Doctor Archive

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hamhamthe3rd wrote:

well its been my experience that the rangers do not set the price. some doc offers XXX cpu then well thats what the rangers sell it for. rich docs set the prices more so than the rangers.

anyway no resource should be easy to gather, thats why its called a hunt. you must hunt for your water, hunt for your wheat, hunt for your berries and yes hunt for your meat.

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If you say that you must have honestly never try to hunt large quantites of Dwarf Nuna meat in Tat (5-10 units per creature, 6-10 creatures per lair). I agree that hunting shouldn't be easy, and mind you hunting avian meat, in terms of comparison, has NOTHING to do with harvesting some berries or wheat where the only thing you have to do is survey for a high % spot, drop a few harvies and come back 1-2 weeks later to get tons of the stuff. Now when you're in a profession that requires avian meat as one of the most important resources you must gather, and when you've only been able to hunt for the high quality stuff in planets that has such aridiculous rate drop you're more than allowed to complain.

After all you don't see Armorsmiths, Chefs or BEs going thru1/3 of all theangstwe doin terms ofcollecting animal resources to be able to keep crafting.

On another note, I do agree with you on the Docs being responsible for setting the prices. Supply and Demand at its finest. (I do however link how crazy the price wars between Docs can get due to the low rate on the drops).

Message Edited by EtosG on 12-08-2004 01:01 AM

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EtosG wrote:

My View:

In areas, some might and DO say that Doctor Crafting is fairly 'doable' (some even say easy), due to the massive % of work done IN factory

Now,You and Iknow there is more beneath the surface and being one of the big producers on Chimaera i know it's anything but easy.

However: You might say....infact i WOULD....the most difficult part of our crafting is not the experimentation, or the factory work, the schems...no no....it's the resourses!! If you want to become a great producer these days, not only do you have to work the economics to be able to afford CPU prices in the early days....but more importantly: You have to be able to find the damn resourses

This ISa challenge...i assure everyone, if this challenge wasnt in place, i wouldnt have any work to do. I'm on auto-pilot most of the time...as are most of us and while this might seem great, it would get boring after a while without any kind of continuing effort. Finding resourses is tough, finding the key resourses for a decent price in the right amount....it's tough.

So i say, maybe this is a good thing...maybe it gets us in gear and makes us work a bit

Only my view and clearly the economics of buying Meat does have it's issues...infact the whole Ranger/Scout market has serious inflation issues which need to be addressed.

But thats my two cents

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Agreed. It's the most difficult part, yep.It's the most challeging part, yep. I'm with you on all that. BUT I must remind you that this doesn't depend strictly on you and how much you're willing to commit yourself to being a great crafter and dedicatea lot of your playing time to finding thebest resouces. It depends on the spawns we get. And there is nothing I can do about this other thanWAIT.And if you're in aserver that since the game was released only had a very few spawns of high quality stuff and all of themin planets were it'sextremely hard to hunt, the challenge can eventually become afrustration.

Message Edited by Ledao on 12-07-2004 05:54 PM

Ok, guess this is a complicated topic, and definetely subject to different approaches, but here is my opinion on it ...

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Ledao wrote:

Nice post EtosG.

I certainly agree that if it weren't for the effort that I have to make sourcing resources, weeks would go by where I would have nothing pressing to do. The interesting part of being a crafter, after all, has very little to do with the crafting itself.

Right ...now what if there ISN'T any resource out there for like 6 months or so that is worth of your effort in trying to get it?

That being said, from a perspective of economic balance, I would really hate to see bigger avian drops. Buffs are already one of the most undervalued commodities in the game (compare the typical costs vs. typical retail prices of Docs and Armorsmiths, for instance. Our profit margin doesn't even hold a candle to theirs...), and increasing the availability of our ONE really hard-to-find resource would only exacerbate that problem.

I disagree. This really depends on the server you're on. In my server most Docs have at least a 100% profit in all enhance pack sales, most of the time even more. Perhaps that's not too much compared to AS or WS, but in my opinion that's fair and more than enough.

Further, increased avian drops would make it even easier for one large supplier to completely dominate the market. The extreme difficulty of getting even enough avian meat, let alone a surplus, causes market cycles that encourage competition. Options are opened up, because no one can keep selling packs made with any given avian meat for more than a few months.

