Scout Archive
Thread: Stop Giving Away Your Harvests!
I just want to chime in with an update on the rare Talus Wooly (all high 900s)I've spent a week harvesting.
If you recall, a discussion started on my board with someone offering 25. The other artisans started saying people must be 'on crack' to charge 30.
Then somebody offered 40per to the general public.
I jokingly said I'm waiting for 100per.
Somebody offered me 100per.
I haven't contacted this buyer yet, so it's not in the bag, but it just goes to show you the power of being able to wait and the willingness to say 'no'.
To be honest, I really don't need the cash so I may just decline the offer as an experiment to see how high it goes in two weeks from now when there is none left on my shard except what's in my inventory.
umm this guys priceing doesnt include **edit** for the crafters time the cost of factorys or gainging skill it cost me about 500k credits atleast to gain master tailor, nor does it take into account the fact taht a lot of the items you make turn out ot be crap and maybe 1 in 5 is actually worth selling, not many people want to buy total crap items so its almost required to make the same item 4-5 times to get a good one
he needs to atleast multiply his price for that same jacket 4 to 5's times , that would be a closer estimated cost of manufacture , his price is taking into account nothign but the simple resources needed to make them
nothing to do with skill gaining ,factorys or time.
it is no different than saying a car costs $550 rl dollars to make because that is the total cost of the metal
only someone without the slightest clue of **edit** they are talking about would say something like that
his estimate is totally near sighted.
I totally agree with everyone on this. We need to collaborate on making a set price range on harvests. Is there any way someone can make a composite of different types of each resource so we could figure out how much to sell for?
I just sold1.2k of Endor wooly hide for 30cr/unit and it sold in 10 minutesin the bazaar. I guess I need to go higher.
Great!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now everybody spread the word to all scouts and rangers!!!
At least tripple your prices!!!!!!!
But we have to tell every one to make it work!
Aethlon Surbaa
Ranger -Bria
Here's the bottom line:
On Radiant I have formed a Ranger Information Network with over 50+ Rangers in it. By constantly keeping aprised of what people will pay for good quality and keeping up to the second with small shifts we have slowly begun to raise the price per.
Yes there are still scouts who throw cheap hides into the mix but the noobs dont look for the qualities that armorsmiths, BE's, Doctors, etc need to make their primo stuff. On Tattooine last shift we had found Wooly at 900+ OQ, 900+ shock and 758 Mal... We were selling at 25 - 30 per hide, however since it doesnt exist anymore I will prolly sell it as rare stock at 50 per.
We truly are the one rare breed in the game and by organizing, we get our prices! Hey... when I am told that a full suit of composite is 500k creds and "Thats the rate" I simply reply "Well... this is mine!"
Even in our network of 50 rangers, when I put a job posting up only 1 or 2 reply to it... Which tells me that every ranger is so swamped and demand is so high that simple supply & demand dictates higher rates.
ggrr, I had a really long detailed post and the forum ate it, sodding 'must log in' thing...
Anyway the short of it is as an ex-armoursmith on eclipse, I could make 52k a day on average turnover.
The basic raw material and component cost to make that was 17576 credits. That was at 4cr a resource for inorganics, and 6cr a resource for organics (except wooly which was for 8cr).
I spent 10500 a day on maintenance
and 6k on travelling (including cloning)
So after ALLcosts which jmatt didn't factor in, I made 17k a day for 5 hours (3 travelling, maintaining and going to specific bazaar terminals to retrieve, 1 grinding and 1 crafting the suits) of damned hard work. To get those sales I had to advertise as well, by standing in theed and shouting. I had to deal daily with noob armour questions (most of which could have been answered by reading the armour guide) and an unbelievable amount of people asking me (with a novice armoursmith tag) to make composite for them. After a resource shift I had to spend 6 hours just to get back to where I was.
From this precious 17k a day I had to buy weapons, food and medical supplies, droids, and most expensive of all resources to grind with (if you don't grind you will take 1 week to go up 1 armoursmith skill box).
I also didn't have time to explore, group with my friends, and the entire experience was like a job, not like a game.
Even after the patch I would never charge more than 12cr a resource (and that for 900 + OQ, SR and MAL wooly hide). I make enough money grouping for missions on endor, lok and dantooine. If you saty in one place for 2 or 3 days at a time you can make a fortune (no travel costs and a one off clone cost).
Charging 30cr for hide will lead to 100k chitin suits, and that will be a reasonable price. Remember the grass is always greener on the other side. I'm enjoying the game a lot more as a rifleman/ranger than as an armoursmith/rifleman.
So if we want this game to mirror some sort of capitalistic economy in the real world, you are all in violation and face fines and jail times.
j/k of course, but not really.Basically I'm operating in my own world, playing the game for me, the way I want to. I'm not really concerned if my actions mean that you will get 1 credit less per unit than you could have gotten. Sorry, that's just the way I feel. I sell stuff for what *I* think is a fair price for the effort it too me to get the resource. Certainly I'm taking into consideration what everyone has said here and I'm not blind to the fact that our resources are a bit harder to get now, so perhaps I will adjust my prices.
Sorry FAR guys, I guess it sucks that you built right near Theed since that is where I live too. I will likely keep selling resources the way I always do. I guess you'll have to comb the bazaar terminals and buy my cheap stuff so you can sell it for more profit. Wouldn't bother me a bit. (But if you let wives into the PA that aren't rangers, maybe I'd join you
).
Hmmm, there are anti-trust laws in the US (and I'm sure there are comparable international laws) that forbid these kinds of discussions of price fixing and collusion, etc.
Discussing fair market value is not price fixing or collusion. If it was, every financial services company on the planet would be in violation. Since we're not in a postion to force anyone to do anything, it can't be either.
