PlaneShift
Support => Complaint Department => Topic started by: Herihi on January 18, 2012, 04:32:35 am
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The prices for crafted items needs to be fixed. While it's just annoying that crafted items aren't worth more then the metal used to make them. It's ludicrous now that long swords and short swords aren't even worth that. In what game anywhere does it make sense that I spent hours making a weapon to have it worth less then the materials I started from?
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I certainly hope this is a bug. Looking at the stats for spangens, and crafted helms, there is (or at least used to be) a wide profit margin for the crafters, which allows them to buy out ore at a fairly high price, and still turn a decent profit. That being said, I certainly hope this is something that was miscalculated, or overlooked accidentally.
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think about the price you sell a spangen for in comparison to stock. For bronze a spangen is 11,900 (price isn't exact) I think and a piece of stock is 8500. Divide that by amount of pieces used and you get the same amoutn per ore. It's the same from every item you make in PS, the amount of material made is the same price as the item you make from it. I have never seen a game or anywhere in reality where that is the case.
Even worse though is the fact they dropped prices of long swords and short swords for new players. That in itself isn't a bad thing since I thought prices for basic items was always too high for certain things. The problem is that now the material is worth more then the weapons. It's not a bug or a mistake, devs changed the basic prices to make them more affordable to new players but never bothered to change the prices of the metal they are made from.
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Just to add another point of view: If you start lowering met value, most mages (low level) will not be able to afford reasonable training. This already is a problem, especially in the beginning of a career.
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I agree that the value of crafted items should be higher than initial materials. Part of the problem there is also a disconnect in quality of initial materials, and the end product. Only the skill affects final quality now (with the randomness factor of course), while materials quality is irrelevant. Normally the final quality should depend on both - quality of initial materials and skill combined by some formula.
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I am still at a loss to figure out why so many are having trouble raising funds. All it takes is 30 levels of metallurgy and you can make hundreds of thousands in a day or two even if you are slower at it. I can spend a day mining, and then another making the metal. Then maybe I'll need another day to finish up the stock and I'll have nearly a million if not more tria. Once I figured out the quickest and most efficient way of making money in game I never had trouble with it again. I have trouble more with PP then tria, and that is what hunting parties are for.
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Here is the big issue for me and the reason I think you see so few smiths and mostly metallurgists working (other then maybe smiths working on spangens). Either I can spend hours making 5 weapons I can sell or I can make over 100 stock to sell. With prices screwed up so badly there is no possible reason I would waste the time making weapons, armor or shields. It's just not realistic for me to spend so much time to make just a few items that will be the same price as the equivalent metal they are made from when I can make hundreds of stock in the same amount of time. Realistically the price for the metal shouldn't even be close to the weapon prices. A high quality weapon should be at least 10 times the price of the metal. I know you want to make it easy for new players but right now if you figure out how lucrative metallurgy can be it's just silly how much tria you can make. At the very least a highly skilled blacksmith and a highly skilled metallurgist should be able to make the same amount of tria with their jobs. And in my opinion with the demand for armor, weapons and shields in a society with this technological level a skilled smith should be worth much more.
And I haven't even mentioned what the prices for stock has done to the mining business. We have buyers offering 500 tria per ore for copper, tin, and iron. At that rate you may be able to make up the difference as a metallurgist by refusing to sell anything less then 300q. But as a smith where you can't guarantee 300q because the final stage of combining the items together is permanent you are going to be losing money. Even with 77 blacksmith, and 44 blademaking I am not going to get 300q every time, and more then likely the chances might not even be 50/50.
Best solution is to either implement supply and demand into the economy for the npcs so that prices will change according to volume npcs get, or drop the price for metal by at least half.
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What really should be done with metallurgy is not a quality gain but rather a quantity yield. A completely unskilled person can separate out most of the native element, gold, silver, what have you. A more skilled person will be able to break down the most unstable minerals to reclaim the easiest stuff, for example bathing the calcite in acid to dissolve the calcium and leave gold flakes behind. So more skill equals getting more metal from the ore. The metal quality already makes little or no difference to the quality of the good produced.
Better skill gets more workable material. Unfortunately this would be a massive change to code.
