Shipwright Archive
Thread: Don't sell chassis, for the love of all that is sacred!
Page 1 of 5
Subcriminal
Sat Mar 05, 2005 10:43 am
#1
Selling chassis is the best way to go out of business.
I feel bad that many people found out about this after the fact, but the information was there for anyone who cared to look.
Whenever resource quality doesn't matter (for a variety of reasons) undercutting is inevitable. If you want living examples of this take a look at what happened to the Architect, Tailor and Droid Engineer professions. Resource quality is an irrelevant factor for the majority of their products. A shirt made of grindage is going to be indentical to a shirt made of +900 stat materials.
As you all probably know, resource quality for chassis doesn't impact the experimental mass enough to make a difference. This means that a chassis made of pure grindage isn't going to be noticibly worse than one made with +900oq/ut/sr/hr/ma/etc material. There is no incentive for customers to pay for "quality" chassis if the difference is so trivial, therefore: undercutters win.
Something VERY similar happened with the artisan vehicle patch. So many artisans stockpiled expensive high SR metal in anticipation only to be bent over and REAMED by server-wide mass undercutting. Why? Because if you kept your bike in good repair, it didn't matter if your bike had a lot of hipoints or not. Therfore, resource quality didn't matter and there was no incentive to buy a quality bike. Once again, undercuters win.
Until the dev's decide to tweakthe resource quality impact on chassis, then undercutters will continue to make the chassis market unprofitable.
I think that the more people who know WHY to stay away from selling chassis, the better. Spread the knowledge.
neinnunb
Sat Mar 05, 2005 2:12 pm
#2
Ive stopped making chassis completely and instead buy high tier chassis off the bazaar. Over the past week ive baught over 10 tier 4 chassis for 6k each and countless tier 3 and 2 and then sell them at regular prices on my vendor. My investments has already payed off big time lol.
I even buy ships for my own personal use from the undercutters, I pay LESS than what I would pay if I mined the stuff myself. The only logical conclusion is those people have so many resources they dont give it any value. They just grinded the stuff and drop it off in the bazaar to get rid of it.
The problem is supply is in excess over demand. In most part the problem from cross-server lot usage. This kind of stuff hardly if ever happens with stuff you make with animal resources because its not possible to harvest with cross server lots.
I even buy ships for my own personal use from the undercutters, I pay LESS than what I would pay if I mined the stuff myself. The only logical conclusion is those people have so many resources they dont give it any value. They just grinded the stuff and drop it off in the bazaar to get rid of it.
The problem is supply is in excess over demand. In most part the problem from cross-server lot usage. This kind of stuff hardly if ever happens with stuff you make with animal resources because its not possible to harvest with cross server lots.
RagNoRock5x
Sat Mar 05, 2005 3:46 pm
#3
Stopped selling chassis loong time ago.
Mabey if no one makes them people wont complain when we sell them for like 10CPU or something....
Kalano
Sat Mar 05, 2005 3:59 pm
#4
I decided to take a big loss on my way up the ladder to master. All the chassies i make end up being practice. Pay off is not great but then again, i don't have to store tons of not so great chassies either.
Probably will not make any after the grind except under special request.
GraySeven
Sat Mar 05, 2005 4:20 pm
#5
The only Chassis I sell are the ones I made during the grind. I just couldn't bring myself to waste the resources with practice crafting, so I loaded up the 100+ deeds on a vendor and they sell for 5cpu...slowly.
Subcriminal
Sat Mar 05, 2005 4:49 pm
#6
The SW forum has had a LOT of noise from ailing SW's who are quitting out of frustrationbecause of "the guy next door selling chassis for 1-2 cpu"...
What troubles me is that most of them have no idea what their mistake was, or understand why undercutting was destined to be an issue with chassis. Maybe they're new to crafting, maybe they just didn't understand the game economy, maybe they didn't know how to make their situation better. I was just getting tired of hearing "SW SUCKS! I'm not making any profit! I quit!", that spawned the original post.
I'm sure you all know what I mean.
Corsican_Ogre
Sun Mar 06, 2005 8:18 am
#7
I sell them by custom order only then I charge alot. I also buy back some used chassis and sell them bases on how good shape they are in. But then I am not a "big time" shipwright. Most of my SW income is from missles.
I am not using pure grinding stuff but I am not using my best stuff either. As long as every box is "green" when you craft it the results are fine. This has become less important now with the no crit fail patch.
The way this happens and how folks can under cut is they are already mining lots of junk metals, ores and everything else. They save the good stuff to sell and then use the crap to make the hulls. For the most part you make much more money as a miner then as any kind of crafter.
Calvintus
Sun Mar 06, 2005 6:18 pm
#8
Subcriminal. This is a most excellent post. Thank you. I couldn't have summed it up any better than you did.
