Droid Engineer Archive

It was a dark DE night... no Customers in sight (like ... uhm... cant remember... definitley more than a Month), walkin around in masses ofpotentional Costumers (wich never will be, but the idea is that what matters) a little "beep" came in....

Costumer: "Hi, are u Selling Droids"?

Me: Sure! How can i help u?

C: I would like to buy a R2 Droid, with an 110 Cap. Medical Module and a Chem/Food Crafting Module.

Meeuphoric) Not a problem, will be done in max. 20 min!

C: How much do u charge?

Me: 9k all together.

C: Really?

Me: Yea, i think its a medium price.

C: That price sux, scumbag. Dont take all the money from the People. YOU MAKE ENOUGH MONEY. Fu*** DE's are the MoneyBag-Scum [never heard that Word before] from the galaxy.

Me: I think u dont want tobuy my droid right?

C: Yea i found a DE that will sell me the same droid for 5k.

Me:/Ignore

I think, this event took me to a cross-way....

1st Option: Chancel your Account... Decision:Nope, SWG rocks anyway... maybe... sometimes...

2nd Option: Get a new Profession.... Decision:NAH, dont wanna be a Main Stream r00l0r

3rd Option: DDP.. DISCOUNT-DROID-PRICES

Decision: Thats a Rodger Sir!

so i took all my Prices and throw them just into the trash can and made them like "R2 with Medical Module and Crafting station LESS THAN 6k!"... k... now i had 8 costumers in 20 min. And wounds at my Fingers. I made 50k in less than 2h.

Now what do u think? Is it worth to destroy the Droid Market with Discount Prices like "Derlivrians DDP" or shall we all take the same Prices?

I am not sure how i should manage it. When i start thinkin the first thing in my Mind is a "Architect"... they get nearly a Million Credits for 1 PA Hall... yea they have to get some Ressources but the problem is, nearly every Architect is charging the same Prices.

At the DE's its another thing... i saw vendors full of R2's Probots etc. all about 40 or 30k. Than i heard about the guy who sells them for 5k... what shall i do now? Please help me in this Endless-Story-of-Priceing.

kill em...thats what i would do...

Normally what i tell a customer if they have a problem with my prices is to go find someone else who will make a crappier droid, and buy it from them. Or to go make it themselves. Normally 10 mins later they /tell me back with an apology, or just decide to deal with me anyway.

Honestly i think people who are selling r2's and everything else for 5k needs to be removed in a violent fashion.

Considering cost of a normal R2 is between 5k-6k without labour or taking into account factory time/usage...

Ithink it sad you value your time in gamethat cheaply. I put the resrouce cost at about 8200, figuring 3 cr a unit. Then we take on factory and power costs and physical time ig as well. That to me is shear lunacy and I believe that thankfully you'll burn out on DE soon.

WHen told the same thing as yo9u by two diff customers, neither _could_ supply me with a name. Customers lie ig far more then one might think.

I sometimes turn away more folks then I make customers out of. I choose to deal wiht ppl who value my time at what I value it at. Those folks I make customers and sometimes friends out of. Those that think my time==**edit** then they buy a droid from you.

Happy clicking!

I sell those droids for 20k on Eclipse... and i honstly thought i was cheap

Nostradamus Smyth

I wouldn't worry too much.

Anyone who sells anything for less than cost won't be in business long.

The problem is, it is hard to price stuff. This isn't a free market, it's just an overlysimplified simluation.

In RL you can check the paper and see that a new low end car might cost about 10k, the medium might be 20k-30k, and the higher end might be 40k-50k and up.

Most people don't know how much to charge for something. There's no info in this game and alot of uninformed artisans. Most of them don't even bother to figure out how much it 'cost' them to make something. So they'll sell it for some ridiculous price and think they're doing OK. Or they're just grinding and don't care how much they make off something they'd just throw away anyway.

But they're not OK. And they're killing the rest of us.

