Droid Engineer Archive
Thread: I give up, I misjudged the market on surveyors by about 400% shoot me :(
Starphire wrote:
Azmodonmine were coming back in 30 mins, we need to learn how to shorten the time spam.. which stat etc.. i heard they can be as quick as 20 mins .
I made my first run of these with concentration on charges when I experimented. They came out with 13 uses and 46 minute away time. A friend said his took 55 minutes to report back. (He had bought them from me, so I am not sure if a DE gets a shorter wait time or he read it wrong)
I then tried to get them to report back faster and concentrated my experimentation on the other line (Not charges) and got it to 22 minute report time. But only with 6 uses per pack.
Since I made a run at 13uses/per droid and 46 minute report time I wont make the others with less charges but shorter report time, until they are sold. Then I will make them 10 uses and 30 minute report time. To me that seems like a fair tradeoff Uses/time.
I sell them for 500 per use and they go pretty well.
Tarne_Monter wrote:
It's costing me about 1k to just make the exploding droids, and that's only because I have nice friends.
And around the same for the survey droids.
Here's my two cents about costsfrom a resource dealer and consumer of goods:
I expend very little energy gathering top notch resources. For the most part, I don't care what I grab because most of it sells. I have some resource more popular than others, so I tend to harvest those more.
No matter the resource, my break even price is always 0.5 credits per unit (plus/minus a bit for % differences) Therefore, regardless of what I sell, as long as I sell it for more than that value, I make a profit. Now, how much is my time worth?
I tend to sell resources from 2-5 cpu depending on the resource quality and rarity. This is because I am senstive to the supply/demand factor and I know that I can get a higher price for higher demanded resources. But I am also sensitive to our economy and so I put a self-imposed cap on the amount I charge.
So... I am making a profit of 1.5 - 4.5 cpu. By the way... as we all know, harvest resourcing is the easiest part of this process since my harvesters run 24 hrs/day. I don't need to be on to make money! In fact, many crafters harvest their own resources yet charge the end user even more than this!
Now, I would expect any crafter who buys my resources to be willing to sell his finalized product at some reasonable price including profit on bought goods. So I could see one charging an addition 1.5 - 4.5 cpu on top of the units I charged. Thats a mere 3 - 9 cpu. Add in a slight fee for factory and vendor costs and time to gather resources and build the unit... and you could justify 5 - 15 cpu.
That's right, 5 - 15 cpu. That's it. That'sa reasonable amount for anything ever made *NOT* including rare dropped loot requirements or other items withsimilar factors. I'm talking about standard items.
Example:
Why is it I have to pay 60k for an R3 with 6 modules!?!?
The R3 takes 1708 resources, each Mdoule takes about 150 resources which = 2608 units. Even at 15 cpu, this costs 38490. Even adding in the profit from another crafterfor some parts required, you can justify this being about 45k. Out of pocket expense (@ 5cpu) is 13040 credits. So the profit is about 32k credits.
60k vs. 45k.... That's a big chunk a money.
Arguments about rare resources: Yes this is an understandable delimma. But think of this: regardless of much of a resource there is in the galaxy, it's still just as easy to harvest it. Therefore, a higher price is reasonable but so is putting a cap on the value to prevent inflation.
Arguments about time it took to become the class and needed recompensance: Yes this is also a reasonable argument. But I pose this: Classes are relatively easy to master. The primary factor is "time", i.e. how long it takes you to get there. Others shouldn't have to pay for your slowness or quickness to Master. Cost to "grind" your way there is relatively low compared to the amount of money you will make over the time of your crafting profession. You chose to go that route, others shouldn't have to pay your tuition.
Sothicus_Kitara wrote:
Therefore, a higher price is reasonable but so is putting a cap on the value to prevent inflation.
And there's the failure of your argument.
You can't prevent inflation because there is far more money coming into the system than leaving it. The "value" of a credit goes down continually because more and more credits come into the system on a daily basis.
