Hey. Almost a year ago I published my first post here and on reddit, and it did pretty well. Got my first reddit gold there actually, it was a pretty cool feeling. Not even a month later I stopped posting. I’ve since completely quit crafting, deleted my reddit account, quit the game for around half a year, and came back with the quarantine. The same quarantine that resulted in quite a big spike in my blog views:
Anyway, I’ve been getting a few dms on Discord lately so I thought I’d write an update here.
I returned home to Russia from China in July, so I actually had a ping where I could do somewhat serious PvP. I also had much less time as I was working a desk job again. I was doing hellgates and getting pretty good at it, found some new friends who were also doing hellgates, so I just dropped crafting completely, and I haven’t returned to it since. Crafting was really fun, I look fondly on all the drama I’ve took part in thanks to that and plot ownership, and I’m glad for all the great experiences I’ve had thanks to all that, not even mentioning it enabling me to not ever worry about silver. My guides being somewhat successful and having people write to me how it helped them was wonderfull, and I want to thank everyone who read them and especially everyone who reached out to me. For sure feel free to do that still, but keep in mind I might not have the most accurate answers to your questions, I’m not quite up to date anymore 🙂
As promised, I’m posting the data from my plots in Thetford. It’s just one month and just 3 stations, but I haven’t seen anything like this anywhere yet, so it should still be a decent insight into how much money plots make.
I’ve also had a little contest with a prize when I originally posted this. I’ve moved that section to the end of this post, check it out if you’re curious.
Plots
A little background
In the May auction I’ve managed to snag 3 plots for an extremely good price, 11m combined. RuKors, one of the biggest owners in Thetford, allegedly got banned for RMT and he didn’t defend his plots, nor did he tell anyone about it. Most of his plots went for under 10m, some even under 1m. He still managed to demolish his buildings.
I still had little idea about the actual worth of plots at the time, so I was playing it safe – betting just 10m on 7 plots. Getting 3 plots at the same time for this cheap was very handy, now I could somewhat safely find out if plots are worth my time.
Here are the plots I had:
Data
Now here’s the data summary from June:
“Line” describes how close the plots are to the center of the city. First line would be the very first stations you come across while leaving the center platform. Second would be the plots on islands further away, where you have to cross a bridge to get to them. I’ve described my plots as “Line 1.5” because even though you don’t have to cross a bridge to get to them, they’re still not the first obvious choice for people who don’t use the minimap to find the best taxes.
“Bulding price” here is 10% of it’s material price, as you can demolish a fully repaired building to get 90% of it’s materials back.
“Food” is the price of food I’ve spent on the station over the course of the month, calculated using the market price in Thetford at the start of the month.
The repair price was 36 T8 blocks for all 3 stations, despite a pretty big difference in use. It seems that the buildings decay at the same rate as long as they are being used.
I’ve lost 2 of my plots in the June auction, both giving me 35m as I’ve tried to defend them with 35m bids.
“Total invested” is the price of the auction + the full price of the buildings, the amount I had to invest at the start of the month and couldn’t take out until the end of it.
“Recoverable” is the price of 90% of the materials I can get back at the end of the month if I don’t manage to defend my plots.
I’ve held the taxes with the cartel for most of the month (55% Hunter’s Lodge and 50% Mage’s Tower), except with the Warrior’s Forge, where I had 5% tax for most of the month. As you can see I made little to no money from people using my Forge, but thanks to someone buying the plot for 70m I’ve actually made decent money in the end.
Also worth mentioning that I estimate quite a decent part (25-60%) of my revenue coming from my associates – people who asked me for associate fees and have only been paying 25% tax, be it people just asking in game or people coming from my blog posts/guides. A big part of owning a plot and making money from it is snatching these big time crafters. I don’t think you need to write guides to get them though, but it will probably take you several months to get to the amount I got to in one.
My personal use is not included in this chart, it was hard and time consuming to calculate accurately so I just kept tabs on it separately. It pretty much amounts to around 5.5m savings combined, compared to using 25% tax stations. That is from crafting upwards of 120m worth of items and studying a few leftovers.
