Overranked weapons; what are you thinking?Follow

True. I have never seen a brass dagger for sale. Ever. I’m sure they are out there, and in the future, with more and more higher level crafters, they will become more common. However, the risk of spending hours trailing through a broken market ward system only to go away empty handed is BS.

You are probably actually experiencing the reverse problem. Brass daggers are goldsmith rank 20ish. On trabia atleast, the majority of dedicated gsmiths are so far beyond 20 that they wouldn't even bother. They are ridiculously cheap to make though, for anyone who smelts their own zinc. I bet you could just look for goldsmith willing to put one together for you and you'd spend maybe 30k if you didn't care about finding the absolute cheapest options.

This.

I would never make Brass Daggers as a Blacksmith except for leves, since
a) I can't actually repair them
b) they require a metal that I have to get from a different class (or pay the exorbitant vendor price)
c) that other class can ALSO make that exact same final item and
d) by the time I can make them, there are other things I can make that are better (Iron Dagger). This would be a case where I would use an overranked weapon on my Gladiator -- I can repair the overranked weapon easily but not the one more appropriate for my rank.

I can understand people not being happy about there being no Auction House in game, but blaming everything on it is ludicrous.

Edit: Slight clarification of b) and c)

Edited, Dec 8th 2010 6:51pm by Ravashack

The wards are only useless because there isn't enough of an incentive to sell only items that are relevant to that ward. There is no search function for the market wards so there will likely be some serious variation in prices of the same items as people don't know how much they could potentially get the item for. Because of the ability for suppliers to price relatively freely, what is the purpose of selling an item in the correct ward for decreased tax when they can simply place their retainers in the most populated wards, raise the price by 5%, sell the items 10x as fast and still make the same profit? Heck, some of the time, buyers will pay a premium for a quick find so that sellers can actually price higher when selling stuff in the incorrect ward.

There either needs to be a search function to counteract the issue of asymmetric information or there needs to be a strong incentive to sell items in the correct ward and not to sell items in the incorrect ward. A tax deduction is framed as a reward. SE needs to come up with some sort of incremental penalty for selling stuff in the improper ward. Maybe,pay a certain fixed rate if less than 50% of your retainers wares are appropriate for the ward in which they are sold? Or even put a time limit on retainers that weren't selling the correct items so that people would have to come back to reset them. That's a little harsh but then people would have every reason to sell stuff in the proper wards unless they were super insensitive to increased costs.

On Topic tho, I think the cost of wearing over leveled gear is too high if you can't repair it on your own. Personally, I can't chalk up many of my deaths/failures to having rank appropriate armor, or even under ranked armor. Similarly, I can't attribute many of my successes to wearing over ranked equips (the few times I did it). It may seem that in the long run you are saving money by making one expensive purchase however, you end up bearing increased repair costs and more frequent repair costs until you are appropriate rank for the equipment, which may be as long as 30-40 levels for some people. Unless you become more efficient/powerful/whatever proportionately to the increased costs, which is very unlikely if you're wearing equipment that is 20 levels above you, your gil would have been more valuable if saved and/or spent on rank appropriate equips.

My thoughts.



Edited, Dec 9th 2010 1:35am by FinalSwag

Even if there was, a problem arises when you want to sell for example, three pieces of armor and three random crafting mats. We only have one retainer, so which ward do you go to? You have to pick one or the other, so regardless of big incentives or penalties, items are forever going to be mixed togeater in whichever ward is most popular.

Well that is a hard decision but its one that needs to be made rationally if the wards are ever going to work. The problem is that people aren't rational and so it becomes a very easy decision. Functionally, the tax deduction does nothing so people can sell whatever they want wherever they want meaning most people just park it in the first few wards. Since people won't act rationally, SE needs to put some things in place to make the market wards function correctly or get rid of it. I don't know enough about behavioral economics to come up with a real solution but SE undoubtably employs people who do and i'm sure they'll figure something out. I'm just curious to know what they're working on.

Lol sorry for getting so off topic...

I think there are two parts to this. On the buyers side, since buyers have no way to determine who is selling what and where, they just go to the most populated ward because it has the highest probability of having the desired item. Additionally, even if there was a completely even distribution of retainers, it's likely that buyers would still go through the wards in order since there is very little correlation between item type and ward which gives sellers an incentive to pack in to an early ward so that there is less of a chance that a. people will stop looking before they get to their ward because its frustrating or b. people find what they need in an earlier ward and never get to theirs.

So there is an incentive to sell in populated, early wards.

Edit: Also because there is such variation in prices of most popular items it's hard to compete based on price so it's really important to get as much traffic as possible.

Edited, Dec 9th 2010 1:55pm by FinalSwag

More derailment!

Brass Nuggets are easy to make, you could probably do them very easily at 1-5 goldsmithing. Especially if you are a blacksmith and have the smelting book, you should be able to do it even before that. Brass basically gives the same SP as copper when smelting them. Hell, with the smelting book, I was doing Silver Nuggets at 12 goldsmith, naked, with no craft gear.

Zinc isn't very hard to come by, I vendor it by the 50's all the time. Especially since it is only 1 ore per 3 copper. I don't understand why there is so many people posting about problems getting their brass weapon repaired ... spend 10 minutes, level to 5, and do it yourself.