1/14/13

“It Was On Sale, So I Bought Four:” Why The Cartel Market’s Pricing Is Wrong

The Case of the $80 Jeans

I’m at my local department store and I see some really cool jeans.  However, they are $80.  Now, I’m not about to pay $80 for jeans, unless they are the best jeans ever and make me want to burn the rest of my closet because I love them so much.  It would have to be the sort of thing where I wanted to wear them every day and then cried when they were in the wash.

However, they are not awesome jeans.  They are merely OK.  I pass on said jeans, walking out of the department store empty-handed.  Total profit of department store $0.  Their potential profit was much higher – let’s say that it costs them $20 (with labor, shipping etc) to have those jeans, and that would be a $60 profit.  Wow!  That would be awesome.  If I bought it.  Which I did not.

Now, let’s say those same jeans are $40.  I don’t have to love them.  It’s a perfectly respectable price for jeans, so I’d be willing to buy something I liked not that much for less money.  Profit there: $20.  Granted, $20 is less than $60 profit if I had bought them for $80 – but $20 is a hell of a lot more than zero, which is exactly what the store made as I pranced out in disgust without buying anything.

Not only would I buy one pair of jeans, but chances are, I’d pick up two!  Even if I loved the $80 jeans, picking up 2 would be clearly out of the question.  But I’m willing to pick up two of them if the price was reasonable.  Now the store has $80 of my money, and $40 of it is profit.

Sure, again, a $40 profit is less than a $60 profit, but again, this assumes that anyone will buy the $80 jeans.

Cartel Economics

Now, let’s talk about the cartel market.  There are a bunch of outfits that I like on the market, but for the prices that they are, I do not LOVE them.  If I am going to spend 1400 coins on an outfit, my character better not change out of it EVER.  This leads to such careful planning of spending, that I end up not spending anything.

On the other hand, if that same outfit were 500 coins, I’d snap it up in a second.  I’d also snap up a few more.  And start buying cartel coin packs to boot.  Sure, the profit margins would be smaller, but right now the cartel market has exactly $0 (real money) from me.

TL;DR

A smaller profit margin may make more money in the long run.

  • People are willing to buy more items if they are getting a good deal.
  • People are willing to buy things they don’t love if prices are reasonable.
  • And indecision about a large purchase may lead to no purchase at all.

Would you be buying more if the prices were lowered?

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    1/9/13

    Maybe It’s A Conspiracy At The Department Store

    TO: Republic Designs Department Store

    RE: Your “Cartel” line – defective.

    I am writing to report to you that, as a happy purchaser of many of your new items in the “cartel” line, I have discovered some serious manufacturing defects that only manifest themselves after one or more washings.  Things should NOT make drastic changes after washing them once – I mean geez, I get that it might shrink a bit, but this is ridiculous.  Before purchasing garments from this clothing line, I have only had issues with the Voss line that appeared to change from white to blue with the first washing and then bleach back to white with subsequent washings.  I almost ripped the dry cleaner a new one over that fiasco. However, there have been many of such issues cropping up unexpectedly with the Cartel line.

    This morning, I put on my phantom v-neck sweater only to discover it had grown a mock turtleneck (and a HOOD) overnight!  I assure you, I had just purchased this item and the turtleneck was not an issue at the time.  I went back and found a small disclaimer on your website stating that the item may be retroactively changed, but that small disclaimer was not exactly obvious to a person browsing the racks on her lunch break.

    I pulled on my spymaster boots only to discover that they had grown such large embellishments that they no longer fit under my pants!  These boots, mind you, and the matching gloves, I’ve had for months, and they are both changed and bulked up.  This makes these garments virtually unwearable as professional attire and, because they have been purchased months ago AND have been worn multiple times, they are not returnable.

    I might get a job on Futurama.

    I might get a job on Futurama.

    See, her glove turned into a weirdass bracer too!

    See, her glove turned into a weirdass bracer too!

    One might say they are bound to me!  My only recourse is to put them in the back of the closet for now, wear my second-choice boots and gloves, and hope that the situation is rectified.  I’m not holding my breath.

    On the other hand, some of the cartel market designs that I passed over for being too pedestrian suddenly have some oomph, and I’m considering picking up a few pieces.  I’m a little concerned that the pieces will revert back to their former (boring) state after first washing at home.  Nothing like all the sequins falling off to make a girl pouty.

    I don’t like nasty surprises when I’m trying to get ready for work in the morning.  I also don’t like having an item subsequently change and trying to figure out whether that change is a fix or whether the change will be fixed.  I like getting what I purchase.  As such, I will be eschewing the Cartel line in favor of the Social or Crafted lines that your store offers.