Tharien
Sun Mar 06, 2005 6:57 pm
#9
So why not fix what is wrong with the whole process in the first place. I understand that its great not having to clone or worry aboutdecay on personal items when in space, but they really need to implment a degrade in ship chassis/equipment to ensure the furture of SW. Heck, i would go so far as to have a "vitality" type system in place so that it can be repaired, but only so many times. Its stoopid that my necklace, wheni die in on tatooine, decays if i forget to buff and get hit by patrol. It has NO bearing n actual game play, but its a fact that my necklace will eventually become crap unless i get it fixed or replace it. Will i miss it, prolly not, but i sure dont like it falling apart neither. Same should be in space. It might not make a big deal that my X-wing dies a few times, but on that 5th or 6th time i need to wind up on the nearest planet taking the shuttle to my nearest SW to salvage the parts from the wreakage and buy me a new one.
Just a thought,and im sure others are thinking too.
So please, help push for chassis/ship equip decay in space, or we might as well have just bought our ships and parts off an NPC.
Subcriminal
Sun Mar 06, 2005 8:30 pm
#10
Tharien wrote:
So why not fix what is wrong with the whole process in the first place. I understand that its great not having to clone or worry aboutdecay on personal items when in space, but they really need to implment a degrade in ship chassis/equipment to ensure the furture of SW. Heck, i would go so far as to have a "vitality" type system in place so that it can be repaired, but only so many times. Its stoopid that my necklace, wheni die in on tatooine, decays if i forget to buff and get hit by patrol. It has NO bearing n actual game play, but its a fact that my necklace will eventually become crap unless i get it fixed or replace it. Will i miss it, prolly not, but i sure dont like it falling apart neither. Same should be in space. It might not make a big deal that my X-wing dies a few times, but on that 5th or 6th time i need to wind up on the nearest planet taking the shuttle to my nearest SW to salvage the parts from the wreakage and buy me a new one.
Just a thought,and im sure others are thinking too.
So please, help push for chassis/ship equip decay in space, or we might as well have just bought our ships and parts off an NPC.
I think the Dev's know exactly how lack of decay and/or irrelevant resource quality effects the market of a profession. Architects, Tailors, and Droid Engineers have all gotten the shaft on the decay/resource quality issue despite repeated plase/complaints/petitions. Thier sluggish sales and widrespead undercutting have indeed destroyed those professions to a large degree. All the while the devs sat back, watched the inevitable happen and still they have changed nothing.
I was one of the angry tailors back during game launch BEGGING for the dev's to give tailors usage decay and experimentation. I jumped ship and changed professions when I realized I was talking to a wall and beating my skull against it.
Best to identify this sort of problem before you jump into any crafting profession, and steer clear from it. I think the Dev's wanted chassis to be widely &distributed, so they've done this all intentionally. My theoy could be wrong, because I really can't speak for the dev's. Their will is mysterious sometimes, but that doesn't mean we have to like it.
Rilnax
Mon Mar 07, 2005 3:52 am
#11
It's due to the fact that the afore mentioned professions aren't as sexy as Weapon Smiths and Armor Smiths. Those two professions facilitate combat in this game, and thus the main focus of the development team. All other crafting professions that don't have an impact on the ground game's combat will be neglected in the never ending loop of trying to balance combat and the GCW. The player base will never be 100% happy with how combat works so the issue will keep the devs focused on that front until the last SWG server is shut down. I've heard rumors of a noncombat profession revamp, but based on how long it's taken them to put out the combat revamp, or I should say start putting out information on it as it's still in the develpoment cycle, I wouldn't doubt that crafters will sit in our current rut for six to eight more months before even getting so much as a nod.
I have the chassis I made during my grind for sale. All other chassis are made only at player request. I make more money from RE'd components than anything else. I normally RE and then sell to the chassis dealer all of my lvl 1 and 2 items as they never sell. Lvl 3 RE'd components and up sell fairly well. I haven't messed around with consumables yet, but I think I might give it a shot and see how it turns out.
HKowalsky
Mon Mar 07, 2005 4:11 am
#12
am i the only pilot that spent hours looking for the best Mass in a scyk ? probably
why ? because even the crappiest scyk mass would not bear a big difference with the best.
make chassis more affected by experimentation and resource quality, that could be a way to help.
i never had thepatience to become SW so i don't know all the issues.
All the SW i've met never want to charge me for REing my equipment but nevertheless i still tip them at least 1K per level
I have a couple SW in my friends list to whom i provide Looted capacitors for their vendors because crafted ones just cannot compete.
One of my friends has a "return policy" on chassis, sells them at 6cpus but you can always return them toher vendor when purchasing a higher tier chassis and you get a full refund.
another problem i see is that players usually don't know exactly what they can askfrom a SW.
but alas making chassis is the worst way to get money as a SW.
Treychyyk
Mon Mar 07, 2005 4:27 am
#13
I agree with what the guy above me said. I've been saying it for a while now, if someone is looking for a ship and sees that it is 20k mass less on a 2cpu one than a 6-7 cpu one, they're going to save up for the bigger ship. If the devs just made resource quality and experimentation more effective on all shipwright parts, not just chassis, it would completely revolutionize the whole jtl experience.
Page 1 of 5