Remember when seeker droids switched to 10 uses? They shut off the BH terminals after that happened so players could sell them all. The 1 useseekerssold on theterminals for like 500cr I think. I still see dummies selling 10 use seekers for 500k. I think they should have shut off the BH terminals before the change, so artisans realized how muchto charge, then they might charge a resonable price for something that does 10x the work the old ones did. I not talking about just ripping people off, but would you be willing to pay 2x or 3x the cost for something that does 10x what theold ones did???

I cant even dream of selling my droids that cheap. I sell adv r2's for 30k. My time and life is way too valuable for a 5k r2 unit..lol..

Just send them on there way and take pride in your profession..

Woha... yesterday i made more than 120k with my DDP, i think i will get it on that way.

(btw my prices are calculated that way: Allover-Ressourcen x 4,6 = Costumer Price -25%=PA Price)

I don't go by the walmart approach simply because it's so time-consuming to to build the dang things even with a factory. If I wanted to sell for 2-4 cpu I'd mine, that's what resources go for. My droids sell just fine around 10cpu. If I made my prices any cheaper I wouldn't be able to keep up with demand and I'd get mighty tired of building them. I've only had two customers ever complain about pricing, I have had some say 'xxx' has them for cheaper than that. Half of them came back and bought one of mine when 'xxx' didn't have it in stock, or didn't really exist.

I value my game-time as well as I want to explore too and not tend shop all day. Once you hit millions, what's it going to be spent on?

I do not discuss pricing on the forums, but I do think that either you will burn out on droid crafting soon, or you're someone who just loves sitting around crafting droids for back-alley cash and doesn't want to pursue any other part of SWG.

If that's the case, more power to you - just don't come to the forums and try to get a competitive droid pricing thread going. It will only turn into a "my prices are better than yours" thread.

Be happy.

If you have a problem with another DE selling as low as you simply take your customer orders and then order than number from the other DE - he will bust his gut making them and then all you have to do is pay him his pittance and sell it on to the customer at a healthy profit with 0 agrovation to you

(this is the merchant approach, not the advancing DE approach)

I doubt any customer will stop to check the deed creator and once its tamed theres no way to know (yet). The only problem is that you dont know that what you got given was exactly what your ordered (I guess theother DE could stiff you on the specs if he knew what you were doing and wasnt happy with it)

I originally priced my droids based on what other people were selling them for. I'm now rolling out a more scientific approach, which will end up have droids with odd prices. I have a formula that bases the price off a certain cpu (4), plus extra cpu for rare resources, a levy based on the tech level, number of required components and number of identical components. I also have an extra column on my spreadsheet that allows me to adjust prices accordingly (ie: if I'm having a sale I can knock of any amount from the droid and it updates everything for me). This will probably roll out tonight when I put a new batch of probots up on my vendor. It's more fair to the consumer, and hopefully will increase the number of droids sold.

Thereare plenty of credits out there. I know i went to endor last night and the group I was with I made 30k in less than two hours. So just giving in to peopIe that complain is no excuse to ruin the droid economy on your server. That same person would not pass up a deal on a weapon that would cost them 10k that will eventually break.

Also I see the other crafters like the weaponsmiths who put a markup on thier goods so they dont end up working for nothing or close to it. DE's should be no different.

What really pointed out to me how flawed this idea can be was when we had a thread in here a couple of weeks ago asking how much money you have. Someone like Madcat911 who always charges next to nothing showed that she had almost no money where the other DE's that did not sell thier droids to the low bidders were running a profitable business and had a reasonable amount of credits. And that is the way it should be in a crafters society.

I am not here to be critical of anyone because we all have our ideas what we consider succesfull. But when they add more content (and they will) to this game or put more things in with prices that will match the economy (Like vehicles and spacecrafts) I fully expect the people that undercut the sales of thier fellow professions will be the first ones complaining, "I can not afford a 10 million credit spacecraft" or something to that affect.

Best of luck to you Derlivrian.