Not necessary true either. While this would definitely make it easier forthe big crafters amass a bigger quantity of meat, it would ALSO help out the new crafter, that one that don't have millionsavailable in their bank accountto pay 150-400 cpu for the meat, or even those Docs that can't or don't want to buy from huntersbutactually prefers tohunt for themselves.

If the drops were increased to the level of herbivore meat, for instance, I would guess that total stagnation within the market would follow within two months. I know I won't be buying herbivore meat for a long, long time, after the 1.5 million units I got of our best-ever shift... Now imagine that happening with avian meat (and think of the widespread economic ramifications -- if I could get that much meat, I would no longer need to buy every decent shift; scouts and rangers would have their options for work reduced, and so forth...).

No one ever said to increase the drop rates to let's say ... what Pikets or Bols drop in Dant. All we are asking here is forSOME increase in the drop rate. Doesn't necessary have to be 15x what it is currently. Also rangers will never have their work reduced, since they are not dependable only on supplying Doctors with meat. There is a lot of crafters out there that need their services and will always be willing to pay a nice price for it. Plus, it's like you said, there is always going to be new Docs entering themed bizMarket, and those not only would end up offering work to hunters but would also benefit from that a lot more than they do today, since they would probably pay less and not worry about price wars.

A top notch shift comes along (like the one we're having now on Valcyn), and with higher drop rates, I'm able to pull in (let us say) 1.5 million units of avian meat.

With that much meat, I could single-handedly supply my entire server with buff packs for a period of... 6 months? But more importantly, if a new doctor comes along 4 or 5 months later and tries to enter the market with packs he's made with some newer (but not quite as good) avian meat, he'll be out of luck...

First of all, no crafter can single-hand an entire supply of enhance packs in a server.And this is just not feasible because it doesn't depends only on you and how much avian meat you have, but on the players knowledge of you and on thechoices they decide to make. So yeah, you could end up with 1.5 mill of avian, but that doesn't mean exactly that you would end up crafting more or that the demand for your wares would increase.Also, you contradict yourself here.Ifwehada lot more of this same high quality avian in the market it would actually be easier for the new crafters to enter the market, not harder. They wouldn't have to pay the crazy premium prices for avian meat. (Which by the way, they currently can't because most of the times they are outbided by the large supplier Docs).

(and to the original poster, try Devil Gulginaws on Talus, and normal Gulginaws on Corellia... Rori and Tat suck, but Talus and Corellia aren't *that* bad...)

Message Edited by Ledao on 12-07-2004 05:54 PM

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I'll be yellow...

Before I say anything else, here's where I'm coming from: I think that a change in the availability of the limiting factor (i.e. the thing we'll run out of first) of our most important and most profitable product would have significant consequences within the 'Doctor product and resource' subset of the economy most certainly, and it would likely also effect the larger economy in some not-insignificant manner. Self-interest aside, I think those "consequences" would be pretty negative, and I say that based on what I anticipate happening, and what I anticipate my own reactions (as one of the two largest suppliers on my server, with vendors on 3 planets at the moment) would be to increases in avian availability.

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Rere wrote:

Ok, guess this is a complicated topic, and definetely subject to different approaches, but here is my opinion on it ...

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Ledao wrote:

Nice post EtosG.

I certainly agree that if it weren't for the effort that I have to make sourcing resources, weeks would go by where I would have nothing pressing to do. The interesting part of being a crafter, after all, has very little to do with the crafting itself.

Right ...now what if there ISN'T any resource out there for like 6 months or so that is worth of your effort in trying to get it?

Although I have seen gaps of 6 months, or even more, between comparable "best-ever" caliber resources, I've never seen a gap of more than perhaps two months between usable avian spawns on Valcyn. Given the infrequency with which creature organics are updated in swgcraft though, I'd suspect there are some that slipped under the general radar... But I think a wait of on the order of two months is certainly reasonable if you expect to harvest your own avian meat.

Even with drop rates as they are, I'm pretty confident that the supply of avian meat will continue to exceed the demand for buffpacks at least on most servers, if not all. It's out there -- if you pay enough, you can always get it.

