Why can't I get the item I want at resale price?
Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2004 12:50 am
There have been a couple of rather heated exchanges on item pricing and availability on the main forums, and I thought some of the responses by crafters were worth saving here to answer other questions in the future.
The original poster wanted a set of q150 black heavy armor of high quality - arguably one of the hardest items to make - but many of the thoughts in here apply to all crafted items.
Posted by tinpony
...Understand that those of us making high level armour are doing our best to supply the general populace. Understand our restrictions:
1) Very limited packer space. What may seem like wide open spaces to a non crafter is small, cramped and woefully inadequate to a crafter. It makes absolutely no sense that I can hold 300 bulk and my entire apartment can hold 500. It's like saying that I can personally carry a TV, so my entire apartment should be absolutely full with a TV and a stereo. Insane. It means for the crafter that they have to pick and choose what mats to have. I generally keep a supply of linings and stuffing and may hunt out clothing and armour clips as I need them. It means I can't just drop and give you twenty on the spot. I set aside a portion of my time to craft and I can't just whip up supreme black heavy armour just because someone wants it.
2) Picky, picky, *picky* people have discouraged many crafters from 'going public' on the vendors. Frankly, unless you're prepared to vendor everything for resale price with no markup, people whine constantly. We get sent tells and told off loud and long and shrill for daring to place a choice q130 amp on the boards for 50K, or a set of excellent white dodge armour for higher than basic purple armour of lightness. Tell ya what, Poindexter, take a look at the stats sometimes. I can make an amp with excellent amber and get 3 out of four stats at 82%/82% and someone will swear at me for selling a choice amp at above vendor resale. It's choice because I use fine/basic mats to get the final stat bump. I could use all excellent mats and it would be a 70% amp. Excellent name, sucky stats. Being a crafter means having a bunch of people who have never picked up a needle and thread lecture you about how to do what you do and great volume, at great length over many continents.
3) Money. Get over it. You pay more for several reasons.
(a) It's hard to get. You want black armour? Fine, you pay for it because my supplies are limited. If I have limitless supplies, the price goes down.
(b) I vendor the crap stuff at resale price and the stuff that means something and that I put a little effort into costs more. You want to shop at WalMart? Fine, you get the basic purple set for vendor resale. Just don't go to Walmart and complain that the Louis Vutton costs more than ten bucks.
(c) I have to buy supplies. I need specific supplies of things I don't have the time or energy to hunt, and I need a wide variety. I can't get all the stuff so *I* have to buy it. I'm not going to pay the markup on mats and then sell it el cheapo. I am lucky enough that my usual team-mate is a high level harvester. He's pretty point and click when I want something. However, he doesn't have access to some of the mats and, newsflash, some of the hunted mats are *much* better than foraged for certain crafts. When I was a lowbie crafter, I was shocked and aghast that it would cost me 12K to level. Twelve-thousand dappers??? At my level now, that buys me maybe 5 mats which I can then put toward a 26 mat combine for 1 small fraction of one level of 6 branches that I have in heavy armour.
(d) I need money. Simple as that. We all have our needs. I'm not sitting on massive wads of cash. I'm a guildless crafter. I can have anywhere from 200K to 2.5mill depending on the day but I spend a huge amount of money crafting and for my own melee supplies and the teleporter tickets. I've had people request that I bring them armour and then bicker over paying me for the teleport. 20K daps charity to sell you something at vendor resale? Get real.
I can and do make tonnes of armour for friends and acquaintences. I had a fantastic afternoon playing dressup with my favourite Tryker. I genuinely love craft. I vendor a fair bit on the markets, anywhere from 3-5 full sets of light at a time in various colours as high stats as I can manage with my supplies. I price according to what I think the armour is worth and I have trouble charging too much. If it's a really good set of armour, I have a friend sell it. He's much more practical.
We work just as hard at our chosen branches as you do yours. Craft is a singularily thankless job because of the amount of *input* required. Pretty much every other branch is a 'something for nothing' scenario. What you have to put in to melee to fight is a so so suit of armour and a sword somewhat near your level. And that one input can see you ten or twenty levels or more. Mages need the one amp for a span of levels. Harvesters need a pick, lots of patience and the occasional rez. Crafters cannot advance in any of their fields without a massive supply of mats. I can't just pick up a needle and start sewing. I have to have the right mats, in the right proportions at the right quality to sell. It's not for everyone.
Posted by zumwalt
Small reality check for Q150 armor.
(not for us crafters, for those asking for it)
You CAN harvest the mats yourself, if you are high enough harvesting level and know where to get the mats, but since you are neither a harvestor or crafter.