I’ve been lazy this month and only really crafted in Thetford twice: once a 95-100m value bulk with 25% taxes “only” going up to 3m, and another time a 15m value bulk. If I was crafting at the same pace as in May, I could have easily saved over 20m in taxes over the course of the month.
Here is the graph of gross margins (revenue minus food cost) from the stations:
Let me also show you the full data of my Hunter station so I can better explain the fluctuations:
10th of June is when I had my first bulk craft. It’s why there is a slight dip in the gross margin graph, as I haven’t added the expected revenue.
You can see the revenue from all stations go up during the “Bonus fame week”, from 13th to 19th.
21st is when the servers were down for several hours, hence very little revenue.
23rd is when I had my second bulk.
25th with a “4%” is when my neighbor Forge dropped it’s tax to 4% and my Forge pretty much stopped having customers.
“Plane” is me having a 9 hour flight right when the auction results rolled in, so the 29th data is more like 36 hours of usage instead of 24 hours.
June auction
After a little bit of thinking about how much I should defend with, I’ve decided on 35m for all three stations. That led to me losing 2 stations and defending one, spending 23m on it. I liked holding a few stations and I’ll miss the ones I lost, but I think I’ve made the right decision and I’m happy with how it turned out. The bidding dilemma is not as easy as it looks, which I’ll explain in detail a little bit later.
I’ve also bet over 150m on other plots, but only won one (funnily enough the one I bid my leftovers on, 16m). I’ve started the new month with 2 plots and 275m silver in my pocket.
My thoughts
With today’s prices, around 3-10% of taxes (depends on items that get crafted and their tier, on my plots it was around 5%) are eaten up by food and repair costs. Lets say your plot has 5% tax maintenance and everything else you pocket. Now to get as much revenue from such a plot at 15% tax as someone at 55% tax makes, you’d need to have 5 times bigger usage than him. At 10% it would have to be 10 times as big.
The usage rates differ a lot. People in the immediate proximity to the center of the town get most of the clients. My Mage’s Tower got used more than my Hunter’s Lodge, despite being further away, thanks to having 50% tax while being the closest second lane Mage’s Tower in town.
After a month of being an owner I can point out a couple of problems with the system, in addition to problems I’ve already outlined in The Big Bad Cartel post.
Problems with the current system
There are pretty much two types of people who make good money from holding plots: people with a lot of plots: most of the money they make comes from plots which don’t get bid on; and people who own plots at the immediate exit from the town center.
This whole system is based on people not bidding on your plots or bidding very little. As soon as your plots get a decent bid, you lose all money you’ve made this month, if not more.
For example take my Hunter’s Lodge: if I had bought it for 70m like the guy who bought it after me did, I’d lose 15m even after getting outbid the next month at the same 70m and getting 35m back. Now lets say this guy bid 80m and I defended with 90m next month. I now pay 40m to retain the plot, and, assuming the same usage (around 25m gross margin), lose another 15m in total. If you own a lot of plots you will get lucky on some and make money from them, but is it really worth it?
You will get high defense bids on some plots and very low on others, changing from one month to another. You might lose money on high bids one month but then make it back and over the next month. Having a lot of plots makes you have somewhat stable profit every month. It still requires having a ton of silver at the end of every month, which
“Easy”, you’ll say, “just don’t defend with high bids!”. Well, then you’ll lose your plot for the low bid you’ve placed. It would work if everyone bid very little, but there is an incentive to bit higher for people with a lot of plots. Low bids probably aren’t happening unless something changes in the system. And if you don’t have a cartel holding 50%+ fees you’ll lose money pretty much no matter what.
If you don’t have a lot of plots, I think your best bet is to bid around the same value you’re expecting to get from the plot in a month, and then pray people either underbid a lot or overbid so you sell the plot.
I really don’t have a solution here, the whole system is just bad for everyone involved.
Another problem, which might actually be a good contributor to the first one, is the auction cycles. Once a month you have to liquidate everything you have to amass hundreds of millions of silver to take part in an auction. And then if you don’t get lucky you have to wait another month. It’s why I think a lot of people don’t even bother betting.
