Greedy Goblin

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

BDO business: timber, ore, plywood, ingot

Blog update: I damn the moment I tried the "templates", because Blogger don't have the old plan thing anymore, so I have to live with it. And some people want larger, others want smaller. I have no idea how to change it back to the old which was ugly but worked for everyone as it was practically unformatted text. You can use CTRL+ and CTRL- to increase-decrease the page in your browser.


In Black Desert Online, if you harvest wood by going to the forest and chop a tree, or send a worker to do so, you receive timber. If you or your workers mine, you get ore. Timber and ore are used in several recipes. For example from pine timber you can craft Cedar Float, Florin Fishing Rod, Noble Wagon Flag, Noble Wagon Wheel, Pine Timber Crate, Seleth Longbow, White Horn Bow and Yuria Staff. Or you can process it into pine plank. You can't do anything else with plank then further process into pine plywood. From that, you can make Sturdy Pine Plywood, needed for alchemy stones. You can also make Noble Wagon Cover, part of one of the carts and Serendia Timber Crate which is inferior to the Calpheon one and I doubt anyone makes it. Besides the total lack of purpose of the intermediate material "plank", you can notice how much more usages unprocessed timber has than plywood. Ergo, processing timber into plywood is probably not the most profitable idea.

Except "fixed prices". You probably heard that you can't just make any random price offer in Black Desert. The prices are in fixed ranges to prevent "gauging". While banning very high prices can be explained by fighting goldsellers who would transfer silver by buying the overpriced auction of the RMT buyer, that doesn't explain the lower limits. You can't really goldsell by underpricing materials. If you list them lower, someone else than your RMT buyer snipe them, and even if the buyer gets them (because you did it at 3 AM, totally not raising red flags), he still has no silver, just a bunch of materials. Anyway, you just can't list Pine Plywood below 6300 silver. Which is great to prevent "nolifers undercut" and "work losing value". Pine timber sells around 300 silvers and you can process 5 into 2.5 planks if you have high level of processing. From 10 planks (20 timber), you can make 2.5 plywoods, so 8 timber for a plywood. That's some serious salary: 2400 silvers (-tax) if you are selling the timber and 6300-tax for selling plywood. As you need 4*10 secs for the planks, 1*10 for the plywood and get 2.5, you need 20 secs to make this, so your profit is 456K/hour and you can do it totally AFK. Way to go market regulations!

Except, everyone else noticed that and producing plywood and lists it for easy profit. The result: the whole marketplace page is full of exactly 6300 silver Pine plywoods. 86K were sold since the servers are up, since March 3. That was 120 days ago, so even if we assume that sells are evenly placed (likely not, as at the first times people had low skills and were better of purchasing than processing themselves) then 715 is sold on a day. There are 2400 listed at the moment, so if you want to sell you'll need to wait for 3 days on average. Did I mention that you only have 30 orders?

The end result is people are seeing the numbers, assume profit, produce plywood and end up with no sales. Or, there is an alternative, you can vendor it for 2880 silvers. Since vendors pay no tax, the opportunity is 2400*0.65=1560 silvers from timber sale providing 237K/hour profit. I checked every materials in the game and found the same: plywood/ingot producing is very profitable on paper, but you end up with vendoring the product since you can't sell. Granted, you still make profit, and I guess more pine ends up vendored than as Yuria Staff, but still the ordinary guy who believes that the price means something is out of luck. That 6300 silver means nothing else than "if you need pine plywood very fast, you can get them for 6300", but as most people don't want them very fast, it's meaningless. It tells nothing about selling you pine or about getting plywood efficiently.

The same can be told for all timbers, all ores, cotton, flax and fleece. Except some of them has low vendor price relative to the raw material price, so if you dumbly process your cotton, you are losing money. Ash and Maple timbers, copper and tin ores are in an even worse position: you can't sell the raw, because it's also on the lower limit of the price range and the page is full with unsold. You either process to timber/ingot to vendor, or vendor the raw. So the fixed prices only reached two things: misinforming people and making people sell to the state (vendor) instead of using their materials in production, increasing GDP. Please note that the 1-200K/hour profit for vendoring seems nice, but it comes with an opportunity cost: if you process, you can't sleep in your bed, losing 40 energy per hour, missing out on the profit coming from cooking or alchemy. Also, while "processing can be done AFK", it doesn't mean that you don't have to manage your inventory and while it's a "few minutes", it can add up.

Below you can see a table from the EU-Jordine server with all materials. As you can see most processed materials cannot be sold. The only exception is steel, which is nicely profitable (considering that you can process for an hour while AFK) and is probably missed because most people simply don't know about it. But I guess it won't be long. Other exception is Fir-Birch-Cedar, because of crates, we'll get to them sometimes this week.