In Matis lands, go to Fleeting Gardens, there is an outpost just south of the border, near this outpost is a good spot for q150 mats, depending on season, that can get you a full set of heavy armor.
Pay a harvestor to go get you mats from here, or just go to the market and buy all the mats for your armor you desire.
Then find a crafter who is willing to use there skill that they spent countless hours building up, and have them craft you a full set, find out first if they will do it for free or at a surcharge.
You 'might' be able to walk away with only spending 400k to 800k dappers from materials ALONE, then lets just say the crafter is generous, and only charge you a 10k dapper per full successful craft, thats only an additional 50k (I think)
I am not in game right now and don't have my notes on me, so can someone please type out the number of mats per each of the 4 areas for heavy armor.
So people wanting to see the cost can write it down and go buy the mats from market to see what BASE is? (on quality they are buying that is)
We need to start putting this into perspective for those who don't understand the dynamics of the costs.
Posted by tinpony
Heavy Armour (not in game right now, so I'll correct as needed):
Pants, Helmet, Vest:
9 Armour shell, 8 Lining, 7 Stuffing, 2 Armour clips each
Sleeves, Gloves, Boots:
7 Armour shell, 6 Linings, 5 Stuffing, 2 armour clips each.
Full suit:
48 Armour shell, 42 Linings, 36 Stuffing, 18 Armour clips = 146 mats (BTW, for those who think we should just have piles of this stuff, a packer holds around 10 stacks or 1000 mats, and I level amps, light armour, heavy armour and two-handed weapons, all of which have their own mat needs in addition to storing my own armour, weapons and some resale items. On a good day, it can take me 3+ stacks of mats for *one* level of one branch of heavy so a craft day can use a packer's worth of meks in about 15 minutes... and that's waiting on focus to regenerate and running to the vendor to dumps armour when I'm encumbered).
Average vendor price for straight resale is anywhere from 1600 - 3000 dappers a piece for mats and up for supremes although the chances of buying supreme mats on the vendor is hen's teeth rare. I've seen some for 10K a piece. I personally will buy mats at 3K daps a piece if I really like them or they're really rare. For the most part, I try to go for the cheapest brands. You cannot buy basic vendor quality supplies above q100 so everything is foraged/hunted and your supplies are dependant on whatever is foraged/hunted that day.
So, base cost is around 230K for a suit with bought basic quality mats.
You want higher q? Almost 440K. An average of 39K - 79K a piece.
Vendor resale for 150q is about 43K - 50K a piece, if anyone buys it. Otherwise, a staggering 22K or thereabouts.
Factor in the minor cost of tools (1K a piece and I've gone through several but not a huge deal), teleports to the various markets and to the roots (10K a pop), the price of grind mats that make armour that never sells to get to the point where you make stuff that sells.
That last point is significant. I vendor 10 pieces for every one that's good enough to sell. That means for bought supplies, I take a loss on ten pieces to sell one at a little profit. At my level, 10-20 combines per armour type (boots, sleeves, whatever) per level with 6 branches to raise. The resale stuff is a very small proportion of the actual combines done by a crafter. On top of all that, take into account the huge and, I still feel, inappropriate fail rate by crafters. With an 80% chance of success using a skill within 5 levels of my mat quality, I can still fail four in five times. It's been like that in beta where I would make 2 successful pieces of jewelry per 15 combines (and yes, I know about heavy armour and penalties and all that). A failure is useless for resale, gives a fraction of the XP but uses all the same amount of mats. Another dent in our vast profits it seems.
And just because it's foraged doesn't make it 'free' and everything's a profit. Foraging takes time, and even supplimenting half the foraged mats with bought ones eats up any profit quickly.
Posted by zumwalt
Thanks Tin, also please note, that the BASIC mats sold by the vendor are 2x the price of a harvestor basic mat in general.
So if the harvestor broke even for there time they would charge the same as a vendor (2x price shown at the time they set it for sale), then to gain a proffit, the general rule of thumb that I have seen for those who want a proffit is 3x price shown.
If the cost of a full suit ran say 500,000 just to make on bought materials, it would sell for 1,500,000 on market to make up for Time, Skill, Energy and Materials.
Just thinking it through, that is where the price comes from.
Posted by tinpony
I'm leery of posting this even as a joke, but for a melee to understand a crafter perspective, try imagining this tree split.
L1-20 fight
L21 'fight' splits into one-hand, ranged, close-combat and two-hand fight and each branch gets levelled separately
L51 each of those branches splits into weapons branches like pike, sword, mace and axe to be levelled separately.
