Gemdiver tells all - How to make plat

[Yammez]

The time argument doesn't work when stuff at bazaar is sold for more than a combine you can buy from a vendor. With the exception of sickles, it doesn't get faster than storebought.

Sure the time argument is very much valid. (1) items are not always available on vendors (2) it takes, guess what kids, TIME to vendor mine. Like I said before, there is a market for everything. Yes, prices will seem unreasonable to you if you don't have the cash to buy the parts or farm them yourself.

[Phantron]

I'm talking about stuff like Velium Bars that do not run out. The vendor mine supply is most definitely limited, and probably far less abundant than Bazaar supply.

[Yammez]

I'm talking about stuff like Velium Bars that do not run out. The vendor mine supply is most definitely limited, and probably far less abundant than Bazaar supply.

*chuckle* I see what ya mean. I laugh everytime I see Class 6 Mana Batteries for sale in the bazaar for more than vendor sale price. Too funny! In that case, the only thing I can say is "buyer beware" hehehehe.

[Unmei]

3) I've just spent nearly a million plat twinking my new cleric and TheWife's new beastlord duo. (We don't two box, but it's much better grouping then an Enc/Druid combo.)

I've found the problem. You are trading off a GODLY duoing pair for a decent duoing pair. Hie your ass back to enchanter/druid! @_@

[Liwsa]

At least do beastlord/druid

[Wyvernwill]

Sure the time argument is very much valid. (1) items are not always available on vendors (2) it takes, guess what kids, TIME to vendor mine. Like I said before, there is a market for everything. Yes, prices will seem unreasonable to you if you don't have the cash to buy the parts or farm them yourself.

For me, the prices are not unreasonable because I can not afford them. I am currently sitting on almost 600k in my bank account. The prices are unreasonable because the items they make are not even close to worth the amount that you spend on only one PART of the combine, let alone the fact that it can fail.

My problem is the fact that the prices of a lot of items are far exceedingly out of range of what their real value should be. Their real value should be in line with the Farmer, Processor, End User line of mark ups. That is how a real world economy works, middle men end up with a bit of a cut to cover costs also and make some money. I know it's been said that EQ is not Real world marketing, but it's the same premise.

Why should a trade skiller pick up the items from a farmer that they can not turn around and make some sort of recovery for their losses?

Since Piles of Gravel have been thrown around a lot on these threads, I will toss them out there again as an example.

Farmer A kills gargoyles in PoN solo for 4 hours and gets 8 Pile of Gravel.
Consumer C is willing to pay about 12k (math in fourths for simplicity sake) for Master's Stalwart Cuirass.
Farmer A knows his items are worth some value as they have a tradeskill flag, however does not know exactly what they are for. He sets his price per Pile of Gravel at 4k.
Consumer C contacts Processor B inquiring about getting a master's stalwart cuirass, but does not have the parts, but will offer you 12k for them if you get one in stock.
Processor B goes to the Bazaar as it is the best place to find odds and ends at times, and looks for Piles of Gravel. What he sees is a sea of gravel, but they are all 4-6k each.
After doing the math, he recontacts Consumer C and explains the situation, but consumer C refuses to pay anymore than 12k.

Nothing gets solved.

In a lot of cases though, the tradeskiller will buy those items in the bazaar, price them accordingly to the cost to get the supplies, and then find out that they can not, no matter how hard they try, sell the item for any sort of a profit because the item they made is not valuable enough for the real market.

That is why a lot of this price gouging stinks and why I am irritated by it.

But then again, a majority of the time, I just farm my own goods and am quite happy making a 10k profit for doing nothing but working on my alts AA exp.

[Angelsyn]

The time argument doesn't work when stuff at bazaar is sold for more than a combine you can buy from a vendor. With the exception of sickles, it doesn't get faster than storebought. Even sickles probably come out to be faster than buying when you start factoring in availability (making 1000 sickles takes 10X time of 100, while buying first 100 whatever smithing combines could be pretty fast but buying the last 100 would be very slow because supplies run out even if money is not an issue).

As far as I know Master armor have very little resale value because it is hard to get the right augs for it.

Master armour has very little resale value because there are just so many alternatives that are as good, if not better.

Magnetic armour (much better AC), BD Cultural (some better AC, easier for some to mass-produce, resell-able & tribute-able, lower Rec Level). Not to mention the sheer number of other random drops like the Architect's Bejeweled BP, BP of the Slavetrader, Iron Gauntlets of Ruin, etc.

[Phantron]

I'm sitting on 1.2 million plat right now. Money isn't the issue. It'd be slower for me to skill up buying every buyable thing in bazaar, while simultaneously paying more per combine than doing Pure Velium Bars. That is the problem with the pricing scheme. It is simply inefficient to buy from the bazaar, both in time and cost, so either goods do not get sold or goods get sold at the expense of the buyer's lack of knowledge. Again you can't even argue something like paying money for the convenience because nothing is more convenient than making Pure Velium Bars (well, besides Inferno Scepters).

