Tailor Archive
Thread: It spreads like a disease..
Songe, don't pity me because I don't value my time. I'm Rorian. For me, it's the other way around. I keep my prices low to provide me with more things to do.
Those of you who are from Coronet City or Theed or Mos Eisley see a different game than those of us from places like Restuss or Dearic do. You price things at 30 credits per unit of material and sell out as fast as you can make them. I price things at 10 credits per unit of material, and sell maybe 15 or 20 things a day on average. And I'm not complaining about that, that's pretty much how I like it.
And Arthur, if you do that to me - and there are those who do - you're not taking advantage of me. On the contrary, you're cheating yourself out of my wholesale discount. You see, as cheap as my prices are (not the cheapest in the game, but still cheap enough to tick off people like Songe), I give an extra 40% discount to merchants who're buying them to resell, if they give me a bulk order in advance and arrange a pickup time. (www.infamousbrad.com/swg/wholesale.html)
No, the guy I pity is the merchant who screwed up his order so badly so often, and criticized the stuff that I offered him so many times, that I basically told him where to stick his shop. He still commutes up from Theed at least once a week, to buy almost everything I have left on the bazaar that day, paying full retail price. Oddly enough, it's nearly all stuff that he complained was "garbage" and "not quality merchandise" when I offered it to him at 40% off plus free delivery. Now he's paying my retail price, plus round-trip shuttle fare, and still doing it rather than apologize. Don't pity him too much. The largest merchant PA in his area charges three times what I do, so he could buy my stuff one shuttle hop away, pay retail price, factor the shuttle ticket into the price, double the total cost, and still undercut them. But oh, well, whatever. It's his money.
The fact of the matter is that I get done with all of my clothing orders for the day in about an hour. That's about one hour of seeing what sold, deciding what items to replace them with in what colors, and making and stocking them. Once or twice a week, I run over to Narmle to pick up more low-level tissues from local bio engineers. On other weekday mornings, when there aren't swarms of other entertainers to play music with in the cantinas, I log out Brad Bradley and go play another character on another server, because there's nothing else much for a tailor/musician from Restuss to do.
Heck, I'm half tempted to drop my prices again, if I thoughtit would give me more work to do. But wouldn't, because the real limiting issue on demand is that there are only so many people on Rori and only so many people willing to travel there for inexpensive expert professional service.
As a buyer, I don't even get stuff off the bazaar anymore. It's not worth (basically) stealing your profit because someone is too halfa$sed to tell people that they make stuff. It also kind of tells you that they probably wouldn't be too good to do business with because they don't make the effort for what they do.
That's just how I see it. /shrug I dunno.
Miggo_ wrote:
As a buyer, I don't even get stuff off the bazaar anymore. It's not worth (basically) stealing your profit because someone is too halfa$sed to tell people that they make stuff. It also kind of tells you that they probably wouldn't be too good to do business with because they don't make the effort for what they do.
That's just how I see it. /shrug I dunno.
I don't quite understand what you're saying.. you don't buy off the bazaar because why?
I can assure you I make plenty of effort in my business.. and I still use the bazaar as an advertising tool.
Judging by the limited offerings on the bazaar, I'd say there is a huge number of people who have no idea what tailors can make. They don't come read this board, they don't visit the catalog sites, and they don't visit tailoring stores 1Km and more away from cities. I know when I first started playing and had decided to be a tailor, I was disappointed at how few items were offered on the bazaar. I wanted to be able to see the clothes I'd be making in the future. Then I'd hike out to the tailor shops that were advertised, and find a small house with no displays and an empty vendor. Very disappointing! So, I think the bazaar can be a great showcase.
I keep track of every sale I make, and I can tell you that some people buy a few items from me anddon'tcome to my shop. Those same people might buy some different items the next time I put some on the bazaar, but they still won't come to my shop. Other people buy one item, then come to my shop and buy 3 outfits off my vendor five minutes later. It's interesting to track. But anyhow, I won't give up on that first type of person as a customer. I don't know why they won't come 1Km to my store, but that doesn't mean they are stuck with newbie clothes forever. :-)
Anyhow, I wouldn't want to make all my sales via the bazaar, but I still regard it as a valuable tool.
Ri'a
(lost sig again!)
...I wish we had an edit button.
