Crafting Price Issues

[Herihi]

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?

[Caraick]

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.

[Herihi]

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.

[Pakarro]

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.

[Gilrond]

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.

[Herihi]

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.

[Herihi]

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.

[bilbous]

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.

[Illysia]

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.

[Gilrond]

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.

[Illysia]

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.

[Herihi]

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.

[Gilrond]

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.

[Herihi]

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.

[Pakarro]

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....