Merchant Archive
Thread: Anything less than 5 fold increase on current item limits simply NOT acceptable
Neuro
How?
joined42904 wrote:
as it will fail to crush the big oligopolies that hamper the casual crafter.
joined42904 wrote:
How will it fail to crush the big oligopolies?
Simple really...they will have more stuff to sell and will be able to have a small number of people dominating the market. Very few of them will camp their vendors 8 hrs a day. So the proposed changes mean that anyone 1/3 of the playerbase on a given server is going to for armor or any other product is going to run out.
When the oligopolist runs out, second-rate "noob" products become something to be considered.
Sound good? It does to me. This may actually mean that crafters will be able to go up in crafting selling their products as they improve in skill. Just imagine that. No longer will just masters be able to completely dominate the market.
I love this so-called nerf. It's high time the oligopolies were dealt with.
What do you mean noob crafters can't compete? I busted chops selling armor on bazaar until I attained Master. Its the noob crafters that charge MORE money for there garbage goods than for Master crafted items. I see 10% Kinetic Chitin all the time for 6k per piece. They should be practically giving it away, maybe 1k per piece.
There is enough customers so I don't consider myself competing against my fellow smiths. If I'm out of something, I'll actually refer the customer to another smith to get the items. I'll even send WP's to my competitors.
The thing with the new crafters though, they want to be able to sell 100 items a day like all the crafters that have been doing there crafting profession since day 1 of launch. Guess what? Not gonna happen. They set up shop, and get upset because the day after they set up nothing is selling. So of course its the "competition" stealing there sales. Then they end up quitting the profession and there vendor is left out, EMPTY.
SeaRaptor wrote:
Sorry, I suppose I should have been more clear.
First things first, you keep throwing around the term oligopolies. I know what the book definition of it is, but I would like to hear how you think it applies to Galaxies. At what point does a business become an oligpoly in Galaxies, to you?
Second, I meant "how do oligopolies hamper the n00b crafter"? In a game with no taxes, virtually insignificant materials costs (if you mine your own stuff it's well under 1 cpu), and no employees, anyone who is willing to put in the time and effort to become a successful businessman can do so. I've seen people break into the various markets well after the launch of the game simply because they decided they were going to do so. The single biggest gate holding back new crafters is resources. It takes about 6 months to gather up all the resources you need to make good weapons and armor and food and meds and so on in high quality. The only reason the people in front of you are turning out better products is because they've alreadyput in their 6 months of waiting for good stuff to spawn for all of the various materials required and are now enjoying that success. Anyone who wishes to follow in their footsteps can do so, they simply must be patient and build up a reputation for being professional, keeping well stocked vendors, and having competitive pricing. Someone who acquires the title of Master Tailor or Master Weaponsmith can't expect to be an instant success. No one who has mastered the profession before them has been an instant bazillionaire, for them to expect to is unreasonable, and for the developers to think that the existing people in the marketplace were instantly successful so anyone new should be is an incorrect assessment as well.
You seemingly take glee in punishing the successful for their success. Why? Every successful businessperson in Galaxies has worked very hard to achieve what they have. Why do they deserve to be punished for working hard and acquiring a fair portion of the market share of their goods on their respective servers?
This is a very complex issue, but it sounds as if you feel like the root of all evils in the in-game economy are the very people who have toiled many hours and put up with endless bugs (factories, vendors, vendor listings) to become pillars that very economyis now based on. I simply cannot understand and do not subscribe to this viewpoint, certainly not to use it as a basis for celebrating the current proposed vendor nerf.
I agree 100%. The only markets thatare difficult to break intoare the quality-based crafting markets, and this has nothing to do with vendor item limits, and everything to do with resources.
As a small business owner whose in-game business has been open just over a month, I have focused on non-quality crafting markets, along with marketing and presentation, and my business is doing extremely well. By well I mean over 100 million gross sales in a month (as a pure merchant that is just sales, not profit).
Furthermore, I feel that such low vendor limits will actually hamper small independant businesses more than the large, what do you call them?, oligopolies. The large malls are generally run by more than one person, and by people with multiple accounts. It will be easier for them to adjust to the new limits, to dedicate points to multiple master merchants, and to carry on with an even greater market share. When its hard to find a stocked vendor, the customer will go to the big store they know will have stock.
The smaller, one-man business, especially the crafter-merchant who doesn't have the points to dedicate to master merchant, will be the ones to suffer the most under this rule. Unless they sit by their vendor, they won't be able to keep up a sufficent stock level, and even if they do sit by their vendor they probably will not be able to offer a good selection of their wares.