Another enhancement that would go along with this is to have mining act similarly more skill gets more successful digs and better maximum return per success. A new miner will naturally have a lot more waste material due to poor recognition and cruder chunks. A more experienced miner will cleave to the seem better and leave more waste material on the ground. An experience miner with a keen eye could probably gleen a significant amount of workable ore from the leftovers of a poor miner.
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You can just make stock for money and reserve making/selling weapons for RP purposes rather than doing it for the money. If you have good money from one source, you can get by from an OOC standpoint and from an RP standpoint. You can just make your money OOCly and you can just RP better prices or put less emphasis on tria return and just have fun with the RP of selling weapons.
That's what I do and plan on continuing to do. I make money from the sale of copper then I can mine/craft/etc at my leisure because I have the tria I need to do stuff, and I don't have to waste time grinding for it.
I doubt the system will ever be balanced so might as well just work with the system that is in place at any given time.
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The point is not to make metallurgy less rewarding just because prices on crafted products are messed up. The point it to fix the prices and make them reasonable. Getting high quality purified metal isn't supposed to be easy, and it should cost a lot. But it should cost a lot also because there should be a real demand for high quality metal. And that is, the metal / materials quality should affect items quality. That will provide real, and not fictional demand for 300q stocks. Of course higher q crafted items should have reasonable prices as well.
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The problem there is that the economy is entirely screwed up from top to bottom and pretty much always has been. That won't be fixed anytime soon since it requires not just the repricing of crafted items, but of all items available for tria. One little shift require a lot of adjustment and anytime you mess with some prices, you invariably mess up others.
As it stands, the larger problem is that there is too much tria floating around, more so than the price you get back from crafting. Those prices wouldn't be so out of whack if there wasn't that much tria to spend. Prices for pretty much everything need to come down.
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There is so much tria to spend though because they made it so easy to make it with bronze stock. It is way to easy to make 300q bronze stock. I don't think they should raise prices for crafted items. If they do the issue becomes brand new players unable to purchase weapons at all because prices are too high. Either they figure out a way to make metallurgy take longer to do as well as adding in changes Bilbous talked about or there will always be too much tria in the game because it's too easy to make. When you work on a crafted item such as armor or weapons you do one at a time and it takes quite awhile to get the end result (though with leather making you can do more then one at a time), so either change the rules so you can only do one at a time as well, make stock of 300q harder to make, or drop the prices.
But that still doesn't solve the issue of inequality with pricing in the game. More difficult items should be priced higher not equal. It's much easier to make stock, you can do a ton in a fast amount of time, and the price of the metal is too close to the items made from it.
Gilrond has a good thought about the demand for 300q stock. There isn't really one since the quality of the metal means so little right now to a crafter. Though to be honest if you get past the point where you get training for the items you are making higher quality metal will speed up your crafting a whole bunch. For example you have 300q ingots you use to make spangens. Well if quality didn't fall for any of the steps which at some point will happen the pieces will always be 300q since that is what it started at. That would speed up production a ton. But you need a very high level in both blacksmithing and the secondary skill for that to happen. Plus at that point the value of 300q metal isn't as high since it wouldn't take you long to get it up that high anyway.
Which leaders to another issue about selling 300q stock to NPCs. If players don't see the value in it npcs shouldn't either. If they can't possibly see a value in it then the prices aren't correct. 8500 for 1 stock of bronze becomes just silly if there is no use for it.
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I'm not sure where that tria is floating, but I usually have no tria left, after training magic with high levels. The same really applies to high levels in other skills as well. So reducing prices will just make training crazy hard, since most of the time will go into coming up with funds. Of course if you reduce the price of training as well, that could work.
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Gilrond I have 2 million right now, had 3 million a littler earlier and I can make a million in a few days. For metallurgists there is a ton of tria floating around. That is the problem. It's too easy to make.
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Right now my char Pakerl has magic ways between 15 and 25, and met 25, and it just buys the advances in magic. So, you have to be careful about generalized statements. At various levels values are are also differently weighted....
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Really? Because with only 30 in metallurgy I can make 500k an hour. I think that is more then enough to pay for training no matter the expense.
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Wow! I'll check my numbers... Maybe iron/steel is far worse?
