PotBS: Playing the 'other' game, - the Economy game.

Nele (my wife) and I had a different view of the economy of the game.  Her views are:

costs = material + labour * wages (db/hr)
price = sale price (on AH, or guild)
profit = price - costs

Hence her goal had been to increase profits, directly, by decreasing costs, this mostly involves making stuff yourself to cut costs.

make your own stuff -> decrease cost -> increase profit

This is definitely one way to play.  This is the view of “I’m the boss, and I pay wages”.

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I had a different view of the economy of the game.  My view is:

costs = material
price = sale price
profit = price - costs
profit/labour = profit/labour

My goal is to increase profit/labour.  This means specifically, to avoid low profit/labour jobs and even just buy materials for those type of goods.

buy the cheapest profit/labour stuff -> make the most expensive profit/labour stuff -> increased profit/labour.

This view is “I’m the worker, and all profits are my wages”

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I don’t know if I’m successful at persuading her, but I think I’m turning her around to my line of thinking.

Her line of thinking is the common one, and it is the line of thinking that prevails in a real-world model.  But the game’s economy system had one major difference from real world:

Everybody gets the same amount of labour, every day.

This means, everybody builds 10 facilities, with 24hour of labour output each.  Totaling 240 labour. You can not increase this amount.  If you own two accounts, you can consider yourself two people for the purposes of all calculations.

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If your goal had been to make a profit of 5000 db a day, that may sound really good on paper, but perhaps you aren’t doing the most profitable thing you can do.

5000db  / 240hr = 20.83 db/hr

Even if you just mine ores and sell them, you can easily make 40db/hr.  That means you can make 9600db each day.

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Caveat:

My calculations are only valid if you can manage to sell ALL your goods within the day.  If you overproduce and the market isn’t ready to consume your production, then you’ll end up with a lot of capital sucked up waiting in the AH.  A particular example is the structure deeds.

Most structure deeds take 1 hour to make, and sells at a profit of 100+ db.  So in theory, you can say if I make 10 draughtsman’s office and produce 240 structure deeds daily, selling at minimum 100db profit each, I’ll be earning:

240 * 100 = 24000+ db daily.

The problem is of course, no one is buying that much structure deeds.  If you put up 240 structure deeds you’ll likely only sell may be 10 (unless you seriously undercut your competitor’s prices, which digs into your db/labour rates).  You’ll end up with losing a lot of invested capital without immediate returns, causing a major cashflow problem.

jliu