I did want to add, though, that I certainly don't sell master items, simply because I don't think they belong there, outside of the loot drops and resells. I do sell the basics like camo pants, cloaks, travel packs in the basic colours-- the standards that everyone wants and that I don't much want to bother filling my vendor with -- and other, more unusual, items that happen to catch my attention on the morning in question. For some time, folks in my city didn't even know that sports wraps, for instance, existed. Nowdays, I can't keep them in stock on the vendor... *laughs*
Brad,
What I don't understand is, if business is so bad, and you feel you have no pricing power at all, why not travel a bit and take advantage of your own "discounts"? Or hell, why not just move? I like Rori a lot too, beautiful place, love visiting there, love hunting there, but I would never live there for the very reason you gave. I mean if you're happy doing what you're doing, cool, but sounds like you're not, so why not make "business trips" to the big cities and make a killing there, rather than working for other people who make a killing off of you (I still say taking advantage of you)?
I used to live on Talus, and still travel there a few times a week. When I was a "Bazar-selling-tailor" it used to account for about a third of my sales. It was like selling lemonaide in the middle of the desert. Not many people, things did timeout on the bazar where they wouldn't in Coronet, but once I learned what items were the most in demand, I could name my price for them. I priced things there probably 25%-50% higher than in Coronet simply because of lack of competition and this made up for the fact that sales weren't all that brisk.
One thing that I found hilarious was last week when I travelled to Dantooine to get some high-level DNA, I forgot to switch off my "master tailor" tag. When I landed on Dant, I was immediately attacked by a couple of people wanting clothing (fieldwear stuff naturally). Ok, there iscertainly not a single piece ofclothing on the bazar in Dant, and certainly no other tailors there, and I wasn't much in the mood to make clothing, so I said "ok, fine" and decided that my prices just doubled. They actually had no problem with my prices at all, lol, 10k for a non-modified gunman's duster? no problem, lol. Before I knew it I had made like 30k-40k there in about 10min.
Mystyrys wrote:
I check to see if who is selling it is also the creator. Often it is not. It's second or more hand I guess? I am not surprised to see many people dumping their old clothing when they have replaced it with new bio-enhanced copies. But sheesh. Did they buy the original that cheap too? Have they no concept of what it is still worth? /shakes head. Shame on them.
Now hold on a sec... 
If it's a normal player (non-merchant) & they are selling stuff they don't want/need/have space for anymore then the pretty much have to sell it for 3K. I imagine that somebody payingfor master clothes and getting new outfits probably has enough in the bank to not worry about not recuping all their money on something they don't want anymore.
ArthurDentOnBria wrote:
Brad, What I don't understand is, if business is so bad, and you feel you have no pricing power at all, why not travel a bit and take advantage of your own "discounts"? Or hell, why not just move?
You mean like everybody else does? (The unofficial motto of the Rori Chamber of Commerce: "Rori - A Great Place to Be ... From.")
For one thing, there are a lot of players who start out there, either accidentally (like I did) or on purpose, and it annoys me to see them have to shuttle down to Theed to buy basic gear. It deeply annoys me that there are never any basic tools on the local bazaar any more (when I started out as an artisan, that was my bread and butter, for crying out loud). It deeply annoys me that we seldom see anything but looted CDEFs up there. (It is very easy for someone with Engineering IV and Domestic IV to double both the damage and the speed on a CDEF, and get good money and user XP for selling it, and it makes life so much easier on the new people if they can get access to them.)
I feel that the biggest problem that grows out of the fact that they've made grinding way too easy and user XP way too scarce is that there is too much concentration on the high end market in crafting. That makes life really, really suck for the new players. You don't believe me? Start a new character on another server anywhere other than Mos Eisley, Theed, or Coronet City, try to level up solo, and see what it takes now.
But the biggest reason that I stay on Rori has nothing to do with that. The biggest reason I stay on Rori is that compared with Rori, every other place in the game is overflowing with @holes. Griefers. Load-killers. Leet-speakers. Exploiters. Spam-shouters. AFK macroers. AFK macroing spam-shouting exploiter leet-speaking load-killer griefers, even, in some cases. Yes, I know that such people are a tiny minority ... but they're a tiny minority that annoys me, so running into packs or swarms of them once an hour means that on average two or three times per playing session, I'm going to be ticked off at someone.