L101 each of those branches splits into strike specialties like hand, arm, leg, foot, chest and head. While you may be a L150 2H-sword fighter in 2HS (leg), unless you have levelled all branches equally, you fight as a L100 2HS (arm) melee when you hit the arm.
If you are a L150 (hand) melee, you will have an 80% chance of hitting a L150 creature if you strike the hand (with no way to improve that percentage). You will not be able to attack anything higher than your highest skill level. If your 'arm' skill is 150 and you try to hit a L150 creature's head using your L140 (head) skill, you have a 64% chance of success. You have a 48% chance of hitting something 20 levels above your skill and over 40 levels difference, your hit chance drops to 5%.
You will have to fight everything solo and (again) you will not be able to fight anything above your maximum skill level even if it means hitting timorous yubos for 10 levels at 1000 XP a piece *max*.
Imagine having to do L100-L150 five or six times just for basic competance. And then again at 150-200.... and again at 200-250.
Welcome to the wonderful world of armour craft.
==========
And usinuk's final thoughts...
Those of us who play crafters (or balance our melee and magic and harvest with crafting) play the second least played tree in the game after ranged combat. There is a reason for scarcity of crafters. Patch 1 nerfed what was mostly a balanced profession. Packer space, raw mat prices, missions, resale prices all went down the tubes from the perspective of crafters. Instead, to level craft you needed to become a big-time harvester or have an insanely big bank account.
But, as pointed out above, there are other problems. It's not a whole lot of fun when people yell at you because you're charging them too much or can't make the item right now.
Why are they yelling? I think its a misunderstanding. I don't think they understand what many of us go through.
To level craft, you get to spend 2x the hours you spend crafting getting the raw materials by leveling harvest. Then you get to spend plenty of time and lots of DP finding just the right mat source to make the particular item. Then you have to come back to town, have 1 out of 5 same-level-with-crafting-skill items work and the others be worth nothing, with failure rates rising precipitously (often well above 80%) once you pass level 100 or before that if you're a jeweler and don't level all sub-branches. And then, if you're unlucky you find your carefully crafted items on the vendor competing with similar items posted by higher level crafters looking to dump grind items.
So, the next time you're tempted to scream at a crafter, please read this thread and understand that's why we're charging what we do. We're just trying to get some return on our time. Not a lot, but enough to keep playing.
The original poster wanted a set of q150 black heavy armor of high quality - arguably one of the hardest items to make - but many of the thoughts in here apply to all crafted items.
Posted by tinpony
...Understand that those of us making high level armour are doing our best to supply the general populace. Understand our restrictions:
1) Very limited packer space. What may seem like wide open spaces to a non crafter is small, cramped and woefully inadequate to a crafter. It makes absolutely no sense that I can hold 300 bulk and my entire apartment can hold 500. It's like saying that I can personally carry a TV, so my entire apartment should be absolutely full with a TV and a stereo. Insane. It means for the crafter that they have to pick and choose what mats to have. I generally keep a supply of linings and stuffing and may hunt out clothing and armour clips as I need them. It means I can't just drop and give you twenty on the spot. I set aside a portion of my time to craft and I can't just whip up supreme black heavy armour just because someone wants it.
2) Picky, picky, *picky* people have discouraged many crafters from 'going public' on the vendors. Frankly, unless you're prepared to vendor everything for resale price with no markup, people whine constantly. We get sent tells and told off loud and long and shrill for daring to place a choice q130 amp on the boards for 50K, or a set of excellent white dodge armour for higher than basic purple armour of lightness. Tell ya what, Poindexter, take a look at the stats sometimes. I can make an amp with excellent amber and get 3 out of four stats at 82%/82% and someone will swear at me for selling a choice amp at above vendor resale. It's choice because I use fine/basic mats to get the final stat bump. I could use all excellent mats and it would be a 70% amp. Excellent name, sucky stats. Being a crafter means having a bunch of people who have never picked up a needle and thread lecture you about how to do what you do and great volume, at great length over many continents.
3) Money. Get over it. You pay more for several reasons.
(a) It's hard to get. You want black armour? Fine, you pay for it because my supplies are limited. If I have limitless supplies, the price goes down.
(b) I vendor the crap stuff at resale price and the stuff that means something and that I put a little effort into costs more. You want to shop at WalMart? Fine, you get the basic purple set for vendor resale. Just don't go to Walmart and complain that the Louis Vutton costs more than ten bucks.
