Droid Engineer Archive
Thread: Underselling the bane of our lives
MachineZed wrote:
Shian, heres a solution for you, I am assuming you have a couple Mil in your bank (Since you are a common sight on the forums) Just buy him out. Buy his underpriced Droids.Put them for sale on your vendor at your price. make a profit off of him.
ive done that before. just because they're lame doesnt mean you cant take advantage of them. Makes restocking your vendor easy too.
Why justify prices at all, so long as the droids sell well? I mean if someone sells a medical droid for 60k to a master doc, they'll make enough profits in buffing the next 10 people in order to pay for their droid.
gardengoth wrote:
Well, I think I possibly charge less than Caix at the moment, but since we're looking at going into business together I'll have to hike my prices up a bit.
The way I look at it is that these things aren't worth all that much, really. I've always been irritated by the 6cpu "going rate" of rescources on the bazaar, and to price a topped-out combat R3 at 6cpu comes to somewhere in the region of 12.3K. I don't feel like I'm selling myself short or ripping off the customer. Fact is I don't have a whole lot of time to market droids so I tend only to build to order, so for the time being anyone in the region who wants to charge 5 times as much is quite safe.
Without meaning to sound confrontational, how do you justify such high prices?
Man I thought my prices were low on Naritus for Surgicals 20k with Armor 6, Med 6 and +12 Chem Crafter, until I found one guy selling them for 10k 200m away from me in South Coronet. 
I do not think they realize they are not making a profit or at least breaking even.
Our economy tho on Nartius is really messed up but funny thing is people get mad at me for charging 50k for a ADV Binary and I think I am underselling them and then I find out about things like the 10k surgical and it is no wonder why people have no concept of what a droid really costs to make and you end up looking like someone who is just trying to gouge the consumer.
Speaking of our economy, we have people shouting in Coronet shouting 10k X34 landspeeders 15k Speederbikes and 20K Swoops. That might be 2 credits per unit if they are lucky and the lowest standard for most materials is 3 cred per right now. It is things like that that really start to hurt the economy (I suspect a lot of them are hologrinders trying to make back a small sum of thier costs in grinding to master artisan).
Message Edited by jcarlson34 on 03-22-2004 04:50 PM
For all our differences of opinion elsewhere Shian, I feel for you on this one. That kind of ultra-low pricing hurts other DEs across the board. Relative newcomers have zero chance of shifting anything without taking a lose, potential new entrants give up rapidly or never bother in the first place, and overall it undermines the perceived value of droids in the marketplace as both saleable items and as useful gameplay objects. I guess the only way to counter it is for other DEs there to try to make sure quality counts and not get dragged into the same downward pricing spiral (and hope the person's supply is severely limited).
What's wrong with you freaks? 75k was my minimum for R3 droids last December! With inflation and the new cool toys they should easily be in the 95-100k range by now.
In a capitalistic market there is never more justification than what the buyers will pay. Remember, you only need to sell 1 droid at 75k to make up for 3 droids at 25k. True, only one person gets a droid but it means you do only one third theeffort and other players who want the droid actually will have something to work for. Goals are a big part of any MMORPG. if you can just breeze through everything you'll be bored of the game inside of a month.
TheWoody wrote:
if you can just breeze through everything you'll be bored of the game inside of a month.
It's also one of the reasons I'm going now. My accounts are being canceled, and I'm on my way out. These next few days will probably be my last posts.
(more to come: fairwell letter, thankyous and acknowledgements,death threats, and so on).
I'm selling combat LEs at 75k with full armor and three 105 rating combat modules (in a cluster) for 75k. I might INCREASE my prices given how many friggin' factory runs that took -- unbelievable.
The solution to underselling is 1) information sharing with other DEs on prices, 2) respectful cajoling with undersellers to raise prices, 3) when all else fails, BUY OUT. That's right, just buy them all out of droids. Established DEs can make a killing of unknown undersellers. I routinely double and sometimes triple my money on other people's droids.
You get one or three DE veterans doing this and the server's prices will go up. Price increases are justified for the additional complexity, time, and resource cost needed for these droids.
Buying out really only tends to work if the people you are buying out are a bit lazy.
If someone were to start buying out all my R3s at 25k a piece(not saying I sell them for 25k, just using that number since that's what's been said) then I would probably just start doing factory runs of them. Sure, they could buy all 100, but I'd be 2.5M richer for it, and I could probably have another run finished before they sold all of the first run.
And what do I care if they go to players or to some other DE who is reselling them? Either way I get the credits.
Up until this recent patch, 10 CPU for droids was just fine, at least on Ahazi. Quality made no difference whatsoever, so you could make droids using "grind quality" resources that cost 2 CPU. A 5x profit margin is pretty good.
Now, though, quality is starting to matter. People are going to have to use better resources in order to compete for sales, and as they start using better resources they're going to realize that they have to charge more to pay for their time. (Either that or they'll go broke/burn out.)