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I still think the problem is that everything is over priced, yes training as well. But the economy has always had too much money and just changing prices of stocks and weapons won't work as that was done in the past and look how good it is working now. ;) They even took away platinum twice to try and balance things out.
However, the economy problem is too complex for it to be fixed through mechanics at this point. Player regulation is your best bet, but it is not likely that players will self regulate just for the sake of keeping the economy in balance. Never really worked in the past either. :-\
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Not complaining.... But....
We have NPCs with an unlimited supply of money that will buy exerything in sight - effectively swapping your time for their money. Each time the NPCs pump more money into the system, they may the tria worth less and less... effectively, the buying power of the tria is lowered.
I'm not sure you CAN have a balanced money system as the player base changes in size, and players come and go - leaving millions in old unplayed characters, and brining those characters back in to game.
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Herihi: Yes, I can make a million or two if I mine and smelt for a few days (and not everyone has time to do that for hours also). But I do it as needed, to pay training expenses, to cover some crazy prices on glyphs and so on. And it's monotonous enough as is. Increasing need to mine / produce stocks to pay for training will make it just too boring, and I doubt I'll be interested in it.
Is your goal to make everything harder, or to make crafting more rewarding? If to make it harder - I don't agree, it's hard enough as is. Training metallurgy takes time, refining metal isn't instant as well, don't forget about mining time / expenses. So I see no problem here whatsoever. I do agree that crafted items pricing looks strange if it's equal to pure metal pricing. But that doesn't mean metallurgy needs to be degraded to make it "even".
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I'm sorry Gilrond but I have to disagree with you. While it is boring that is part of the game just like a job in real life can be dull and boring. While this is a game they are trying to aproximate real life in certain things. So you have to work for a living and do some things that are boring. Kind of real life there.
Rigwyn brought up an interesting thought about the economy being messed up. If you go to summer of code wiki you can see some of the things they were working on. I'm not sure if some of them will ever be implemented or not but one of them is about the economy. I think the idea the devs had about supply and demand with npcs is a great idea. Instead of unlimited needs for all items npcs prices will vary depending on how much of an item they get each month. This should plummet prices of certain items like bronze stock. I am not sure if it will help to deal with the issues in the game with too much tria getting pumped into the game or not. They could always have a certain limit to how much tria npcs have but I'm not sure how they would go about doing it.
Pakarro bronze is so much better then iron it's not even funny. It's easier to mine, you can get more tria for it if you sell the ore, and the price for 300q stock is 2000 tria more for the same amount.
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Thank you, Herihi! I wasn't aware of that. I thought is was just minor differences....
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While it is boring that is part of the game just like a job in real life can be dull and boring. While this is a game they are trying to aproximate real life in certain things.
So, the game is boring on purpose?
(http://i.imgur.com/D4aeN.jpg) (http://imgur.com/D4aeN)
I'm sorry, I just couldn't resist...
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There has been a lot of discussion about rules issues recently, maybe because players feel some progress in the field and are increasingly encouraged to point at the various problems.
This thread started with a very simple and specific request, and the idea got somewhat lost with other, bigger, much more complicated things. So, wasn't the initial idea something like this?
Please consider by design that base prices (i.e. quality factored out) of result items should never be lower than the sum of the ingredient items base prices.
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Yes that would be the main problem right now, along with the fact that the prices shouldn't even be close to each other to begin with. But the fact that long swords and short swords aren't even worth the stock they are made from is the biggest problem right now.
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Again, hopefully that can be changed soon.
Was there any discussion on this topic in the recent Dev's meeting?
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Well I hope they are planning on reworking the economy soon because the chainmail implementation just put it in chaos. Now that you can make a killing selling 300q closed steel rings to npcs prices are more crazy then before. Though I am still not sure about the speed and efficiency between the two. But 9000 for steel stock is a pretty good deal when you sell to npcs and last I checked a 300q reinforced battle axe 300q didn't sell for 25k.
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Not that it isn't totally awesome that armor making is being implemented :). I am totally stoked about that.
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Now that you can make a killing selling 300q closed steel rings to npcs prices are more crazy then before.
I had the impression that intermediate items are supposed to have a lower value when sold to NPCs than result items.