Yeah, we Rorians (and I assume Talusians) put up with a smaller economy than the rest of you do, and there is no meaningful way to level up an entertainer here, I admit. But I have never in the the last several months run into a single Rorian who wanted to "pwn" anyone.
In fact, when it comes to dealing with each other, I've never even run into a single Rorian who wanted to clip their neighbors for every credit they could squeeze! Other tailors on these boards have reamed me a new orifice, over and over again, for selling things for less than I could sell them. At my prices, I'm making good, steady money, to the point where I honestly don't have anything much left to spend it on - how would tripling it make my life any easier or better? Out there, my attitude is weird. On Rori, it's normal. I'm still using a pair of very-high-end DX2 pistols that I was given, free, by one of the best weaponsmiths on the server. He didn't do it in barter. He didn't do it in hope of future favors (although he'll likely get them). He did it because I'm a neighbor, and a friend, and because people from other planets are paying him so much money for his goods that he's got more money than he knows what to do with. You want another example? Yesterday somebody sold me their used medium harvesters, ones with better than average extraction rate ... for 3000 credits for the chemical and 1500 credits for the mineral. Why? Because we take care of each other on Rori. You want another example? When I was stuck having to grind Cloaks, a Ranger was selling me grinding-quality hides in stacks of a couple of thousand for 3 credits per hide, and sometimes less. OK, during one server-wide wooly hide shortage, prices went up to 5 credits per hide ... but he later refunded the difference, just to be a good neighbor. Unsurprisingly, he was a Rorian. You want another example? We've got two local bioengineers tha I know of who are very happy to sell bioengineered tissues for 500 to 1000 credits each. Why? Because they're selling to fellow Rorians. You want another example? No? I'm not surprised. I could bore you even more with stories about how nice it is to be a Rorian.
And by the way, many of the above examples were across factional lines. Heck, so was the doctor who droppped what he was doing yesterday morning to grab a shuttle from the Rebel Base up to Narmle for me. I'd accidentally (or through a bug, I'm not sure) ended up in the wrong cloning center pretty torn up, and he had time, so he shuttled up - even though he's covert rebel and I'm covert imperial. He offered to do this even before I offered to give him a set of bioengineered +4 scrubs. Why did I give him several thousands of credits' worth of clothing for a single heal? Because we're both Rorians.
The more time I spend elsewhere, the more eager I am to get back to Rori. Living and working on Rori is like being in one big planet-wide Player Association.
And besides, business isn't that bad. If it were any more than twice as good, it'd probably be annoying.
Some people wil go the way of KMart and Walmart and get you rankled but withthat time sink they wont make millions fast - it IS really how you deal with YOUR PARTICULAR MARKET. and how you choose to grow from there. Dont over react to fast bazzare sales- the peeps who sell regualrily on the Bazzare are not really tailors and the will pooof fast. If you are dedicated, your reputation will sell faster than you can keep up with in any given market situation. Please dont worry about bazzare sale deflating the market . been there done that, yes you can out do the server master in sales, wth some balls
BradBradley wrote:
But the biggest reason that I stay on Rori has nothing to do with that. The biggest reason I stay on Rori is that compared with Rori, every other place in the game is overflowing with @holes. Griefers. Load-killers. Leet-speakers. Exploiters. Spam-shouters. AFK macroers. AFK macroing spam-shouting exploiter leet-speaking load-killer griefers, even, in some cases. Yes, I know that such people are a tiny minority ... but they're a tiny minority that annoys me, so running into packs or swarms of them once an hour means that on average two or three times per playing session, I'm going to be ticked off at someone.
I find it hard to believe we play on the same server.. to be honest outside of Theed or maybe Moenia, I've haven't run into anyone like that. Even those places aren't THAT bad. Keren is a great city, frequented often by roleplayers. I have a *great* relationship with my neighbors.. they are some of my best friends in game.
But whatever, I've got no desire to recommend you move from Rori. :-)
But here's the problem Brad.. this last post makes it sound like you are actually happy with how the game is going for you.. (mostly). But prior to today, all I have seen from you is complaints. Complaints about game mechanics, your business, prices other people charge (tailors and bio-engineers), and who knows what else. Even your website has a very jaded sarcastic tone to it. I know that this medium can make it difficult to communicate intentions accurately.. but I'm letting you know that to me (and at least one other person on this thread), you come across as very *unhappy* with most things about tailoring. In the past it hascaused me to wonder why you even play the game at all.
