Costs...database=total cost

[Gladry]

Please have the database software calculate the total cost of all vendor bought items for each recipie.

Since the display software is already gathering all components and sub-components for the expandable sub-recipies it should be straightforward to calculate the costs.

There are several recipes where some sub-components can be either combined or purchased (eg: aqua regia) and in this case there would be a few calculated costs. I would think listing them as (vendor cost with fewest sub-combines: XXpp, vendor cost with least total cost: XXpp)

This would allow a recipe search for trivial vs vendor cost automatically showing the least (vendor) costliest method for skilling up.

[KyrosKrane]

It's been a while since this request has come up, but it's actually answered in the FAQs:

http://mboards.eqtraders.com/eq/showthread.php?t=15995

Or, if you can't see links yet, copy and paste this into your browser bar:

mboards.eqtraders.com/eq/showthread.php?t=15995

Although Ngreth's answer is from 2004, not much has changed in the last four years. There still no viable method to assign a value to non-purchased goods (like dropped or foraged items), other than zero, which doesn't make for a meaningful reflection of the total recipe price. On top of that, it would be difficult to get a fair price for items that can both be made or vendor bought (usually at a much higher cost). Between these two factors, there isn't any single method we could do that would satisfy all (or even a majority) of the site's users.

[Gladry]

Here's my thinking on the subject.

There are item drops and vendor purchased items.
Yes, there is no easy way to figure out the drop rate of these drops, or difficulty in getting to whatever zone they drop in to get them...etc.
But the vendor purchased stuff is a known quantity. Its already in your database.
So...if you list a price for "all vendor purchased" which includes potions you could make yourself but vendors sell also, and "all vendor purchased + combines" price, along with a count of drop items required this would satisfy a LOT of questions.
It would allow a sorted listing by either # of separate drop items required, sort by vendor price if user wanted to combine everything (on the cheap) along with knowledge of how many drops they would have to find, bazaar buy, merchant fish, etc.
There is, for example, a method to use only vendor purchased components to raise brewing to over 200, and methods like this would easily be searchable if these values were listed.

[mewkus]

Any recipe that calls for subcombines would make attempting to total up a cost difficult (how do you estimate the cost of making subcomponents when there's a chance to fail).

If you take a look at how I present the items on my trophy page (http://www.eq-manager.com/trophies.htm), I think that's fairly reasonable. For those components that are vendor sold, it includes the price of them. For those that aren't, it doesn't. The only caveat is that people would have to realize that those prices are effective when your charisma/faction are sufficient enough.