Are the Smelters of Gold Being Greedy?

[bilbous]

Hopefully this is a valid topic for discussion but if it is considered spoiler feel free to delete without notice.


What should you sell gold ore for? Does it seem like the buyers of ore are taking advantage of the sellers? A fairly standard price for ore is 400 tria/ore, the NPC's will pay 240t/o. This means the buyers are offering a premium of 160 t/o. Sounds pretty good right? I do not think so. Let's examine this more carefully. In order to come up with a fair price we must look at several things. Division of labor and value increase are the two main ones I will deal with. Smelting a pack full of gold, 40 for example, takes about 15 minutes while digging it will take anything from an hour on up, usually more. What about the value increase? In pure dollar terms the smelters seem to have the upper hand here, the miner increases his value 240 t/o from 0 to 240 wheras the smelter increases the value from there to ~860 or 620 t/o. Let me know if this number is off, and I'll fix it, it should be close AFAIK. Not bad return for 15 minutes work.

Personally I think a fair division would be straight up the middle, 860+240=1100, 1100/2=5500.

As far as I am concerned an offer of 400 is just greed and should be rebuffed. It may take the miner longer to get rich by selling to NPC's but at least the money is going out of the economy and not making someone else undue profit. If everyone followed this advice the smelters would have to mine their own ore and earn their value increase.

[Zan]

The time needed to mine requires on ones mining skill and knowledge of the good mining spots so it's hard to generalize.

Personally I'd say it's a free market though so people decide how much they sell and buy for themselves. If you think the price is unfair then I suggest you start buying gold ores at higher prices ... but be warned, Donari tried this and got some nasty jealous backlash from the mining and smelting community. Not all miners can melt gold, those who can and still sell their gold are fools ... and not all melters are interested in spending their days mining.

[Raleigh]

@Bilbous: Fair division? Yliakum isn't a socialist utopia, so this is something that will not be common, surplus value always is an interesting prospect to look for, and it's a known fact, specially nowadays, that industrialized, manufactured or crafted products have much more worth than the feedstock used on their production. Use of specialized skills or technology on a product has a significant effect on its value. If the miners are being underpaid, then they should form some kind of Union, or join one.

[John80sk]

Smelting is skilled labor, mining is unskilled labor.  If you want to make what metallurgists make train metallurgy.

[Illyria]

Smelting is skilled labor, mining is unskilled labor.  If you want to make what metallurgists make train metallurgy.

Same goes for mining 

[Seise]

Smelting a pack full of gold, 40 for example, takes about 15 minutes while digging it will take anything from an hour on up, usually more.

Yes, but what you are forgetting is that in order to smelt gold you have to spend a large quantity of time and trias in order to progress to the level of skill it takes to smelt gold. It is not a one or two day task. It involves a lot of progress points and time. So to say it takes only 15 minutes to process the gold is true, but it took a heck of a long time to get to that ability. It is like in real life, your Med.School trained surgeon makes all the money even if the assistant is doing more work. There is a premium for knowledge and learned skill. So it is fair.

[Vampire_Orchid]

I'm a miner, for now. At this moment I'm not training met, but I will eventually. I really don't mind the 400 i get per gold ore, hey man it's a lot better then the 240 from an npc Also, alot of the ppl that have a high met training is because they have been playing for quite some time. So chances are that they've had to 'only' sell to npcs in the past. If you ask me I think us miners of todays PS are pretty lucky to be getting that 400 trias, I think it's really nice that the high leveled MET ppl of our community see it fit to give us lower level players a break. If they choose to bring it down to 350 they want to buy the gold for I would still be happy with that. Why? Because it's still alot better then 240. Either way, I see it as a break for us miners. I would be pretty upset if all of a sudden one day all the MET players decided just not to buy gold from us and go mine it themselves. What a sad day that would be

[bilbous]

I had 45 gold ore yesterday in Oja and tried to negotiate a better price somewhat successfully but in the end I just sold my gold to the NPC. Did I lose out? no I received the baseline value of my gold. Did the potential customer lose out? no, she already had a pack full of gold and got the full value for smelting it. We each could have gotten more but didn't because I was not skilfull enough of a negotiator to even get 500 t/o. I could have stuck around and made more of an effort but I had some stocks I wanted to go practice with and I am kind of impulsive. I am positive I could have gotten a better deal from a different buyer.

