Tradeskills

Eiphy

List of design options: https://pastebin.com/VYsmRCy5

Syntax: https://pastebin.com/XnMHQbiU

Requires level 20 to obtain one.

Cost for design (fashion, cuisine, jewelry): 200 credits

Cost for trans skills: 900 lessons

Cost for design submission: 15,000 marks each

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Sharing what info I've discovered. I'm a bit bummed, as I raced to get to 20 to select a tradeskill. The submission cost seems excessive. 100-200 would be much more reasonable, especially considering the other costs we've sunk in.

Qitorien

whoa, 15,000? I'm not familiar with the true value of crafted items in SM because I haven't reached that, but that does seem quite excessive.

Tecton

Designs operate a bit differently here, if you put your design up for use, and people download it, you get royalties for it - so popular designs will actually make you money. So there's a higher starting cost there to offset that. As with all things in the game though, costs (especially for things priced in marks) are very likely to change in the coming weeks as we get better baselines for real world mark generation. 

Albion

That's actually really cool, wow. 

Eiphy

That still seems very high. If someone is leasing my design for retail (which I don't really understand, why would I want shops competing with me?) I can't price it very high as they can't make a profit if I do and they wouldn't buy. Sale price also has to include material cost (where do I find materials? Maybe they are expensive too), so my margin per design sale will only be a few hundred marks or less which would require around a hundred resells to make a profit. I don't forsee people forking out cash to use basic designs either, which is a huge staple for crafters (people love their plain black stuff). Obviously, prices will fluctuate but my experience in IRE games is that people undercut and margins get razor thin.

Maybe give an option to submit something for trademark, for a higher fee and resale potential, but give us a cheap option for submitting just for ourselves and for stocking our own shops.

I hope the costs go down. The design leasing sounds interesting, but it seems like it competes with shop ownership.

Aebrua

200 credits to even start to design - am I understanding that part correctly?

Eiphy

Yes, level 20, then 200 credits, then 900 lessons.

bairloch

So you could design only, never build anything, and make money. That's neat. Is there an XP gain with royalties, or just cash?

zacc

That's a little... steep. By steep, I mean approximately $70 steep. Might as well make tradeskills artifacts at that price.

Aebrua

I doubt you would ever make enough to offset the cost, which is discouraging to say the least. Though I'm used to Lusternia's design system which cost less than a single Cheetoh.

Flipilaria

Also not thrilled by a 200 credit barrier of entry

Minion

Lusternia is a special case which saturated the market in such a way that most people only really took tradeskills in order to attain the trans skill perk. Not many people actually ended up bothering crafting for much more than thier own personal use or pocket money from time to time.

Every other IRE except just recently with Imperian (I think design trades went free with the free game model) charges for a design trade permit. It truly makes less work for the approval team because only those who are very serious about it will buy a permit. You don't get inundated with high amounts of low quality designs. 

*Please note: Before people jump on me about the subjectivity of design quality, I played primarily in Lusternia for 8 years. I have seen the types of garbage that was submitted and the wait times required as the approval team slogged through them.

EDIT: Also, 900 lessons for a trade skill with a 200 credit permit is approximately equal to the 1700 lesson investment in a Lusternia tradeskill with a relatively small credit fee added on. The fact that they are gating it will be restrictive but only to those who are casual designers rather than the ones determined to craft for a living. 

I am sure design fees will be adjusted at some point though, so no need for panic just yet.

Qitorien

People paying for your design makes me feel better about the price, but it does still seem high, especially with the initial 200 credit unlocking. As Eiphy says, it might be an issue with people selling the same item. If they have to pay a price to use the design and then sell it for the same price, they won't be making as much. However, I'm also trying to consider the fact that some people may not want to buy from someone in another faction. Tradeterminals access all shops though, so  geography is much less of a limiting factor.

Eiphy

So my fiance has been holding our money to minimize cloning costs and we still only have a grand total of 16k, enough to submit a single design. I think it would be helpful to have two submission types - the current, expensive one for trademark and a cheaper one (ideally 250-1000 marks) for personal designs. This would let us use tradeskills without a huge constant grind and begin spreading the magic of cool customized items.

