My Own Nano Shop
OK so I am interested in Trade Skills, one of my main reasons for playing. I am an NT and have the usual sets of trade skill implants and have maxed my NP and CL.
Well I had looked at nano crystal production every time a new patch came out that affected it. So I found out a few things. First off it took a huge investment in toolsand back when they first came out getting hold of rocks was all but impossible. The market forces pushed up the price of carbon rich rock to insane levels and the only practical thing to do with the trade skill was to compile the TS only nanos.
Things improved a lot when the rocks became common and again I looked into making nanos. A few calculations showed that the cost of the components seemed to follow a square rule between the fixed cost points in the object database, i.e. the items in the database are of QL 1,25,50,75,100,125,255 and have a fixed cost at each of these increasing with the square of the QL between these points. This meant that if I was very careful to use the min QL components that I could make some crystals cheaper than that of the shop selling price... but I again thought that this would only be worth while for the non shop nanos.
With the latest patch the cost of the components is now only 1% of the previous price. This has meant that it is now possible to make nanos for a fraction of the value of them. My new calculations indicate that even if you sell the nanos back to a NPC vendor you will double your money (based upon the value of the disc if you sold it to a vendor and the cost of the consumables).
So I thought that now it would be practical to try and make a shop of sorts. But how do I market my wares?!?
Well many people are probably aware of Helpbot. If not it is a script that sits on the chat server and you can communicate with through the games chat interface. Well I downloaded the AO:CHAT PERL module from AO.Quest and got to making my own! The bot does several things but primarily it allows me to tell it what items are in what bags and where they are in my bank. Then you can ask it to search the database for matches… it also outputs the contents to a webpage.
While doing this I found a few big problems with the current trade skill system, a lot of them are already posted here but, the biggest problem I faced was that the components don’t stack that is I want the rocks to stack, instruction discs to stack, symbol libraries and reflection patterns. It wouldn’t hurt if the finished crystals stacked as well!! I would be happy enough if they stacked like the generic ring that is if you use the stack you loose them all, but you can split them.
I am currently trying to work on putting sections into the shop to allow searches for profession rather than just name and QL.
Hate to burst your bubble
