Tailor Archive
Thread: tailors do not deserve to earn the same as other professions
Trianna-Xanaphia wrote:
My server has just the oppisite happening. Tailor Items are boing sold for a lot, and weapons are going cheap. I saw a flame thrower and a lightning cannon for 1500c each today....
Not on bria, I can tell you that. I bought an ee3 carbine that I really like for 15k the other day (and that's what, a level 2 or 3 item for weaponsmiths?). The same day I saw cloaks (level 3)selling for 1k, parliamentary cammos (level 4?)selling for 1.5k, and li'ku wraps (level 4) selling for 1k, thin striped pants (level 3?) selling for 400, and on and on. The clothing price wars have begun I'm afraid.
PeeyoNiba wrote:
Uhm... Kylania... if I do 2 delivery missions, I make 2000 credits. So for every run I make, I get 4000 credits. I make 2 runs and I have up to 10,000 credits. There is no need to inflate prices.Tailor is not a profession for those who want to grub on money. I play it more as an art than a "steal your money" sort of thing.
P.S. - Please avoid telling me that "my business will fail" and my "sales will drop." I make 10-20 sales a day. You can accuse me of failing all you want, but I have a steady flow of money.
Just because I don't stockpile 1,000,000 credits doesn't mean I'm the poorest sod in the galaxy.
You just mention how easy it is to get money, then say that clothes should be extremely cheap because of that? That's a ridiculous comment. If you want to make your money running delivery missions, go do that. Most tailors would prefer to have Tailoring be their source of income, so that when they're done tailoring for the day, they can decide what to do based on fun, not having to supplement their income so they can give more clothes away. The fact that money is SO EASY to acquire is exactly why you SHOULD NOT underprice your work. Why should you make less for your time than a Master Pistoleer can make running missions?
Calling people who charge prices based on supply and demand "money-grubbing" or "stealing" is just stupid. If I can sell things for 5x as much as you, and my customers are all happy, where exactly is the "evil" act?
Do you really think that you have the moral high ground because you teach people that crafter's time is worthless, and that people should expect free items from strangers regardless of their own behavior? You're not a saint, you're an enabler.
"I do whatever I can to get business."
You do whatever you can get get a trickle of business. Your volume of sales *WILL* drop. Yours costs related to your business *WILL NOT* drop. You'll have absolutely no buffer of money from charging market prices for items, and you won't be able to keep things going since when you need 10k in cash you won't be able to make it off selling 1 item, you'll STILL have to sell 10 items but the sales you seem so hard up to get now will only be less later.
Move your store, advertise more, give better customer service, do ANYTHING but charge insultingly and damagingly low prices for items to 'drum up business'. It's the absolute worst thing you can do to yourself.
I'm somewhere in the middle of this debate. (7 credits per resource, no skill box multiplier, markup to 15 to 20 credits per special resource. For example, Gunman's Duster 1200 cr, Revealing Fleshwrap 4200 cr.)
First of all, I sincerely doubt that I'm driving anybody's prices down. I sell in Restuss/Kettemoor. This morning, there were 32 items on the local clothing Bazaar. 25 of them were mine. 2 of them were mine being resold. At least 2 of them were obviously loot (no creator name). I'm not putting anybody local out of business.
Secondly, yes, I could stand to make more money per sale. I could stand to make a lot more money per sale; since the survey mission nerf, my cash flow has been towards the negative. But I need to put clothing into a lot of people's hands. I need to get my name out there again. You see, most of my previous ongoing clientele have moved to Tatooine or Naboo, same as everybody else. And because I spent almost three weeks grinding to get to Master Tailor, I haven't been out there getting my name and reputation out to the public. And yeah, I don't know what it's like where you're at, but clothes aren't selling at ANY price on Rori/Kettemoor lately. Even at those low prices, I sell maybe 7 items a day out of the 25 I have on the Bazaar. Even limiting myself to proven sellers, mostly, I still get time-outs.