There are very few money sinks in the game, and the ones that do exist are pretty pathetic compared to the amount of money that can be made running combat missions.
Due to the excess credits in the game, people can and will bid excessive amounts of money for high-end items. They have the credits, so they want the absolute best items that money can buy. This, in turn, means that sub-elite items are very difficult to sell, so crafters are forced to gather and use only the best resources. So that causes bidding wars to erupt buying resources.
And that's why 50 CPU makes perfectly good sense for an elite resource. Many crafters do *not* harvest their own resources and are therefore forced to buy them. In order to obtain the resources they need to compete, they have to pay astronomical prices. So in order to stay afloat, they have to charge 60k for an R3 that only use 2800 resources to make.
Simple economics.
Kollos wrote:
Sothicus_Kitara wrote:Therefore, a higher price is reasonable but so is putting a cap on the value to prevent inflation.
And there's the failure of your argument.
You can't prevent inflation because there is far more money coming into the system than leaving it. The "value" of a credit goes down continually because more and more credits come into the system on a daily basis.
There are very few money sinks in the game, and the ones that do exist are pretty pathetic compared to the amount of money that can be made running combat missions.
Due to the excess credits in the game, people can and will bid excessive amounts of money for high-end items. They have the credits, so they want the absolute best items that money can buy. This, in turn, means that sub-elite items are very difficult to sell, so crafters are forced to gather and use only the best resources. So that causes bidding wars to erupt buying resources.
And that's why 50 CPU makes perfectly good sense for an elite resource. Many crafters do *not* harvest their own resources and are therefore forced to buy them. In order to obtain the resources they need to compete, they have to pay astronomical prices. So in order to stay afloat, they have to charge 60k for an R3 that only use 2800 resources to make.
Simple economics.
Kollos, I think you should look at the most recent Astromech stats. I don't think you can say that more is entering the system than leaving it.
Tarne_Monter wrote:
Kollos wrote:
Sothicus_Kitara wrote:
Therefore, a higher price is reasonable but so is putting a cap on the value to prevent inflation.
And there's the failure of your argument.
You can't prevent inflation because there is far more money coming into the system than leaving it. The "value" of a credit goes down continually because more and more credits come into the system on a daily basis.
There are very few money sinks in the game, and the ones that do exist are pretty pathetic compared to the amount of money that can be made running combat missions.
Due to the excess credits in the game, people can and will bid excessive amounts of money for high-end items. They have the credits, so they want the absolute best items that money can buy. This, in turn, means that sub-elite items are very difficult to sell, so crafters are forced to gather and use only the best resources. So that causes bidding wars to erupt buying resources.
And that's why 50 CPU makes perfectly good sense for an elite resource. Many crafters do *not* harvest their own resources and are therefore forced to buy them. In order to obtain the resources they need to compete, they have to pay astronomical prices. So in order to stay afloat, they have to charge 60k for an R3 that only use 2800 resources to make.
Simple economics.
Kollos, I think you should look at the most recent Astromech stats. I don't think you can say that more is entering the system than leaving it.
I think Kollos's argument is still correct..the flow is being manipulated by the Devs (just by the factual evidence that they monitor it, never mind Holocrons comments)
It is easy to make money in this game, whats harder is to make the right amount of profit onan item.
Kollos has the right idea, and sadly, few seem to realize the fact. They therefore underprice. I suspect neither Kollos nor me cares all that much..because we do it right and make money anyway, but ignore his advice at your peril (= economic loss) because it never did come down to CPU issues, its a matter of demand, rarity today, and most importantly rarity in the future. What you sell today and congratulate yourself on, is cheap by next week's available resourse spawn, especially true i the case of our ever increasing list of named and special resources.