I still start my prices at 10 CPU for the components that don't require quality, but I'm charging 30 CPU for Combat Modules because I'm using 10-15 CPU resources to make them. I'm probably going to increase that shortly, too, simply because the effort required to make them is also annoying. I'll probably be at 5k per combat module very soon, which is 50 CPU.
The final combine matters now, too, so that last 280 Chemical that I have to use to complete the droid is going to start costing more as well. The stuff I'm currently using sells for 10-15 CPU so I had to raise my prices to keep up. It's either raise prices or go out of business once my current supply is depleted, and I like making droids so I'd rather stay in business.
The end result is that my Combat R3 currently sells for 44k and will probably get bumped to around 55k in the near future. My R3 UberCrafter currently sells for 50k, but that's without using my good chemical on the final combine. Customers who want 1600+ HAM on an UberCrafter will have to pay closer to 60k due to the added cost of the high OQ chemical.
Materials for droids matter more with this patch, but only marginally so. Combat modules require a good conductivity and quality for, I think, metal, low grade ore, inert gas, and possibly inert chemical. Of those three or four ingredients only one of those has any conductivity, so the remaining three only require a high original quality which is typically not too difficult to get.
Additionally, since the maximum combat rating is 600 if you are building advanced R3s you can get by with combat modules with a rating of only 100 a piece. Since the maximum for a module is 110 I am guessing the final quality of the modules needs to be around 92 or 93%, which is not too difficult given that you need primarily a single stat.
All other subcomponents can be built with any material you care to use as they have no effect on the final build unless you are stacking 2 level 4 modules, at which point the modules need only adequate materials to max out.
With the exception of a few low end droids (Treadwell, DZ70, R5) you can make an advanced version of any droid in which the final HAM is determined by the Overall Quality of the chemicals used and nothing else.
So in essence to make the best droids possible you would need a metal with a high Conductivity/Overall Quality, and a low grade ore, inert gas, and inert chemical with high Overall Quality.
I suppose after reading what I have written that yes, it is true that materials play a more important role in droids now, it is simply that with such a small set of important materials it really isn't all that difficult for a player to get either maxed out or at least close enough to max that it won't really matter.
I will also add that this isreally justfor droid construction. For repair kits it is a lot more important to use good materials every step of the way.
Icarus-6 wrote:
Materials for droids matter more with this patch, but only marginally so. Combat modules require a good conductivity and quality for, I think, metal, low grade ore, inert gas, and possibly inert chemical. Of those three or four ingredients only one of those has any conductivity, so the remaining three only require a high original quality which is typically not too difficult to get.
Additionally, since the maximum combat rating is 600 if you are building advanced R3s you can get by with combat modules with a rating of only 100 a piece. Since the maximum for a module is 110 I am guessing the final quality of the modules needs to be around 92 or 93%, which is not too difficult given that you need primarily a single stat.
91% only gives me 98 CR while 89% gives me 97 CR, so my guess would be 95% to get a combat rating of at least 100. And yes, when you spread OQ over the ingredients needed to do it, it is actually somewhat difficult to pull off.
I realize that doesn't ramp up correctly to a CR of 110 at 100%, but I've made all of the above and those are the stats I get.
All other subcomponents can be built with any material you care to use as they have no effect on the final build unless you are stacking 2 level 4 modules, at which point the modules need only adequate materials to max out.
With the exception of a few low end droids (Treadwell, DZ70, R5) you can make an advanced version of any droid in which the final HAM is determined by the Overall Quality of the chemicals used and nothing else.
So in essence to make the best droids possible you would need a metal with a high Conductivity/Overall Quality, and a low grade ore, inert gas, and inert chemical with high Overall Quality.
I suppose after reading what I have written that yes, it is true that materials play a more important role in droids now, it is simply that with such a small set of important materials it really isn't all that difficult for a player to get either maxed out or at least close enough to max that it won't really matter.
No, it's not really all that hard to do it, but it does cost more to do it. And that's the point of Shian's post, more-or-less. If you're charging 6 CPU for a Droid that costs you 6 CPU to make, you're not making any profit. I personally prefer to charge at least 2x cost, so if I'm using 15 CPU resources to make Combat Modules (which I am doing) then I need to charge at least 30 CPU for the Combat Module.
And I think you'll find that for top-end products, there's no such thing as "close enough." High-end players want the best equipment then can get. If I'm selling an R3 with 1690 HAM for 75k and you're selling one with 1680 HAM for 50k, those players are going to buy from me every time. (Which is purely theoretical because high-end players aren't going to buy these crappy combat droids anyway.)
I will also add that this isreally justfor droid construction. For repair kits it is a lot more important to use good materials every step of the way.
Yup, quality matters during all the steps on the Repair Kits. Now if I could just find some Ionite Intrusive Ore and some Vendusii Crystal Armorphous Gemstone...
Tycalibur wrote:
And believe it or not, some people would rather paythe premium going rate for a droid than ride that far.