to sell their product. I cant just say, Id like to order 100 crate of broad spectrum please. Well I can but I'll get laughed at.
Nonsense. I stock Broad Spectrum at 40k per crate of 25. Yes, it's not as profitable as pet stims and vit packs, but it's less hassle to makebecause you don't need the med components.
Funnily enough, the two chefs who've expressed an interest are both saying they don't want to pay cash, they'd sooner have a trade deal. One of them is still skilling up and would sooner pay in kind than tie up liquid funds, the other is setting up a large scale business and wants guaranteed supply contracts in place.
Quite frankly, I'd sooner just take the money and hand over the crates.
(And make schematics for 50k? No thanks, you can pay me 1.6 million for the 40 crates and save yourself the trouble of collecting 20k of meat and tying up your factory.)
I'm sorry I wasn't clearer in my original post, perhaps this thread wouldn't have gotten quite so ugly (well, ugly for the chef forums, at least).
My original suggestion of a partnership was based on the fact that there is no incentive for me to sell my product because I don't need the money. I can sell two crated tissues for 25K, I can sell a high-quality cl10 pet for 100K, and I can sell a top-quality Kimo for 1 million. Each of these items takes less than 100 meat. Now how much do you want me to sell a crate of chef additives that will require me to gather over 1000 high-quality meat for?
Some chefs will find BEs to make cheap schematics for them. I can see the more CH minded MBEs seeing this as an easy supplemental income source. Others will find BE/Rangers that have enough meat to meet any needs. But I think that you will find the majority of BEs will not see the amount of money you are offering as worthy of their time since they know they can make many times that in other ways. I have millions of credits and nothing to spend it on, quite literally. I'm not trying to brag, just trying to point out why a barter system based on getting something that I do need, specific food and drinks, might be your best chance of getting what you need, BE additives.
Im kinda kinky an all but I cant really say that being enslaved to my BE to be able to perform my profession has ever really entered my dreams 
I think the backlash of this forced barter is going to be there are going to be a whole lot of BE/Chefs.
apulieus wrote:
As for schematics with chefs providing materials, I would expect to pay 50 percent so 25k a heavy or 1 million for the schematic in my arrangement. I'm not sure why anyone would do it for less, you just devalue your profession if you do.
It's called interdependence, and it's a key concept that the devs built the game around.
my 2 cents worth.
I'm a long time MBE and closeing in on Master Chef. As it happens, as a BE, i've been in the same situation a lot of chef's find themselves in for a long time. I used to make my money selling high quality pet stims. To make these in high quality, a number of medical sub componenets are required. My general opinion is that:
1) I'd value reliability and long term cooperation more than the price. The timesI didnt have a regular Master Doc supplier it was always a hassel to figure out where to get the next set of crates to be able to keep working. When i did have a regular supplier, my own work became so much easier since it took a lot of uncertainty and hassel out of the whole deal.
2) I personally see no problem selling schematics, its simply a matter of who will do the work of collecting the meat / resources, and base the final price on this. Personally I'd much rather sell a cheap schematic to a chef than run around for hours trying to find high quality meat, do the factory run etc. Making the schematic will give me a little extra income and not eat up time i could use on something else.
It seems that, right now, the BE's have "the upper hand" in the sense, that for a chef to produce high quality materials he needs a BE. BE's on the other hand have several diffrent goods they can turn to. Heck untill now i doubt that theres any BE's out there that have made much selling supplements to chefs, i used to make the schematics for free because the chefs would'nt be able to justify a fair price for the final product anyways.
I'm guessing that Chef's and BE's alike will find themselves split intothree camps. First the ones flexible enough to make a good, long term deal with a counterpart, where both feel pretty happy and are able to feel they make a fair profit for their work. Second, those wholack the flexibility to find a good working arrangement, and thus end up doing little to no business with the other profession. Third is the ones who are BE/Chefs or who have access to both professions.
Number two, most likely, won't do too well long term. They'll be unable to compete effectively, number three has the potential of doing really well.. but they will at the same time have to do all the work on thier own, members of the first group are the ones most likely to be in business half a year from now.
Templar1865 wrote:
We don't have a "stranglehold" on any profession, though.
