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.
Today we’re going to be talking about crafting. We’ll talk about crafting for the normal marketplace for now, not Black Market.
In this post I will try to give an example of how to start making money from crafting with an investment of less than 50k silver. I am based in Thetford, so the example will take place there, using city crafting stations with 50% taxes (far west stations).
We will not be using focus points in this example. I will expand on focus points in later posts, for now just forget about them.
I will assume you have premium already, but even if you don’t, all that’s going to be changed is the market sell fee (4% instead of 2%), so this post should still be useful to you.
Preface/Disclamer
I think the most important thing to understand about market gaming in any online game is that it’s a PvP activity. You’re always competing with all the other people doing it. In Albion, if you chose to craft for profit, your competition isn’t limited to other crafters from your city. You will also be competing with people doing trade runs from other cities and with people selling their loot from dungeons, hell gates or ganks/camps. Don’t get discouraged yet, there’s a place for you in this market machine, just don’t expect that place to fall into your hands on its own.
Do not expect to make much money selling the exact item from the example below. The money making part comes from crafters spreading their attention over all the different gear, and if many people are crafting the same item its price and your profit will drop. Don’t worry though, there are enough items in this game for everyone, just don’t give up after the first unprofitable one you check.
Finding your place
Now with the boring stuff out of the way, let’s make some money!
Market can seem very overwhelming at first, but you will only need to know a small section of it in the beginning. Let’s start by choosing what to craft. The easiest way to do this is to look at your gear. What are you using? Chances are, it costs less to craft than to buy off the marketplace.
For this example I’ve picked T4.1 Light Crossbow. T4.0 gear is very rarely profitable as it generally has low demand and very high supply at the moment. T4.1 gear on the other hand is used extensively in hell gates and by gankers or gatherers, making it very desired and often lost by users on death, raising its price as a result. Let’s check the price for our item:
Note: to get this info you need to click the little arrow near the top right corner of the order window.
Average price isn’t often the best indicator, you’d want to look at the flat lines on the curve to see a reasonable price. By hovering over the graph we can see that people have bought over 30 items for more than 13k silver in the past 18 hours, and the current lowest sell order is at 13.6k, so we can expect to sell our crossbows for 13k a piece in less than a day as long as we don’t craft too many at once.
Now let’s look at the material costs. You can check the materials required by clicking on the items icon in the top left corner of the same market window, then scrolling a bit down:
16 planks and 8 bars, let’s check their prices:
263 * 16 = 4208 silver.
340 * 8 = 2720 silver.
Combine that together and we get 6928 silver material cost of a crossbow.
There’s a formula to calculate the crafting fees for an item, but we won’t bother with it for now. Just assume the taxes will be around 20% of the end product price. 3% of the end price will also go to the market fees, together that will be 13000 * 0.20 = 2990 silver.
Total estimated cost to craft and sell: 9918 silver. Total estimated profit per item: 3082 silver.
Good, now we know this will most likely be a pretty good start, but we’ll need to unlock T4 crafting for crossbows first. I recommend buying T3 materials for around 10 crossbows, crafting them and researching them at the station. That should give you enough fame to unlock the T4 node. If not, buy a bit more materials. This should cost you less than 20k silver.
Now that you can craft T4 crossbows, let’s buy the materials. I’ll buy enough for 10 crossbows, but you can start with even 1 or 2.
36820 + 3900 + 1300 = 42020 for 160 planks, 27200 for 80 bars, or 69220 silver total.
Time to craft
Crossbows are from the warrior’s tree, so let’s head to the cheapest forge in town.
Alright well, I said we’re using 50% tax stations so we’ll use this instead:
Oh. Turns out while I was writing this the fees of all forges except one dropped to 17-20%. We’ll use the only 55% one left instead. Other stations are still at 50-55%.
So at 55% tax the crafting fee is 1980 silver per crossbow, which is a bit lower than the estimated “20% of end price” 2600 fee. So crafting one crossbow will cost us 69220 (total material cost) / 10 + 1980 = 8902 silver.
Sweet! But wait, we also have leftover resources we forgot to include in our calculations. City crafting stations normally return 15% of the materials spent. For simplicity’s sake I’ll just sell these to the buy orders, but you can safely think of this 15% resource return rate as a 15% discount on material costs. Also you will probably get more normal items and less good ones, but that doesn’t affect the price as much as you’d think, especially for lower tier items.
Selling our goods
I sold my leftover resources for 5512 + 3410 = 8922 silver. As for crossbows, I’ll just list them all at 13k, 130k total paying 1300 silver market fee for listing them.
Once we sell the crossbows over the next several hours, we’ll get 13000 – 260 (2% market tax) = 12740 silver per crossbow, or 127400 silver for all 10. That makes our profit 127400 – 81398 = 46002 silver, more than 50% of what we’ve spent! At this point we have already made back our investment into learning T4 crossbow crafting and can continue making money.
Note that I’ve bought the materials straight from the market. You can make more money if you set up buy orders for the materials, transport them from other towns, or, sometimes, if you refine them yourself. This adds on top of the profit we’ve already made, and I’ll encourage you to research the prices of the materials once you’re comfortable with doing what I’ve shown here.
Now go out and apply all that you’ve learned today to some other gear!
Final notes
I tried to make this example very basic and simple, while having all the math written out and all the steps listed. This is my first try at writing something like this, so please don’t judge me too harshly for any mistakes, inconsistencies or repetitions, but feel free to point them out in the comments.
I will go into more in-depth concepts in later posts, as well as discuss topics other than crafting, so stay tuned. I’ve also excluded a paragraph from this post that I deemed not worthy of inclusion, it will go up as a separate post a bit later. (Update: it is now up)
As always you can contact me in game (Thulgrom), on Discord (Thulgrom#1425) or on Reddit (/u/Thulgrom). Cheers!
P.S: If you need access to associate fees (30-25% tax on Warrior, Mage and Hunter stations) in Thetford just PM me on Discord or send a mail in-game, I’ll add you asap. And if you want to thank me – just use my stations 🙂 (Outdated, don’t own stations anymore as of 26/07)
P.P.S: 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.
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