    Although I will miss the cartel’s extensive selection of bikinis… the sacrifices we make.

    XOXO, me

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      1/2/13

      Server Economy For Fashion Post Mega-Merges

      As those of you following along at home may know, I was first on Juyo, which was merged – I mean totally optional transferred – to Canderous Ordo.  I was pretty stoked about an increased population because I’d be able to more easily buy and sell goods with a larger customer/seller base AND the combination of imp and rep side markets.  It was a huge benefit to my quest to get all the schematics.1  However, I was the opposite of stoked about the degree to which the population was increased.  If you remember, at the time, I said it was pretty damn overcrowded and impersonal.

      I was won over to the larger population when, not only was I able to find the schematics I needed, but my crafting became a means for me to support my repair bills and other needs so that I didn’t have to do things that I did not prefer for cash (dailies).  Once I stopped needing commendations, I could legitimately quit doing dailies and focus on crafting for cash.

      It helped that I had been diligent (obsessive) about recipe collecting fairly early, so I was able to make items that other people simply COULD NOT – at least not yet.  I priced them reasonably, and they sold like hotcakes.  Or flatcakes, as one would say in space.

      I have no earthly clue why, but the market that was bustling to buy orange belts, bracers, gloves, and boots, totally dried up when we were merged – I mean consolidated – into Jedi Covenant.  You would think that with an even larger playerbase, the economy would be better, but it doesn’t seem to be.  I’ve stopped selling crafted goods as much because the prices do cover the cost of mats and then some, but don’t come close to covering the pain-in-the-ass factor of crafting, listing, and relisting.  I have started resorting to other methods of making money – for example: selling off excess materials or farming companion gifts to sell on the GTN.

      Now that the cartel market is here, with its new shinies for fashion, I don’t really have a prayer of selling crafted goods.  I admit that I am as taken in by the fashion of the cartel market so that even I want to wear all its fun stuff and not crafted gear.  My main’s current outfit (not counting weapons) contains 2 cartel pieces, 1 space token piece, 1 legacy piece, 2 armormech pieces and 1 synthweaving piece.  I should be wearing more crafted items for CRAFTER PRIDE, but hot damn, the cartel items are sexy and allow us to do what I’ve been wanting forever – wear imp fashion.

      I want fashion crafting to become more relevant again, but I’m afraid of how it might be implemented given the prominence of the cartel market.  I don’t want to pay real money to buy recipes so I can make in-game items for myself, guildies, or cash.  I don’t want recipes in the cartel packs because holy crap, that would be excessively expensive on the GTN, or I would have to spend real money, not get what I want, and swear a lot.  I don’t want cartel to have anything to do with any new fashion schematics we might get.  As Skadge would say, just hand em over.

      But my favorite thing about the fashion isn’t doing GTN sales.  Those could drop off a cliff.  What I have always liked, from my SWG days, is to actually have the specialized knowledge to help someone out.  If a guildie wants “a belt that doesn’t clip with my butt” or “shoes that will colormatch with blah” I can usually find it, even if it’s something that isn’t crafted.  I miss the boutique nature of SWG custom orders and I practically smother anyone who comes to me with a request for an outfit because I CAN DO THIS.  However, here’s the problem with custom orders in SWTOR – things are not crafted instantly.  Sure, I can queue them up, but then I have to do some serious out-of-game bookkeeping to track what I’m sending to whom and for how much.  It’s not like I can pre-make things that people are likely to want (like selling hilts) because I have no effing clue which of my…. 400+ recipes the person is going to want.  This slow crafting, which I usually don’t mind, is a severe disincentive to doing fashion custom orders.

      Fortunately, I should be done with houseguests soon and will be raiding again, which will once again shift my focus away from my crafting woes.  Since, right now, I’m only logging on to craft, and it’s very woeful indeed!

      1. For those of you not following along on the twitterz, I did in fact get the last recipe a few weeks ago.  I am officially done. ↩

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        12/28/12

        I Stepped Down As GM

        I don’t usually talk about guild stuff OR srs bzns here, but you’re getting both today.  Lucky you.

        For various reasons, I recently stepped down as GM.

        The first reason was real life pressures. I am going to have considerably less time in the upcoming months, and just can’t be there to do all the things.

        But the second reason, and the most important reason, is that I ran out of the will to care or, to put it bluntly, stopped giving a fuck.  Let me explain:

        As a GM, I had plenty of help.  I had all the important tasks pretty much farmed out, so I wasn’t exhausted from running the guild on my own.  Some GM’s do that and that’s a recipe for burnout, very very fast.