That being said, from a perspective of economic balance, I would really hate to see bigger avian drops. Buffs are already one of the most undervalued commodities in the game (compare the typical costs vs. typical retail prices of Docs and Armorsmiths, for instance. Our profit margin doesn't even hold a candle to theirs...), and increasing the availability of our ONE really hard-to-find resource would only exacerbate that problem.

I disagree. This really depends on the server you're on. In my server most Docs have at least a 100% profit in all enhance pack sales, most of the time even more. Perhaps that's not too much compared to AS or WS, but in my opinion that's fair and more than enough.

I think 100% is the correct number to work with for enhance packs, but our margin tends to be a lot lower on the other things that sell particularly well -- stim Bs, notably. I don't remember the precise numbers for Armorsmiths off the top of my head (I remember posting a detailed workup of the difference some time ago, but I'm not going to go look for the thread now...), but as I recall it was closer to 500% than 100%.

But when I say "undervalued", I'm not thinking of profit. I'm thinking of their cost to the player-base relative to other things. Think about a crate of stim Es. On Valcyn, 300k will get you a very nice set of non-enhanced composite armor, or it'll get you a crate of 50 70-charge Stim Es from me. Now, the composite armor is certainly more valuable than a crate of 5 stims, but think about the number of suits of composite armor that a doctor might burn through while still using that same crate of stims...

Further, increased avian drops would make it even easier for one large supplier to completely dominate the market. The extreme difficulty of getting even enough avian meat, let alone a surplus, causes market cycles that encourage competition. Options are opened up, because no one can keep selling packs made with any given avian meat for more than a few months.

Not necessary true either. While this would definitely make it easier forthe big crafters amass a bigger quantity of meat, it would ALSO help out the new crafter, that one that don't have millionsavailable in their bank accountto pay 150-400 cpu for the meat, or even those Docs that can't or don't want to buy from huntersbutactually prefers tohunt for themselves.

But here's the thing: the increased supply would flood the market. New and smaller docs would be undercut into oblivion. Plus, it would (in the long run) significantly increase the advantage of the big players by shunting a disproportionate amount of the increased general supply there way. (Buying works just like selling, the more people that know aboutyou, the more people that will sell meat to you-- every time there's an avian meat shift, all the small docs complain that they have plenty of money to spend, but can't find enough meat... The larger docs tend to have the opposite problem -- where to find the money to buy all the meat)

If the drops were increased to the level of herbivore meat, for instance, I would guess that total stagnation within the market would follow within two months. I know I won't be buying herbivore meat for a long, long time, after the 1.5 million units I got of our best-ever shift... Now imagine that happening with avian meat (and think of the widespread economic ramifications -- if I could get that much meat, I would no longer need to buy every decent shift; scouts and rangers would have their options for work reduced, and so forth...).

No one ever said to increase the drop rates to let's say ... what Pikets or Bols drop in Dant. All we are asking here is forSOME increase in the drop rate. Doesn't necessary have to be 15x what it is currently. Also rangers will never have their work reduced, since they are not dependable only on supplying Doctors with meat. There is a lot of crafters out there that need their services and will always be willing to pay a nice price for it. Plus, it's like you said, there is always going to be new Docs entering themed bizMarket, and those not only would end up offering work to hunters but would also benefit from that a lot more than they do today, since they would probably pay less and not worry about price wars.

This gets back to the general supply, or the total amount of avian meat in existence on the server. I'm 100% sure that it exceeds the total demand for buffpacks on Valcyn, and has for quite a long time. By the same token, the armorsmiths stopped really competing to buy hide a few months back, because they had been paying enough that the general supply was large enough that they all felt comfortable taking what would come easily. That is stagnation. Because of the ease of harvesting hides, I imagine there are a half dozen armorsmiths on my server who could continue to produce at their present rate for 6 months without harvesting or extracting a single resource.

A top notch shift comes along (like the one we're having now on Valcyn), and with higher drop rates, I'm able to pull in (let us say) 1.5 million units of avian meat.

With that much meat, I could single-handedly supply my entire server with buff packs for a period of... 6 months? But more importantly, if a new doctor comes along 4 or 5 months later and tries to enter the market with packs he's made with some newer (but not quite as good) avian meat, he'll be out of luck...

