Droid Engineer Archive
Thread: Help me out here fellas
What I'm talking about is for example I make Droid Combat Modules with a 20 Quality or 102 combat rating. I would say that's a top of the line module that I put a lot of hard work in collecting the resources and combining them. I put these high quality mods into a Probot with 3200 HAM. I don't mean 3165, I mean 3200, maxed out. I then max out the resists. This give a probot with 175-185 damage with a .75 attack speed. I would venture to say that these are probably the best on the server. I can't say that for a fact but I always take the time to check out a Droid Vendor to see and haven't seen any that good. It was suggested that I charge 35k for these by someone who consulted one of these resource calculators. Are you kidding me? What would a bio-engineer charge for an animal this good? Am I missing something? Am I just being greedy and high quality shouldn't matter?
Charge what you want. If you ask in this forum you will get an answer anywhere from 20K to 125K for the Probot you describe. I personally would charge 50K for it in my vendor. Or if I see a newbie, I might give it to him for free.So dont go by me.
I decided long ago to charge X amount for each model maxed out with any modules. If a droid was exceptional, I might add a bit more. Say I charge 50K for a probot. I make a Probot with 3200 HAM and Combat rating of 550. I might charge 52500 for it instead.
It all depends on your needs, and goals. If you need or want alot of cash, charge alot, if you want to make a fair profit, charge a middle amount. If you have more cash than you know what to do with, charge a little. But you should be consistent with your pricing. Believe it or not, it is possible to have repeat customers. And even if you dont, your customers might recommend you to others, so try and be consistant with your pricing.
} {Master Combat Medic} {Master Doctor} {Marksman}
tmerren wrote:
I use http://www.undeadfish.com/droids.php to price doids I put on my vendor. I usualy charge a little extra for custom orders, and give discounts if they want large amounts (ie someone wants to buy 5 droids at the same time). Hope that helps.
The last update made that site more interesting in terms of comparison, but I still find the prices rather arbitrary. However, they are a good base.
What it fails to take into account is varying qualities - like in combat modules or final HAM.
Actually, now that I look at the prices that site generates, I think that's exactly what the difference is between my prices. In fact, on those items that I don't have great sucesses experimenting on with HAM, those are close to the prices I sell the lower quality droid for.
I really like that quality is starting to matter now. When I don't experiment as high on something, it becomes my lower-tier product. This is great for combat droids, because HAM is very important to a lot of players. All of my combat droids have the highest combat rating I can make (because the modules are factory made), and the only thing that varies is the HAM. This enables me to keep my stock of parts lower, but keep a full range/prices of combat droids for people.
I also find that when you have two or three tiers of quality (say R3's with 4K, 4.25K, and 4.5K) you can charge much more for the higher-end while providing a bargain for those players who need one. In actual gameplay, there probably isn't a heck of a lot of difference, but some players want higher numbers no matter what and have the credits to pay for it. I get a good 50-80% more on the 4.5K HAM droids than I do with the 4K HAM ones.
AO
Pricing is very difficult to figure out especially if you look at other servers prices. The prices here on bloodfin would seem crazy compared to other servers. I find that the Undeadfish website is very low compared to how i am pricing and selling. For example some ditanium spawned on my home planet recently so i made a protocol droid with just the merchant barker. I put him on my vendor for 100k and it sold the same day. I have sold adv surgical droids with 110 med rating for 50k. Crates of 5 exploding MSE droids sell in the range of 50-80k on my server. In fact i have them on my vendor for 60k per crate of five. IMHO every crafting profession should have at least 2-3 rare products that sell for over 100k.
Do not use the cpu/resource exchange rate. Pricing is about supply and demand and percieved value. The cost to make that protocol droid in cpu was probably less than 10k but if ppl are going to buy it for 100k that what im going to sell it for!!!
yes. charge whatever you want. I do use formula thatset a cpu price per resource. I use this formula as a guide in choosing my prices and if I don't like the prices it gives me, I change them.
But 2cpu for normal resources and 4cpu for rares? that's way too low. you'll barely be able to subsist at those kinds of prices.