I don't know where I'm going with this.. it's too early and I haven't had any caffeine.. but I guess I'm saying that if you are really having FUN in this game, then maybe lighten up a bit.. cause that's not how you come across at all.
Ri'a
AnitaSWG wrote:
But here's the problem Brad.. this last post makes it sound like you are actually happy with how the game is going for you.. (mostly). But prior to today, all I have seen from you is complaints.
There's an old joke that I'm fond of ...
When this one kid got to be about two years old and hadn't spoken a word yet, his parents started to get worried, so they took him to a bunch of specialists, none of whom could find anything wrong with him.
One morninga couple of years later, his mom overslept and served him cold oatmeal for breakfast instead of his usual oatmeal. He took one bite of it, put the spoon down, looked at her and said accusingly, "It's cold."
His mom freaked out and said, "You spoke!"
He said, "Yeah, I spoke, I said that my oatmeal is cold."
"You mean you could speak all along? Then why didn't you say anything until now?"
The kid replied, "Until now, everything was OK."
Most people only post on these forums when they're (a) confused or (b) angry. The rest of the time, they're playing the game.
That being said, somehow you have to have missed all of the threads where I addressed complaints from other people who were unhappy. For example, when they announced that time-based decay for clothing was never going to happen, 90% of this forum screamed that the sky was falling and at least a half-dozen of them quit tailoring forever. I calmly did the math to show them that it wasn't going to matter, and they weren't going to be hurt by it at all. Similarly, when the new decay scheme came along, 90% of this forum screamed that the sky was falling and at least another three quit tailoring, and I again did the math to show them that no, it wasn't going to make much difference. When things are all right, I say so. When they're not, I say so.
I'm not surprised you missed it, but I posted a lengthy article in the SWG Discussion forum the other day in which I described tailoring as the second-least broken crafting profession in the game. We have it good. Anybody who thinks we don't have it good should try being an architect, or a droid engineer, or if they really have a taste for masochism, a chef. (I attribute much of this to the fact that we've now had two absolutely mind-bogglingly excellent correspondents in a row.)
I did have a complaint about bioengineer prices. Fortunately, Adam Smith's "invisible hand" is solving that problem for me quite nicely, so I don't even have any complaints left about that - except of course that I agree with the bioengineers that the number of eggs per lair needs to be at least doubled, and with both them and the chefs thatsome way to get milk needs to be implemented or the ingredient needs to be replaced in all those schematics. I am hardly the only person with those complaints.
I do have some big complaints about merchanting in this game. So do the other merchants, including the tailor merchants. I have been complaining lately that the proposed fix that's supposed to go into the next publish won't solve the problem. So far, the other merchants don't agree with me - but watch, unless the Merchant developer changes his mind between now and then, and extends stockroom decay time, I'll have been right and merchanting will still suck.
Come to think of it, what I'm complaining about in this thread isn't the game, it's the complainers in this forum. This thread (like most pricing threads) started with somebody else whining about a fellow tailor's prices and sales practices. When I defend some of those prices and some of those practices by pointing to the game mechanics that make them necessary or at least useful, why does that make me the complainer?
No, I'm not familiar with every post you've ever made.. I just gave my general impression of how you come across. It's just my opinion, and I'm entitled to it. :-)
I'll be sure to keep a better eye out for those positive posts in the future..
Ri'a
The villain of this drama, as I see it, is the bazaar price cap. Since 3k is the most you can charge without throwing away perfectly good skill points on Business/Merchant, 3k is the default price for a lot of goods. I've gotten perfectly functional laser carbines at that price. I got my solar collector at 3k, and a few small houses.
Toss out the price cap, and the "standard" prices will increase, resources will be more available, more merchandise will move, more people with no interest in vending will be able to make a living.
To compensate, there should be sales taxes (taken from seller profits) on both vendor and bazaar sales, but the taxes on bazaar sales should be substantially higher. Make it enough of a differential, and using a vendor becomes more attractive than the bazaar not only for items above 3k, but for everything. Added to the 25 item limit, that's more than enough to keep Merchant viable without the Bazaar cap.