* Goes to crumble some cheese as in the good old times ...*
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I just spent about 2 hours to make 3 chainmail gloves q300 from 54 steel ingots. One pair of gloves sells for 2430 Tria. So I earned around 7200 Tria and in the same time spent around 20k Tria on training BS and AM. I don't even think about how much money I could have made out of the 54 steel ingots, cause it's just too depressing....
Each and every choice of profession should be able to earn yourself a living. If I'm a hunter I don't want to bother with mining and met. Even worse are things with baking and cooking, fishing, harvesting and don't know what else. If you really stick to your RP character, making money is hard unless you're a miner or metallurgist. In a game that puts so much weight and importance on RP, professions are really badly unbalanced.
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And that is the problem right there. There is absolutely no point in spending the time to make the armor itself for less tria then you can sell the parts for, not to mention the actual metal stock goes for roughly the same price anyway. Let's see....will I spend hours making weapons, armor, or shields from the metal or spend a quarter of that time making more metal into 300q stock so I can sell it for the same price. I don't think raising prices on crafted items is the answer either since they are indeed hard to purchase for new players. Though I do think the prices for 300q armor pieces are a little low, 2400 for a pair of 300q gloves is a little silly when you think about how much metal it takes to make them.
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Ya but it has pretty much always been the same way. You never finished that low quality knife, you just recycled the ingots and started over. You never actually made anything from the ingots so that you always had ingots to work with to train metallurgy.
Sure some people made up inventory to sell to other players at a huge profit but there was always ever only so much the player market could absorb. Me, I would make stuff for my own use and sell them to the npcs just so I'd have an excuse to go train mining some more.
I do not see too much point into changing everything that is going to have to be changed again the next time a new skill is released and needs to be balanced in. I think it is great that there are a lot of ways to make cash, if I get bored doing this thing there is always that other thing I can do that is not financially punishing. I can take the 4 stacks of iron ore I mined today make a bunch of rings out of it and perhaps a couple of q300 chain pieces to wear as the old ones are getting worn and repair practice seems currently out of whack. I make enough from the spare rings to pay for my time. If I had to rely on finishing chain pieces for cash it would not be worth my time. If you want to reduce the price for the rings then you have to let me reclaim the ingots, or again, it is not worth my time to work it.
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There is a good chance that I am misinformed on this, although isn't it interesting that cooking, looting, and harvesting prices have been down for years, although as soon as Crafting/MET goes down in value, the everyone is up in arms. Personally I think there should be a change in what makes people tria every few years. Time for Cooking to be profitable and/or harvesting imo.
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Hunting became more profitable lately by the way. I doubt you need to lower prices on any crafting parts anyhow. As broken as the system is, at least crafters can earn some tria.
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the core of the problem is this: Prices are arbitrarily assigned with no consideration of supply or demand. 'tis why free market societies have a better track record than, let's say, communism.
and HEY, if only we weren't buying and selling goods to NPCs, where they come from and disappear into thin air, but rather bought and sold to each other, you know, players. Then and only then would the actual value of items emerge.
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Here's an idea: formulas for determining price that are based on the prices of the components (normalized for quality). For example, one 200q sabre should be equal to the price of one 200q sabre blade plus one 200q sword handle, plus a "crafting bonus" of maybe 10%. The sabre blade in turn should equal the price of one 200q steel stock plus a small crafting bonus, while the sword handle should equal the price of 2 200q steel ingots plus a small bonus.
If we make hardcoded formulas like this, then crafting will always be more profitable than selling intermediate products (at least per unit of raw material, not necessarily per unit of time). Also any new craftable item will have a formula guideline to follow so that the introduction of a new skill won't entirely skew the economy.
A smaller side-effect is that things that are complicated to make are slightly more valuable because there are more steps and therefore more "crafting bonuses" in the process of making the finished product.
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Just suggested an interesting experiment (http://www.hydlaaplaza.com/smf/index.php?topic=40643.msg456177#msg456177)on another thread for those interested.
- Nova
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I like the idea of adding a certain percentage into the prices for the work involved. The price for a sabre is already based on price for the stock and the two ingots which is the problem. It takes longer to make a sabre then a piece of stock. You can redo a piece of stock over and over to get it up to 300q while the sabre is a one shot deal once you make the kit. Add those two together and there is no way that someone will bother making a sabre instead of the stock.
