semi-rant about silver and coralFollow

its true. i play on oggok and before anyone found out coral and silver were used for making adept3 skills/spells you could pick it up for about 50sp now your lucky if you can find it for less then 15gp. hell ive seen adept 1 selling for 1pp+ and i think to myself these people are absolutly crazy who in the hell has 1pp+ to spend on a spell. ive also seen a big rise in the player market int eh last week. about a week ago you could buy most adept 1 skills and spells for a decent price. now people are raising their prices to well over a gp for skills/spells that just arent worth that much.

so to you people who keep your prices decent i give you a big pat on the back. to all you greedy bastards out there **** off your breaking my small bank account.

I don't mind the cost so much, it's the whining about having to pay so much for the Adept 3's that I really can't stand. It's like they don't even know that they are the reason we have to charge so much. I don't craft so others can make money..

Cost is all relative, if I pay 3g for all stuff I sell for 4g. But if I pay 10g I sell for 11g no big deal. Either way I make the same amount, the problem is later on it makes everything really expensive and money eventually is worth less. And they will never stop whining..

That's your problem. Get a merchant board and don't sell everything to the vendors to 3-5 silver. Money is pretty easy to make in this game if you actually try.

Jute,

That is excellent advise. I follow the same plan. One question for you....where do you find your wholesaler ranking?

Thanks, I have completed so many tasks, I am curious to see where I rank.

Player made crafting guilds would actually work very well in this game. Have a few adventurers in there who get their armor for almost free or free and have them adventure (cause most adventurers will want to be in a guild with lots of other adventurers, not people who don't leave the city ever... That's why you give them free equipment) and gather materials. Spread this around the guild and only sell the end product for something. Everything going around in the guild (materials and such) go at base cost, or with minimal inflation, and you could have a fully self sufficient guild that supplies very high quality products in a fairly short amount of time. They could also easily corner the market in that the items they're selling aren't at any inflated costs (all materials are very cheap, being within the guild.)

Oh, the possibilities...

Oh, what have I unleashed upon the world???

"That's your problem. Get a merchant board and don't sell everything to the vendors to 3-5 silver. Money is pretty easy to make in this game if you actually try."

I call BS right there. Money is anything but easy in this game. It might be easy if you have multiple computers and accounts or if you have 10 hours per day to spend ingame (not saying either of these applies specifically to you). But for the casual player, the basic mechanics of the game are weighted totally against you.

I have merchant boards on both my characters but I actually have a life and responsibilities outside the game that demand a fair amount of my computer time, so I can't just leave my toon in his tenement apartment online for hours on end. SoE has to have the biggest bunch of design idiots in the known universe to let such an ill-conceived player merchant system actually go live. It's really a travesty and what makes it worse is that it should've been apparent to anyone that it was an idiotic system waaaay back in the earliest design stages. I've made it clear that I think the system should be totally scrapped in favor of a player-bought merchant who will sell your goods FOR you whether you are online or not. It worked great in DAoC- which was, for that game, a real rarity.

Jute-

Aside from the fact that, as I explained above, I can't leave my computer on all night just to sell stuff, I do exactly what you're doing. My skills aren't capped but, at 14th level, all but Fishing is above 50 (I think Gathering and Mining are 60+). I set my prices roughly 15% BELOW the lowest listed price anyone else has. The longest I was able to leave my computer on was about 6 hours this past Sunday. I had 6 5 slot backpacks full of stacks of tier 2 materials such as maple, electrum, tubers and even a full stack of some sort of food ingrediant (I forget which). I think my highest price as 20cp/maple with the others at between 15 and 17cp (typically, prices range from 25cp per to as much as 40cp, according to the Broker). Total sales: ZERO. Not a single anything sold. I've tried selling my Adept I loots in the 10sp-40sp range- again, cheaper than anyone else. ZERO sales. I've tried selling tradeskill subcombine ingrediants such as chloro wash and chloro resin. ZERO sales. From everything I've read, my prices are, if anything, too low. The items I want to sell are in demand. The only thing that I can point to as an impediment is the stupid merchant system.



Edited, Tue Dec 14 17:53:52 2004 by Adiemus

Ivven-

So what you're saying is that I need to, essentially, win the lotto to make my coin- by that I mean hit one of the rare harvests and sell that for whatever the market will bear. Well, I managed to harvest some Bone (tier 2 wood rare) so we'll see what that brings.

My complaint isn't with pricing or people overcharging. I've been to Nek a time or two and not much there is very hospitable to players. If you manage to harvest a rare there, in addition to making me faintly jealous and admirious at the same time, I'd say you were entitled to get a good sum for that.

No, my complaint is that there are players like myself who, frankly, don't have equal access to the market due to obligations outside the game. We work just as hard as those who do have access to harvest materials and/or craft them into sellable finished products or subcombines. We may even offer them at prices lower than others. But we can't devote hours and hours of time to doing nothing but keeping our stores open. That's what needs fixing.

This is the first rare harvest I ever got. Previously to this, I had already made upwards of around 20 gold give or take (spent most of it :P Kaitar, my rogue, has a hole in his pocket)

What I'm saying is this. Compared to what I'm used to, this is easy for me. I don't have hours and hours typically either, I work and have a real life. BUT, it sure as heck beats - for me- farming for weeks and weeks just to get enough to squeak by.

Yes, I can see where people who can't leave their merchants up while they are AFK would be upset. Yes, for them it is a pain in the butt, because they won't make as much profit. I might be gone half the time, but my computer stays running with my merchant up.

