I'm a noob to MMOs, so please help me understand (without the use of acronyms please). I've been playing since early access on one server. I've watched the price of items get higher and higher. Now that populations have dropped to rediculous lows, I'm exploring other servers with better populations with an eye towards transfering when it's available.

As I explore these other servers I'm finding grade 1 normal crafting materials, such as green goo or desh, going for more than 100 creds/item. These are items that can be collected quickly and easily on any of the starting planets, so what makes them so expensive? Are they priced to gouge the 50s that are just starting to craft? Is this normal? I can understand the price of purple ingredients being higher, but 1000 creds or more for grade 1 means that only 50s can afford them. Again, is this normal? Or are certain people just trying to gouge others?

An economy works when people can afford to buy things. Then the money flows and an economy is established and maintained. I've read in other threads that people have 35mil in the bank from selling items at high prices. What good does 35mil do? You can't buy a mansion or your own Star Destroyer.

Again, I'm a noob thats just trying to understand.

I suspect that currently the prices of grade 1 & 2 mats, in particular, are overinflated because of the current ability to crit craft custom (i.e. orange) items, resulting in a "best in slot" (a.k.a. BiS) item. These BiS items naturally go for quite a bit of money, and are spread across the entire skill range, so you can make them using those grade 1 & 2 mats (as well as the higher grade mats)

However, they take a LOT of mats. (for armormech, IIRC ~68 green mats, 29 blue mats on average. & some whites) As such, the demand for mats (particularly those lower level ones) has gone WAY up. Thus, prices have gone WAY up. I suspect when 1.3 hits, and you need grade 6 mats to make BiS items (as it should be) the prices on the lower grade mats will come back down to saner levels.

There will always be a market for people buying crafting materials becuase quite frankly its a lot easier than a mission system with no ability to que missions... (subtle hint bioware).

Prices are high becuase not enough people are listing crafting materials becuase in my opinion not enough people are either A: gathering to sell.. popular money maker in mmos B: People cant be bothered to play the GTN becuase its a pain in the butt relisting every 2 days. Which seems to fly by if you ask me..

The more people list crafting the materials the cheaper it gets i know if i see a stack of say one of the rarer grade 2 i would by it up at any half decent price.. so a new start with little money will have to use the mission system or run around in the world gathering.

Yes the GTN as a whole needs massivly looking at, as does the crafting. And not just the big revamp that came with 1.2... ie :sorting out a few menus.. which ended up being bugged anyway.

Yes the GTN as a whole needs massivly looking at, as does the crafting. And not just the big revamp that came with 1.2... ie :sorting out a few menus.. which ended up being bugged anyway.

This!

I'm a noob to MMOs, so please help me understand (without the use of acronyms please). I've been playing since early access on one server. I've watched the price of items get higher and higher. Now that populations have dropped to rediculous lows, I'm exploring other servers with better populations with an eye towards transfering when it's available.

 

As I explore these other servers I'm finding grade 1 normal crafting materials, such as green goo or desh, going for more than 100 creds/item. These are items that can be collected quickly and easily on any of the starting planets, so what makes them so expensive? Are they priced to gouge the 50s that are just starting to craft? Is this normal? I can understand the price of purple ingredients being higher, but 1000 creds or more for grade 1 means that only 50s can afford them. Again, is this normal? Or are certain people just trying to gouge others?

 

An economy works when people can afford to buy things. Then the money flows and an economy is established and maintained. I've read in other threads that people have 35mil in the bank from selling items at high prices. What good does 35mil do? You can't buy a mansion or your own Star Destroyer.

 

Again, I'm a noob thats just trying to understand.

The prices are set either through competition (what others are selling at) or the opportunity expense of the item. When they are priced at the opportunity expense is where you see low level mats at high prices. I at 50 can spend an hour gathering mats and posting them on the gtn so you can save that hour, or I can spend that hour and do dailies and gain approx. 200k credits. When you buy easily farmable mats on the gtn you are buying the convienence of saving you the time to gather them, hence what is that time worth to you. For most people at 50 that time is valuable.

The reason people like to have large sums of cash in the bank is to exploit future opportunities that the cash can buy. As a case in point right before patch 1.2 went live the developers told the players certain mounts (that cost 1 - 2.5 mil) were going to be removed from the game. Hence anybody who had the money could buy one and then have an item that they could sell that wouldn't even be in the game anymore.

I don't gather mats to sell; I gather them to make stuff. I also never buy mats off the GTN, because the prices are far higher than what I could gather, and there are never mats I want available in quantities that matter.

Also, gathering low level mats is a pain in the ***, because of the crippled mission dispatch UI, and because all the low level missions, at least for some skills, are stupidly low yield. Most people actively crafting are running tons and tons of gathering missions for the highest level mats, which is why you will see stuff like hundreds of level 50 orange schematics on the GTN for dirt cheap (the crits from UT missions produce these, and when everyone is running UT missions to get grade 6 mats, there are tons of excess ones produced).

So it basically comes down to no supply (nobody wasting time running low level gather missions), and limited demand (nobody really wants to craft low level stuff anyway). The market winds up thinly traded, and pricing is all over the place, because there is no steady demand and no competition from suppliers.