OK, I gotta vent. Are people stupid or... Stupid?

[darkstarpoet1]

As for would-be crafters, please do not be discouraged. There is plenty of opportunities to make easy profit from crafting. You may have to spend a couple hours to market research, but they are there.

this is 100% truth. if you see an item is selling in the wards for 80k and the materials cost you 100k to buy what could possibly entice you to make and try to sell that item. best advice is check the wards and look for items you can make cheaply and see a profit. you do not invest to lose gil, but invest it wisely.

if you can make more profit off making a stack of woolen cloth and selling the finished gear then why would you ever make the woolen gear to sell? proper analysis of the market and good decisions can make you massive profit if you pay attention to trends.

[Conradus]

They need to make gear break permanently or something to drive up the demand for gear and strip it from the wards faster (yeah right lol)

Oh, I've got an idea! They could make it so that you can destroy gear to get gear enhancing items! And then they can make it so that if you try to put multiple gear enhancers on one piece of gear there's a chance you can destroy everything! All we need is a name for it...

[Mychael]

Median pricing. The market will always search for its median this according to Smith in Wealth of Nations. Walmart will sell its products for the highest profit margin it can. Walmart can still be undercut and is quite often by Target, especially when it comes to food. Targets supplier chain makes it possible for them to often get food at a cheaper price than Walmart. Other products Walmart gets for cheaper and can make a larger margin. Seriously this all pretty common sense stuff. Sell your goods for the lowest profit margin and hope you can make up the difference in volume of sales, or you can sell at a higher margin and not get the volume. You just need to read the market and make the right moves.

I appreciate the informed answer, and thank you for making my point. If you think the economy is doing this at the moment, we'll have to disagree. Companies would not make products if there was no profit from crafting them--i.e. Proctor and Gamble would not produce an item which costs more to make than it sells for. Then there are those who say "but it was easy for me to mine/farm/etc this item and I think it's not worth that much! So I will sell it this low..." which is all fine and dandy, but if they put ten seconds of thought into the matter, they could have sold their farmed/mined/etc item for a better profit, probably in less time.

Maybe if every person paid attention to the prices, this wouldn't happen, but people go far below the lowest profit margin, and it doesn't matter what volume they sell because they're losing money per synth (either by the loss from buying mats, or the loss in would-be-profit from selling them). They seem to think that, because there was no cost of labour in gathering their own mats, they have no value, and the "profit" margin starts at 1 gil.

The best argument in favor of the current economy is that "people are paying for exp." With no use for the items produced while leveling a synth, and the additional rapid influx of useless items due to achievements, I can understand how the supply so far exceeds the demand. We can't completely compare the game's economy to real life because P&G does not need to produce 1000 Bent Toothbrushes before they can be a famous company; they don't need to produce Women's Deodorant far in excess of demand just to gain the experience points to make Men's Deodorant. Further, if several companies are comfortably meeting the demands of the market, it would be a bad idea for another to try to compete in that market unless they had some clear advantage starting out; in XIV, the "clear advantage" is DoLs leveled, but there's a constantly-growing number of competitors and constantly-growing supply, while demand is only shrinking as people max out their jobs and optimize their gear.

While fixing the players' understanding of economics could fix this problem, that's not going to happen. I made a pretty lengthy post (I think in TheV's thread about the issue) with some ideas about how SE could basically make crafted items useful, since a surplus is --including more "re-crafted" synths (where you have to work up in "stages" to reach a high-level item (Ash Bow -> Wrapped Ash Bow -> Reinforced Ash Bow -> etc.)--Crab Bows, for example), "scrapping" a piece of gear (for a few materials returned), a wider variety of goods tradeable for GC currency at a higher rate, etc. Are these ideas foolproof? No.

And finally, I do admit that the economy is functional, at the moment, but I think it needs work if we're to take DoHs seriously in the long run.

[StateAlchemist]

EDIT: THIS IS IN REGARDS TO THE CURRENT SITUATION. NOT WHEN PATCH 1.21 FIRST CAME OUT.

I keep getting the notion that since I'm a GSM50 that I make tons of money, and let me tell you... NO I'M NOT. You want to know why?

2 reasons:

1) Because making new jewelry is pointless since there's always 30+ items listed of the hot selling ones, and people undercut like crazy.

2) And second of all and the most important of the two reasons is: HQ jewelry is WORTHLESS because people STILL undercut like crazy even when there's 3 +1 rings listed...

So here's an example of WHY making +1 items and selling them is pointless:

I want to HQ a Zircon Ring +1 (Int +18). I buy 3x Electrum ores +1 for 50k each, and a zircon gem for around 30k. I begin the synthesis process and I freakin HQ the ring!!! Go over to the wards, and the Zircon Ring +1 sells for... 180k....

