Weaponsmith Archive

I've made my first batch of Proton Grenades. I get 5uses per with stats 1600-3225/5.0.

Any ideas how these should be priced on the Wanderhome server?

Pricing grenades is tough because from the customers perspective, it's a high damage weapon with a seriously limited number of uses. But from our perspective, they're a huge pain in the butt to make, take a lot of factory time a fairly large amount of resources so the tendency is to charge a lot of money. My advice, start high and work your way down....You'll find the middle ground.

I did crates of Protons @ 50k each.

padawan come to bria.

We neeeeed you

Hey tacwraith. I did my best to stock up Commandos on the Radiant Server. Now, they're losing an All-Commando WS too...

Sony's Support is about as helpful as a solar-powered flashlight.

I've also found that the perspective of lost opportunity factors in too. Bearing in mind Protons are an ingredient to making rocket launchers, selling a crate is 5 rocket launcher's worth of sub-ingredients. Granted, more goes into making a rocket launcher but for a while I sold crates of Protons for 42k - they didn't really move much, while Rocket Launchers tended to move more.

Oddly enough when I realised this and figured to up the price of my Proton crates from 42k to 55k - they sold out. Us weaponsmiths get bagged out for pricing up and yet only when I shift the price up do things actually sell - I find this holds true for most of my things as well. I've increased my prices across the board by 10 to 20% and my sales actually increased.

Thanks for all the input. Opportunity cost is huge on these things, because protons are roughly as big a hassle as Republic Blasters to manufacture. At 40 or even 50k per crate, that's roughly 1/5 the revenue as a repub blaster, less than 1/3 than even a lousy scout blaster.

I guess it depends. I'm curious what people do--I have piles and piles of substandard resources that have been outdated by recent spawns. I guess I could use grenades as a means of eating up this inventory and still getting 10:1 revenue from resources (though they all seem to sell for that much on Bazaar these holo-prof grinding days).

I'm somewhat averse to producing weapons using anything but the best quality resources, though. What would you do?

5k/ea

Oar

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Morticius wrote:

Thanks for all the input. Opportunity cost is huge on these things, because protons are roughly as big a hassle as Republic Blasters to manufacture.

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Ummm, it would take you DAYS to run a full set of Proton Grenades - possibly up toa week depending on how many factories you devoted to it. Don't you think Republic Blaster are just a tad bit easier than grenades???

It doesn't take that long to make a batch of Proton grenades. They use 4 components, just like a Repub Blaster does when you equip it with a scope. Granted, the munitions components take a little longer to run in the factory, but I rarely keep factories going even 25% of the time. I just pop in a batch of munitions stuff and let it run for a day.

The real issue is profit--grenades are 5use, that's it. They use comparable resources and time/energy cost, but people just aren't willing to spend the same $$$ on them.

In the end, it's more about making something unique and different. Besides, grenades are way more fun to use than Repub Blasters!!

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Morticius wrote:
It doesn't take that long to make a batch of Proton grenades. They use 4 components, just like a Repub Blaster does when you equip it with a scope.

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What's the production time on a scope in the factory? Now what's the production time on a Medium Warhead Mechanism? If you set up to run 1000 Med. Warheads, you WILL be waiting for more than 2 days - just for that one component. It's probably closer to 3.

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Kershakk wrote:

I've increased my prices across the board by 10 to 20% and my sales actually increased.

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That's hilarious!

"It's expensive, this guy must be a rock star!"

1000 Medium warheads will produce 40 crates of grenades. Priced at 5k/grenade that'd be a 5 million credit order. I guess I wasn't thinking quite so large a quantity, because I'd never consider making 1000 scopes at a time. This must be where we're missing each other, because I've never made a 3 day run of anything--don't want to be stuck with that much stock when the resource spawns change.

However, if the volumes of grenade purchases were such that 1000 unit runs were justified, I could easily justify the additional factory cost. You only need to move grenades at 4 times your RepubBlaster sales volumes to make up the profit difference. I personally have not seem that kind of demand yet.