Incentive to level

[Lange]

I mean this as a serious question not a rant.

I am about to ding 34. I had been grinding out poison subcomponents for a minor profit to make some money (about 5sp per combine) and very little xp (about 1% per 12 combines). I was happy with this, though, because I could do it while selling and it was helping me keep my finances on-par with the other tradeskillers in my guild so that I could buy my spells, armor upgrades, etc.

But now they have nerfed the sellback prices on our combines again and I find myself wondering what the point to being an alchemist is anymore. I am a scout and chose the profession in hopes of crafting my own, more powerful poisons but SOE continues to ignore this issue and I continue to have to shell out good money to NPC merchants to buy my DPS. Potions, too, remain broken. I have no use, personally, for fighter essences and they simply do not sell even at ridiculously low prices (cheaper than the inks used to make them) and even after weeks on the trader. The price floor fell out on WORTS and inks are cost prohibitive because people won't pay much for non-pristine and recent changes have made it extremely difficult to get pristine inks often enough to make this profitable.

We make nothing useful and now we make nothing profitable either?

And to top all of this off, we seem to receive nothing but others' anomosity for making their interims. No gratitude. No thanks. No sympathy. No support. Just hatred and disdain from the other tradeskill classes.

So... What keeps you going? Will you continue to level your alchemist and, if so, what makes it fun for you?

[Yellowspine]

Sounds like you need to change servers lol.

I can't keep up with orders. In T3 still, and I get people asking me almost daily if I can make T4 WORTs yet. I make App IVs only to order. T2 I still sell for 25s each and I keep a stack of inks/papers/quills/spikes to do that. T3 ink (and I know T4 ink will be this way becuase I get tells asking for T4 ink) I can't make enouph to keep up with demand.

I have never seen the disdain towards my class on my server. I just wish I had more time to keep up with demand.

[Lange]

That's great, Yellowspine, but I meant this as a serious question. For those of us on servers with larger populations where there is already significant supply of chemicals at all tiers, what is the incentive? Also, keep in mind that all servers will eventually hit this point because the scenario you just described certainly does have profit incentive. People won't be asking you if you can make tier4 chems for very long. Soon there will be 20 of you making tier4 chems and only one of you selling them (the cheapest price).

[Yellowspine]

Pretty much. But this is the case for all TradeSkillers. All classes have competition. All have price undercutters.

Now with the subject at hand, we could take 1 rare, refine it, and make a good profit selling it. Does this sound balanced? Did SoE swing the nurf bat a little to far with cutting the price here? Possibly. But even other classes who make interim products can not take 1 raw, crank out 4 items with it, and resell it at a good profit.

Carpenters used to have Maple Scraps. That was a huge resale item to merchants. What happend, it's not even sellablle now to merchants.

Same thing happened with Provisioners.

So Alchemists the: Oh poor me I'm an alchmist I can't make any money now. You can make money, you just need to make more then 1 combine producing 4 prodcuts to do it now.

Anyway, to keep from rambling on forever, my server has it's share of undercutters. Every night I log in, I auction my services. If I have no orders I work on ink to make App IVs. Auction App IVs for all tiers I can make. I do writs. I go harvest. I have more I would like to do then I have time to do it.

Plus I can make my own App 4s. Which when I started was all I wanted to do. All the plat I have made has just been a bonus :cool:

[harvyst]

I wouldn't mind so much if potions/poisons didn't stink.

I've made almost all of them, even the rares. I hand the poisons out on raids, I hand the health potions to the mt. It's useful for a novilty act, but nothing more, they aren't worth paying for.

I am sad.

In EQ1, We had invis potions. EB potions. Sow potions.

In EQ2, all of these went to the WWs, and they don't want to make them. They are also 1 shot, of a limited level requirement, and don't stack.

I went into Alchemy hoping to make a living off of potions/poisons, like I did in EQ1, where I did 10-shots and sold in the bazaar. So far, nobody buys, and there's no reason to.

[Yellowspine]

No doubt potions are weak. They need tweeking.



This was a good post from the EQ2 Board on the price nurf:

It wasn't that players were not playing "right."

It was that left unchecked that the game would suffer massive inflation and money would become essentially worthless because certain crafter professions were creating large quantities of money. That is intruducing NEW money into the game which is bad for the economy.

That is why these changes were put in. If you can't understand that, then your solution to the poverty problem in the world would be to print more money.

