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 Posted: Tue May 27, 2014 2:17 pm
So...backstory time. I threw 400 mil into the Flynn's Plunder auction for that pack of 100 Severed Souls. That's technically just shy of 4x what they're actually worth, but I saved myself the pain of opening a lot of caches. Think about it. Even though I have hundreds of Gold Caches, I had to open over 10,000 base caches to get those. Then I have to open 100 more of them to get the Severed Souls. Seems like a lot of other people have a similar thought 'cause there was a small bidding war for these Souls. In the end, it turns out that I value all the clicking at about 300 million gold. >> This makes me wonder if there is an unexplored (or at least minimally explored) niche in Alchemy. I used to get rid of unused Aquamarine and Sapphire caches by opening them up into Empty Bottles and Smooth Whetstones, and then I sold those components in bundles of 10 or 20. I get to charge about 10-20% extra than the caches' value, so I'm guessing that a lot of people are willing to pay up to save themselves from the trouble of opening caches. If I opened up a cache opening business, would anyone be interested? I remembered seeing some cache selling threads offered a similar service for a nominal fee, but it was an extra thing. I'm thinking of having a shop dedicated to that. I do have a massive stash of caches of every color, and I don't think I'll used all of them for Wing Mastery. There will be 2 payment options: 1) you trade in an equal number of colored Caches for the components + 10% ABP of the sum of caches or 2) you pay 3x ABP of the sum of the caches. Example: You need 140 Smooth Whetstones for your Angelic backwings quest. You can put in an order for 140 Smooth Whetstones in my shop, and I'll start opening Sapphire Caches. Once I have the Whetstones, you have 2 options for payments: 1) you exchange 140 Sapphire Caches + 98k or 2) you pay 2.94 mil. I realize that the pricing for paying just gold is a bit steep, but that seems to be what people are willing to pay in order to not open hundreds of caches. The ABP for a Smooth Whetstone is about 22k while that of the Sapphire Cache is only 7k. With a daily sales volume of around 200 Whetstones, people are definitely buying them up. Going back to my Flynn's Plunder Severed Souls, I doubled their value with one of my initial bids (210 mil) and I still had someone top me with 350 mil. So anyway. What do you think?
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Posted: Tue May 27, 2014 3:29 pm
I think your shop would be very busy. You'll just have to find that balance of what to charge for your time versus what it is worth to your customers. What about when your customers put the items up on the MP for double what they paid you? Are you OK with that?
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Posted: Tue May 27, 2014 4:08 pm
Larkadroid I think your shop would be very busy. You'll just have to find that balance of what to charge for your time versus what it is worth to your customers. What about when your customers put the items up on the MP for double what they paid you? Are you OK with that? haha, yeah. I think that's why I wouldn't attempt something like this until after i get Winged Mastery. I'm honestly not that concerned about customers reselling. Cache components aren't finite resources, so they rarely inflate much from their ABP. If for example, someone bought the Smooth Whetstones with pure with the intention of reselling, they'd have to charge 44k per Whetstone. I highly doubt anyone in Alchemy would be willing to pay that much. If that person exchanged Sapphire caches for the Whetstones to resell them...well, I already taxed them, so I don't care if they ran their business inefficiently. =P I am curious about the % to charge if customers go with the exchange option, though. 10% seems too low, but I don't want to go so high that people will shy away from the service.
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Posted: Tue May 27, 2014 5:24 pm
You might want to consider a flat charge per opened cache. It will take you the same amount of time if the cache is Gold or Emerald. If you use a percentage charge based on the worth of the cache you'll be working for a lot less on the lower priced caches.
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Posted: Tue May 27, 2014 5:26 pm
I do it for free and sell them each on mentioned cache prices.
When I buy an unopened cache and open them, I already click the common ones usually wanted at higher amounts like what you mentioned. So it's no hassle since I'm hitting two birds with one stone.
But to make it a business, it's more stress on the seller's part even with gold to compensate. On the short run, yeah seems fine, on later runs, its going to be dull.
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Posted: Tue May 27, 2014 7:12 pm
Larkadroid You might want to consider a flat charge per opened cache. It will take you the same amount of time if the cache is Gold or Emerald. If you use a percentage charge based on the worth of the cache you'll be working for a lot less on the lower priced caches. I thought of percentage charge based on the cache value just because it's harder to replace a Gold cache than an Emerald cache if the customer chose to pay with pure. I'll take a flat charge into consideration, though. Sphyxia I do it for free and sell them each on mentioned cache prices. When I buy an unopened cache and open them, I already click the common ones usually wanted at higher amounts like what you mentioned. So it's no hassle since I'm hitting two birds with one stone. But to make it a business, it's more stress on the seller's part even with gold to compensate. On the short run, yeah seems fine, on later runs, its going to be dull. That's what I used to do with extra caches, but then I started recording color cache probability. I wanted to have the color cache data recorded into my spreadsheets (and Platonix's by extension), and it's a lot easier to keep track of how many Aquamarine, Emerald, etc. I got if I don't have to sort through the components too. I personally don't see it as stressful 'cause I multitask when I open caches. I'm usually playing Hearthstone, so when I'm waiting for my opponent to make their move, I'm on Gaia cracking caches. I can do about 150 in 30 minutes that way. The only problem I could foresee is that I don't have enough manpower to get through potentially a lot of orders.
