Merchant Archive

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CDR700MB800mins wrote:

Power...... hmm.... I sell them long time on Bria, but not much ppl buy them......

Im running a Water company. Its speedy sell !

Message Edited by CDR700MB800mins on 01-05-2005 10:39 PM

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Power Company? Water Works?!?!

Screw this I'm buying the railroads

i guess Sunrunner's economy is different from Scylla's. we don't have many resources for 5cpu unless they're reaaaallly good.

i know what you mean about commanding the energy market. i'd love to have that kind of power, but i myself can't keep my vendors stocked, and i sell whatever i get out of the ground. most radioactive is decent PE anyway. i've seen other vendors on sunrunner with radioactive for 2 or 3cpu and they seem untouched. no one wants to spend that much for power here. the stuff they're selling is from spawns that happened months ago.

/shrug.

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GanymedePharuu wrote:
i guess Sunrunner's economy is different from Scylla's. we don't have many resources for 5cpu unless they're reaaaallly good.

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I doubt the economies are very different. The key for me is focusing on a segment that nobody else does well (flora) and a crafting audience that can take 5 to 10 cpu resources and turn them into 15 to 25 cpu product (doctors and chefs). 180 unique flora to choose from at any given time virtually guarantees that I have 2 to 5 good resources to harvest at any given time.And there's usually 1 or 2 good medical or chef inorganics on top of the flora.

This doesn't work well in areas that are saturated (weaponsmith inorganics) unless you are only chasing the truly superb resources or in crafting markets where the cpu of the final product is low (architects).

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GanymedePharuu wrote:


180 gens? /worship
haha. that's awesome. it's hard to create an agreement between two people in this game. there's no standards and laws like there are in RL. So very true. Our agreements were limited to non-compete agreements (not having a vendor on the others planet) and using standard pricing.. we both priced the same and both used the same name for 'brand name' recogniton

i basically run my company by myself, with the help of my employees of course. at one point i took on a subsidiary company ran by someone who had run a large power company but took an extended break from the game. he quickly dissappeared again, and i was back to my lonesome. many employees have come and gone... taking with them 7-10 harvies... must have lost nearly 40M worth of harvies in my time... just consider it part of the business expenses.

i'm glad to hear that someone else pushed the limits of how big a power company can get. maybe someday i can surpass your achievement hehe. if i get up to moving 10 million units per week i'll be happy. i just hope i don't run into the same problems you did. i'm planning a week long vacation in march, and i'm already thinking what i should do so my company doesn't skip a beat haha! maybe have hired help do the work.. i eventually paid people to scout and send waypoints to the employees rather than doing it myself... less profits for me, but it left me free to do other thing, so I really only was responsible at the end for running the vendors. It does take a certain amount of 'harping' on employees to keep them vigilant. I only ever harvested on naboo as our city was there and most of our employees were as well.

i was thinking of advertising for new employees in mos eisley but i'm afraid of new players (or players new to the server) dissappearing on me and wasting hundreds of thousands on generators. major concern here. I tried to only use citizens of a player city with a few recommendation and references on peopel outside the city. Best bet though is to find a core group you can count on, take a risk on a few others. Never overextend yourself and be prepared to lose all your harvesters except your 'core group' becuase people suck and when they decide to quit or just don't feel liek playing, they just leave. but i think i have finally found someone willing to work for me as a surveyor which will take a huge load off. the best would to take on a full partner, but they'd have to be as dedicated to the business as i am, and able to survey at least 2 entire planets in a night like i do. and be trustworthy of course.

i would love to buy out the other power vendors but they all sell for twice as much as i do.maybe time to raise your prices then dear chap.
i'd also like to cater to the bulk volume buyers as well. right now that's all i sell to. cause i never have enough left over to put on my vendors. but i'm taking on some new employees next spawn so that should change.
and with all the new employees i've been taking on i haven't been making money, cause i'm spending it all to buy new gens hehe.
thanks for your input. it's given me a lot to think about, and a lot to work towards!

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best of luck to the future power baron in you. It's a good profession and profitable. (and easy.. originally started because i didn't want to be bothered with who needed what quality resources... everybody needs power)

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GanymedePharuu wrote:

i was thinking of advertising for new employees in mos eisley but i'm afraid of new players (or players new to the server) dissappearing on me and wasting hundreds of thousands on generators.

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The ultimate way to limit risk is to make the miner take on most of the risk. First, make them responsible for their ownharvesters. For non-energy, I would give out BER 4 personals, but the miner would be responsible for buying up as they wanted to. It literally only took days of personals for the miner to be able to afford mediums. It took longer to move to heavies, and some people didn't bother. For energy, it's tougher, unless you are committed to buying wind and solar as well.

In my case to save my own playtime, I would never do the actual surveying. I would simply contract out with my miners saying that I wanted up to x amount of units of y resource for z cpu. They would find their own spots and use their own harvesters. I know in some cases, my miner would sub-contract out the actual surveying (I had some miners without novice artisan). I would tell them what to harvest and what planets were available. In this arrangement, I generally had to pay out about 60% of my sale price tokeep a decent miner pool. Which was no big deal as long as I knew the resources would sell.

