Tailor Archive
Thread: Tailor grind: The future?
I fully expect factory XP to be removed. I'm looking at being a straight up Merchant, but I don't know how that will work out.
If all you can make is travel packs and stuff, you have competition so you gotta find a way around it. Do door to door sales at cantinas and stuff
There are plenty of low level/newer players that balk at spending 4k in my store on a single duster. People come in all the time and say 'what can I get for 500 creds?' I could help them, but I tell them to go to the bazaar because:A) I am wayyy too busy to make something for 500 creds
B) I don't wanna take business away from the newer tailors that need it
So just remember that most of us higher level tailors are not interested in serving the guys that want a pair of ribbed pants and a formal shirt.. well.. at least, I'm not. You do have a niche there.
Again, the biggest problem I see is not in the rate of advancement. That's fine from my perspective. The problem I see is that to achieve that advancement, we as a group are producing much, much more product than the market can absorb. Even if we immediately destroy it, in both our minds and in the minds of the customers that strongly devalues our products.
Compare and contrast with architecture. In that field, each item produced requires huge amounts of material and grants huge amounts of experience. I don't know any architects that are grinding and destroying house deeds, and the few that get dumped on the bazaar cheap are snapped up in a heartbeat by people who can turn a fast 15-20k profit on them.
That's why I'd like to see a more finely-textured experience system, with provisions for material specificity and scarcity, experimentation, and item tier all taken into account. Balance it right, and people will be scrambling for good resources and quality finished products as the road to fast xp, rather than grinding ribbed shirts out of whatever crappy fiberplast and metal happens to be available.
Balance it wrong and people will just flock to whatever is most efficient after the change. But I think that can be largely avoided.
I have a factory. Only Once did I used it to make non-sythetic cloth parts. (Tipless glvoes to be exact) Mostly so i could give the crate to a friend to sell them on the bazaar as they fly off the market. I can sell close to 20-30 tip-less gloves a day if i tavel to the 3 main planets. So while that was grinding for me (got 7k xp for it too which was a WTH) I was busy making more interesting clothing to stock my vendors.
To all of you who complain about tailoring being a grind, simply doesn't understand the profession or how to get lots of XP for it. I have nearly 7 tailoring boxes, almost Casual IV as well and I have yet to ever have a grind session where I don't sell everything I make the day I make it. In fact I'm to the point people get terribly upset when they show up at my shop and my vendors are empty cause I can't "grind" enough in a day to keep them stocked.
My best day, was 40k on saturday from taking NOTHING but personal orders for 10 hrs straight. My hands hurt from all that "grinding". Man it was so horrible, people wanting to buy my stuff, upteen tells asking for things, 10 people in my shop all wanting stuff. People waiting showing up at my shop while i'm tending harvesters asking for things. Man thats so horrible, they better find a way to speed up advancement, cause I got 70k xp in 2 days without trying and without using factory XP. *sarcasm*
Yes there are issues. But we need to split the issues from ones that are self-imposed, and ones that are legitimate. Grinding is not required unless you want to do it. Free xp for doing nothing but ploping resources into a box is NOT the future of a profession that is about creativity, fashion and customer service.
But that's what I try to tell people. Setup your business right and it DOES get better. The way I run my store is everytime I sell something, I replace it, and it takes me 4 hours a day just to replace stock.
Like Jedi said, grinding is a choice, not a necessity. I've never grinded to destroy, and have found stuff that sells at every level. Now, granted, the tradeoff here is that I'm probably advancing a lot slower than many of you - I only have Field Wear I and II, adn Casual Wear I so far - but I'm having fun, and I have a successful business with satisfied customers who have good stuff to buy now, and will come back to buy even more stuff later.
I'm trying to say (maybe badly) don't get disheartened if you can't make dusters, not everyone wants to spend 10k on a suit of clothing.
)I guess all I was taking issue with is "grinding ribbed shirts from formal 1 to formal 3" - so far, I've been able to find ways to make sales at every level, without needing to "grind up" because I can't make stuff that sells....
Travel around your server and look for whats on the bazaar. I see a few "high end" items and and lots of artisan lvl casual pants/shirts. There is nothing ever in between, except lts of travel packs. Currently in kaadara, naboo there is no one selling belts, gloves, striped pants, fancy shirts, jewlery, dress shirts, novice lvl wookiee clothing, or anything of that nature.
At casual III i'm getting too many requests for high lvl items to have time to flood the bazaar with these necessitities.
Half the tells I get are for "high lvl" items, the other half is simply because they can't find ANY tailor to make them a simple black outfit of pants shirt and jacket. I still get lots of requests for simple things like black pants, gloves and boots.
I have a general attire vendor, and a "high lvl" vendor. I get as much turnover on BOTH these vendors. There is no reason a tier I tailor or even a novice tailor couldn't make a shop to cater to these needs or sell them on the bazaar.
I don't know if its because people have given up totally, or because people are too busy crafting and destroying. All I know is there is a huge tailoring shortage right now. Its Like all the tailors went poof in the last week. Its a great time to be ANY lvl tailor right now if you just take the time to be social, and be a little business savy.
Personally, I think the xp amount is fine. What I would like to see are more boxes on the way there. Even to the point where you get fewer items per box (since there are more of them). Possibly even giving you the choice of what schematics to learn when you go up in a skill.
That way, not everyone who has Field I would be making the same things (in theory anyway). It would also add another level of customization to the character.
I am very very much looking forward to the factory nerf. I don't like the idea that someone can pickup 2 factories, sit afk and get 20-30k xp in a day doing NOTHING releated to their profession.
Well there's one glaring hole in the factory XP thing and that's one that's killing our long term profits. And that's that an armorer can just buy a schematic and a factory and sit there and become their own cloth/panel supplier without any tailoring effort at all.
I think we'd be seeing a lot more business relationships and a lot fewer field2 armorers without this.
I also spent 2.5 hours with 3 customers personally color matching their clothing, allowing them to try dozens of styles on, and wrapping up good looking outfits. At the end I was satisfied they got several good outfits and happy I made 1/2 way up my next skill box. They were happy they got what they wanted and got great customer service from it.
Did it hurt the game that I made exp this way? No. In fact, it made it better. Pure MMO interaction and happy banter. Without the factory, I'd have made 3 outfits, and the same amount of exp. The customers just would not have gotten as much attention and I'd have spent 1.5 hours grinding by hand. My goal to have better clothing for my customers would hinge upon me hiding in a corner and trying to grind through 20,000 items a night.
Factories and CXP are a good thing.