Augmented Items Abound! (07/13/2009)

[Myriads]

I think they should allow you to remove existing augments or reaugment items for a price.
The price would need to be high enough that it encourages purchasing some of the cheap items off the auction house vs reaugmenting, but still allows you to augment something like a hagun.

To me, the ideal would be that each craft had a number of crafted 'cleansers' of the "Stat begone" sort.

For example, I'm a BST that solos a lot with WHM as a sub. I enjoy my Khimara - Bison look alike gear, and finding a complete set of it was a pain. It has a lot of MP on it, and that fits my play style nicely. Now would I like to add Pet+ stats to it? Yes indeed.

But I'll be darned if I'd risk it on the RNG as the odds are good I couldn't find a replacement for some of the pieces at any price. So I'd love to be able to go and buy some "Stat begone" made by a leather worker, and clean off my armor of that icky STR-1 and take another swing.

Each of the crafts could have a number of Stat be gone synths that targeted different levels of armor, (one could work on items from 60-70, another 70-75, or even finer if you like, as in one for gloves, another for bodies etc) Each craft would have some pieces that they would make remover for, fishing and cooking could be involved in providing base materials for the remover synths (Needs an Azure Jellyfish, and a roasted crab-apple per synth or somesuch)

Make these costly enough, and people would only use them for the hard to replace or truly expensive gear. Average pieces, or easily found ones would be more cost effective to toss and try with a new one.

[Xanthe]

Random Number Generator.

Bah, I read range into that which made almost as much sense.

[Hellfury]

As a flipside, with items being taken out of the economy due to being made into EX, you're making certain items that people would call "standard equipment" and possibly making it cost more. Remember when dark staves were 100K+? People here are stating that they'd augment their elemental staves. If they don't get a desireable effect, then they'll buy more, putting more money in the hands of crafters, crafters are like "Hey, this item sure is popular. Let me just up that price a little..." The cycle continues until supplies need to be acquired, which means the demand would beat out the supply, causing more price rising.

But I'm not an economist, so I could be entirely wrong. I just hate random number generators.

Well, I am (if I ever get around to finishing my degree).
Whilst there is a degree of correctness to the statement above, the model is too simple.
There's multiple joints in the production of most products.

At the core, you have the amount of a certain good the game gives us (be it drops from mobs, gardening, mining, fishing, et cetera ad infinitum).

Then there's refinement processes, this can be one single craft (say for example smithing, where someone mined 4x Iron ores, sold them to a crafter, and the crafter made an iron ingot, that he uses for whatever purpose). Then there's also the possibility of multiple refiners, take for example the aforementioned elemental staves which start as ores, are refined to beads, then turned into staves, going through multiple crafters.

All of these instances can decide to jack the price, and the end crafter will very often find himself with a fairly small margin of profit unless said crafter has the apparatus to perform most of the refinement on his/her own.
(as another example, you can take imperial wootz ingot, the real profiteers here are the miners/ISNMers, sure, there is a pretty hefty profit margin on the ingots, but a single break puts you back heavily).

There's also the supply-demand equation: Your statement assumes that all available crafters are constantly producing all possible goods available and an increased demand would per definition create an imbalance. But what you need to account for is:
1, it doesn't entirely work like this in real life, it's a lot more complicated with multiple joints interacting, but it's "close enough for jazz".
2, in this game, you don't have a cost of living comparable to anything IRL. There's no production facilities you need to maintain, no workers you need to pay wages on a regular basis, etc. etc. so there is nothing FORCING people to constantly use their crafts, which means there is a possibility of a lot of idle crafters (and with the messed up economy, there's not THAT many incitements for new people to level crafts either.)
edit (missed this one in c/p for some reason): 3, higher prices will create a larger incitement for production/extraction, increasing supply. (this is where all the stuff we don't know about SE potentially limiting # of thingies that can be acquired over a given period of time kicks in)

That said; crafters usually compete with other crafters for prices, supply-demand equation DOES work here, but for reasons stated above, expanding the perspective a little including more instances of the production process, (and I hate agreeing with free market theory), from the crafters perspective, the market will be just fine.

I could stay at writing this for a few more hours, to make it more accurate, but rough and simplified will have to suffice.

cliff notes:
- Not necessarily the crafters fault when pricejacks go up, the suppliers of raw materials are just as, if not moreso, likely to be responsible.
- Supply-Demand just looking at one refiner and one customer is a simplified model that's close enough to be usable, but not very accurate.
- According to very basic supply demand, this shouldn't become a problem at all once you account for a wider array of factors.


apologies for poor phrasings/erroneous choices of words where applied, English is my 3rd language.

[Gergall]

Crafters seeking skillups quickly eat up the profitable synths until they are at a reasonable loss (whatever crafters are willing to pay for skillups).

The real profits are made by farming materials and of course, HQs.

[Drabblecox]

http://i724.photobucket.com/albums/w.../Augment-1.png

Edit: Had a typo

[Mistress Stowastiq]

Crafters seeking skillups quickly eat up the profitable synths until they are at a reasonable loss (whatever crafters are willing to pay for skillups).

The real profits are made by farming materials and of course, HQs.

I try my best to farm or produce my skillup synth materials as much as possible. In my opinion, SE has been leaving subtle hints that farmers should put their products into the market and not c-block crafters and the economy by selling to npc. But us crafters need to not be too cheap and be willing to pay for what we are too lazy to farm ourselves, appreciate the farmer for saving us time so the farmers and HELM'ers do not need to turn to "npc till nerf" roulette.

