The last few days of Aion have been spent in the Sanctum running back and forth between my Warehouse (bank) the Broker (Auction House) and the crafting vendors. I'm far more addicted to making Kinah than I thought.
It has gotten so bad that I finally sat down Sunday night and made a spread sheet adding up the production cost of each potion I can currently make and the average going rate for those potions on the Broker. I now spend about 30 minutes a night doing Broker and Trade Skill related chores. The nice thing is that the amount of Kinah I’m making from this 30 minutes far exceeds the amount of Kinah I make in 3 or 4 hours of grinding.
I’m currently selling 3 types of potions, I’m going to do a cost benefit analysis tonight and decide if I want to pick up a 4th potion type. There are a few reasons for me selling more than one type of potion, and I want to explain them here
Supply: All of the items I make are subject to the amount of materials I can obtain to create them. They each consist of 3 items. One item is sold from a NPC so that supply and cost never changes. The second is sold from players on the Broker and is common and cheap thus I would consider it low demand. The last is the main ingredient, Fresh Lumesia, which can sky rocket in price if you are not careful.
So if I were only making 1 type of potion then when I start buying ingredients in bulk I would drive the demand up. With the new average price for Fresh Lumesia being so high all new listings would only undercut the current ones by a small margin. It then would take about 24 hours of undercutting for prices to come back down to my acceptable range and the market to reset it's self.
By spreading my purchases out from buying three types of ingredients rather than just one I retain the same amount of profit per potion while keeping the cost of my materials down. This helps me keep from driving my own prices up, and thus putting me out of business. I’m competing against the “I farmed it so it’s free people” here so remember that.
Market Presence: In Aion each character can only has 10 broker slots. The point of this is to keep people from flooding a market and driving out the competition, but also raises an interesting thought of opportunity cost per slot. Now this is good for me more than you think. I WANT to drive away my competition by having a strong market presence. Given that I only have 10 slots that would seem like a handicap but in fact it only makes it easier on me.
Most people are only listing with 1 character. So I only have to compete against 10 broker slots per competitor. I don’t know if all my competitors are the same person with 3 different characters that just happen to have random names or if they really are 3 random people. I have identified only 1 name as a consistent market presence though which leads me to believe they aren't trying to take over the market.
How this benefits me? I have decided that with a little up front time and effort, to level alts up. All my alts have similar spelt names. The point of that is so when I list items all of my competition KNOWS they are competing against 1 person, regardless of how many characters I have. I’m trying to do market intimidation.
The morons and slackers won’t take the time to level up a second character for the sole purpose of selling items. At the most they will have an abandoned alt who theyuse to help sell “extra” stuff. Now I’m sure a few other people will take on my strategy, but there are always more slackers than goblins in any MMO.
Conclusion: I’m currently pulling in 300,000 Kinah a listing from Alchemy with less than 30 minutes worth of work per listing. 15 of those 30 minutes are typically spent combing materials which thankfully I can queue up then go read, shower, brush, or do whatever. I do 2 listings a day, once in the morning and once in the evenings assuming materials are available.
Fun math! That translates into approximately 10,000 Kinah a minute. Thanks to Gevlon @ http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com/
I have applied most of what I have read there to Aion and it seems to be working.
Interesting update from last night. When I logged on all of the materials for the 3 potions I typically made had been bought up to the point that the only ones left on the Broker were going for 3 times the normal price.
ReplyDeleteLuckily I checked the prices of potions and they had dropped alot... so much in fact that people were selling potions for less than it costs me to make them.
Now I had to options at this point. Wait and let people buy these out and hope the market recovers, or do something. I choose to do something.
I bought out EVERY potion that was being sold for less than my production cost to make one. This helped me stock pile potions to sell in the future at a higher profit then the ones I made AND it drove the average price of the potions up 150 kinah each.
I checked this morning before work and I am about 50 Kinah away from being the cheapest vendor again. I also have 3 characters selling potions so my market presence consists of 2 and half pages of ME selling potions.
I'm back on top. I sold ALL of my potions and have made 3X my investment. I'm going out of town this weekend so I listed a few items at a slightly higher than normal price.
ReplyDeleteI figure they will sell when the lower priced items are bought up, but it will take longer. The longer isn't an issue since I'm 48 hours computer free starting tonight.