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greymage

The wolfram and great swords

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Actual market pcs:

- steel long: 700 - 750gc

- Wolfram ore: 700gc

- serpent stone: 2000gc

- Wolfram bar: 8000gc

- binding stone: 6000gc

- great sword: 21000g

 

1) LilManu buys for 630gc ingreds.

LilManu makes steel longs, risking to fail

LilManu sells steel longs @ 700-750gc

LilManu plays fair game

 

2) Harv buys steel longs @ 700-750gc

Harv makes long trips and harvest wolframite

Harv sells wolframite @ 700gc

Harv is very friendly

 

3) BigAlch buys 10 wolframite @ 700gc = 7000gc

BigAlch buys 1 serpent stone @ 2000gc

BigAlch buys 30 fes and 1FP @ 1060gc

BigAlch mixes, risking to fail

BigAlch sells wolf bar @ 8000gc

BigAlch is loved by all players

 

3) BigManu buys 2 wolf bars @ 8000gc = 16000gc

BigManu buys 1 binding stone @ 6000gc

BigManu buys specifics @ 1000gc

BigManu mixes, risking to fail

BigManu sells great sword @ 21000gc

BigManu is loved by all players

 

I dont know why, i dont harvest anymore wolframite nor mix any wolf bar.

 

I dont understand either that any manuer be passionate enough to make a great sword.

 

My suggestion?

 

the market speaks!

 

Wolframite 800gc

Wolfram bar 10Kgc

great swords 28-30Kgc

 

Any advices?

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I'll be specific...

 

I buy some wolf bars for 8k each. I make some of them from scratch. I pay 6.5k generally for binding stones. And I sell at a loss. However, it has nothing to do with getting xp from them. Honestly, I can get more xp/gc making leather helms in the manu school. Part of it is the chance at a rare sword, but most of it is because my customers expect me to sell them. I no longer sell training gear except on rare occassions, however, I must sell the great swords, steel plate items and up to keep my customers.

 

As for "Any advices? " yeah, I have some... When you manu, you make your gc from the ingreds you harv/alch yourself, not from your skill at manu so be ready to do a lot of it.

 

For whatever their reasons, someone will always undercut. Just this morning I was hearing about a great sword that was sold for 19k...the npc pays 20k for them. Standard market price of all great swords is (and has been for a long time) 21k.

 

EDIT: I haven't ever paid over 600gc for steel longs. If I calculated it right(and I may not have since I'm quite tired), cost to make if you buy all the ingreds is ~635gc so 650gc would be a fair price.

Edited by CelticLady

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If you look at the word "guild" throughout history.It is almost the same as "union" If the top 20 manufaters/crafters etc could form a "guild" they could control the prices and the market for those items..

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If you look at the word "guild" throughout history.It is almost the same as "union" If the top 20 manufaters/crafters etc could form a "guild" they could control the prices and the market for those items..

 

That wouldn't work. It's not just the top 20, 50 or even 100 manuers that sell manu products. People come to me with ingreds for me to mix all the time. I generally don't have a problem with it unless I later find out they are undercutting on market (or if they are just on my bad side). I won't mix for them again if I find out they are doing that to me or another manuer. Then there are the people that bought something, used it (but didn't degrade the item) and decide to later sell it for less than what they paid. It isn't just top manufacturers that are also sellers.

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And hey, lets not forget people who get them from DBs, either from bagjumping or PKing... What does it cost them to sell below cost price? They make a bit less of a profit on it, but they sell faster.

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From my experience there are three basic rules that govern profit in EL

 

1. The closer you stay to raw ingredients, the more money you'll make.

 

I can make more gc/hour selling ores/minerals than making essence. But I can make more gc/hour making essence than making bars (with FEs for example), more making bars than armor/swords, etc.

 

This leads to a "time is money" corollary - the more work you do yourself the better; the more stuff you buy the less chance to make a profit or even break-even.

 

2. It's very hard to make a net profit on high level items.

 

In addition to rule #1, you also have the high cost of books, mixing failures, and the cost to level up to higher skill levels. All this "drag" on profit means you have to sell a lot of an item to recover all the costs involved. I'm not sure it's possible to recover the costs of even the books for some of the newer high-end stuff.

 

3. Profit takes second-place to experience or the simply fun of making higher-end stuff.

 

As noted by others, getting experience means that the EL economy will never work like real-life economy. People are willing to mix things for a total loss (in a school) simply for the experience. And people are also willing to loose large amounts of gc just so they can say "I make that crown" (or whatever).

 

 

Personally, I make most of my money selling harvested items. I then spend that money leveling up my skills. Traditionally, when I run out of money, it's back to the titanium mines to make more, then back to leveling. Anything I've sold along the way is not profit, it's not even break-even, it just reduced the losses a bit letting me work on levels a bit longer before I got back to the mine.

 

Of course some harvestables have made me more gc than others... ;)

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I am tired of the prices as well. I wish we could get the prices fixed. The closest we can get is to quote the prices at 108%-110% the cost of the ingredients and have as many people as we can to do the same.

 

As for the bulk producers, I really do wish they would sell their swords to the npc instead of the market, but we can't force them to.

 

As for the time is money thing from bkc56......The leaders of the ALCH guild used to be Tyralin and Jason. Both of them were experts on using their guild members to do a bunch of work for them and pay them too. Even though they would only make 1-2gc per essence, they would make a massive profit in the long run due to the mass production.

 

I have been told that MarkusWeck would buy bags of harvested goods for cheaper and have some (probably free) guild assistance. He has managed to influence the prices a little bit here and there. I don't see why we couldn't Try to influence the prices to be profitable ourselves.