Eiphy

Downloading a design costs 5000 marks, and 5% of that (250 marks) is paid to the original designer as royalties

Yikes. So it costs 15k to submit a design and we get a FLAT FEE of 250 marks if someone reuses it. This is 60 designs to break even and we have no control over the charging? And it costs 5k? People will just give private access for an obviously lower rate, which will make design reselling even less profitable. It feels like this mechanic is trying to push something which doesn't need to be forced so hard.

TextWench

I would love to know why IRE choose to double the cost of entry for a license (200 is yikes)? 

More blood from the stone since you are limiting crafters to one skill? 

Also, can it possibly be one soft (decorative) and one hard (component) skill? 

As someone who has invested thousands of credits on assorted design related crap, this makes me not wanna play with crafting in Starmourn, tbh. It's always been a hard sell, especially since the other games make the process of designing tedious, unfun, and then actively do things that make it harder to make anything resembling a profit on trade skills (and generally bone rp-focused players in favor of combat-focused players). Most of us do not do it with an expectation of profit but because we genuinely love creating content. 

I don't have a ton of critiques that are not going to be resolved with time and the beta process, but this is a big huge one. Make crafting accessible to players that are not flush with spare income without making them sacrifice having a character capable of anything else. I promise you'll still get plenty of cash from us if you adjust this cost. 

Arsentar

Crafting approvals take a lot of admin time. I really doubt they could not make it cost 200 credits. Would be really nice if the mark cost was lessened, though, there's really no need for it to be so steep after forking so many credits.

Tye

It's 200cr in achaea for trades.

TextWench

Arsentar said:

Crafting approvals take a lot of admin time. I really doubt they could not make it cost 200 credits. Would be really nice if the mark cost was lessened, though, there's really no need for it to be so steep after forking so many credits.

...they take precisely the same amount of time they took in other games where the cost is half that. And they could always implement player-approval processes like other IRE games have. This is a non-argument.

Minion

No they do not cost half...

Tye said:

It's 200cr in achaea for trades.

Actually 200 credits for creative trades like tailoring and jewelry.

Minion said:

Lusternia is a special case which saturated the market in such a way that most people only really took tradeskills in order to attain the trans skill perk. Not many people actually ended up bothering crafting for much more than thier own personal use or pocket money from time to time.

Every other IRE except just recently with Imperian (I think design trades went free with the free game model) charges for a design trade permit. It truly makes less work for the approval team because only those who are very serious about it will buy a permit. You don't get inundated with high amounts of low quality designs. 

*Please note: Before people jump on me about the subjectivity of design quality, I played primarily in Lusternia for 8 years. I have seen the types of garbage that was submitted and the wait times required as the approval team slogged through them.

EDIT: Also, 900 lessons for a trade skill with a 200 credit permit is approximately equal to the 1700 lesson investment in a Lusternia tradeskill with a relatively small credit fee added on. The fact that they are gating it will be restrictive but only to those who are casual designers rather than the ones determined to craft for a living. 

I am sure design fees will be adjusted at some point though, so no need for panic just yet.

TextWench

In every other IRE game, a tradeskill costs 100 for the license and they have mini-skill lesson requirements. 

And a design costs 100 gold in the ones I have crafters in. 

I'm also just baffled at why people wanna justify a credit hike for players who are -paying- for content creation for a game with minimal overhead? Like... ???

IRE got ya'll thinking fuzzy.

TextWench

Aetolia even has the little mini crafting skills with an even lower cost of entry.

Arsentar

You are factually wrong. It costs 200 credits in achaea.

Minion

TextWench said:

In every other IRE game, a tradeskill costs 100 for the license and they have mini-skill lesson requirements. 

And a design costs 100 gold in the ones I have crafters in. 

I'm also just baffled at why people wanna justify a credit hike for players who are -paying- for content creation for a game with minimal overhead? Like... ???

IRE got ya'll thinking fuzzy.

You didn't actually read what I copied.

TextWench

Aetolia is 100 credits, plus mini skill lessons for primary trade skills. Imperian was 100 (and is, but for the first freebie on trade license) credits plus mini skill lessons for a trade skill. Lusty is bizarre and I tend to ignore it in IRE discussions cuz it's a good bit odd compared to the others in just about every direction, Achaeans have proven themselves willing to pay astronomical amounts for silly things (a 300 credit resetting pie, yo).  I was wrong about Achaea, though I guess in hindsight I'm not surprised. I genuinely thought theirs were 100, but I haven't looked in like a decade, so.

