QVCatullus
Gallente
Red Eclipse Inc.
The Cyrene Initiative
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Posted - 2006.12.06 18:04:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: Estel Arador
he wants more cash for less effort
he's using salvaging as an example, which is kinda weird, since the prices of rigs are yet to be determined and if they take less effort to make, they'll be cheaper.
The thing about this argument is that it's only half thought-through. Sure, the easier rigs are to make and the more common they are, the cheaper they will be. But restricting the supply as sharply as has happened so far from the scarcity of salvage components will NOT make the few rigs that are built go to infinitely high prices. The demand for them is still static, because they only offer so much benefit in-game. If rigs can offer me such and such a bonus, which many players can get instead by using T2/faction/officer mods, or by flying a more expensive ship, and the rig would cost several times as much as using one of these alternatives, the market will not support that price. At unreasonably high prices for rigs, the number of players who have the money and inclination will get very small (eventually reaching 0) and the amount of money that there is in the rigs market will get very small, making such a profession unmarketable.
The price of rigs WILL remain far too high at the current rate, as many people have pointed out. If it takes literally weeks of play to assemble enough components to make a rig, then no one will sell the components or a rig that they make from the components for less than their weeks of effort were worth. Some estimations suggest that the working price for rigs will outpace the price for many T1 ships, which will of course limit sales. If no one is willing to pay a fair market value for the time the salvagers put into their work, they won't sell any rigs and they'll lose the effort they put into making them.
How precisely, then, is it 'good' for the salvagers that the supply of the components that they rely on is so limited?
Granted, if components were limited because they were only available to one or two players and they could monopolize the supply, they would stand to make an enormous amount of money. But there is no monopoly at all the way things stand -- any character with 2 level III prereqs and enough cash to slap salvagers on a destroyer can enter the very shallow salvage market. That suggests that the impact of rigs on the game will be more or less nil, which seems like a waste with all the effort that went into coding them in (and the irritation that the new wreck system has caused among PvE'ers  .)
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