Iron, Noobs, and Raiders.

[sabinati]

see my numerous posts on the topic of what can be traded for metal...

[Pansy]

I know they can, my question is why any mine owner would bother.

What can you trade that I can't produce???

[sabinati]

it's not that a miner owner can't produce these things, it's that they don't have time. sure i can forage up a chest of chantrelles (or blueberries, cavebulbs, etc etc etc), but i'd sure as hell buy a couple chests more.

[Pansy]

Ok.

I'm not going through food fast enough to need chantrelles or blueberries or anything of the kind in quantity higher than what I find while strolling out through the woods to chop a tree. I suppose I would be tempted to pay a lot for a chest of pre-buttered cave bulbs, but my desire for cave bulbs has not actually been enough to motivate me to go explore the cave nearest to me... I suppose my logic is that isn't psyche mainly only good for making jewelry, and that means having gold and silver? And never having experienced the benefits of either metal, I haven't yet worked out why a player would actually want them. Like Ferraris and hang gliders and call girls, to me these are mysterious things that other people want for reasons they haven't been able to convey to me.

One reason for the differences here has to be that you are a very serious player and I am not. You have maximized your calorie expenditure so as to eat more and thus raise attributes, right?

Time is not a valuable resource to me. I'm logging in and thinking vaguely," now what would be fun to do today....?" It's certainly not a matter of "oh no, I have no time to go foraging" So again, I would say that intensity of play is one reason why your trading needs differ from mine. I make sure I don't have too much maintenance so that I can switch from alt to alt, or not log in at all unless I feel like it, fairly secure that whatever I am ignoring is not going to turn into a crisis.

So I guess what my question becomes is not, what would [i]you[i] trade iron to get, but what slack-ass players like me would trade to get?

And then my next question is, how many iron mine owners are like me, not hugely motivated to stockpile stuff and how many of them are like you, rationally maximizing your game wealth and lp.

Now I wonder what you would consider to be worth five chests of chantrelles if you had to collect them yourself and couldn't trade for them? (I'm scaling up from one chest to five chests on the assumption that your per*exp is enough to find chants at five times the rate of the average wannabe iron purchaser.)

[sabinati]

15 bars

p.s. psyche also helps with ranger gear (including the bow) and bear tooth necklaces. maybe something else that i'm forgetting.

[Pansy]

15 bars

p.s. psyche also helps with ranger gear (including the bow) and bear tooth necklaces. maybe something else that i'm forgetting.

Ouch! That means if I am paying the same hourly rate for their labour as the one you would accept, one chest of chantrelles collected by a fairly new player is worth 15 q10 cast iron!

No wonder the iron buyers talk about goudging. I can't imagine wanting to pay 15 bars of iron for 36 chantrelles. That's practically a 3:1 chantrelle to cast ratio. Mind you, I suspect you might not find five times as many chantrelles unless they were a quite new player, but still where you are coming from iron is dead cheap.

I figure you would probably figure your time is worth more than theirs, and there is a decent argument for that since you would actually bring in more chanterelles, but it is likely that the iron buyers consider their game time just as valuable as yours, so the point where they would consider it "no longer fun" and "not worth it to play" sounds to me like it would be quite close to 3:1 chantrelles for cast.

Any iron buyers want to venture an opinion on this?

[Avu]

If you have 1 million perception you wont be able to to collect 1 million chantrelle just on the two tiles outside my mansion door. And sabinati is quite generous with his chantrelle deal to be fair their value has decreased considerably ever since the hunger update. So your entire argument is kinda fail.

[sabinati]

15 bars was for 5 chests

[Pansy]

15 bars was for 5 chests

I know 15 bars was for 5 chests. But since I don't want chanterelles I am converting it into the amount of time you are willing to spend. Is that not reasonable?

The time it would take you to produce 5 chests of chanterelles is the same amount of time (estimated) that a new player would take to produce me one chest of chanterelles. I see no reason to pay you at a higher hourly rate than him, given that I don't need chants and will probably have to dump them or give them away, or worse yet to store them. Player time in game is the real valuable commodity here, not q of chanterelles, or metal or cave bulbs. The deciding factor is how long you are willing to play to get the token pay-off of fifteen virtual bars of metal.

That new player considers his time as precious as you consider yours and probably more so, if you consider it as % of time spent in game. I am guessing that if you feel you are not wasting your time to get 15 bars of metal for say, three hours of work, he is going to feel the same. If I try to make him work for fifteen hours to get those fifteen bars of metal, is it not likely that he will think I am a gouging jerk and refuse the bargain? It's not like he has to play the game. He's only going to play it as long as it is fun.

I'm trying to figure out how to set things up so that he doesn't say, "Aw shit, this ain't worth it." and quit. It's very possible that you or some dedicated players would feel that setting things up so that he quits is a desireable outcome, of course, so you may not understand my motivation. But I am trying to figure out a way to make it is worth it to me to trade iron, and worth it for the iron buyer to trade with me.

[Xanthic]

  Wow, don't watch a thread for five minutes and look what happens? Nice to see Pansy up and about, and outdated of course but hows about trading bronze with your local supplier? Us. We're 5 mins away from your base, and on the will of your lawspeaker was building a road to trade with you. I was told to contact you to trade, a week ago, and left you a message right after I was told.
  Last night or so, (could have been two nights), I was told that now I need to wait two or three weeks to trade for this precious commodity. Hell, I even offered to be an iron bitch to mine the iron that I wanted for my camp. Granted this was refused for security issues, but regardless of price I'm still left looking for a remotely reliable source of iron. I can't get it from my neighbors and have considered going out to constantanople, (pardon potential spelling mistakes), just to get a remotely reliable source.
  I still resort that whether or not you think it's worth it, you gathering that ore takes 1 hr / 2 hrs tops, your base is sitting right next to the mine. I could mine sixteen cupboards in a sitting. But I've got to wait two weeks to get some? I grant that you lose some in making iron bars, but come on. The problem with considering literal time - time trade considerations is that some people do things a little more efficient than others. Takes more time for someone to smelt iron if they only use one smelter, but shouldn't cost me more because you're not building a second one.
  A standardized price would be nice, and yes, maybe you don't need anything but I don't know, for other people to enjoy the game too maybe it'd be nice to trade regardless? It's not my fault, or other iron buyers faults that iron is so damned rare. Nor that so many things depend on getting your hands on it. Why penalize us because you have what you want, since you were lucky enough to get one of the few iron mines?