All of the houses on my block sold for about the same amount of money. Is that price fixing, or is it collusion? Neither, it's fair market value -- and asking my neighbor how much he paid for his isn't a crime.
But you'll find in any market that anyone can claim any price structure is 'criminal'.
Charge more than the competition: Price-gouging
Charge the same as the competition: Collusion, restraint of trade
Charge less than the competition: Dumping
The simple fact of the matter is that many people don't like having to compete. So no matter what price their competition is charging, they claim that it is somehow 'unfair' and punishable.
I spent 10500 a day on maintenance
Surely that's not typical. A small house and a factory don't cost 325,500cr a month, do they?
and 6k on travelling (including cloning)
About the same for hunters, more or less.
After a resource shift I had to spend 6 hours just to get back to where I was.
If you were running mining equipment on the side, I hope you're not factoring that into your cost equations. Because getting your resources at cost works against you for the sake of this comparison. I factored your resources at 3 per, getting them yourself is about .65 per.
From this precious 17k a day I had to buy weapons, food and medical supplies, droids,
We have our daily combat overhead, too. Although I must say I've never bought a droid, let alone enough to count them as a daily expense.
I also didn't have time to explore, group with my friends, and the entire experience was like a job, not like a game.
Hey, I don't blame you. I played an artisan fortwo weeks before I realized I simply hated the grind. I'm not here to knock smiths, I'm here to talk about fair market value for our time and effort. Most hunters, myself included, have never owned a house or any of the consumer goodies out there. And many have a hard time just meeting their travel expenses.So when we go to purchase a suit of armor, and the smith has an entire PA hall as his personal residence, you'll excuse us if we see some small imbalance in the economic equation.
jmatt wrote:I spent 10500 a day on maintenance
Surely that's not typical. A small house and a factory don't cost 325,500cr a month, do they?
Oh, its far less than typical I'd think. Very low end.
You need to work in harvesters and such. Heck, I run 8 personal level harvesters. 3 flora farms and 5 wind generators (I sell power for most of my spending cash).
Costs? Farms run me 800cr and 600 power a day (more or less), generators cost me 1440cr a day. Means I spend close to 10k a day just running my tacky little generators. If I had fusion generators and heavy extractors that would close to triple (granted, my profit would go up too, but the point remains). Given that most of the "hardcore" high end crafters rent lots from many people to pull up resources, multiply that again.
You also need to take into account that while my extractors cost me less than 1k each, the heavies will run close to 100k credits just to buy, so that needs to be ammortized in as well.
I'm not arguing with you, the master crafters with good word of mouth make lots of money, but there are significant startup costs to get there.
I have an armorsmith on another server so I have some idea how it is on the other shoe.
As a master ranger, I normally only harvest hides and sometimes meat, depending on the type and quality. I usually keep a stash in the bank and probably have about 50k assorted hide sitting around gathering dust. I put up about 5k of hides for sale on the bazaar of varying quality. The basic crap (the grinding stuff as mentioned earlier) I have no problem selling for between 3-5 cpu. Hide only good in 1 stat maybe 5-7 cpu, hide decent in 2 stats 7-10 cpu, and hide with very high levels in 2 stats 10-15 cpu. It was sold in a day. And I can't tell you how many tells I got asking me for more. Since I know the stats and amounts needed for armorcrafting, I priced specific for those stats so I concentrated on OQ and malleability and didn't sell hide with very high DR and SR. I don't really need the money so I just keep the hides for the most part. If anyone can provide what hide stats are needed by other professions I would appreciate that as my doctors recently gave me a shopping list for meats.
All that said, if you are underpricing your hide, well that's you fault. I would bet my Vibroknucklers that there are enterprising middlemen who will buy underpriced hide and resell it at a markup, possibly buying it on the bazaar in Endor and reselling it in Theed or Coronet. Ask your friendly neighborhood armorsmith what he is paying for hide, sell him some at that price, and put the rest on the bazaar at a higher price and he'll probably buy that too!
I agree with NerfBurger, and see validity in jmatt's position.
First of all, I think the economy will slowly come to appreciate that hides, bone and meat are not properly lumped in with minerals, flora and chemicals as "resources." The prices should not be comparable at all. The fact that a harvester can harvest these resources in bulk while unattended, or even logged off places them in a completely different realm than hides and bone. It is not uncommon for me to get 50k of a particularly good mineral resource with little or no effort. Bulk sales equal a discount, because the supply is abundant.
However, just getting over 3k of thesame hide or bone resource is incredibly difficult. First of all, you've generally got to kill the same creature on the same planet(or maybe 2 or 3 types) over and over. You've got hte same resource shift issues working against you, so you've only got about a week window to get all you can. After that, killing that same creature will yield a different resource. I'm not griping about repetition,but just finding the same creature over and over can be incredibly difficult. If you can't somehow juggle your weapons/armor to get missions for that creature, you're just roaming the countryside milking lairs. That's VERY difficult and can be time-consuming. For that reason, most scouts/rangers end up with a hodge-podge of bone and hide - maybe 300 of this type, 300 of that type, 500 of some other type. That's all fine and good,but makes it difficult for armorsmiths to set up factory runs. Bulk commodities in hides and bone therefore command a premium, becuase it allows the armorsmith to drop a large supply into a factory, log off, and wake up to a whole batch of product.
As to prices, I think the market will bear that out over time. I have no doubt that hides and bone are worth substantially more than extracted resources. I think armorsmiths, for one, already realize this and are willing to pay more for better supplies. I had an armorsmith offer me a full ubese set of armor ($35k on my server) in exchange for a stack of 2k wooly hides. If the armorsmiths are making hte profits we're discussing, you'll see them start to spread that money around to keep an edge on THEIR competitors - it's the nature of hte market.