I use 5-10cpu for cheap resources.And 15-50 cpu for rare and/or expensive resources when working out pricing formulae. Anything that is hard to find I consider rare. Even if the name of the resource is a common name, if it has really high stats, I definitely treat it as very rare.
Sell them for what people will buy them for, a good example: I started out crafting fishing poles< shut up it was fun> I ended up making 99% poles. I had no idea what to sell a pole for , so I gave them a fancy name BL sportcaster pro, put them on the bazaar for 500. I sold out 10 in one night. The next day I put them on for 800 and so on.. They kept selling out until I hit around 1500 credits each then they sold well. I bumped it up to 2000 credits and they didnt sell well at all. I brought it back down to 1500 credits and now I have a steady stream of money coming in every night just from fishing poles. (which reminds meI need to put some back on the bazaar tonight).
I also make probots and R3's with maxed HAM and my combat modules are at 19. I sell my probots for around 35k depending on configuration. Should you sell your probots for 20 more credits than mine HECK NO!!! yours are maxed out, that will almost double the price. Those who will use them will pay more to get the best thats the way things are. Try selling them at 60k and see if you still sell then half as fast, if so you are making the same money but spending half the time. :-) by the way... I want one of your probots.
AudioOrgana wrote:I really like that quality is starting to matter now. When I don't experiment as high on something, it becomes my lower-tier product. This is great for combat droids, because HAM is very important to a lot of players. All of my combat droids have the highest combat rating I can make (because the modules are factory made), and the only thing that varies is the HAM. This enables me to keep my stock of parts lower, but keep a full range/prices of combat droids for people.
I also find that when you have two or three tiers of quality (say R3's with 4K, 4.25K, and 4.5K) you can charge much more for the higher-end while providing a bargain for those players who need one. In actual gameplay, there probably isn't a heck of a lot of difference, but some players want higher numbers no matter what and have the credits to pay for it. I get a good 50-80% more on the 4.5K HAM droids than I do with the 4K HAM ones.
AO
I agree with you Audio (as I usually seem to do), this is almost exactly the same routine I use for pricing but I use the DroidCasRegister as my starting point instead of the Deadfish site.
I have no problem selling some combat modules. Actually we might be able to work out a little trade. Right now I can only get my auto-repair mods up to 17. I have found some rare alum that brought them up to 20 but I don't have a lot of it. So if you have any 18's - 20. Also need some EMM's (factories busy pumping out my harvest master droids).
I guess I should look at some BE pets and see how droids compare. Mysan is in my guild so I'll talk with her. I just think DE's as a whole are pricing their droids way too low, especially now that they are actually worth something.
I think you will find that if you have a good rep for selling top quality droids, you won't have any problem selling them for more than the average DE sells them for. As long as my resources hold out (and better stuff doesn't spawn), I fully plan to charge a bigger price than the guy down the road.
Check around and make sure your stuff is better than joe blow next door andcharge accordingly. I have madequite a bit since patch, and I assume this to be because I had better resources and therefore better droids to begin with.
Had this same supply/demand question and I did exactly as one poster said. I had been selling my LE tank 5940 HAM (yeah, yeah,not max but there hasnt been a 1000OQ chem on my server in a while)109 combat (thats a 99% module btw), 40 autoheal for 45k. It kept selling out and I was having a hard time keeping them on my vendor, so I bumped it to 50k and they kept going as fast as before so finally settled at 58k. They sell well at that price, so thats the price.
I don't buy into the whole consistency thing, flat pricing per moduleor cpu pricing. Your price should be what the market will bear. I know very few people that buy droids from the 1st vendor they come across, so there are market forces at work. Snoop around DE vendors to get a feel for what things should be selling for on your server. It's healthy for the market, and willusually work in your favor as I almost always find that my initial price is too low after checking around.
Generally, if you have something on your vendor that has been for sale for longer than say 45 days, it's time to consider lowering your price. If you work day and night to keep it stocked with another item - well you need to raise your price a little because that means you're probably, and in most cases unknowingly, lowballing your competition.