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Posted: Tue May 27, 2014 7:37 pm
Depends on stress perspective I guess. I usually ask desperate souls if they could work for me and open them in this and that order from forums. I let them use my mule and pay them. It has risks on it but if you pay people well and give them more incentives, you get more from them than you give. I have to stalk them for a while to select a good candidate (process will not be discussed.)
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Posted: Tue May 27, 2014 7:42 pm
Sphyxia Depends on stress perspective I guess. I usually ask desperate souls if they could work for me and open them in this and that order from forums. I let them use my mule and pay them. It has risks on it but if you pay people well and give them more incentives, you get more from them than you give. I have to stalk them for a while to select a good candidate (process will not be discussed.) I considered doing something similar to that too. Especially when I was trying to bid on Flynn's Plunder for backwings quests. I figured that people would be more honest when the precious quests are involved, but I decided that it wasn't worth the effort in the end. I think this is why I thought my proposal would be a more acceptable trade. I have enough caches of my own to pick out the components, so I can just trade them back to the customer 12 at a time for their caches. A bit of a hassle, but less risky.
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Posted: Tue May 27, 2014 8:17 pm
Yami no Sakura Larkadroid You might want to consider a flat charge per opened cache. It will take you the same amount of time if the cache is Gold or Emerald. If you use a percentage charge based on the worth of the cache you'll be working for a lot less on the lower priced caches. I thought of percentage charge based on the cache value just because it's harder to replace a Gold cache than an Emerald cache if the customer chose to pay with pure. I'll take a flat charge into consideration, though. I've opened 1K caches a day for the last few days, and can't keep up with my own gold requirements. It will be hard to find enough golds to keep up with demand if the price is too low. I'd just price golds high enough from the start and then the charge to open. I used to find gold caches at a rate of 6%, but now that the bulk packs are available the rate has dropped for me.
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Posted: Tue May 27, 2014 8:21 pm
Larkadroid I've opened 1K caches a day for the last few days, and can't keep up with my own gold requirements. It will be hard to find enough golds to keep up with demand if the price is too low. I'd just price golds high enough from the start and then the charge to open. I used to find gold caches at a rate of 6%, but now that the bulk packs are available the rate has dropped for me. That's why I charge 4x ABP of the caches if the customer wants to pay in pure instead. I don't mind charging a small % as a tip if they want to exchange their own Gold caches for Severed Souls (for example). But if they pay only pure, I'd be charging them enough to cover up the costs of buying new caches. And yeah, the Gold cache drop rate is way low now for some reason. I'm getting about 3-4% Gold now. =/
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Posted: Tue May 27, 2014 8:31 pm
Yami no Sakura Larkadroid I've opened 1K caches a day for the last few days, and can't keep up with my own gold requirements. It will be hard to find enough golds to keep up with demand if the price is too low. I'd just price golds high enough from the start and then the charge to open. I used to find gold caches at a rate of 6%, but now that the bulk packs are available the rate has dropped for me. That's why I charge 4x ABP of the caches if the customer wants to pay in pure instead. I don't mind charging a small % as a tip if they want to exchange their own Gold caches for Severed Souls (for example). But if they pay only pure, I'd be charging them enough to cover up the costs of buying new caches. And yeah, the Gold cache drop rate is way low now for some reason. I'm getting about 3-4% Gold now. =/ Ok, that sounds good. I didn't understand the pure payment. I'm 3.91-5.28% the last few days and 5.33% for the month of May for golds.
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Posted: Tue May 27, 2014 8:51 pm
Larkadroid Ok, that sounds good. I didn't understand the pure payment. I'm 3.91-5.28% the last few days and 5.33% for the month of May for golds. The pure payment is as if the customer bought the caches and the components. I got an average of 3.5% in the last 5000 caches I opened. It was 3% average for the 5000 before that. I guess I just have really bad luck. ;-;
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Posted: Wed May 28, 2014 7:13 am
So I tried to bid on the Flynn's Plunder 100 packs of components...Someone was willing to go to 2 billion gold for Bloodgrass x100. Damn. >>
EDIT:
I'm amused. This same person is bidding on all the 100 packs of components. He has Lepidopteran Silk at 500k per...I wonder if he realizes that only a handful of formulas use them, and they're only worth maximum of like 50k each.
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Posted: Sun Jun 01, 2014 6:55 am
I tried an experiment on mp with regards to this and sold 100 of each component from an aqua or emerald for 40k ea, it got sold. Laziness and gold go well together.
As for the chances of gold caches dropping on a large base. On personal experience, I prefer opening 1000 caches and get 40-60+ gold caches than opening 5000 caches and get only 160+ gold caches.
Maybe the luck is better for others but bigger bases means lower gold caches for my luck.
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Posted: Sun Jun 01, 2014 8:10 am
Sphyxia I tried an experiment on mp with regards to this and sold 100 of each component from an aqua or emerald for 40k ea, it got sold. Laziness and gold go well together. As for the chances of gold caches dropping on a large base. On personal experience, I prefer opening 1000 caches and get 40-60+ gold caches than opening 5000 caches and get only 160+ gold caches. Maybe the luck is better for others but bigger bases means lower gold caches for my luck. I've never opened more than 2K of caches at one time. I've found between 99-120 gold caches each time, but it takes me 4 or 5 hours to open that many, so I've only been opening 1K recently. If I notice my luck is bad on the caches, I'll stop for awhile and start again later.
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