 

As for Me, I won't sell to players at all unless it is at a respectable price and I make a profit. I will let them substitute some items for some of the gc, but that is it. Either I make a profit or I don't bother. It is sad, but trading in gc is worse than trading items for items.

 

Sometimes, I will give price quotes that include a breakdown by major ingredients. If I can't make a profit, why bother? If anyone has trouble making a profit off of something, why should they bother? The answer, they shouldn't. Sell for decent prices or expect to wait a while for another cheap seller to come along when you need something....and may that take ages.

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We've been around this block too many times...

 

Market prices for harvestables, and derived products are meaningless in a game where basic resources are unlimited. All the ingredients for that Steel Long Sword are free to gather, with only a minor cost in tool losses. The only things that have a real cost associated with them are:

  • Ingredients that can only be bought from an NPC (leather, sand paper).
  • Rare or exotic ingredients that cannot be reliably obtained, where supply & demand do create a price.
  • Creature drops which are in limited supply, controlled by spawn rates. Again, supply & demand will give you a price.

So where does the "700-750 gc" price tag for the Steel Long Sword come from? How is this not pure profit if you want it? A reward for players time and effort?

  1. This is offset by experience earned -- this is an economy driven by experience points, not gold coins.
  2. Isn't the fun of playing the game a reward in itself? Sure, earning money in game is fun, but then you are in competition with others who do not value that -- and who is to say what is the "right" way to play?

In a competive market based system, prices are limited to the range set by NPCs' buy-sell prices. NPCs have infinite supply & demand at fixed prices, so represent the edge of the EL economy where it meets some larger system. However, players are free to ignore NPC's buy-prices in closed-house production plans; so again raw materials are valued at zero or less (depending on what value you place on xp), and thus for derived products.

 

"Fixing" prices for goods in never a good idea. In EL terms; NPCs could buy and sell items for the same price, effectively setting a fixed price for it. That then removes trade between characters -- just do business with the NPC, who always has a supply/demand. But closed-house production still bypasses this.

 

The only way to impose value on raw materials is to limit their supply, maybe resource spawns similar to creature spawns. But that produces its own set of problems. EL doesn't limit resources, and to change this would be a fundamental change.

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imo the swords prices are at 21k cause all ppl want em cheap, manuers cant sell it and then they sell it cause npc buys for 20k :P

 

just change npc buy price to ingredents value and then lets see :P

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<snip>

EL doesn't limit resources, and to change this would be a fundamental change.

 

But isn't that a part of EL being in beta?

 

Some games also "force" you to harvest each individual "ore" or "plant" - no "click once and harv till you are full"

 

But that would widen the gulf between cost and price.

 

Maybe if the manufacturable items were different than the items won from DBs - even possibly make the looted items a component of a greater item that can only be player-made?

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...

But isn't that a part of EL being in beta?

...

 

 

Beta, again, implies to me about the stability of the client and server and

has nothing to do with the games RPG system. Even when this reaches final

non production state, I highly doubt it means the end to any RPG system changes.

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[*]Ingredients that can only be bought from an NPC (leather, sand paper).
Except that since you can sell harvestables at the same time, you can trade for them for free.
[*]Rare or exotic ingredients that cannot be reliably obtained, where supply & demand do create a price.
Eh, if you spend enough time on it, you'll get them. It's just a matter of investing the time. Same as harvesting those (free) resources)
[*]Creature drops which are in limited supply, controlled by spawn rates. Again, supply & demand will give you a price.
As above, although you also have the cost of healing/repairs, in most cases... But then, that's free too, right?
So where does the "700-750 gc" price tag for the Steel Long Sword come from?
From the cost of the ore, the demand for bars based on the higher use of bars to make swords, and all of the more mundane item costs.

Time and effort have a value. Both in-game and IRL. And harvesting takes time. Ergo the items are not free.

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I always like to consider this money to represent time spent in doing something. So you can make certain money from mining titanium but also steel bars or potions. If I don't want to mine silver, I pay someone to get some. On this level it works pretty well.

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  • Ingredients that can only be bought from an NPC (leather, sand paper).

Except that since you can sell harvestables at the same time, you can trade for them for free.

True, you can reliably mine ore and sell for gold, to buy any know expense. This can be planned for.
  • Rare or exotic ingredients that cannot be reliably obtained, where supply & demand do create a price.

Eh, if you spend enough time on it, you'll get them. It's just a matter of investing the time. Same as harvesting those (free) resources)

Except you cannot plan to get them; its down to luck. Which is no good if you are planning a project -- you have to budget for buying them off the market, which opens up to supply & demand. Any you do make or find is then a boon.
  • Creature drops which are in limited supply, controlled by spawn rates. Again, supply & demand will give you a price.

As above, although you also have the cost of healing/repairs, in most cases... But then, that's free too, right?

There is a key difference, which is the limited supply due to spawns, which then puts you in competition with others. ~40 characters can sit around a single flower and all harvest as much as they want, but only one person can take a spawn at a time.

So where does the "700-750 gc" price tag for the Steel Long Sword come from?

From the cost of the ore, the demand for bars based on the higher use of bars to make swords, and all of the more mundane item costs. Time and effort have a value. Both in-game and IRL. And harvesting takes time. Ergo the items are not free.

So there is no intrinsic cost here? The price is arbitary, based on what people will pay, and on how much profit people want for their effort.

 

Others may choose to undercut to take the business. The bottom line is the actual cost (which for mundain items close to zero) or what an NPC will pay for the item.

 

If it was a pure gc making exercise, then there is a separate valuation which of "best price" which is the best price for the ingredients limited by the NPC buy-sell range. This is an interesting calculation (I did have a spreadsheet for this once). However, it doesn't work because the economy isn't cash driven.

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