Hopefully this system will give smart and diverse-minded farmers a lucrative source of income while giving crafters also a chance to profit. For those crafters who are too impatient to farm their own mats, there is another outlet for a much needed farmer income source. Low level players also benefit by competitively selling crystals and HELM.

[Shinta]

Well I'm just glad they didn't add some shitty story to this about pixies, throw in some cutscenes and charge me $10 for this.

[SnickySnacks]

http://i724.photobucket.com/albums/w.../Augment-1.png

Edit: Had a typo

/shoots milk out of his nose


Not related, but I made this from waaaay back when nobody luved dragoons.

http://www.thefortunehunters.net/dilgoon.jpg

[spooky]

Calling it now. You will be able to augument HQ elemental staffs!

[Belgaer]

Go go STR+3 and/or DEX+3 on a Chakram for BLU? Haste+% on a Scorpion Harness or Hauberk would be nifty.

[Deimos]

The real profits are made by farming materials and of course, HQs.

Agh, this sort of statement has to be my biggest pet peeve in any crafting discussion.

Farming materials does not increase your profit or lower your costs.

Let's say that you're a clothcrafter and want to make some rainbow capes. Rainbow thread costs 80k/stack on the AH. Yes, you can farm all the spider webs to make a stack of rainbow thread, so that you don't have to buy it. That doesn't mean you "saved" 80k, or made 80k more profit. You could have sold that stack of rainbow thread for 80k. All you did was farm 80k. Nothing more than that. In fact, somewhat less than that, because you had to use a stack of lightning crystals to do it, as well as any associated travel/food/etc costs.

If you have a faster method of acquiring 80k, go do that and then buy the rainbow thread, it's a better use of your time.

Now, if you actually just meant that you can make good profit by farming things and crafting them, then yes, that's often true. To continue the same example, farming spider webs isn't ideal because they don't stack, and you have to fill up all your AH slots with them (though they'll sell very quickly). A clothcrafter farming spiders is much more efficient than a non-clothcrafter, all other things being equal. So that's accurate, it's just a huge pet peeve of mine to see people say things like "well, this synth is a loss if you buy everything off the AH. But if you farm the materials, then you skillup and make profit!"

[Gergall]

You misunderstood me Deimos. I actually agree with your entire post.

My point was on a slightly different topic. I am saying (predicting) that crafters won't see much profit from the sudden increased demand of light staves and other crafted products. Instead, I predict that it will be ore growers and material farmers who make more gil than they currently do.

The reason I make this prediction is because the skillup crafters will continue to synth items at a loss. If the item becomes profitable, they will synth more of them until the mat prices go up and the sale prices go down and the profit is gone soon enough.

I have no direct response to the content of your post because I agree with all of it. People who farm materials and then craft them are silly. Go do whatever makes you the most gil per hour, then spend it on synth materials.


Edit:

This is what I said:

The real profits are made by farming materials and of course, HQs.

This is what I meant:

The real profits are going to be made by the people out in the field farming stuff (presumably to sell it, but they can craft it if they want), not by the people sitting at the AH crafting stuff. HQ synths are still good too.

[Deimos]

The real profits are going to be made by the people out in the field farming stuff (presumably to sell it, but they can craft it if they want), not by the people sitting at the AH crafting stuff. HQ synths are still good too.

Definitely agreed. Rainbow/Prism Capes and Errant/Mahatma body/legs are all likely to be popular augment targets, especially if someone actually manages to get one with a relevant stat increase. But like you said, this isn't actually going to make those synths any more profitable, at least after the initial rush. It will probably just end up increasing the price of rainbow thread/cloth as clothcrafters grab up as much as they possibly can.

Through ffxiah, I can already see some people on various servers buying multiples of these items in preparation for the update, either with intent to sell or to try to augment themselves. I'd expect to see a lot of this over the next few days, it might be hard to find previously-common things like Warwolf Belt for the next week.

[Sumy]

Well I'm just glad they didn't add some shitty story to this about pixies, throw in some cutscenes and charge me $10 for this.

I wonder what they would have called it?

[ronin sparthos]

I wonder what they would have called it?

Wrath of the Augment Pixies

[jimbobsonofgod]

I wonder what they would have called it?

Come get your Fairy Sticks.

[Gergall]

Wrath of the Augment Pixies

I have pointed this out before and apologize to those who have seen the other post.

Full expansions are named "Blank of (the) Blank"

Add-ons like the pixie story would be are named "A Blankety Blank"

With these rules in mind my vote would be for A Pixie Plea

[akoru]

Better attempt to get your weapons the first week, because after the week no one is going to care.

[BRP]

Calling it now. You will be able to augument HQ elemental staffs!

This is a given.

[Mojo]

I doubt that you will be able to augment HQ items. I haven't really paid that much attention to them although I have yet to see any HQ items that can be augmented. I don't have high expectations for NQ augments either. Augmenting an item to make it better than the HQ would defeat the purpose of their crafting system. I don't think there are any non-crafted items that can be augmented so that rules out potentially good items like Warwolf and Trance. Mostly I think it's prepare for a flood of augmented NQ items and some weird weapons all of which are below the best thing.