        Still, when you’re GM, random stuff comes up and it falls to you to deal with or guildies bring stuff to your attention.  Unlike in most guilds, the Snarkers don’t bug the GM with stupid shit, because they’re not whiners.  The STUFF that was coming in to me recently, from guildies or otherwise, hadn’t changed, but it hit me that my reaction had changed.  Rather than wanting to put on my fixing pants and get shit done (which could include delegating the crap out of the task), like I would have done a few months ago, I was thinking to myself… “Ugh do I HAVE to?”

        It’s not you, it’s me.  For realsies. Thinking something along the lines of “shut up” or “go away” or “do not care” is a completely inappropriate reaction for a GM and a big fucking clue that you need to not be doing this GM job.

        Upon this realization, I posted then and there that I needed to hand the keys over to someone else pronto because I was out of energy to care, and that was bad.  And then I set a deadline.  The logic behind the deadline is that we’re a democratic guild and we don’t actually have a procedure for picking a new GM, so the process could last until the end of time while we discuss how to do it, and even longer to actually implement the process and choose someone.  The threat behind the deadline, I said, was that if nobody was chosen by January 1, I was going to hand over the GM-ship to the first guildie I saw online, and run cackling into the night.  Yes, I said “cackling into the night.”

        Well it worked.  Someone stepped up, nobody objected, and that was that.  I am pretty relieved.  Snark lives on.  And if/when the new GM runs out of the ability to care, I might have regained mine by then.

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          12/22/12

          The Fashion Police Takes Issue With The New Free To Play Video

          Hey, it’s a new F2P video.  Look at this cool scene with a bunch of people getting ready to pwn face!

          newvideo

          Keep looking.  Do you see what I see?

          bikininoooooo

          That’s right, it’s one of those ubiquitous bikinis!   Too much boob!  Silly butt-flap! The horror.

          The work of the fashion police, in cooperation with the activist group BOOB (Ban Overused Obnoxious Bikinis), is never done.

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            12/19/12

            Adversity Makes You A Better Player: Leveling Without Healing

            If you had been sitting in my computer room around January of this year when I was leveling my Jedi Knight, you would have heard the swears flying, and it mostly sounded like this:

            Why the fuck don’t we get a healer until Balmorra?  That’s like level 35! It’s not like knights even have the option of healing themselves, ever, no matter how we spec.  And those cheater sith warriors get theirs at like level 16.  How is THAT fair? Stupid Bounty Hunters get their healer before they even leave Hutta.  Fuck you, sith cheaters. (Devolving into incoherent grumbling).

            I died.  A lot.

            Looks so innocent... swears like a sailor.

            Looks so innocent… swears like a sailor.

            See, I’ve never leveled a non-healer in any serious fashion because heals are my security blanket.  Even when I was planning to DPS on a character, it had to be a heal-capable toon.  Not surprisingly, my highest level toons in WoW were a priest, druid, and shaman.

            My first character in SWTOR was obviously a healer, so I wouldn’t have to worry about healing because I was the one doing it – and my companion could stand in front and I, as a control freak, would take care of the health aspect of it.  I created a scoundrel, a commando, and a sage – but of course I ended up falling in love with my throwaway melee dps alt, the future sentinel, before even leaving Tython.

            So I convinced myself, “Self, you can branch out and not play a healer and still have your security blanket because the companion can heal….” not realizing that for the knight, that was a good ways off.  Remember, in the beginning, we barely knew when we got which companion.  Or maybe (probably) I was just an idiot and didn’t know where to look.

            I became a better player through not having that security.  Being without a healer (or roflstomping with another player) I had to know very early on where my damn cooldowns were, and you’d better believe that I still use every single one of them. No “Lol, I always forget that I have that!” or “That isn’t even on my bars.”  Fuck, no.  I had to use all my defensive and offensive cooldowns in the mad race to pwn the thing in question before it pwned me.

            I also had no room for derp.  By that, I mean I couldn’t eff up my rotation too badly or choose kill order poorly or survive accidentally pulling another group or patrol.  I had to interrupt every bad thing I could, because one missed interrupt could decide the encounter right there.  If I screwed up, I was dead.  Period.  It’s very unforgiving and there’s little wiggle room to recover from bad decisions or sloppy playing.

            Now, when it became time to level a dirty imperial, however, and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to lean on my guild to help me if I got in over my head with storyline battles, I chose Bounty Hunter in part because we get Mako first.  I’ve pretty much ignored the option of running with any other companion.  And, honestly, I’m a mediocre mercenary, because if (when) I derp up a little, it may take longer to kill the thing, but we usually survive.  And when Mako occasionally falls behind in the healing, I do fumble for what to do.  I don’t have a practiced “finish off quickly even if you burn all your resources” DPS sequence in muscle memory (at least my defensive cooldowns roughly approximate the keys where they are bound on my knight, so I can usually hit those in time.)