(c) I have to buy supplies. I need specific supplies of things I don't have the time or energy to hunt, and I need a wide variety. I can't get all the stuff so *I* have to buy it. I'm not going to pay the markup on mats and then sell it el cheapo. I am lucky enough that my usual team-mate is a high level harvester. He's pretty point and click when I want something. However, he doesn't have access to some of the mats and, newsflash, some of the hunted mats are *much* better than foraged for certain crafts. When I was a lowbie crafter, I was shocked and aghast that it would cost me 12K to level. Twelve-thousand dappers??? At my level now, that buys me maybe 5 mats which I can then put toward a 26 mat combine for 1 small fraction of one level of 6 branches that I have in heavy armour.
(d) I need money. Simple as that. We all have our needs. I'm not sitting on massive wads of cash. I'm a guildless crafter. I can have anywhere from 200K to 2.5mill depending on the day but I spend a huge amount of money crafting and for my own melee supplies and the teleporter tickets. I've had people request that I bring them armour and then bicker over paying me for the teleport. 20K daps charity to sell you something at vendor resale? Get real.
I can and do make tonnes of armour for friends and acquaintences. I had a fantastic afternoon playing dressup with my favourite Tryker. I genuinely love craft. I vendor a fair bit on the markets, anywhere from 3-5 full sets of light at a time in various colours as high stats as I can manage with my supplies. I price according to what I think the armour is worth and I have trouble charging too much. If it's a really good set of armour, I have a friend sell it. He's much more practical.
We work just as hard at our chosen branches as you do yours. Craft is a singularily thankless job because of the amount of *input* required. Pretty much every other branch is a 'something for nothing' scenario. What you have to put in to melee to fight is a so so suit of armour and a sword somewhat near your level. And that one input can see you ten or twenty levels or more. Mages need the one amp for a span of levels. Harvesters need a pick, lots of patience and the occasional rez. Crafters cannot advance in any of their fields without a massive supply of mats. I can't just pick up a needle and start sewing. I have to have the right mats, in the right proportions at the right quality to sell. It's not for everyone.
Posted by zumwalt
Small reality check for Q150 armor.
(not for us crafters, for those asking for it)
You CAN harvest the mats yourself, if you are high enough harvesting level and know where to get the mats, but since you are neither a harvestor or crafter.
In Matis lands, go to Fleeting Gardens, there is an outpost just south of the border, near this outpost is a good spot for q150 mats, depending on season, that can get you a full set of heavy armor.
Pay a harvestor to go get you mats from here, or just go to the market and buy all the mats for your armor you desire.
Then find a crafter who is willing to use there skill that they spent countless hours building up, and have them craft you a full set, find out first if they will do it for free or at a surcharge.
You 'might' be able to walk away with only spending 400k to 800k dappers from materials ALONE, then lets just say the crafter is generous, and only charge you a 10k dapper per full successful craft, thats only an additional 50k (I think)
I am not in game right now and don't have my notes on me, so can someone please type out the number of mats per each of the 4 areas for heavy armor.
So people wanting to see the cost can write it down and go buy the mats from market to see what BASE is? (on quality they are buying that is)
We need to start putting this into perspective for those who don't understand the dynamics of the costs.
Posted by tinpony
Heavy Armour (not in game right now, so I'll correct as needed):
Pants, Helmet, Vest:
9 Armour shell, 8 Lining, 7 Stuffing, 2 Armour clips each
Sleeves, Gloves, Boots:
7 Armour shell, 6 Linings, 5 Stuffing, 2 armour clips each.
Full suit:
48 Armour shell, 42 Linings, 36 Stuffing, 18 Armour clips = 146 mats (BTW, for those who think we should just have piles of this stuff, a packer holds around 10 stacks or 1000 mats, and I level amps, light armour, heavy armour and two-handed weapons, all of which have their own mat needs in addition to storing my own armour, weapons and some resale items. On a good day, it can take me 3+ stacks of mats for *one* level of one branch of heavy so a craft day can use a packer's worth of meks in about 15 minutes... and that's waiting on focus to regenerate and running to the vendor to dumps armour when I'm encumbered).
Average vendor price for straight resale is anywhere from 1600 - 3000 dappers a piece for mats and up for supremes although the chances of buying supreme mats on the vendor is hen's teeth rare. I've seen some for 10K a piece. I personally will buy mats at 3K daps a piece if I really like them or they're really rare. For the most part, I try to go for the cheapest brands. You cannot buy basic vendor quality supplies above q100 so everything is foraged/hunted and your supplies are dependant on whatever is foraged/hunted that day.