I have many customers who just say to me ' I need X deliver it to Y and charge what you think' Why? Because they all know they get a price that is fair on the day, and has a view to the future. Never once has anyone said my price is too high. My pricing mirrors Kollos's thinking, though I was doing it long before I ever heard of him *grin*
Still, as I said many times before, if you want to underprice just go ahead..it makes no difference in the end. I had customers I havn't sold to in 8 months (cos droids last forever) just call me and order at 'whatever price you say' cos they know a rip-off merchant when they see one, and they know an underseller will not be around 6 months forward.
It's called establishing a business reputation..and its the right thing to do. Most of your customers are doing it, why should DE products be in 'the sales' just because we had a hard time selling before?
My 2 cents, and I don't care if you don't like it.
The easily quantifiable part of my *cost* is based on things like my resource costs, factory costs, shop costs, tickets, etc.
The ****ONLY**** relationship between *price* and *cost* is that in the long run price must be higher than cost - otherwise you go broke.
Opportunity cost is very very real. If I take a resource that I mine up for 0.50 credits per unit, and sell it on the open market for 3 cpu, then that *is* the market value of that resource. That value is set by supply and demand. I now have a baseline that says "you know, with zero investment in factories and showrooms, not production planning, very little customer education (about droids or harvesters), etc I could just sell that damn resource for 3 cpu and spend all the time that I save doing something else in the game." I absolutely refuse to value my time in the negative space - if a product only has a *value* to the customer of less than the raw resources that go into making it, then I'm not interested in making that product.
For harvesters determining "value" to the customer is pretty easy - you know how much profit per day they will make using that BER13 harvester. You figure out a payback period (often about the attention span of the average player
) and say "this harvester will completely pay for itself within 8 days" (or 12 or whatever).For surveying droids, the same logic applies. If I live on Naboo and have harvesters set up on Lok, how do I know if the resource is still there? I can look on swgcraft, but there is definately a lag in reporting, particularly on the advanced planets. I can pay for a round-trip ticket, go there (5-20 minutes time), and look at the survey tool. Or I can fire up a survey droid to do that for me. If it is both cheaper and more convenient for me to send the droid, I'll do it. If the droid is much more expensive then that round trip ticket, then I probably won't do it (unless I live on a planet 2 hops away from where my harvesters are - in which case my time really becomes a factor).
So we can figure out the "value" of these survey droids to a customer, and price it based on that value.
I think that throwing out terms like "price gouger" and "undercutter" is really pretty silly, and it ignores the fact that different people have different ideas of "fun" and they have different business models.
ZenDragonMLS wrote:
Gosh
I think that throwing out terms like "price gouger" and "undercutter" is really pretty silly, and it ignores the fact that different people have different ideas of "fun" and they have different business models.
And here we have a winner.
And a Master Architect at that
.
DE is not like Architect, and so cannot be compared
In a very mysterious way.
Perhaps its because Architect is so much easier to do on a day to day basis, I don't know
i sell 13 charge survey droids for 8k
detonation mse rated 38 i sell for around 8k as well
I sell my survey droids a 1k per charge, with the first charge free. My (early) droids had 9 charges so I sold them for 8k. This isn't dirt cheap to me, and not too expensive for the customer. I also don't sell in crates (yet).
I reckon 1k per charge is just about enough to cover a roundtrip to another planet (for most of the locals) and so should work out reasonable for most people. Of course when resources get harder to find (I had a good Medic friend who by pure chance happened to have all the rares I needed on publish day) I'll whack prices up a bit.
i sell the survey droids for 1k per unit. i sell the detonations for 5k-standard mse 1 Detonation module-8k for adv mse. i tried the survey took 20 min. i didnt ask anyone from my guild what they were getting but i got peps buying them daily and no complaints. I also beleive in being lower than anyone to be honest if you really look at it were only paying 1 cpu when you harvest materials. On kuri we have alot of vortex and tollim. im curious as to what you charge for a full combat R3
Imperila
Kuri Server
Master Artisian/Master Archtect/Master Droid Engineer
