Recipe to break down materials - Needed!
This is an interesting idea, sounds good to me. Not sure how willing people would be to utilize their higher tier stuff to break down into lower stuff, but still, its a nice option anyway.
I think the drop rates might need a bit of looking as well, though. T1 and T2 fine materials seem to drop more often than the T3-T4 stuff does.
I levelled 5 characters at the same time, and in the early stages I always had plenty of fine materials to level up crafting and craft myself the gear I wanted to craft fitting with my character level. But once I started getting to the point where I was using T3 and T4 stuff, I started running out before I could get all my crafting professions up and make the stuff I needed. I even dropped one character out of crafting completely and I still wasn’t gathering enough materials, where I always was in the earlier crafting tiers.
That’s part of the reason why the breakdown yields more rather than less, as you are indeed paying to step down. There are a chunk of advantages, though of breaking down -
- You’re 80 and have a bunch of Silk. You haven’t leveled your crafting really. You can break that down at the cost of a skill point and a few dusts and be able to get the mats you need rather than paying 3s a cloth mat
- Prices show the supply imbalance. Silk costs coppers. The lower tiers reach 10x that in cost. Until it balances, you could make mad profit on the materials. I’d give up a skill point for a few gold.
That last point is the linchpin – when it’s profitable, people will do it, balancing the market. When it’s not, they won’t unless they want mats without buying them off TP. I’ve mastered every single crafting school, and have multiple 80s… I can assure you that the drop rate is no where close to being able to support crafting. That very fact is why many items in crafting are so unprofitable – the mats cost too much as demand just for leveling crafting alone exceeds supply, allowing for inflated prices.
I don’t support the idea. Let’s wait to see what the market does. Typically, when people learn that Material A is high demand and low supply and prices are trending upward, they will unload their stock. If that isn’t enough to lower prices, then people will tend head to mid-level areas to farm these items for profit.
The initial post makes the assumption that mid-tier mats are “outrageously expensive,” but doesn’t support that contention. What is too expensive? Perhaps T2-4 mats were outrageously in expensive in 2012 and they are finally reaching an appropriate equilibrium, for a variety of reasons.
John Smith: “you should kill monsters, because killing monsters is awesome.”
How exactly would one unload a stock of a material they cannot farm? When you go to those mid level areas, sure you can get metal and wood (thus they’re cheap), but you get at level armor and weapons, so you don’t get the mid-level common materials. I admit I’ve only done farming through my altaholic habits, so bags/fine mats I cannot definitively say if they drop at level or zone level, though I don’t ever remember getting zone level mats on any dungeon runs or the zones the dungeons are in.
Really, though, why would you not support this? What could this do but help balance the market? And if the case is that the market is already balanced, and there is no profit margin in material demotion, it simply wouldn’t happen then unless people need it personally. It’s pretty much a win-win as far as I can see it. You don’t have to go to zones you don’t want to to farm mats (if you can that way). Level scaling doesn’t punish farming goals if you do want too. Demotion > promotion would be expensive, and at a loss, so this is not a market breaking process. So what are you arguing against?
(edited by Drawing Guy.3701)