I think making auctions rotate with a cycle being 1 month but starting and ending at different times would be cooler. This way you can make an auction in one of the cities happen every 5 days.
Conclusion
So is there money in the plot business? Yes. That is if you get a really cheap plot in a city with a cartel, the cartel doesn’t get broken, you get lucky with a placement and the station you chose, and you get lucky with the auction next month.
I don’t think I’m ever betting more than a few millions on plots in outer cities again. I have finally checked out Caerleon’s market and the items there are even more profitable to craft than in Thetford, even with the 50% tax. I’m probably getting a plot in Caerleon next month, I think I can easily recoup the investment from my crafting alone (that is if I actually craft like before).
I’m sorry for no posts lately, I have a lot going on irl right now and I’m getting a bit bored with Albion. There are posts in the works but I’m not sure when I’ll get around to finishing them. Until then, I wish you good luck on the markets!
P.S:(outdated, see updates below) I’m still offering associate fees on my Mage station and my new Alchemist station. As it’s a new type of station I won’t be transferring the old associate list to it, you’d have to write to me again if you want to use it as an associate. Thanks to everyone who have used my stations and I’m sorry I can’t provide the 25% taxes to some of you anymore.
UPDATE 4/07: I sold my mage plot for 65m, so it’s only Alchemist now. I will probably take part in the next auction cycle but I don’t see much reason in holding plots right now when people are buying them way over their market value. And there’s a 7% Mage tower available atm so it’s not like you guys don’t have a place to craft at.
UPDATE 26/07: Sold my last plot at the end of the cycle for 60m. I’m pretty busy now so keeping up with the plots and stuff gets in the way of my primary activity atm: hellgates.
Contest (outdated)
A few days ago I’ve accidentally went out of bounds in Thetford. After confirming with a friend it wasn’t just on my end and reproducing it, I’ve decided to wait a bit and have a little fun with it. I’ve submitted a support ticket just before posting this. I don’t see any way of how this can be used to gain an advantage in the game, so hopefully I, or anyone who manages to reach me, won’t get banned over using it.
Here is my location:
I will give 3 million silver to the first person who reaches me and throws me a trade request while standing next to me. The first 26 characters who reach me will also get a T4.1 Light Crossbow crafted by me: 1 excellent, 10 outstanding, 10 good and 5 normal ones.
Sadly I completely forgot I had to go to the office the next day, and so I had to leave early. I’ve only managed to hand out 5 crossbows. It was still fun, and the most important part – giving the 3 million away – was accomplished.
It may sound obvious to some people and stupid to others, but you really should try different things from time to time. Not only there is a chance you’ll find new fun in the game, but you’ll also discover things that will help you with your other activities.
Doing PvE and PvP, being aware of the meta and experiencing it yourself is what will put you above other traders and crafters. You will get a feel of which items are going to be selling good, as well as get a feel for the price of a lot of gear and artifacts as you’ll be selling and buying them frequently. Shifts in the meta will always change up the prices, and sometimes you can make millions off of these shifts if you’re fast enough. You will also discover items to craft and sell with big margins naturally from selling your loot and just being curious while doing it.
On the other hand, if you PvP a lot, crafting your own gear and being aware of the prices will make you save a lot of money, and also enable you to potentially sell your loot for more silver.
I’ve been doing a lot of 5v5 HGs the last couple of days (also quite busy with work, hence no posts), and it’s extremely fun when you get together a decent team. Very good fame and money too.
This is what ~4-5 hours of hellgating in 4.1 overcharge (no capes, no expensive artifacts, average set is under 50k silver with a horse and overcharge) look like. Not sure yet, but I’m guessing this is in the ballpark of 15-20m silver.
And here are my stats as of 14th of June. Getting my PvE fame up, aiming at 25m by the end of the bonus fame week.
I won’t be spamming Reddit with mini-posts/rants, so if you want to follow the blog and get updates when I post new stuff, you can either like the thread on the forums or subscribe with your email/WordPress account by clicking on the menu button in the top right corner of this page.