Here's an example. Say the stock is already made so we don't have to get into the mining, combining business. I can either just work on the stock itself to improve quality or make something out of it. So I go for working the metal itself. For this example I'll use smelting and not hammering the stock. I put the stock in the furnace and it melts into molten ore. I take it out and place it in the caster. Quality goes from 100 to 160. I repeat the process and it goes to 250. Even say it goes down and up a couple times so the whole process takes 5 tries to get to 300q.
Now here's what happens in making the sabre. First off I need to heat the stock so I can hammer it into a blade. It becomes an alpha blade, I have to reheat again and then hammer to a beta, and then another heating so I can hammer a delta blade. Now I have to heat it to red hot then put it into the quench tank. After that I have to heat it again until super heated when it turns into a dull blade. I hammer this with the anvil again and check quality. Say quality is about 200q after all that hammering. Now I can sharpen the blade or keep working on it to raise the quality more. Next step is to make the handle with 2 ingots. So you heat the ingots in the forge, hammer them into a sword handle. I prefer to work the handles to 300q rather then the blades so I really don't bother redoing the blade once it's sharpened. However the handle I have to hammer and reheat 5 times before it gets to 300q. Now that I have the pieces I need I combine the handle and the blade together into a 300q kit. Now I get to hold my breath as I work on the next step to see what quality I get with the finished weapon. Oh wow look at that it went from 300q kit to 180q sabre. Oh well you are out of luck since you can't ever go back and redo it.
Okay so I just spent over an hour RL making this sabre instead of much less time smelting the stock. Even worse now I have a 180q sabre that won't get me even half as much as the 300q stock will. So I just wasted time and materials to make a weapon that won't go for even close to the amount of the metal I could have sold. It's not just about comparisons with the 300q compared to the 300q sabre, it's the chances involved in making the weapon since you can't ever go back and redo it.
Now add in the fact that you can only hammer one blade at a time, so while you can work on a bunch at a time it'll take you much longer compared to working on stock where you can just dump 30 pieces into the furnace and caster at the same time. So while I like the idea of adding in a percentage extra for the final product of the sabre which will increase it's value over the metal by itself that still doesn't come close to dealing with the issues of inequality between smelting stock and crafting things from that stock.
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If you don't care about the blade turn the alpha blade into the brittle blade and save a few of the steps that annoy you then sharpen it and it is ready to have a handle attached. I don't know why you go to all that trouble if it bothers you so much.
I rarely make stocks for cash these days, there are plenty of other ways and since I am experienced enough to fight anything there is that too. I have never participated in the player markets overmuch because they always seemed to be hyper-inflated and I was always able to find ways to make do with what I had. Sometimes that meant leaving for a few months but so what?
There is a problem with your outlook. It appears to value money over depth of experience. I get far more out of making that sub-standard sabre than I do making the stock. Other than financially the stock represents stasis. The sabre is intellectual progress. Of course as my blade making skill advances to match my metallurgy skill the sabre will become no different than the stock, and indeed a stock of a more difficult material is already better than the one that goes immediately to q300. Not as lucrative, but I don't need the money. Now if I was just starting out it is a whole different thing. It is pretty tough, I think. I'll have to try it again sometime soon.
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I agree that the step which turns 300q kit into 150q item is very irritating (especially since it's not reversible). But what exactly do you propose, to significantly raise prices on all crafted items like blades and armor? Didn't they just decrease those prices, for example for swords? What about cooking by the way, or for example fishing? I think prices in that area need fixing even more.
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I do agree Bilbous that prices and profits shouldn't be the only thing you look at. I actually have fun running a business and making items people are happy with when I sell them. If it was all about profit with me I'd have millions of tria and be making stock all day. My issue is that one reason why others aren't making weapons, or armor, or doing other things is because it's just so easy to make a huge profit on stock while so much harder to do so with anything else in comparison. Closed steel rings have added another way to make a huge profit as well. What I'm trying to say is that it would make the economy more dynamic and players would do other things if the economy was more balanced. It is far to easy to make a huge profit with metallurgy at low levels in a short time in comparison to everything else. I know people will scream bloody murder but I think dropping the price for the metal to a fraction of it's current price is a good idea. You shouldn't be able to make tria so easy as you can with bronze stock. And no it would not make playes poor. You can make a good living off hunting now, and not a bad living mining or crafting either. You just can't make millions in a few days (which you shouldn't anyway).
