Greedy Goblin

Wednesday, July 6, 2016

Next patch I will not be an early adopter

When Valencia came out, I immediately went to explore and to connect the nodes to make money with the new items, especially with Star Anise. At the first two days I sold 80% of the Star Anises on the server. Star Anise is needed for a consumable that is necessary to go to the desert and my stocks sold instantly. Great money, right?

Not so much. The price of Star Anise was maxed at 1100-something and I couldn't sell for more, despite people would have paid 50-60K for it. Many people wanted to go to the desert fast and they would gladly pay high for the ability.

In the meantime, the price of Steel increased by 30%. Who cares, right? Well, I should have, because that means going from 7K to over 9K. Which is bigger difference than the price of Star Anise. I could make more money if I just ignore Valencia completely and AFK-process iron and coal into steel. There were other "Old World" items gaining value too like certain gems. The AFK-gathering water was introduced too and water sold high at the first days.

If you are an early adopter of something, you take the extra hassle and risk for the extra profit. Going head-first into a new thing is very different from doing it when proper guides are released and prices settled. But the socialist fixed price system removed the extra profit, so the rational choice is to not be an early adopter. Next patch, I won't be leaving Heidel and just craft whatever the irrationally acting early adopters demand and get rich. If everyone acted rationally, no one would go in first, so the new thing would never be conquered.

This is the reason why socialists systems are so bad at innovations. You need and deserve the 1000% profit for the few new projects that actually work out of the dozens of attempts. When the government don't let you have this profit, you simply don't innovate but sit in your old, safe, mildly profitable system.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ironically, what the people with new ideas and tech usually need most is government subsidies, just ask Elon Musk, who now wants to remove them for other people.

Subsidies for new tech allows them to take the risk and enter a market dominated by large established players.

Anonymous said...

That is not an early adopter issue punishing the innovator. It is a market-shock issue. In this case, the supply of older resources has gone down because players are focused on the new content but demand has not dropped because, unlike WoW, BDO materials continue to be useful into the next patch.
The closest real world equivalent would be a gold rush. Everyone has rushed off to exploit in the new content. There is an oversupply of innovators and risk takers! Players are doing it free because it is new content. The people that really get rich were the merchants selling good old shovels and moonshine.

Gevlon said...

@dobablo: it's worse than that. In a gold rush the best (or luckiest) miner will be the one who goes home with a fortune. (Of course the merchant and the red lamp house owner will be more rich than the average miner).

Here the miner income is artificially limited. If you hit a gold vein, the government says you can only sell it for peanuts.

Destabilizator said...

Price of Steel raising is because of many Muskets and Horseshoes are being made (for failstacking). Auto water gathering was introduced yesterday (along with auto shoveling), did you mean that workers can now gather water (they can :P)?