Thirdly, I can easily imagine someone pay 25k for a gun that may save their life, especially since they really only need one. But very few people, it seems to me, are going to buy more than 5 complete suits to look cool, and I can't imagine them spending much more than 25k on the project. Or that they should.
Expenses? What expenses? I pay about 1 credit per resource for mined goods, about 3 credits per resource for hides, maybe 6or 7 counting travel expenses to get obscure resources. I run an average of maybe one and a half person extractors at a time - four right now counting the solar plant, but often as few as zero or one. I have one factory, a medium showroom and a small warehouse. I need more money than I'm making lately - but not more than I'll make once the reputation gets built back up and the economy recovers a bit from the organic harvesting bug they just fixed yesterday.
I saw 2 gunman dusters at 1100 cr in Mos Eisley, bought them both, sold them back at 3k in the next hours in the same place. I even got an email fron the guy thanking me with the loc of his shop lol!
Not taking into account the level required to make the clothes is denying the work it took to get there, it also leads to overpriced low level items and underpriced high level items. It took me hours to get there, it cost me around 500k, you can bet I will make people pay for it.
What I find interesting about this whole lot is that people are complaining about the price of items that have absolutely no functional value whatsoever. When they fix skill tapes and bioengineered cloth we can talk about 'Value' in clothing. But for now we are nothing but a cosmetic modification to a toon. Now the players do place an artificial value on appearence, but only because on a whole the community is rather vain.
However priceing does matter. As well as competition. But in the tailoring industry there is no product competition. Even in crated materials we lost the one place we could compete. And as far as clothing goes, a ribbed shirt and a flight suit really provide the exact same benifit. As an interesting point, almost all of the really nice outfits I've come up with involved items I have been able to manufacture for months now. Often this includes stuff from the Domestics line. Master clothing is in no way superior to novice. There is no reason what-so-ever that a master item should be marked up because it's 'better'. It's not. The only reason that master items sell more is because the game designers hired a 14 year old male to select what clothes he liked and put them in master (I mean this metaphourically). And since the largest segment of the MMO gaming community is of 14 year old males, well. Duh! But what makes acasualjacketinferior to areinforced jacket? One's closed front, the other is open. But they're at different tiers. Does this make the reinforced superior? Nope.
Should we be screwing ourselves pricewise. No. Shouldn't we get a fair slice of the mission money pie? No. Should we be litterally attacking eachother's personal integrity over a pricing difference? No. Should we be exerting totalitarian control over the price of clothes? No. Should we be harrasing n00bs because they sell for too little? No. Do all of these things make the game seriously unfun? Yes.
If you're having trouble with your neighbors undercutting you, have you contemplated providing some service that would make your shop more desireable then theirs? Player events? Pleasent Coustemer Service (if your neighbor is a jerk)? A built in cantina? There are lots of things that a veteran tailor can provide to their coustemers that a newbie just can't do. Veterans know what outfits look good: appropriate color combinations, what makes the best substitue for a man's wedding apparel, how to make the horriffically overused 'Neo' look, all the way to the right pants. These are the veteran tailor's allies. Use them to your advantage.
But that's only value to you. Not your coustemers. It's really irrelevent to them how long it took you to get there, only how long they had to wait to get the item matters to the people who buy this stuff.
That was really clunky grammar. I appologize.
But seriously. Is your training really make you worth 5-10X what a novice is (Just in raw amount of time?) Back in week 2 when there was 1 master tailor, period, on my server (I know that's not quite right, but it's the point of the matter that's important here), ya, the time was worth that much. But now there are many master tailors. And even as such, doesn't that logic mean that the price of a novice tier item made by a master should be higher than if made by a novice? I mean, you can make it in more colors, more selectivity, the works! Why then shouldn't a master smock cost more than a novice smock?
But that isn't what's happening. Masters charge the same for novice items as novices do. This shows that their time ISN'T worth anything to them. If it was, a red plain shirt (Novice Artisan) should cost about 500c, not 100 like they would sell it for...
