Kick start mid to late game food service economy

Let's get a general discussion going on possible ways the player economy for foods could get a kick start.

My thought would be if someone was industrious enough and wanted to get to the daily quest dungeon and plant a couple item vendor boxes in the first room with food for sale. This might be a decent way to get groups together faster if you could just run in grab food and hit the dungeon right away. That might also work for snacks and bacon, potions, you get the idea.

Anyone else have any suggestions or things that work for them right now in mid to high level foods?

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_FnrV8hLiRf...400/Cheese.gif

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Originally Posted by Daguin

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_FnrV8hLiRf...400/Cheese.gif

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Cheese Maketh The Man

On a side note they probably should do this already for convenience also maybe even tweak it so only food can go in the shops not random odds and ends

Hi, I think it's a good idea

If you have Gadgeteering you can create item vendor boxes and put items for sale at whatever price you want. I think that would be the best implementation for the game as it stands and might even kick off a big need for vendor boxes in the player economy too.

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Originally Posted by Rick Sanchez

If you have Gadgeteering you can create item vendor boxes and put items for sale at whatever price you want. I think that would be the best implementation for the game as it stands and might even kick off a big need for vendor boxes in the player economy too.

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They just dont last long enough to be placed anywhere other than high traffic areas. If the timer were say 12 hours or more It would likely work better.

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Originally Posted by HardRock

They just dont last long enough to be placed anywhere other than high traffic areas. If the timer were say 12 hours or more It would likely work better.

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This seems to be the crucial hold-up. Any time I've tried to use these to generate income it's been a miserable failure.

As someone who regularly sells food, there is already quite a demand for food. In fact, I have to price my food at a higher markup than I normally do because most people buy my food and turn it around on their stores for a larger profit because so many people just want access to quick food, so I might as well raise my prices so my food still gets to the people who need it and not people who want to scalp my product. To me, the problem with food servicing is the ease of creating cheese vs. gathering ingredients for high-level food and snacks that can't even compete to cheese at the moment, which creates a sort of stranglehold.

Follow me through on this: Cheesemaking is almost universally agreed upon that the price to raise the skill is astronomical due to the stomachs alone, but the rest of the ingredients are relatively easy or cheap to acquire with the final leg of cheese preparation just being a time gate. 8 bottles of milk can be acquired per hour from NPC cows and a theoretical infinite from player cows, wood to make kegs is pretty cheap, and mushrooms are quite easy to farm once Mushroom Farming is acquired (which I guarantee most cheesemakers have MF). A few minutes of work results in a lot of the best food in the game, at the moment.

On the contrary, high-leveled cooking requires active participation in Gardening for ingredients such as squash, red peppers, and green peppers. In addition, cactus juice and great tier meat is needed for some select recipes, which is just more busy work. At the very end of all the gardening and butchering, the end products are not comparable to the end products of high-level cheesemaking when speaking in terms of bonuses bestowed after eating. That being said, an advantage cooking has over cheesemaking is the barrier to entry is less money-focused than cheesemaking, and stomachs can be acquired while butchering for cooking at the same time, which saves a bit of money down the road when one eventually decides to train cheesemaking.

With the time and the costs of food production out of the way, let me explain why that comes back to a lack of food selling. With a few players having max-rank cheesemaking and the cost to max cheesemaking being really high, it allows the few players with max cheesemaking to dominate the current end-game food market (remember, cheese is currently the best food; eating cooked food is the budget option for less stat boosts). If players can't or don't want to eat the best foods, they would obviously buy just cooked food, but the chores required to prepare cooked food aren't really a fun time for potential cooks to participate in, so many people are turned off from grinding busywork to grow and gather ingredients just to be out-competed by cheesemakers. With that in mind, cooking is the easier choice to train, so many people can just prepare their own food instead of buying from cooks, so sales altogether are quite low for cooked food. I can verify this, because I've prepared low-to-mid level food and had it sit on my stall for the good part of 2 months while high-level food sold within 12 hours of me putting it up for sale.

EDIT: While I make an argument that not many people want to buy cooked food over cheese while claiming I've made a living selling cooked food, this was months ago when people did want budget-priced items compared to the best and most expensive food items. If I had food now, I'd try to sell it again so I can see how my claim I've made holds up today.

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Originally Posted by Daimes

As someone who regularly sells food, there is already quite a demand for food. In fact, I have to price my food at a higher markup than I normally do because most people buy my food and turn it around on their stores for a larger profit because so many people just want access to quick food

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I think this is common practice. I often underprice things because the economy seems stagnant, then some enterprising young buck buys my whole stack and jacks the price up for profit. There's no real way to prevent this because the player markets (seem to me anyway) function on a first-find-first-buy basis with people rarely bothering to compare prices at multiple vendors.

Maxed out cheese making , haven't made 1 mushroom box. I'm probably the only one though.

@HardRock you're not alone. Two of my toons are capped, the 3rd is lvl 53 and the 4th is lvl 36 in cheesemaking. And no MF used.

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Originally Posted by zthali

@HardRock you're not alone. Two of my toons are capped, the 3rd is lvl 53 and the 4th is lvl 36 in cheesemaking. And no MF used.

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Someone has to keep the mushroom farmer paid eh? Do you place work orders for the mushrooms or just passively push cheese making as you collect em.

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Originally Posted by HardRock

Someone has to keep the mushroom farmer paid eh? Do you place work orders for the mushrooms or just passively push cheese making as you collect em.

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I've spent the majority of my time solo hunting, foraging and gathering for almost 2 years. Turning the mushrooms into suspensions and then rennet is a great way to level mych and alch. So I used those products to level cheese.

@zthali absolutely great way to level up Alch and Mych there is also added grinding with Alch if you grind all the basic bones you get to bone powder which I use all the time to make fertilizer for gardening.