The idea that somehow paying more nets you better designs is laughably inaccurate. Having more spare cash has absolutely zero bearing on how adept you are at descriptive writing and/or the weirdly shifting and often nonsensical crafting rules IRE sets up. 

Can you name any other reason why it makes sense to charge more? "It takes a lot of time" - Meh, coding around game balance takes more. "Achaea does it." - Meh. 

I know how much effort it takes to keep up on a design queue. And if they truly don't have it, IRE has existing models to alleviate the burden on the admin. 

Edit - No hate to the pie lovers. I, too, love pie. I just like game stuff to be more accessible rather than less.

Minion

TextWench said:

Aetolia is 100 credits, plus mini skill lessons for primary trade skills. Imperian was 100 (and is, but for the first freebie on trade license) credits plus mini skill lessons for a trade skill. Lusty is bizarre and I tend to ignore it in IRE discussions cuz it's a good bit odd compared to the others in just about every direction, Achaeans have proven themselves willing to pay astronomical amounts for silly things (a 300 credit resetting pie, yo).  I was wrong about Achaea, though I guess in hindsight I'm not surprised. I genuinely thought theirs were 100, but I haven't looked in like a decade, so.

Aetolia is weird and ~I~ tend to ignore it in general. It is, however, part of IRE so I acknowledge that they have a different model. They also have some crazy weird artifacts that people are willing to pay money for, however, and without them Aetolia would be going the way of Imperian. Imperian had to go free with limited admin support because they had a tiny player base. This was not, however, because of crafting.

Lusternia is very much part of IRE and while I appreciated that crafting was accessible, they still got those credits out of you. For example, Lusternian tattooing. Someone I know once tattooed someone In game for 4 hours straight because of the massive time each tattoo took to complete. That was 4 hours WITH the 300 credit artifact needle which halved the time to tattoo. From what I hear it was something like 600 individual tattoos. (EDIT FOR CLARITY: *Lusternia's tattoos are very different to the other *IREs'.)

The idea that somehow paying more nets you better designs is laughably inaccurate. Having more spare cash has absolutely zero bearing on how adept you are at descriptive writing and/or the weirdly shifting and often nonsensical crafting rules IRE sets up. 

You are correct. However, my idea is not that you get better designs, it is that you only get designs from serious crafters. Typically, the serious ones do, in fact, practice the writing craft though there are, of course, exceptions.

Can you name any other reason why it makes sense to charge more? "It takes a lot of time" - Meh, coding around game balance takes more. "Achaea does it." - Meh. 

Coding around balance is very intense and a vital part of the functionality of the game. The crafting side of the game is tiny in comparison to the amount of the playerbase that uses game mechanics.

I know how much effort it takes to keep up on a design queue. And if they truly don't have it, IRE has existing models to alleviate the burden on the admin. 

Part of that model is to alleviate it by gating it behind a credit license. While that may not be the best way, it does eliminate those who are not intent on making a living from it. Unless there is a mechanical benefit for taking it, most people will not pay 200 credits to design pretty sashes for their B.E.A.S.T.

Edit - No hate to the pie lovers. I, too, love pie. I just like game stuff to be more accessible rather than less.

I, too, love pie. I have, however, seen the results of too much pie being made for too small of a group of people. Much baking time is wasted. 

Wuff

I'm going to keep tight hold of my credits until those new tradeskills come out, which is in about 6 months or so.

Cuisine is hideously tempting though.

Devina

What are the new ones?

Eshe

I don't mind the 200cr entry fee. That's like Achaea and I can deal with it.

The 15000 submission cost is pretty harsh though. The concept of royalties is neat, but you would need 60 downloads to break even (which means 60 people paying 200cr on the same trade + lesson investment to be able to use that design type). Here at least it would be better if royalties had limited uses before you need to pay to access the design again, or have an annual subscription to keep using. 

Kax

Wuff said:

I'm going to keep tight hold of my credits until those new tradeskills come out, which is in about 6 months or so.

Is there a source on that? 

zacc

Unless there's some fancy mechanic that allows unique, functional designer-chosen attributes to the items, at the end of the day it's all fluff and one item from CrafterA has the same functionality as the same item from CrafterB. I don't see any justification in spending that much as an entry fee. It's not as though there is going to be significant competition beyond who writes the prettiest descriptions and who can undercut the most.