Every one of these debates is marred by too many assumptions being made about people in most cases you don't even know. Someone charges 1k less than you does not mean lousy CS, intentional undercutting, or just a really mean person out to get you. You wouldn't know that from reading some of these threads though. Then there's the assumption that we work just as hard as "insert class here" we deserve just as much reward. Sorry, that doesn't fly either.
Here are the requirements to make a good E11 rifle, good meaning made with adv components that someone will actually buy:
45x Plumbum Iron
15x Ferrous Metal
12x Metal
16x Irolunn Inert Gas
8x Phrik Aluminum
5x Diatium Copper
5x Ostrine Carbonate Ore
10x Polymer
8x Ryll Amorphous Gemstone
17x Duranium Steel
19x Duralloy Steel
40x Rhodium Steel
9x Metal
28x Corellian Deciduous Wood
8x Link-Steel Aluminum
That's a tier II schematic. Name any tailoring tier II, or any tailoring period, schematic that requires 11 specific named resources, or resources from more than 2 harvestor types. Now go to the next step, a weaponsmith has to successfully experiment on every step of that weapon, and has to have good OQ and conductivity on all of those resources. Even when we had experimentation it didn't matter if it worked, and never will. They've yet to put in a retroactive change to crafted items. Changes to weapons, armor and droidsonly affect those created after the change.
A weaponsmith crit fails combining this weapon he's out nearly 250 specific resources that took a lot more time and effot to gather than the 345 generic resources going in a master tailor level schematic like a grand ball gown, and it's only half way through the weaponsmith profession.
You could argue that tailors make up that time and effort on the CS end working with customers while they customize items, but then go look through all the threads where people say they don't work with customers, they do all their sales by vendor/bazaar, or take orders and leave them on the vendor. If it's bought it's a completed sale, doesn't even matter if the person who ordered it is the one who bought it. There's no corellation between people running their shops that way and how much they charge, so it's a little difficult to make the arguement of pricing be justified by customer service across the board.
Last thing - the mission income is so easy and low prices hurt new tailors arguement. You can't have it both ways. Either mission income is so easy people will run x number of missions to get master level clothing no matter how much it costs, or people don't have enough money for master tailor items so they'll settle for lower tier items and colors, thus providing income to non-masters. Read it again, does it make sense yet? Business for non-masters is hurt by 2 things - lack of colors and lack of schematics. When there were no masters yet, or only a few, people flocked to buy non-master items because that was the only thing they could find. Unfortunately, that time has passed. I've yet to hear of a master tailor that fills an order by making the master level items and then referring the customer to a lower level tailor for the rest of the things they want. Instead they make the master level items and throw in some of the non-master extras for free. I've also not yet heard of a master tailor who's repeat regular customers only return to them for master level schematics. They go to the same tailor for everything, whether it's a fleshwrap or a pair of artisan level shorts. The colors make it worse, someone wanting hot pants and a bustier could go to a non-master, except they want them fire-engine red, which means they still aren't giving their business to a non-master. I don't care if you charge 50 credits or 5000 for those hot pants, if you can't give them the colors they want they'll find someone who can.
Charge whatever you want for your stuff, but don't come here complaining because you didn't put enough thought into your pricing to give a short reasonable answer to someone who questions it. And don't write off anyone who dares question your pricing as a jerk, if they just finished running 4 hours of missions to buy that weapon, they may not be so willing to run another 2 just for something pretty. Clothing is not the only expense in the game, and it's definitely not the most necessary for the majority of players.
No, because it didn't take them long to get to Novice, while it took them a long time to get to Master.
And it's the value that items have for us that determine the price, because we are the ones who set it. And the customers will not care, they will just run one more mission but they will be able to buywhat they wantafterwards anyway - it's *our* market.
Also, keep in mind that failing on high level items causes a bigger loss than on low level items because they require more components, so that's also the best reason to have high level items cost more.