There are ways to shift the financial risk to the employee. Just expect to pay them a bigger slice of the pie.

right now most of my employees are guildmates so that's working out nicely. i'm trying some cross server dynamic lot trades. we'll see how that works out in a few weeks or so. that's a good idea about using citizens from player cities. i'll talk to some people i trust and spread the word that i'm hiring.

i would raise my prices but it seems that the other power vendors are stocked with power as old as 1 or 2 months. to me that means people aren't buying. i'd rather sell everything i have at a lower price. i'm not looking to seize the galaxy by its harvesters. i just want to have fun hehe so i couldn't see raising prices to over 1.5cpu. it would really put the hurt on the resource companies.

it is pretty easy, a lot more easy than searching for all sorts of different resources from across the spectrum. but at the same time it's not that easy. at least when you're doing all the hard work of organizing and surveying yourself. i guess with a partner or a couple of full-time surveyors it would seem a lot more easy.

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DingoBoi wrote:

I was a power baroness on Eclipse for over a year. I ran the Largest™ Power Corp in the galaxies and I believe I was the Largest™ ever in all the galaxies.

I started small and started from launch with just a couple wind harvies. We quickly ramped up thru reinvestment to fusions and I took on a partner. We slowly started growing and growing.... adding new 'employees' as time went on.

Our business model was to purchase the harvies, and provide waypoints. The only thing our employee had to do was drop the harvey and turn on.... and then pickup at end of cycle... all maint and collections were done by me. Employees were paid 1/3 of sales price for resources collected. Very good income for them doing practically nothing.

We peaked at about 180 fusion reactors in our fleet and could harvest upwards of 18M resource units per cycle, with agood PE fetching a best ever cycle of 54M in sales.. for one cycle.

Most of our employees earned about 1M credits per cycle for lending their lots and took no risk of loss.

Over time, it became quite a burden to manage so many harvesters that moved.. (finding them was a task in itself) I changed the pay structure to 1cpu flat per resource regardless of PE.

My sales for the most part were PE based... higher pe = higher price on formula of pe/500*1.5=sales price.

In the beginning as well, we merged with another large power broker under a common name to form (and boast) that we were the biggest even tho we ran completely seperate from each other. The only things we shared were non-compete agreements and common pricing and of course, our name. My partner eventuallyleft the game and i took over his shop on corellia adding to my two on naboo and tatooine (the big 3).

I moved an incredible amoutn of power and was handsdown the go-to guy forguaranteed power. Yes, that guarantee did come at a premium price and I did tend to catermore toward volume purchasers rather than someone buying a 10k stack.

The beginning of the end came with the Florida Hurricanes...and me being in orlando.. /sigh. Was slowly losing employees due to attrition and then being unable to logon for 1/2 month did cuase issues... i ended up keeping only a small group harvesting and primarily bought out other vendors There was even a great supplier/vendorliterally 2 shops behind my coronet vendor who sold at 1cpu.. which is promptly bought and moved30 meters and resold on my vendorsat near 3cpu. Thanks! /cackle.

But in the end, it just became.. unfun. and we moved onto shipwrights doing the same basic things with that which we did with power. Bigger is better for guaranteed stocks... although myself I am cancelled now due to health reasons, my guild (we did form our own business guild) carries on. Definitely a merchants wet-dream.

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180 gens? /worship
haha. that's awesome. it's hard to create an agreement between two people in this game. there's no standards and laws like there are in RL.

i basically run my company by myself, with the help of my employees of course. at one point i took on a subsidiary company ran by someone who had run a large power company but took an extended break from the game. he quickly dissappeared again, and i was back to my lonesome.

i'm glad to hear that someone else pushed the limits of how big a power company can get. maybe someday i can surpass your achievement hehe. if i get up to moving 10 million units per week i'll be happy. i just hope i don't run into the same problems you did. i'm planning a week long vacation in march, and i'm already thinking what i should do so my company doesn't skip a beat haha!

i was thinking of advertising for new employees in mos eisley but i'm afraid of new players (or players new to the server) dissappearing on me and wasting hundreds of thousands on generators. but i think i have finally found someone willing to work for me as a surveyor which will take a huge load off. the best would to take on a full partner, but they'd have to be as dedicated to the business as i am, and able to survey at least 2 entire planets in a night like i do. and be trustworthy of course.

i would love to buy out the other power vendors but they all sell for twice as much as i do.
i'd also like to cater to the bulk volume buyers as well. right now that's all i sell to. cause i never have enough left over to put on my vendors. but i'm taking on some new employees next spawn so that should change.
and with all the new employees i've been taking on i haven't been making money, cause i'm spending it all to buy new gens hehe.
thanks for your input. it's given me a lot to think about, and a lot to work towards!