They fixed something that was not working and that was not healthy for the longterm in-game economy.

Hekp of Crushbone
Level 25 Coercer
Level 31Alchemist

Source Page (http://eqiiforums.station.sony.com/eq2/board/message?board.id=a13&message.id=609)

[Korsis]

My incentive to level was being able to make money. Specifically, I wanted to make money from what was I felt and obviously broken system before it was fixed. And guess what? It's not fixed yet. Alchemists can make just as much vendor sell back money as always, they just have to be a little more creative now.

[Lange]

Yellowspine,

That's the best argument I've heard in favor of this yet. I agree that inflation can be a major problem in these games.

I despise the arguments claiming alchemists are not entitled to x% profit because all we make are chemicals when the person arguing this is making over x% profit themself. It penalizes us for the very thing we are most upset about in the first place (the fact that we can't make viable end products).

The inflation argument makes some sense, though. Still, it's unfortunate for those who are alchemists that we get the short end of this stick due to our reliance upon large quantities of interims rather than small quantities of finished goods for our profits.

I still wish they would fix poisons and potions before pullings stunts like this. It seems like this bitter pill would be a much easier one to swallow while kicking back in a newly-dyed suit of charcoal grey armor, poisoning my blades with a concoction of rare herbs, sipping on a regeration potion.

[parki]

Yah, what yellowspine pointed is right, however...

Well, you can make quite a nice proffit off the NPC on most of the trades at high levels just by selling back (having an alchemist alt works wonders money-wise).


The only way to do stop inflation is to nerf ALL the sellback prices, limit the adventurer drops, etc. And, as of now they can't do that basically because everyone would jump on them.

It wasnt planned too well from the start. Now they are trying to fix their those mistakes... slowly.

The ones that hit high levels (at least on crafting) were able to do pretty nice amounts of money. At least you got a big rewards for being the first hehe

While we have good sellback prices we'll abuse them. But that's reasonable. Wouldn't you abuse it if there was a way only you and a few more people could exchange $5 for $10 every 5minutes in RL? That wouldn't create much inflation if any.

[Yellowspine]

I make at least 2x more selling to players then selling back. So I have always done that, trying to maximize my profits.

I guess for those who don't like to interact with other players plus can not AFK sell then this must have sucked.

People like myself this has zero effect. Ok, will probably cause more competition, but my guess is people who were milking this system becuase it was easy, will find the next easiest thing instead of actually making effort to sell on the market.

[Frelle]

My incentive to level was being able to make money. Specifically, I wanted to make money from what was I felt and obviously broken system before it was fixed. And guess what? It's not fixed yet. Alchemists can make just as much vendor sell back money as always, they just have to be a little more creative now.

True. I was suprised by that.

My incentive to level was/is to make money. I am a greedy gnome and love the jingle of plat in my pockets.

[Thicket Tundrabog]

I've got three tradeskillers in the mid-twenties and can make piles of money from all of them.

My level 26 alchemist can't keep up with guild demand let alone the market for inks, washes and oils. I sell resin and temper in the market and they sell out quickly. I don't bother with App IV although I will need to soon for leveling experience.

My level 24 tailor has more than he can handle making thread, cord, harnesses, padding and straps. Most goes on the open market and moves steadily.

My level 28 provisioner is happily making food and drink for personal consumption. Looking at broker boards, I could do very nicely making drink to sell. I just don't need an additional income source.

I trade within my guild for things that I need - primarily patterns.

From this smattering, I'm convinced that all tradeskill classes can make money readily.

Thicket

[Korsis]

The only way to do stop inflation is to nerf ALL the sellback prices, limit the adventurer drops, etc. And, as of now they can't do that basically because everyone would jump on them.

It wasnt planned too well from the start. Now they are trying to fix their those mistakes... slowly.

Actually, I'm not 100% sure it was a mistake at all. You see, for a healthy economy to exist, there must be a sufficient quantity of money in circulation for various transactions to take place.

When the game first launched, there was no money in the economy. Zero. It was imperative that money be "minted," and quickly. It's too circumstantial to make any real claims, but I would be unsurprised if the whole provisioner sellback issue was intentional, and once the provisioners printed enough money, the presses were stopped.

Players have an illusion of control, but SoE controls drop tables, drop rates, and sell back values. If they so choose, they have some very powerful tools for controlling the money supply.