No post today, just wanted to share this old post by Gevlon. It touches on the topic of people who hate late game content in games so much and is exactly on point with the situation we have on Reddit and official forums right now. Don’t be like this.
This is an addendum to the previous post, Judging efficiency, as I feel I should expand on it a bit. If you haven’t read it yet, you can do so before or after reading this one.
Self-sustenance
A few weeks ago I saw a post on Reddit about a guy who has imposed a rule on himself to make the game more challenging: he was going to only use the gear he crafted himself, with materials he collected himself, using silver he picked up himself. Sounds pretty cool right? It does, but after a few days of playing, when approaching tier 4 you’ll find your progress slowing down to a halt. Refined materials take exponentially more raw materials with every tier, unlocking T4 gathering takes some time even for a single tool, and you’ll need at least 3. You probably won’t play much further than this, because even when you manage to get full T4 set of gear, you’ll still be riding a donkey, you will still be afraid to go anywhere but blue/yellow zones because replacing your gear will take you a week, and progressing in royals is terribly slow compared to black zones.
So we can see that being completely self-sufficient is, although fun at first, very unproductive after a while. This is an MMO game after all, it was designed with constant people interaction in mind. Now we come to the thing we often take for granted in multiplayer games, and even more so in real life, the thing that makes us progress much faster, the thing that makes it possible to enjoy this game for all of us (except that guy from Reddit I guess): division of labor.
The big picture
Think about how your 6.1 Royal Hood came into your inventory. People had to gather T2-T6 resources, refine them, then someone bought the resources and the Royal Sigils that people also had to get by doing daily expeditions, crafted the hood. And what about the stations? Someone bid on an auction and won, constructed the station, fed it. The station used up blocks that also had to be refined, and for them raw materials had to be mined. Food had to be cooked, crops watered and harvested. Farms and refineries constructed. Sounds pretty grand, don’t you think? And this is true for almost every single item in this game. Would this be possible if no one traded? Absolutely not.
This is why I love player driven economies. One of the first MMO games I’ve played had a similar system (it’s a Russian game that isn’t known at all outside of Russia, I might talk a bit more about it in the future posts), and I can no longer stick to MMO games without these economic systems for longer than a few weeks. However, I’ve put countless hours in that game, EVE online, now putting in hours in Albion, and I’m loving it.
Where am I in all of this?
That’s the beauty of it – you’re where you want to be. You can be a gatherer, you can refine materials, you can transport them between cities, you can craft, you can manage crafting stations, you can fight for territories to make it easier for your friends to gather/craft/transport, you can flip goods on the market without ever leaving it. All of these activities add a little bit to the value of each other’s products, and together they can create a finished item.
Some of these activities are more late-game than early-game, as you’d generally need progressively bigger investments the further up the chain you go, so you might find it hard to skip to the top. I don’t see why it’s a bad thing though. You’ll still want to be familiar with the whole chain below you to be successful in your place, and you can accomplish that by gradually moving up, amassing a capital you’ll need to continue moving up in the process.
Now, as long as you participate in the production chain – you’re contributing, and you’re entitled to compensation for the time and money investments you’ve made doing so. Don’t let others make you think otherwise.
Being efficient
Here the previous post comes in. As stated there, you’ll want to research this chain of production and take upon yourself the links that are most fun/profitable, take as many links as you see fit while throwing out the ones you deem not worth your time. Don’t hesitate to use other people services/labor to further your silver/hour numbers, after all we only have so many hours in a day.
And now you, hopefully, understand a little bit better how the division of labor works, and how you can use it to your advantage.
What to expect next
Right now I’m slowly writing my thoughts on city plot ownership, the cartel, the anti-cartel initiative, as well as collecting data from my own plots. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t worry, I’ll give a brief introduction in the post. I have written several paragraphs already, but it is still far from being finished and may take another week or two. I will try to make it as compact as possible, but I’m afraid it will still be a pretty chunky post.
In the meantime expect more rambling, a focus point spending guide (more of a mindset than a guide), and maybe a glimpse into the world of spreadsheets as I see it.
Thulgrom's Tavern 