So, base cost is around 230K for a suit with bought basic quality mats.
You want higher q? Almost 440K. An average of 39K - 79K a piece.
Vendor resale for 150q is about 43K - 50K a piece, if anyone buys it. Otherwise, a staggering 22K or thereabouts.
Factor in the minor cost of tools (1K a piece and I've gone through several but not a huge deal), teleports to the various markets and to the roots (10K a pop), the price of grind mats that make armour that never sells to get to the point where you make stuff that sells.
That last point is significant. I vendor 10 pieces for every one that's good enough to sell. That means for bought supplies, I take a loss on ten pieces to sell one at a little profit. At my level, 10-20 combines per armour type (boots, sleeves, whatever) per level with 6 branches to raise. The resale stuff is a very small proportion of the actual combines done by a crafter. On top of all that, take into account the huge and, I still feel, inappropriate fail rate by crafters. With an 80% chance of success using a skill within 5 levels of my mat quality, I can still fail four in five times. It's been like that in beta where I would make 2 successful pieces of jewelry per 15 combines (and yes, I know about heavy armour and penalties and all that). A failure is useless for resale, gives a fraction of the XP but uses all the same amount of mats. Another dent in our vast profits it seems.
And just because it's foraged doesn't make it 'free' and everything's a profit. Foraging takes time, and even supplimenting half the foraged mats with bought ones eats up any profit quickly.
Posted by zumwalt
Thanks Tin, also please note, that the BASIC mats sold by the vendor are 2x the price of a harvestor basic mat in general.
So if the harvestor broke even for there time they would charge the same as a vendor (2x price shown at the time they set it for sale), then to gain a proffit, the general rule of thumb that I have seen for those who want a proffit is 3x price shown.
If the cost of a full suit ran say 500,000 just to make on bought materials, it would sell for 1,500,000 on market to make up for Time, Skill, Energy and Materials.
Just thinking it through, that is where the price comes from.
Posted by tinpony
I'm leery of posting this even as a joke, but for a melee to understand a crafter perspective, try imagining this tree split.
L1-20 fight
L21 'fight' splits into one-hand, ranged, close-combat and two-hand fight and each branch gets levelled separately
L51 each of those branches splits into weapons branches like pike, sword, mace and axe to be levelled separately.
L101 each of those branches splits into strike specialties like hand, arm, leg, foot, chest and head. While you may be a L150 2H-sword fighter in 2HS (leg), unless you have levelled all branches equally, you fight as a L100 2HS (arm) melee when you hit the arm.
If you are a L150 (hand) melee, you will have an 80% chance of hitting a L150 creature if you strike the hand (with no way to improve that percentage). You will not be able to attack anything higher than your highest skill level. If your 'arm' skill is 150 and you try to hit a L150 creature's head using your L140 (head) skill, you have a 64% chance of success. You have a 48% chance of hitting something 20 levels above your skill and over 40 levels difference, your hit chance drops to 5%.
You will have to fight everything solo and (again) you will not be able to fight anything above your maximum skill level even if it means hitting timorous yubos for 10 levels at 1000 XP a piece *max*.
Imagine having to do L100-L150 five or six times just for basic competance. And then again at 150-200.... and again at 200-250.
Welcome to the wonderful world of armour craft.
==========
And usinuk's final thoughts...
Those of us who play crafters (or balance our melee and magic and harvest with crafting) play the second least played tree in the game after ranged combat. There is a reason for scarcity of crafters. Patch 1 nerfed what was mostly a balanced profession. Packer space, raw mat prices, missions, resale prices all went down the tubes from the perspective of crafters. Instead, to level craft you needed to become a big-time harvester or have an insanely big bank account.
But, as pointed out above, there are other problems. It's not a whole lot of fun when people yell at you because you're charging them too much or can't make the item right now.
Why are they yelling? I think its a misunderstanding. I don't think they understand what many of us go through.
To level craft, you get to spend 2x the hours you spend crafting getting the raw materials by leveling harvest. Then you get to spend plenty of time and lots of DP finding just the right mat source to make the particular item. Then you have to come back to town, have 1 out of 5 same-level-with-crafting-skill items work and the others be worth nothing, with failure rates rising precipitously (often well above 80%) once you pass level 100 or before that if you're a jeweler and don't level all sub-branches. And then, if you're unlucky you find your carefully crafted items on the vendor competing with similar items posted by higher level crafters looking to dump grind items.
So, the next time you're tempted to scream at a crafter, please read this thread and understand that's why we're charging what we do. We're just trying to get some return on our time. Not a lot, but enough to keep playing.