If the limits were raised significantly for master merchants, this could be a good mechanism to force crafters to use merchants to sell their goods, though under the current vendor interface system this is still a very delicate kind of arrangement and can really only be managed through great trust on the part of the crafter, or great investment on the part of the merchant. With such low limits for master, this will not even be likely to happen, as the ratio of contracting merchants will be nowhere near enough to fill the demand for all the crafters and their goods.
A career merchant should be able to service 6 crafters at master. Under the new item limits, one merchant will be able to service one crafter very well, or two crafters with less range and availability. Its just not enough.
I think the limit should be increased by 6 fold at master, although I would settle for five. Maybe we should say we will settle for nothing less than 10 times what they are offering, if we want to play the same haggling game it seems SOE is playing. They offer low, we counter with something higher than what we'd be happy with and end up with something in the middle that we could live with. Being so honest about the limits we could handle is probably going to leave us with only half of what we need, once the bargaining is concluded.
Grudsy wrote:
Any of us who are successful now started as a small time noob. We succeeded through planning and good business sense. We worked hard for very little money for a long time till we got known. Every one in this game has the same chance...
Don't tell that to the "oligopoly" conspiracy theorists. They seem to think that we all were given our master titles, a care package full of 1000 OQ / 1000 SR/CD/etc resoruces and a system message was sent out to everyone proclaiming our newfound dominance.
I'm sick and tired of hearing people complaining about not being able to break into a market because of other crafters. The only way other crafters are keeping anyone out of any market is if these arch-smiths are producing gear that exposes the "give me everything now" crafter's gear for the crap it is.
You don't see Mr. Conspiracy up there talking about bringing his own product up to snuff so that it can compete with the long time crafters' wares. No, he simply wants to make it more difficult to bring quality items to market, so that his crap looks acceptable to a desperate and starved market. Nothing like making mediocre productlook good by making quality product disappear.
The truth is that crafters like Mr. Conspiracy are a dime a dozen, and they never last. They simply don't have the desire to put in the same time and effort as everyone else before them has, and instead of realizing the fault lies within them they cast blame on the ones that do have the desire to succeed.
One last thing - on every server I've played on the quality-dependent crafting communities (weaponsmiths, armorsmiths, chefs, docs) are very tight. If they're shunning you as a new crafter, it's because we can smell your kind (the undedicated, the ones that want things handed to them) from a mile away.
Message Edited by DirthNader on 08-10-2004 05:43 AM
DirthNader wrote:
Grudsy wrote:
Any of us who are successful now started as a small time noob. We succeeded through planning and good business sense. We worked hard for very little money for a long time till we got known. Every one in this game has the same chance...
Don't tell that to the "oligopoly" conspiracy theorists. They seem to think that we all were given our master titles, a care package full of 1000 OQ / 1000 SR/CD/etc resoruces and a system message was sent out to everyone proclaiming our newfound dominance.
I'm sick and tired of hearing people complaining about not being able to break into a market because of other crafters. The only way other crafters are keeping anyone out of any market is if these arch-smiths are producing gear that exposes the "give me everything now" crafter's gear for the crap it is.
You don't see Mr. Conspiracy up there talking about bringing his own product up to snuff so that it can compete with the long time crafters' wares. No, he simply wants to make it more difficult to bring quality items to market, so that his crap looks acceptable to a desperate and starved market. Nothing like making mediocre productlook good by making quality product disappear.
The truth is that crafters like Mr. Conspiracy are a dime a dozen, and they never last. They simply don't have the desire to put in the same time and effort as everyone else before them has, and instead of realizing the fault lies within them they cast blame on the ones that do have the desire to succeed.
One last thing - on every server I've played on the quality-dependent crafting communities (weaponsmiths, armorsmiths, chefs, docs) are very tight. If they're shunning you as a new crafter, it's because we can smell your kind (the undedicated, the ones that want things handed to them) from a mile away.
Message Edited by DirthNader on 08-10-2004 05:43 AM
DirthNader wrote:
One last thing - on every server I've played on the quality-dependent crafting communities (weaponsmiths, armorsmiths, chefs, docs) are very tight. If they're shunning you as a new crafter, it's because we can smell your kind (the undedicated, the ones that want things handed to them) from a mile away.
Ittov pwn3d j00.
Five stars for you, mate. =)