Recently it has dawned upon me that prices of items in this game are very, very unbalanced.
Seeing as such, I decided to create our first official community based spreadsheet, to refer pricing to.
http://skspreadsheet.blogspot.com/
Currently it requires a lot of tuning up, and a far better template, however...
With enough work, we will be able to get a little more stability on prices.
Your thoughts on this plan, though?
I can guarantee you that this pricing guide will fail. It completely fails to take into account the unbind fees of higher starred gears -- you're promoting the selling of a 5* cap for 64k crowns, which is just around 1k CE, when it takes 4k CE to unbind. That'll never happen: just peel through the bazaar and you'll notice that the cheapest 5*s are at least 5k CE: unbind + majority of crafting cost. Nobody will sell under these conditions.
The spreadsheet further ignores the supply and demand of the market's materials. Monster Bones and Green Shards are highly sought-after materials for ragecrafting wolver coats, whereas red shards and dark shards are barely touched. But by your guide, they'd be priced the same. That's a fundamental flaw in concept.
UVs, same idea. A Stun max wolver and a shock max wolver differ by a margin of at least 8k CE, and you're pricing them both at 32k crowns, which is incredibly cheap for a max. Again, supply and demand ensures that any attempted dead-set model like this will break.
Finally, as Asukalan pointed out, you've got many, many factors outside of just the item itself. You'll have to contend with current and future projected supply and demands, and the demand of individual customers (some, need it NOW whereas some can wait until they find a better price that rolls around. conversely, some need to sell NOW whereas some will post on the bazaar and wait until a fair deal comes around). In this sense, your market price guide is very nearsighted.
IMO the best price guide would be one organized per item, and then per every possible UV of the item, including double and triples. But that's just not worth anybody's time.
TL;DR: Citing fundamental principles of Economics, no.
Now, I did take both into consideration...
It does seem it may fail, but if it succeeds, it may also end up backfiring, causing said insane prices to be followed unknowingly.
So I'm hoping it'll either die off without a whisper or manage to be properly handled by the community.
This whole thing is out of my hands, anyway; I'm just the guy who started it, it's actually up to everyone else to decide what will happen.
Say you fix all the pricing issues and get them right. Good job, but it still won't work.
My main point is that you don't differentiate between the usefulness/popularity (keyword: demand) of UVs, as opposed to their magnitudes, and that you don't differentiate between the demand of the items themselves. This will affect how recipes sell, how items themselves sell, how UVed items sell, even how your different materials sell.
In this sense it fails entirely on the premise of it's generalizations, by magnitude and not of supply and demand of the market. As I said before, the best (and IMO, only) way to do this is by pricing each item, normal vs UVed, and each material, independently. But that's just not worth the time.
It's completely out of my hands, it's made for the public.
Now, you think it'll fail? Great, you want it to fail? Great too, I don't really care how it plays out, it's not going to be my problem at all.
Personally, unless someone comes in dedicated to repairing the mess that exists, it's going to skydive into a bed of spikes and never be seen again.
"Personally, unless someone comes in dedicated to repairing the mess that exists, it's going to skydive into a bed of spikes and never be seen again."
That it will.
sooooo. you are saying that you posted garbage so everyone else should fix it?
Anyways, I'll argue that the prices are perfectly balanced by the simple economic principle called supply & demand (as noted above). OOO already implemented your spreadsheet in the game via vendors (all 0* materials get you 1cr). Most (if not all useful) materials can be purchased for tokens at a fixed price. Obviously people don't really care about it since they go to the AH rather than to the vendors. Brandishs now sell for ~900cr. I used to sell brandishes while hunting for a UV, but now I dump them to vendors because the extra 100cr isn't worth my effort or the risk of not selling. The market adjusts itself based on risk aversion and desire to sell/purchase items.
Another problem is ppl who dont value their own work. Selling underpriced stuff, treating mist energy like its nothing (many times i saw an most stupid argument
- dude x - i can sell you that sealed sword for 700CE
- dude y - no 600CE
- dude x - man, im not getting profit that way
- dude y - lulz, use mist, you will have profit
It will fail. Since there are always crazy dudes who will ask like 10kCR for a skolver coat and a "not very clever" people who will sell their sealed swords and antiguas for 601CE just becouse they want to sell it NAONONAO. Also there are always ppl who would like to get everything for free or would want things with extra crowns payout.
you can make it, and put there your prices but most of ppl wont even read it, not mentioning fallowing it.