Crafter Economy 101

[jdiegel]

This ain't my first rodeo. I know how the forumla works

I disagree with you though. This is still a loot game, people just call the stuff "mats" instead of "loot".

FYI, is it so hard to type out "materials" people.

[chuangpo]

Because SoR is one of the few games where theres no loot. Players who dont craft themselves will never become independent therefore. And players who dont get along with this dependency from others will never be really satisfied with this game.

Although I still claim its the wrong game for non-crafters because there are enough phat lewt games out there you can also look for a guild that takes care of the needs of non-crafting members.

That may be true right now, but lets see how well your harvesting axe and sewing needles help when the kitins start invading and storming our cities. EVERYONE is needed, crafters and non crafters. This is not a crafting game, nor is it a combat simulator, it's a virtual community. Adapt, co-exist, or die.

[ayne31]

I disagree with you though. This is still a loot game, people just call the stuff "mats" instead of "loot".

You are right of course. May I rephrase to that Ryzom is just one of the few games where loot is NEVER a ready-to-use item?

[jesder]

Vendors will change the whole thing.

In the mean time .. whenever I need something I go to my guildmates first to see if anyone can make the item (I normally have the mats since I harvest but dont craft yet). If none of my guildmates can make the item, then I check with other people to see if anyone can make the item I would like if I supply the mats. MOST people will not charge you anything if you have your own mats. They really have no reason to charge you since all the work they have to do is meet you someplace.

I could see a 25% markup on items based on mat costs. The problem is that rightnow there is very little mat trades going on. The only base price you have is what you could sell the mats for to an NPC. Most of the time this price is way off compared to the value of choice and higher mats. Vendors should help this as well, unless people continue to hoard their mats

[tetra]

I am a militant crafter because I dont SELL? I dont even BUY - I even TRADED less then 30 mats so far (looking for certain colors makes me not a very easy trading partner I guess ). Please explain that to me whats militant about that?

Your brutal rebuttal that amounted to "if you don't like crafting then play a different game". One of the many many problems that horizons had, was there was absolutely no purpose in fighting things. You didn't get loot that was worth a damn, and because of the abyssmally low drop rates on mobdrop parts after the droprate got nerfed you typically had nothing or very little of value to barter with to crafters. Since you had nothing of value to sell, and very little if anything to trade, and a virtual inability to get the raw materials to make things... adventurers were rather pointless. Now granted, many of these problems do not exist in SoR since you can make equipment from mob drop parts, but you still have a situation where typically mob drop parts are worse than crafted parts.

The militant crafter comment got leveled at you because with your post, you acted in the same fashion as those crafters in horizons who trolled the boards viciously attacking any attempt to improve the game for noncrafters if it meant bringing adventurers up to a point where they felt useful in the economy... You dismissed his incredibly valid argument entirely, and told him to play a different game.

Some people don't want to craft stuff, other people don't want to dig in the dirt, some people might not even want to kill monsters... a few others might not want to do two of the three. Saying that because someone does not want to participate in one branch of the game for lack of interest and instead wants to focus on some other branch is not a reason to tell them to play a different game.

[korin77]

I agree, vendors will change everything, once more vendors sell for lower prices, those that charge those high prices will simply get no sales. Hopefully you can look at all the stats of an item before purchasing and it shows every aspect of the item. There is currently no way of really telling if someone really made something out of "Choice" mats etc.

For now, just sell things you can make with your own prices lower than the advertised ones. With enough competition you will soon see the prices drop. That really is the problem with this current economy, not enough competition. Most of us are busy leveling our fighting levels, the only people that are selling are the ones that have reached higher levels of crafting and have a distinct advantage with the bonus stats on their items.

[shrike]

I agree with tetra here (hell must have frozen over). But you mean foraged/harvested parts at the end of your first praragraph, tetra, right?

About the first post. I actually sell my 97/97 elemental q80 magic amplifiers in euro-english for 275k. With a markup of about 1000% if I would sell them in a shop. And they sell well. Why?

Because simply using the shop prices to determine an items worth is a milkmaids calculation. NPC Shops pay the same amount of money for basic or supreme mats and neither care shops in which item combination I sell them. And that is what people pay for, not for the mats per se, but for the know-how behind the item.

[kisedd]

The cost of items isn't just about how much certain mats sell to vendors etc. Crafters need money to skill up. Most crafters use their profits to buy more mats to build their skills. It can take dozens of items to get one crafter level. Like other crafter games, a crafter has to make far more items than he can sell in order to meet demand for higher level items.

In some games crafters devalue the items made in order to trade money they could make for extra exp to skill up. I see that some in Ryzom too. If you bring me mats, I'll make you that item for free. At higher levels I'm sure you will see people dumping farmed mats onto the market in the form of cheap goods just so they can clear huge stockpiles of items. Right now its harder to get mats, so they are worth more in a crafted item than what you can get from a vendor.

Many players demand more than just baisc crafted items. They want uber itmes made from choice mats. Since there are less choice areas than basic areas, these items can take more time to make and thus cost much more to meet a large demand. I certainly won't be selling any basic armor for 200k.

At Q30 there are missons that I can do from Overseers that pay me 1000 a mat in value. Thus, I can make things for NPC's at Q30 and make more money than selling to the player base at 500 per mat.

[tetra]

I agree with tetra here (hell must have frozen over). But you mean foraged/harvested parts at the end of your first praragraph, tetra, right?

About the first post. I actually sell my 97/97 elemental q80 magic amplifiers in euro-english for 275k. With a markup of about 1000% if I would sell them in a shop. And they sell well. Why?

Because simply using the shop prices to determine an items worth is a milkmaids calculation. NPC Shops pay the same amount of money for basic or supreme mats and neither care shops in which item combination I sell them. And that is what people pay for, not for the mats per se, but for the know-how behind the item.

Yea it was a typo, thought about editing it but forgot about it and was too busy to remember ;P.

[Morax]

The difference between choice mats and normal mats doesnt really matter for harvesting. I pull all my own mats and it takes the same amout of time to pull choice vs regular. Once you find the spawn points it easy. I hope the npc vendors bring the prices in line. The economy is not that good and hyper-inflation will kill it alot faster, as players will not be able to upgrade before thier weapons and armor wear out.

I can understand the argument for paying for the time and skill of the forager/crafter, but q60 stuff is pretty easy to get by grinding merchant mats. It does slow down but newbie missions generate alot of cash to pay for them. I harvesting all my own materials and can make q100 heavy armor. It just seems wrong to me to charge 500k or higher for something that takes me 1 to 1.5 hours to get all the mats and make the armor.