ARE YOU SERIOUS?

The end.

Update edit: For people who are reading this topic for the first time. In short, it seems like don't bother to level DoH classes as getting the raw materials +1 as a DoL is the way to go to make money.

Which basically means, I WAS RIGHT.

The first thing you said wrong: I buy HQ Materials. Go mine them yourself. Profit.

Also. You make it sound like HQing is hard. It's not, if you have the right abilities. Therefore you will keep getting undercut by the guy that mines his own ore and gems and can hq stuff for days, while you scramble to find cheap hq materials and pop out a random hq occasionally. Level something else or plan ahead (you had plenty of time to stockpile hq materials before this patch.

[Digirotta]

Are the topic titles inaccurate or... stupid?

OP fell for his own incompetence, and still claims that he's doing things right.

/thread

[Lstkaws]

I appreciate the informed answer, and thank you for making my point. If you think the economy is doing this at the moment, we'll have to disagree. Companies would not make products if there was no profit from crafting them--i.e. Proctor and Gamble would not produce an item which costs more to make than it sells for. Then there are those who say "but it was easy for me to mine/farm/etc this item and I think it's not worth that much! So I will sell it this low..." which is all fine and dandy, but if they put ten seconds of thought into the matter, they could have sold their farmed/mined/etc item for a better profit, probably in less time.

Maybe if every person paid attention to the prices, this wouldn't happen, but people go far below the lowest profit margin, and it doesn't matter what volume they sell because they're losing money per synth (either by the loss from buying mats, or the loss in would-be-profit from selling them). They seem to think that, because there was no cost of labour in gathering their own mats, they have no value, and the "profit" margin starts at 1 gil.

The best argument in favor of the current economy is that "people are paying for exp." With no use for the items produced while leveling a synth, and the additional rapid influx of useless items due to achievements, I can understand how the supply so far exceeds the demand. We can't completely compare the game's economy to real life because P&G does not need to produce 1000 Bent Toothbrushes before they can be a famous company; they don't need to produce Women's Deodorant far in excess of demand just to gain the experience points to make Men's Deodorant. Further, if several companies are comfortably meeting the demands of the market, it would be a bad idea for another to try to compete in that market unless they had some clear advantage starting out; in XIV, the "clear advantage" is DoLs leveled, but there's a constantly-growing number of competitors and constantly-growing supply, while demand is only shrinking as people max out their jobs and optimize their gear.

While fixing the players' understanding of economics could fix this problem, that's not going to happen. I made a pretty lengthy post (I think in TheV's thread about the issue) with some ideas about how SE could basically make crafted items useful, since a surplus is --including more "re-crafted" synths (where you have to work up in "stages" to reach a high-level item (Ash Bow -> Wrapped Ash Bow -> Reinforced Ash Bow -> etc.)--Crab Bows, for example), "scrapping" a piece of gear (for a few materials returned), a wider variety of goods tradeable for GC currency at a higher rate, etc. Are these ideas foolproof? No.

And finally, I do admit that the economy is functional, at the moment, but I think it needs work if we're to take DoHs seriously in the long run.

I agree and mentioned those exact points in some of my other posts. I am not going to pull them in here. You can go back and look at them if you so desire. However the market be it in game or in RL is always "searching" for the median value. It is rarely at that median value but is searching. It can be higher or lower due to many of the aspects you mentioned.

You can make margin regardless. As someone else pointed out (and I have been doing) you can NPC many items for more than the cost of the mats. This is essentially subsidized crafting. Granted you do not make a ton of money, but it is a consistent profit and I will take that especially considering you can skill up DoH in the process. If people are looking for a get rich quick, well i just would not recommend DoH.

If I want to make good fast money I would farm dungeon drops with my LS for the first couple weeks after patch release as they go for extreme amounts of money. After I have made my money and the market on those goods has dropped out I will go back and buy them or just keep future drops.

As far as people getting jobs skilled up and flooding the market, I feel there is also real world situation of this. What happens when the job market is flooded with lets say....Engineers (unlikely, but whatever) you will see salaries decrease. Same deal here in game, the market is being flooded with DoH and we are seeing the results. 2.0 and an influx of fresh blood into the game is the only fix for this, and of course they need to something about the ease of skilling up at that point. That is why there will never be too many engineers....engineering programs are hard as hell.

Oh I did address the issue of getting something for no profit in previous post. I used the example of going to dental students for dental work. You just pay for the cost of the materials (possibly less) so the students can "Skill up". In Game people just sell off there finished product because they only care about the skill and may not be too concerned with gil.

I do like your ideas about tiered crafted items.