The basic resources of Archeage are log, iron ore, pelt and raw stone. You get them from chopping trees, mining ore, skinning animals or chopping stone. Besides some obscure uses, they are all processed into materials (lumber, Iron ingot, leather, stone brick). This takes 5 labor points and 3 raws for one processed. Below you can see the prices on the EU fresh start server in silver and the amount of gold one can get if he burns all the labor he gets in a month on these works:
- Those who consciously don't value their labor points. They prefer to play other aspects and stay affluent by either farming/NPC trading or spending money. Instead of just letting their labor points rot, they use it on the most obvious things: buy raws, sell processed. There is always raw in the market and processed always sells.
- Second region characters. You can run a character with different labor pools on both North America and Europe (for some crazy reason), but they share premium currency. So you can farm gold in the other region using labor to pay for premium, while playing on your main region. This doesn't fully explain why the least profitable usage is chosen, unless we assume "can't care less" as explanation.
- Just being dumb. If someone can't focus for a few minutes to calculate prices of more advanced recipes, chopping lumber seems lucrative.
- Being poor. Most profitable ventures needs various materials. If you want to build something that costs 90G of materials and sells for 110G, you need to have 90G. Those who have silvers in their bag, that's a problem.
- The legendary "I farmed it for free". They mined it, so it's free, so selling the processed material is pure profit. Or, the labor points are free.
6 comments:
As a non-Archeage-player, would I be right in assuming that somebody needs to burn the labour points to convert raw materials, or else no higher production could be done?
Or are there alternate ways of obtaining the processed materials?
No, there is not, so someone must do the process. But no one has to burn labor points for so cheap. There is no reason why log - lumber is 0.8 silver, while lumber to boat part is 10 silver.
Logs are a waste product, Ore (and especially stone) are much more in demand.
On my US server, 100 lumber goes between 10 and 20g depending on time of day, stone is 25-35g and ore is 15-25g per amount for a pack.
The reason labor is valued so low for some of these tasks is that they're easy and mindless to do on an alt account. If they still have loyalty in the game for being active daily and having a sub then an alt account can essentially pay for its sub from loyalty alone and still gain some profit. That last part might need checking into as I haven't played in 2 years, but that's how it worked back when I did. Thus for low effort, some quick in mining hot spots you'd burn off your labor and generate those bonus items to buy chum, crops, etc. all having some value to them. This would push an alt account into the ball park of a decent chunk of value for "low effort". as I recall it took roughly 45 minutes of mining to burn 5k of labor with all the mining speed ups available. Again I don't have the figures in front of me, but it was an activity I found tolerable to add to my daily routine for awhile. Since I needed additional accounts to split my property and reduce taxes (as I owned a large portion of south windscour in my days). All of these factors and more made alt accounts valuable, thus there are activities that were extremely low effort that don't make sense financially for the labor to silver ratio.
Also yes, I just noticed what you said about regions, that was another way to make alt accounts more valuable (thus making labor more recklessly expendable). Every other month with minimal labor I would be able to pay for those alt accounts with their labor. Again from a stand point of silver to labor or $ / hr it probably didn't make much sense, but the masses (and even I) often times do not value our time very much x.x
TYPOS AND LINKS ARE FIXED, THANKS!
@Anon: Logs being waste products (of thunderstruck tree - I guess) explain why they are so cheap. It doesn't explain why anyone spends labor to turn them into lumber.
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