Sadly atm, that is incorrect. People always want the best. With BE ingredients doubling chef food instead of "enhancing" chef food and chef experimentation being reduced to nil there, BEs have more influence over our products than we do. And currently many seem to be using that to their advantage anyway possible. I used to have a working arrangement with my BE. I bought supplements prepatch. I never asked for schems. I bought stuff he harvested that he didnt need. Now instead of BEs wanting a price for their product they want food in amounts they could never possibly use or % of chefs profits. Without them, we can still sell suff for the moment because its new. But 2/3 of my nonBE brandy sales are followed up with...isnt there better stuff than this and an order to be putting on the waiting list for it. When people only want what stuff enhanced by BE and BEs refuse to just sell product, yea thats a stranglehold IMO.
To be most effective, a profession must rely to some extent on another profession. A combat professional needs armorsmiths and weaponsmiths (and chefs and doctors). Now certain crafters look to chefs to be more competent. Creature handlers will come to chefs to improve their pets. Does this give chef a stranglehold on those professions? No. Will a person be a more successful creature handler if she uses chef pet food? Absolutely.
The issue isnt so much about interpendence. You dont hear chefs screaming about buying trim for casks on this level. Many BEs dont seem to understand (or maybe they do and thats the problem) that chefs are utterly helpless in their experimentation now. When someone with 8 experimentation points and crappy resources is making almost identical stuff as me with great resources and 12 experimentation points, theres a problem (go revamp!). Then you have BEs effect have about doubling our buff size (while we are increasing them like only 30pts with experimention yall are adding 200 pts of buff and thats just nutrition. If you want to talk about quantity or fillings its even worse. We can spend 10 pts on many things and have it move ONE point.. or even none on some. Yet toss in an additive and voila...its more than the chef could do if he made 2-3 stacks. Thats too much control. Armorsmiths need tailors. But the cloth the tailormakes doesnt double or triple the effectiveness of the armor. The armorsmiths tailor is not what determines his product quality. You dont hear very many hollering about the tailored components for casks like you are BE components. Why do you think that is? We need them too ya know. And the artisan parts once barrels are fixed.We are using tailored components to greatly increase our uses per stack. Yet tailors arent going around saying...hmmm well Ill give you 1crate of trim for one crate of casked BEbrandy. I havent had one tell me they would make me trim for 50% of my profits yet either. They are selling their product to make their profit which we in turn use in our product to make our profit. BEs are the only people doing this. And the only reason they can get away with it is because of the massive effects they have on food. Which brings us back to the stranglehold thing.
And you are out of your mind if you think creature handlers will look to chefs to improve their pets. I have had ONE order for chef petfood. A creature handler isnt worried about buffing his 12k ham petfor 500 health once an hour. If anyone buys the pet food itll be non-chs with since they have very low HAM pets. Mostly all I get is people wanting to buy the petfood for themselvesbecause the devs decided to not allow any "food" items to buff HAM.
Astrok, the reasone I'm sure you've gotten offers from chefs about exchanges is trades is due to the fact they're broke.
They're probably new chefs who just finished master or maybe are only high enough to do brandy. To do volume on any crafting proffession takes a serious outlay of cash. Havesters, factories resources etc. Much less being able to buy a run of additives.
I have a BE he supplies by the crate and i just pay him cash 45k for light and medium additives and 50k for heavy additives.
Ironically I had a harder time finding a tailor to do trim. Course I didn't start looking for one I figured I would do barrels now I have a lot of materials for a broken schematic.
Scorus wrote:
Glad we can edit finally...
Okay, I was thinking of trying to find a chef willing to go with the following arrangement:
I supply the chef with two crates (plus a few to experiment with) of BE components in return for one crate of something (brandy, most likely) made with one of those crates of components.
Think that sounds fair?
Message Edited by Scorus on 02-13-2004 03:53 PM
I dont understand the flames this idea has recieved and this is why.Chef makes non bio brandy and sells for 100k. Cost to make is 50k so profit being 50K. Chefmakes bio brandy and sells for 300k. Cost to make still 50k but profit is 250k or 5 times original profits. So now chef has to pay bio 33 of every 100 crates produced. This cuts into profit...so lets look at the numbers.. Total profit on 100 crates of non bio brandy is 5 Million credits. Total profit on 66 crates of bio brandy is 16.5 Million or 3.3 times the amount of non bio. Yehaa chef rejoice!!! but no some complain???.. Now assume bio sells his crates for 300k as well..he would make 9.9 Million or roughly 66% of what the chef would profit. So why is this guy getting flamed? Forget who does more work...forget who has more factory runs... the fact is at a 1 food for 2 bio deal is nothing but profitable for everyone involved..including the consumer whoare blessed with the magic these 2 classes create...