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I think it's an illusion Herihi. It's not easy to make profit in PS, whether with rings, spangens or stocks. It's easier than other methods (which are hard), true. But I won't call it easy. And if you propose to choke those options to make the profit - you better think twice what you are going to achieve in result - i.e. only hard remaining methods to cover your expenses. May be for Aramara's suggestion of pure RP without any NPCs it's fine, but with current system it's just not usable.
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Really Gilrond? I can make 400k in an hour with bronze stock, over a million in a day. That is an illusion of profits? And hunting if you pick the right things to hunt you can make 200k or more in one hunt. Last I checked 200k wasn't an illusion either. If all you do is level you character as fast as you can while not doing anything constructive then yeah you run out of tria real quick. I experienced that with crystal way. Training while not making tria at the same time drains your bank account faster then you can blink. But to say making a profit in PS is an illusion is not even remotely close to the truth. You just don't get to level up 10 levels in a day. Instead it's 2 if you are lucky.
Even if they drop the productivity of metalllurgy it won't be so horrible. Instead of 400k an hour I make 100k or 50k, well 50k still trains for a few levels. And dropping the profit from metallurgy will encourage players to do other things.
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Really Gilrond? I can make 400k in an hour with bronze
stock, over a million in a day.
That's for how many hours IG? I don't think the game has to either require you to stay in for hours, or to wait for weeks of real time to cover your training. If you count all the time needed for mining, processing, producing and etc. It's long. You can mass produce of course, if you have a team, but I'm not talking about that.
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So you think you should be able to train a level in what 20 minutes in game? I couldn't disagree more. And making tria shouldn't be something you can do in just a few minutes either. Just like real life you should actually have to work in PS to make money or get stronger as a character. My hunts where you make 200k are indeed long but they should be. You shouldn't be able to make that much tria in 20 minutes playing the game. This isn't a game where you can speed the days up, it's a RP designed game that has it's own hours in relation to RL. 6 hours for every one of ours. Last time I checked you can't really make millions in RL in just a couple days. It takes quite a awhile if you ever can at all. PS already has sped up that process to the point where it's not real at all. But to make it even easier would defeat the purpose of the game which is immersive RP environments. Having everyone maxed out and earning millions of tria each day doesn't make for much RP.
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I'm not talking about time needed to train. I'm talking about time needed to cover expenses. I don't think it's unreasonable now. You want to make it longer for some reason, so I disagree.
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I was thinking about the issues of game time in comparison to real life actually. You could speed game time up but the way the game is set up you'd have maxed out players in a week or two. I know it's really hard to players who have full time jobs and not that many hours to play PS, they have a hard time making tria and training since both take so much time. Not sure if there is a way to even that out that doesn't make the game too easy for those who play it all the time.
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Tell me how it's so difficult now and takes so long Gilrond? Because I can't figure out the difficulty some of you have making tria. New players will have a tough time and I just spent all day yesterday in game helping out a new player make just 25k. But it really doesn't take me that long to make more then enough tria to not only cover expenses but to make a huge profit.
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How many hours did it take for you to get to this point? How many stats do you have over 100 and how many skills? All my stats are maxed and I have several skills that approach 100. I am over the hump. What do you want, the hump to be at max skills and stats? I say I am over the hump because I can make enough to train everything because many of them train too slowly now. I don't see how I can max even one skill, armor training excepted in the next few months. At some point I am going to hit the wall where enough practice to advance will be almost impossible to get because each thing that generates it will be such a miniscule amount that it will take forever. By that time though things will have changed and the situation will be other than it is. It has always worked that way. Wait 6 months and then tell me what is up. Making tria isn't the whole issue.
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I agree Bilbous it takes forever to level things up. But I actually prefer it that way, gives you something to work for. At some point I'll get to realm 7 in red way, will just take forever. Something to look forward to rather then getting there to quickly