First of all, no crafter can single-hand an entire supply of enhance packs in a server.And this is just not feasible because it doesn't depends only on you and how much avian meat you have, but on the players knowledge of you and on thechoices they decide to make. So yeah, you could end up with 1.5 mill of avian, but that doesn't mean exactly that you would end up crafting more or that the demand for your wares would increase.Also, you contradict yourself here.Ifwehada lot more of this same high quality avian in the market it would actually be easier for the new crafters to enter the market, not harder. They wouldn't have to pay the crazy premium prices for avian meat. (Which by the way, they currently can't because most of the times they are outbided by the large supplier Docs).

Hehe... To some degree you're right -- no one person could every sell every enhance pack on any server. However, someone could certainly get a better than 80% market share if they had the time to devote to it. If I did pull in 1.5 million units of Avian meat during a shift (and if I had no job, and the time to deal with this, since this is a fantasy scenario...), I would immediately drop at least one vendor on every buildable planet that I don't already have a vendor on, and drop my prices.

Some other docs would stick around, sure... But it would be a lot less fun for all of us, in the long run. Competing over Avian meat is an interesting challenge -- one of the most interesting that I've found thus far in the game.

And I really do think that the drop rates are close to balanced. I think the combat revamp will actually help with that -- if everything becomes a bit harder to kill, the supply will fall again, and perhaps we'll find economic equilibrium.

(and to the original poster, try Devil Gulginaws on Talus, and normal Gulginaws on Corellia... Rori and Tat suck, but Talus and Corellia aren't *that* bad...)

Message Edited by Ledao on 12-07-2004 05:54 PM

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Lol. Ok. Here we go again ...

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Ledao wrote:

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Rere wrote:

Ok, guess this is a complicated topic, and definetely subject to different approaches, but here is my opinion on it ...

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Ledao wrote:

Nice post EtosG.

I certainly agree that if it weren't for the effort that I have to make sourcing resources, weeks would go by where I would have nothing pressing to do. The interesting part of being a crafter, after all, has very little to do with the crafting itself.

Right ...now what if there ISN'T any resource out there for like 6 months or so that is worth of your effort in trying to get it?

Although I have seen gaps of 6 months, or even more, between comparable "best-ever" caliber resources, I've never seen a gap of more than perhaps two months between usable avian spawns on Valcyn. Given the infrequency with which creature organics are updated in swgcraft though, I'd suspect there are some that slipped under the general radar... But I think a wait of on the order of two months is certainly reasonable if you expect to harvest your own avian meat.

Even with drop rates as they are, I'm pretty confident that the supply of avian meat will continue to exceed the demand for buffpacks at least on most servers, if not all. It's out there -- if you pay enough, you can always get it.

Again, what I was referring to here was to high quality buff pack. 900+ power. EtosG mentioned the challenge of crafting and getting resources. And for me, the challenge in this prof is to be able to make the best. It's to carefully stockpile all the other resources for over an year to be able to usethem with really high quality avian in order to make not a regular product, but an awesome one.

That being said, from a perspective of economic balance, I would really hate to see bigger avian drops. Buffs are already one of the most undervalued commodities in the game (compare the typical costs vs. typical retail prices of Docs and Armorsmiths, for instance. Our profit margin doesn't even hold a candle to theirs...), and increasing the availability of our ONE really hard-to-find resource would only exacerbate that problem.

I disagree. This really depends on the server you're on. In my server most Docs have at least a 100% profit in all enhance pack sales, most of the time even more. Perhaps that's not too much compared to AS or WS, but in my opinion that's fair and more than enough.

I think 100% is the correct number to work with for enhance packs, but our margin tends to be a lot lower on the other things that sell particularly well -- stim Bs, notably. I don't remember the precise numbers for Armorsmiths off the top of my head (I remember posting a detailed workup of the difference some time ago, but I'm not going to go look for the thread now...), but as I recall it was closer to 500% than 100%.

But when I say "undervalued", I'm not thinking of profit. I'm thinking of their cost to the player-base relative to other things. Think about a crate of stim Es. On Valcyn, 300k will get you a very nice set of non-enhanced composite armor, or it'll get you a crate of 50 70-charge Stim Es from me. Now, the composite armor is certainly more valuable than a crate of 5 stims, but think about the number of suits of composite armor that a doctor might burn through while still using that same crate of stims...