Here's the typical snapshot on Drinal on smithing stuff:

Pile of Gravel. Cost 1k-2k+. Supply anywhere from 1-~20

Tae ew blood. Cost 800k-2k+. Supply anywhere from 1-~20 (and remember need 2 per tae ew legs)

Magnetic armor. Raw pieces seem to have a cost of 5K. Availablity is probably no higher than 50 and that's assuming you also bought all the regular magnetic armor and broke them down for extra parts.

Metallic Drake Scales. 10K-significantly higher, no more than 20 on supply usually.

So suppose I have an infinite amount of money, I could buy maybe 100 smithing combines at a price way higher than 1 Pure Velium Bar (and probably even exceeding inferno scepters). Note that even the cheapest buyable stuff is more expensive than a Pure Velium Bar even factored in increased skillup rate. Now let's consider Pure Velium Bars which have around 800pp base cost on components for 100 combines.

I can pay 100pp per bar of velium to be enchanted.
I can pay 50pp per purified water.

I haven't tried the above but I'm willing to bet I can get those supplies pretty fast if I offered such prices.

This adds 350pp to the cost and brings the average to 1150pp. So now some of the cheaper Gravels I bought would be more cost effective, but that's it (and certainly not good for more than 20 combines). I'm going to assume that I can live with dragging 5 items in a forge without the tradeskill UI. This is still lower than the average cost of what I bought from bazaar above. And that's just the first 100 combines. After that, while I can keep on pay people to make enchanted bars and purified water as long as I can afford it, I can't even buy any more supplies from Bazaar. Even if I started offering 10K per pile of gravel and get the whole server in RCoD expeditions, I'm willing to bet someone doing Pure Velium Bars would've maxed out smithing long before you can buy enough Pile of Gravel to do the same even at 10K per gravel.

You're supposed to pay money to gain time, but currently on smithing, you pay to lose even more time if you don't plan on reselling the finished product.

[Chkorsis]

how not to make plat.

destroy discordant scoriae when not paying attention which red pile of dust you're having on your cursor *cries*

[Flehmen]

Okay, someone has GOT to tell me why the economy on the hammer is all screwed up.

I just picked up 3 pile of gravel on a vendor which I can't use due to race, figuring I'd sell 'em at half price in the baz to make a little cash and help out the tradeskillers... So I go to see that pile of gravel are going for 200-300 pp compared to the 1-20k (one said 60k but I figure that was the price it was *NOT* selling at) that people on the chat channel told me about.

The thing of it is that the same people are still selling the same piles of gravel today! Anything made with the gravel is priced the same as I've heard on other servers. Go figure.

Oh well, unless my guild wants them, selling piles of gravel for 75pp on the hammer. I still make a little profit and I guess it will be a help for someone.

Take care all!

[Draggar]

Basic rule, buy low, sell high.

Work on subcombines.

CEs are mentioned, but there are many, MANY more you can make.

I have one item, you can farm it at a rate if 2-5 per hour, or make stacks at 3.5Pp each (low trivial, too). I sell them at a good profit because they sell well at that price.

My question is, why do people shell out a lot more for something that they can make (a subcombine that is only needed for a combine using the same tradeskill and the final product is about 100 points higher than this subcombine!).

I have many others, too. Enchanted metals, etc..

I rotate my stock as supply and demand go. When one item gets lower than what I'd sell it for, I go down to one stack of it and move on to other items. When the prices go back up, I sell them again.

The only people who know how I am linked to my trader are in my guild, but they get huge discounts anyway. (Free geerloks etc..).

[Neebat]

My question is, why do people shell out a lot more for something that they can make (a subcombine that is only needed for a combine using the same tradeskill and the final product is about 100 points higher than this subcombine!).

Because most people don't know that you can make Drops of Mercury.
Same goes for Vegetables, but less hunting.

[Angelsyn]

I would love someone to keep stuff like Enchanted Gold Bars in stock in the Bazaar.

Yeah, sure I can skill-up Jewelcraft on non-enchanted Gold... but the Enchanted Jewelry I can at least get some Tribute points out of!

There are many other examples.

[Kilzen]

My experience is that people are perfectly content to keep items in inventory forever since inventory is quite plentiful. Hence that's why I'd like to see a tax based on the asking price. I think 0.1% per 1 real life day isn't asking too much assuming the goal of Bazaar is to excahange goods as opposed to just listing them. The auction house in WoW charges like at least 1% on a successful sale and probably some lesser number for a listing and people don't have a problem with that.

If I had a 1% surcharge on selling items in the bazaar - wouldn't it make sense to just move the price on my item up in order to cover this - in the end, the buyer would wind up paying even more.

[Twistagain]

If I had a 1% surcharge on selling items in the bazaar - wouldn't it make sense to just move the price on my item up in order to cover this - in the end, the buyer would wind up paying even more.

The point is to discourage people from asking outrageous prices. A lot of people put items up at 5-10 times what they normally sell for...hoping that someone, somewhere is desperate enough to pay that. A lot of the time, that item sits there for weeks or months. Unknowingly, people start basing THEIR asking price on the asking price of that item. The surcharge would make it unlikely that someone would be willing to have an item listed at a ridiculous rate for long periods of time.

Not really sure how I feel about it, one way or another.