13 comments:

Destabilizator said...

One more thing to add, you have 30 Sell Orders, but each of these has limited stack - you cannot put more than 500 timber on one order, or 20 pots, etc.

seanas said...

/cont

Secondly, the lack of input prices (or labour costs) in most MMOs makes them unstable and unrealistic. If I have decided to make plywood all day (a decision I might make because I've already allocated my time to playing, and there is no input or labour cost to me), then - in the absence of regulated prices - I could also crater the market and make it illiquid (this was one of the benefits of processing costing energy: it gave an input cost). In a real market, the presence of real input costs puts a floor under the equilibrium price (or really: it creates the equilibrium price) and helps create an orderly market; BDO's market regulation (at the lower end) simulates these input costs - without these, you have the typical ridiculous MMO market where undercutting a competing supplier by half is considered a valid strategy. In a real world market, undercutting a competitor by half (assuming equal input costs) is a route to bankruptcy (temporary loss-leaders excepted); in an MMO it can lead to market dominance and mistaken ideas about how real markets work.

BDO's market regulation isn't perfect - it's not even particularly great: the price ranges are not dynamic (meaning: supply volume cannot push prices above or below set limits); and they don't match my perception of equilibrium prices. However, by simulating real market conditions, they are much better than the usual, unrealistic 'economy' of other MMOs.

Destabilizator said...

@Seanas: it's not true, that the price brackets don't move, they do, but on some weird algorithm where volume has too big weight and scarcity/time to sell too low.

Eg. since start of the game, I've made and sold 100x Steel Taritas chests and I had monopoly on it, since the number sold matched the number I made. It got sold immediatelly and for max price, everytime. The bracket didn't move even by 1 silver.

Before sieges, I've made and sold ~2500 Elixirs of Human Hunt, at first, 20 stack sold for cca 180k (max price), last few hundreds went for 318k/stack (max price, always sold out).

But all these brackets mean nothing when it comes to selling really desired items, due to Buy Orders, where even 4x max price is usually not enough to win.

Anonymous said...

How much contribution do you have to lodge the amount of workers and connect all the available timber, to fuel your hourly figure for timber or other base items?
Also what does the "other T1" and "other T3" stand for?

what ever I do, I find myself bottle necked on contribution points (sitting on 178 now) I don't see an efficient way to push CP fast. Some suggest calpheon dailys but they give mediocre contribution isn't there a faster more efficiant way?

Gevlon said...

Other T1 and T3 is for example cotton and cotton fabric
You need exactly zero workers to process wood, your character does it.
I had 250 CP two weeks after starting to play, will make a guide.

Destabilizator said...

Mediah dailies give double the CPexp compared to Calpheon, but you need to unlock many of them, but all the other quests give superior exp compared to old world.

But if all you are after is timber/crates production, you should have sufficient CP, no?

Anonymous said...

So wide... Your front page and each article width are greater than my 1366 px laptop screen it operates on a fixed width independent of window size, forcing me to scroll left and right to read each line.
The only place where your blog scales to fits the window is on the comments page.

Anonymous said...

You need timber to process. so you need workers on timber nodes. These nodes need to be connected to a major city. the city need enough lodging to house all these workers grinding the mats for the processing. Granted I only have skilled lvl 20-22 workers an a few professinal workers on lvl 14-18 range. Sure I have enough timber for crate production or vendoring. But I don't have enough to haul in every material like you seem to get .. and place workers on every node there is.
well soon I should have enough CP because I can breakup the grade 3 armor and weapon stone material nodes. In a few days I should have enough platinum and black crystals for 4* ultimate armor and 2* ultimate weapon upgrades. after that I can disconnect alot and should have enough CP to somewhat emulate your figures.

well I'm three weeks in and am wondering about CP for a few days. Will look into mediha dailies, ty! I'm not a good quester, I did a bit till heidel and ignored most of them and only focused on blackspirit quests for inventory space coop missions.

Gevlon said...

@dobablo: press ctrl minus in your browser and the whole page shrinks. I can shrink it so tiny that I can't read it.

@Anonymous: you need timber to process, so you need to go to the marketplace and buy timber

Hanura H'arasch said...

@Gevlon: am I right to assume you upgraded the template of your blog? In that case you can switch back to your old one by using "Revert to classic templates" in the templates settings.

If you did something else it can almost certainly be reverted as well, blogger should save all your templates.

Gevlon said...

@Hanura: I've tried that. My old template was "pre-classic" and the classic is even worse than the current.

Manserk said...

I'm not sure how helpful that can be, but you can find the old CSS by going on archive.org

Tithian said...

Blog layout is looking sharp, easy to read, quick to load. The permanent pages are also a lot more 'visible' now.