As it is now the smelters are overcrowded with gold smelters who are solely in it for the cash value and this makes it more difficult for those who wish to train or actually make stuff. It would be nice if each area had its own smithy i.e. one in the fortress and one in the winch but the devs have not seen fit to do so, so overcrowding has become a problem. On in the BD region would certainly go far to alleviate the crowding and might possibly be restricted to those with sufficient factional points. Actually I think usage restrictions via factional points might be a very good idea, and encourage doing the quests. They could open up an area behind Zak and in the room near the dark rogues for those characters with a less honest bent, put one in the winch for those of a mercantile bent and leave the remaining two with perhaps one in the fortress proper for those with a pro-government alignment.

Another idea might be to enforce time rental whereby you have to pay the owner of the equipment to use it and the fee for smelting gold would be considerably higher than the fee for less valuable ores.

Anyway I did not expect to see smelters agree with my initial post greedy people can always justify their greed, just as poor people bemoan their powerlessness. I do not think I will be lining anyone else's pockets unless I get a fairer portion of the take and I urge other miners to do the same though I doubt many will have the same resolve (if I even do).

[Zan]

The overcrowding of the furnaces is becoming a serious problem indeed ... the best solution for this is to give practical experience based on the number of stock in a single stack instead of equalizing a stack to a single stock. I'm certain the devs are aware of this bug and hopefully it'll be fixed soon so people can load their stacks into the furnaces.

[Natrina]

 Hmm, gold ingots sell for 608 trias (which mean 208 profit for the smelter) or am I missing something?

 Anyway, Donari, once she joined the Imperial Trades, tried to raise the price to 500 trias as mentioned before. This resulted in the general community doing acts of vandalism (such as putting garbage in the furnace to stop us from smelting), hating us and doing threats of boycotting (and doing bad publicity of) our steel business. So, I agree, the gold smelters are, even if just for their agenda on keeping the 400 price at all costs, being unfair (a funny demonstration of how economic interests bring a community together). I doubt you'll have much luck in getting the 500 trias price. Either the seller already has such conviction and will put himself through the pains of "defying" the gold smelters, or most of them will simply wait for some other miner to show up and buy his ores. Nevertheless, good luck on that.

 On the furnaces case, I agree, we could use another economic center, off Ojaveda and Hydlaa.

[bilbous]

Another thing that is a little odd and correct me if I am wrong here too, is that by and large the base price per ingot is higher than the price per stock so the bold smelters use up more slots because they have no incentive to make stocks.

hmm 608? perhaps it is not so unfair as I imagined. That would make a fair price 414 by my previous algorithm. 

[Kiern]

Ok, let me get this straight.  You're using the term "unfair" to try and determine what prices something should be sold at?


Ha.

[bilbous]

Well considering the whole thing as being without danger, the gold economy is not fair to those who risk death to make a living. Of course nobody ever said the world was fair. Then again as far as I know gold is useless so should have no value at all at the moment. Here is an idea (rhetorical), make the npc's only buy stuff that can be used and base the price on the relative merits of that use and what the supply is. Hey, here is another idea (also rhetorical) let's have open pvp and see how much money the smelters can make with an ax in their head. My point is that the whole system is artificial and could be more realistically designed. I am sure it is temporary and things will get better eventually.

[Jackdaw]

When the gold rush took off prices for ore were in flux and finally seemed to have settled down where they are. Why? because most miners seem to feel that is a fair price and most smelters seem to feel it is a fair price. Most miners seem to want to unload their ore as quickly as possible to get back to the mines. On occasion I see miners dropping the price hoping to get someone to buy their load quickly instead of standing around waiting to find a buyer willing to pay a higher price.

I mine and smelt my own gold ore when I need tria so I don't have a vested interest in the price of gold ore other than the impact it has on people willing to mine ore and create steel at an affordable price.

But if I did decide to buy ore I would have to look at the time and effort involved as the price goes up. If I dig 10 ore and smelt it myself I make 6080 trias. If I buy it at 400 then I have to smelt 29 ore. If I buy it for 500 I have to smelt 61 ore. If I'm able to mine 30 ore in one trip to the mines I make 18240 tria or I have to smelt 183 ore bought at 500 tria apiece. I prefer the trip to the mine.

The only way for miners to get the higher price is a union that no other miner is willing to buck. But at that point most of your smelters may just start to mine their own ore.

[bilbous]

Just curious, what is the difference in the time factor between going to the mine for your 10 gold and buying 30 at the forge to make the equivalent profit? I suspect it would be at least 30 minutes of real time. Now what is the difference in time between digging a full load at the mine and transporting it to the forge with buying a full load at the forge? I suspect that buying at the forge, even at 500 would be more profitable in the same time than mining your own, although I do now agree that is somewhat higher than is absolutely reasonable. It is the digging that consumes the most time because it is one at a time and not always successful.