However, it's very hard to please everyone all the time. The only thing I would suggest is they have a consignment shop put up. But I'm very VERY afraid of this game turning into another FFXI where prices went so sky high you couldn't afford anything. I had almost 2 million gil on my character after a year... and 2 million gil went very very fast when I played monk. Basically, I had (like many others) a ton of gil worth next to nothing because of inflation. We REALLY do not want to see a repeat of that, trust me. It ruined that game, many many are leaving because of the economy problems, and it's just horrible.

So, if they did implement a "consigment" sort of system, where players put up their goods to be viewed by others while they were offline, and perhaps the money sent to their bank account, there'd still have to be some kind of safety net for inflation and the greed some people have. I...and many others I'm sure...would be really sad if this game turned out like the "other" game, rampant with IGE money sellers and buyers and overly tweeked "uber" characters. Yes, the merchant system could use work, but SOE is going to have to be very careful as they implement new things into the system over time. Hopefully they will learn from past mistakes.

Yes, but the "other" game.... you didn't sell to or by from merchants at all. Ever...except for a very rare occasion of selling (which the price was nerfed, btw) rusty caps or something. But 99 percent of the time it was going on the AH. NPC merchant prices were crazy.... very crazy and no one could afford them. AH prices are almost as bad. People started getting greedy, started over-farming and getting a monopoly on the AH prices. People turned to buying gil. Now, people are running around with huge amounts of gil...and are willing to pay those insane prices. So the sellers jacked it up even more. More gil is bought. Prices rise. Viola', inflation.

Maybe you would have to have played the "other" game to know the extent of paranoia most "refugees" of that game have about it. It was a VERY bad situation. Like I said, I agree the merchant system could be changed for the better, BUT I also think it still has to be regulated and controlled, not just a 'free-for-all' because that's when you run into trouble.

If prices stay reasonable, and supply and demand balance out, and money is destroyed (by this I mean, you buy from a merchant NPC now and then instead of a PC where the money keeps flowing and building all the time...I myself, in EQ2 buy my arrows and throwing knives from an NPC, a lot of people pick up some of their armor from an NPC, it's not totally outrageous to the point you can't afford it = money destroyed ) and created at a rate that can keep up with the economy, then it should work. I agree, it's much faster in this game to "destroy" money so there's never "too much" floating around in the economy. Orc meat, for example. Most people just toss that off to an NPC rather than put it up,because it's so easy to get and no one wants to pay for orc meat they can go kill 2 orcs and get themselves. FFXI...you did not have this. You might get...let's take couerel meat for example. The NPC would give you 50 gil for it. 50 gil is....less than a copper in terms of comparing gil to EQ2 currency. You can buy NOTHING with 50 gil.

But, you could slap it up on the AH and maybe get 500 gil and was an essential part of leveling a cooking craft?

So money was being created far faster than it was being destroyed, especially with gil sellers/buyers because of the already too high prices on common items like Couerel meat. Imagine if the NPC's would only buy orc meat for 3 copper (the high end orc meat drops, I mean). Or you could put it up for 1 silver and someone would have to buy it because a) it was a higher mob lvl drop (Couerel meat was lvl 35+ mob) and b) you really needed it to level a certain cooking skill. I think you can guess where this is going. Prices went sky high, mobs got over camped, people bought gil....people sold gil.... economy hits rock bottom.

I'm not saying an AH sort of system would be bad, but SOE would HAVE to make sure they had other things in check before they did it. Really, IMHO they should have had it all figured out in beta, but unfortunately they did not. Really though, you don't want them to just rush in and establish an AH system and have it be another FFXI. Trust me. You don't want that. So ...hopefully in the future, and I do see some hope... and so far, as I said, money destroy/create ratio is good, much better than FFXI... you might still see an AH sort of system.



Edited, Wed Dec 15 00:33:43 2004 by Ivven

I read some of the posts in this thread and noticed that Ivven seems to have an obsession with comparing EQ2 with this "other" game and not seeming to want to recognize that "yes EQ2 is not a game where money is easy to come by".

The issue with the pricing on the adept III and the referrals to gold pieces not being much somewhat has to do with how in the 20's levels you can indeed get a number of drops that vendor for larger amounts of 2SP to 8SP from regular mobs. As some people go about it can be seen that some mobs drop nicer loot from their bodies and/or chests more often than others, so if your not getting much from what your killing at the moment "Try And Move".

Of course you are indeed going to be limited by not being able to go into merchant mode all the time, but if you can leave your comp on over night once or twice every week you can sell out much of your things at times. At other times you may be able to take a few of the items you got and try /auctioning them off in antonica or the commonlands which can work out ok at times.

But you shouldn't try judging yourself against what some people may say is the norm since some people on these boards can get into playing ALOT, and yes have lives.

I totally agree with ivvan for the simple fact that i played FF XI and the prices were insane the best lvl 8 equip for theivs, leaping boots, would run u 200,000 gil and that would be a bargin. I was one of the people that camped the courel meat for 4 hrs a day at least and it was the only way to make good $$ each day to keep up with the markets. I hope and pray that i dont have 2 sit in an area for 4 hrs a day every day just to get good items for my character to be well equiped. As of now i can run around in TS and mine, gather ect.. for 1 or 2 hrs and get a few stacks of carbonite, belladonna roots, lumber and u can make a good 2 gold but this is where ur problem comes in u cant leave the comp on. Until they change this wich i dont think they will just leave it on seller whenever u can. If they fix your problem it prob wont be until the first expansion or a really big patch sry.

EQ2 Hoopdee lvl27 befallen server
FFXI Lunchbox lvl50 DEAD:x valefor server