Your Stim Es are priced like mine. And I don't know what kind of costs you have to deal in Valcyn, but in Bloodfin (and we have a serious hyperinflation problem here) I still manage to make quite a decent profit selling them at that price. Agreed it might not be the 500% profit some other profs might make, but it's fair and more than enoughfor me. Plus a Doc here always have other options such as making most of his meds without certain advanced components.

Further, increased avian drops would make it even easier for one large supplier to completely dominate the market. The extreme difficulty of getting even enough avian meat, let alone a surplus, causes market cycles that encourage competition. Options are opened up, because no one can keep selling packs made with any given avian meat for more than a few months.

Not necessary true either. While this would definitely make it easier forthe big crafters amass a bigger quantity of meat, it would ALSO help out the new crafter, that one that don't have millionsavailable in their bank accountto pay 150-400 cpu for the meat, or even those Docs that can't or don't want to buy from huntersbutactually prefers tohunt for themselves.

But here's the thing: the increased supply would flood the market. New and smaller docs would be undercut into oblivion. Plus, it would (in the long run) significantly increase the advantage of the big players by shunting a disproportionate amount of the increased general supply there way. (Buying works just like selling, the more people that know aboutyou, the more people that will sell meat to you-- every time there's an avian meat shift, all the small docs complain that they have plenty of money to spend, but can't find enough meat... The larger docs tend to have the opposite problem -- where to find the money to buy all the meat)

Again I don't really agree with you here. When I started no one knew who I was, where I was, what I was buying or what I was selling. Still I did managed toget an incredible amount of avian meat once I dedicated myself to it. Let people know you're buying, use the Auction Channel, spam a little bit once a day if you have to, send emails to hunters, contact Guild leaders and let them know what you're after. Now, if the only thing you do is post a thread in the trade forums saying youre buying this and that, then sure, the well established Docs (that will be doing the exactly same thing as you) will end up getting most of the meat.

If the drops were increased to the level of herbivore meat, for instance, I would guess that total stagnation within the market would follow within two months. I know I won't be buying herbivore meat for a long, long time, after the 1.5 million units I got of our best-ever shift... Now imagine that happening with avian meat (and think of the widespread economic ramifications -- if I could get that much meat, I would no longer need to buy every decent shift; scouts and rangers would have their options for work reduced, and so forth...).

No one ever said to increase the drop rates to let's say ... what Pikets or Bols drop in Dant. All we are asking here is forSOME increase in the drop rate. Doesn't necessary have to be 15x what it is currently. Also rangers will never have their work reduced, since they are not dependable only on supplying Doctors with meat. There is a lot of crafters out there that need their services and will always be willing to pay a nice price for it. Plus, it's like you said, there is always going to be new Docs entering themed bizMarket, and those not only would end up offering work to hunters but would also benefit from that a lot more than they do today, since they would probably pay less and not worry about price wars.

This gets back to the general supply, or the total amount of avian meat in existence on the server. I'm 100% sure that it exceeds the total demand for buffpacks on Valcyn, and has for quite a long time. By the same token, the armorsmiths stopped really competing to buy hide a few months back, because they had been paying enough that the general supply was large enough that they all felt comfortable taking what would come easily. That is stagnation. Because of the ease of harvesting hides, I imagine there are a half dozen armorsmiths on my server who could continue to produce at their present rate for 6 months without harvesting or extracting a single resource.

Thatwe havemore of any type of quality avian meat inmost servers than the demand for enhance packs I most certainly agree with you, now I can also definitely assure youthat the demand for high quality enhance packs (900+ power) definitely surpass the amount of high quality avian meat available in most servers (Bloodfin is a very good example were this happens).

A top notch shift comes along (like the one we're having now on Valcyn), and with higher drop rates, I'm able to pull in (let us say) 1.5 million units of avian meat.

With that much meat, I could single-handedly supply my entire server with buff packs for a period of... 6 months? But more importantly, if a new doctor comes along 4 or 5 months later and tries to enter the market with packs he's made with some newer (but not quite as good) avian meat, he'll be out of luck...

First of all, no crafter can single-hand an entire supply of enhance packs in a server.And this is just not feasible because it doesn't depends only on you and how much avian meat you have, but on the players knowledge of you and on thechoices they decide to make. So yeah, you could end up with 1.5 mill of avian, but that doesn't mean exactly that you would end up crafting more or that the demand for your wares would increase.Also, you contradict yourself here.Ifwehada lot more of this same high quality avian in the market it would actually be easier for the new crafters to enter the market, not harder. They wouldn't have to pay the crazy premium prices for avian meat. (Which by the way, they currently can't because most of the times they are outbided by the large supplier Docs).

