Crafting Price Issues

[Herihi]

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.

[bilbous]

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.

[Mekora]

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.

[Gilrond]

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.

[Aramara Meibi]

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.

[tman]

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.

[novacadian]

Just suggested an interesting experiment on another thread for those interested.

- Nova

[Herihi]

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.

[bilbous]

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.

[Gilrond]

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.

[Herihi]

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).

[Gilrond]

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.

[Herihi]

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.

[Gilrond]

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.

[Herihi]

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.