            Cool bounty hunters walk in slow motion away from explosions.

            Cool bounty hunters walk in slow motion away from explosions.

            Lately I’ve been playing my gunslinger, that I was hesitant to start specifically because I’d be leveling the whole way up without healing. The healer companion is Guss Tuno from… Hoth, which is way late in the game, but, regardless, I don’t plan to level with him even when I get him.  Based on the class itself and its long cast times and dependence on cover, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for a gunslinger to be out front taking the hits while the healer cowers in the background.  Bowdaar dies a lot.  Fortunately, when that happens, I’m usually within a sliver of finishing off the mob.  Better Bowdaar dies and I rez him afterward than I die and we have to start the whole mess over (and indeed, when I’m leveling with a healer companion, I’m out front taking the hits and croak before my companion ever would.)

            Hey, Bowdaar, can you try not to die this time?

            Hey, buddy, can you try not to die this time?

            With any luck, leveling to 50 without any healing will train me to play my gunslinger in a similar manner as I was trained to play my sentinel: interrupt all the things, use your cooldowns, no mistakes.  Throwing off your security blanket is a little daunting, but ultimately rewarding.

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              12/18/12

              Hutts, You Say?

              For those of you living under a rock1 SWTOR has announced that we can start preordering the next expansion and I am all over that.  Preordering today, yo.  Not so much because of the early access2 but because I’ll probably forget to do it later, so I might as well just add it and then forget about it.

              “But,” some might say, “QQ do not want to pay money, QQ subscribers should get everything for free, QQ want to use my cartel coins…” To that I say SHUT UP.  Mostly because I’m a jerk, but also because… it’s $10 for a full expansion.  There are new levels (fully voiced!) and a new planet.  My friends in WoW also pay a subscription AND pay for each expansion – and it’s a hell of a lot more than $10 to prance around with pandas.

              If you weren’t already convinced that you need this expansion, I made an awesome promo poster.  In fact, the art department should hire me right now.

              hutt

              1. I’m sure it’s a spacious rock… ↩
              2. knowing my luck, it will be during a busy time at work and I won’t be able to login much when it launches anyway ↩

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                12/14/12

                Why Is This Life Day Holiday Different Than Other Holidays?

                Yes, I know, I’m borrowing from Passover 4 questions, and that’s in March.  Shut up.

                On other holidays we participate in activities. On this one, we um… don’t.  If there’s no in-game event, is it an event? Or a “celebration?”  We can shoot off our fireworks and that’s about it.  Whoop.  I hate to invoke WOW, but where’s my Metzen the fuzzy reindeer – I mean SPACE reindeer?

                On other holidays we get presents. On this one we buy presents for ourselves.  Having an option to spend more money on things (cartel coins or credits on the GTN) for ourselves isn’t getting presents.  It’s the difference between holidays-as-a-kid and holidays-as-a-parent and, honestly, I have just about enough of that in real life.

                On other holidays we might get content that helps us earn items.  On this one, we buy or grind ourselves items in order to access the content.  Ignoring the whole pay-to-play issue which is being resolved, this is a classic example of the persistent “mobius strip of fail” issue of needing the gear that is dropped in a given raid in order to get in the front door of that very raid.  Rather than doing the new space missions to obtain level 7 gear, you want to have level 7 gear just before you access those missions.  (Darth hater says you can technically do it in level 6 upgrades, but I’m sure that’s only if you have the reflexes of a coked-out ferret.)

                There are supposed to be 4 questions so here’s the 4th: REALLY?!  Underwhelmed here.  This “holiday” doesn’t mean much to me if I’m not spending cartel coins or a ton of credits, and I’m probably not.

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                  12/13/12

                  Do Not Wear This (Ever)

                  Obviously you guys love your bikinis, but I cannot stress this enough:

                  There are crotch flaps and butt flaps attached to the top.  They always look stupid!

                  Observe, this might be marginally acceptable from the front, even though you can see the crotch flap clipping through the skirt.

                  However, from the back, it’s horrendous.

                  Why, by the way, would you pair the flashy bikini top with that raggedy skirt (Sandpeople bloodguard from the world event, I think)?

                  Now, a “how” for you.  HOW do you strap an assault cannon to your back whilst wearing a bikini? ”Seasons Greetings” tape like in Die Hard?1  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, fix that.  Seriously.

                  bikiniandgun

                  Upon collaboration with several twitterati, I have decided to start a campaign to “Ban Overused Obnoxious Bikinis” or “BOOB” for short.

                  boob

                  C wut he did thar?

                  Until next time, remember, only you can prevent fashion disasters.

                  1. But I decided not to include a picture of the movie scene because, ugh, there is a *lot* of blood. ↩

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