Hehe... To some degree you're right -- no one person could every sell every enhance pack on any server. However, someone could certainly get a better than 80% market share if they had the time to devote to it. If I did pull in 1.5 million units of Avian meat during a shift (and if I had no job, and the time to deal with this, since this is a fantasy scenario...), I would immediately drop at least one vendor on every buildable planet that I don't already have a vendor on, and drop my prices.

In other words a person would have to dedicate his real life to this. So I don't really see it happening.

Some other docs would stick around, sure... But it would be a lot less fun for all of us, in the long run. Competing over Avian meat is an interesting challenge -- one of the most interesting that I've found thus far in the game.

Once again, yes it's challeging and fun, but it can become a frustration once you hit the 4-5 month of looking around for any avian that might get you a 900+ pack.

And I really do think that the drop rates are close to balanced. I think the combat revamp will actually help with that -- if everything becomes a bit harder to kill, the supply will fall again, and perhaps we'll find economic equilibrium.

In other words a person would have to dedicate his real life to this. So I don't really see it happening.

(and to the original poster, try Devil Gulginaws on Talus, and normal Gulginaws on Corellia... Rori and Tat suck, but Talus and Corellia aren't *that* bad...)

Message Edited by Ledao on 12-07-2004 05:54 PM

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And wow, that's a long post. Cheers to anyone who got this far! Hehe.

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Ok, Im done too, lol. This post looks like a rainbow. But anyways, you got some valid points and it's pretty obvious that we not only have different perspectives on the subject as well as different experiences within our own servers. So I'll tell you what, sell me a couple hundred K's of 900 OQ/PE meat from your server, find a way to get them to Bloodifn and I promise I'll shut up.

Message Edited by Rere on 12-07-2004 09:30 PM

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Jirob1 wrote:

Its just a matter of how much you offer. I managed to get 100k + from Tat avian Spawn in past (not hunted 1 nuna myself.. grin). And sure I'll get 200k Avian from Talus within spawns.. if you offer enough cpu hunters will go out. especially since solo missions got nerfed. They do pretty good money running missions and getting payed 200-300 cpu.

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Not really. At one point I was offering 400 cpu for it, and advertising it not only on the boards,but as well as inMos Eisley to try to get the newbies to hunt for it and during a 2 weeks spawn I only manage to get less than 70k of it.

Also, even if I did manage to get 100k of it, it would most certainly had not been enough to keep crafting till this day, since that was the best meat we ever had and it's been6 months old. (Notice that we haven't seen not even a similar spawn since that day).

As for solo missions being nerfed, I don't know what kind of impact that it have caused yet, so I wouldn't know for sure. Guess you're right though, it will eventually get more people interested in hunting.

Message Edited by Rere on 12-08-2004 06:00 AM

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Rere wrote:

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Jirob1 wrote:

Its just a matter of how much you offer. I managed to get 100k + from Tat avian Spawn in past (not hunted 1 nuna myself.. grin). And sure I'll get 200k Avian from Talus within spawns.. if you offer enough cpu hunters will go out. especially since solo missions got nerfed. They do pretty good money running missions and getting payed 200-300 cpu.

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Not really. At one point I was offering 400 cpu for it, and advertising it not only on the boards, but as well as in Mos Eisley to try to get the newbies to hunt for it and during a 2 weeks spawn I only manage to get less than 70k of it.

Also, even if I did manage to get 100k of it, it would most certainly had not been enough to keep crafting till this day, since that was the best meat we ever had and it's been 6 months old. (Notice that we haven't seen not even a similar spawn since that day).

As for solo missions being nerfed, I don't know what kind of impact that it have caused yet, so I wouldn't know for sure. Guess you're right though, it will eventually get more people interested in hunting.

Message Edited by Rere on 12-08-2004 06:00 AM

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So far the solo-group nerf only has one certainty, we will never again have to hear:

"200 cpu?? BAH! I can make more doing Janta missions"

I'm not happy about the nerf, but that is the silver lining