Hello everyone,
after yesterday's JC post and me catching up on blogs & podcasts, I got behind since school started 2 weeks ago, I start to think about this.
A lot of bloggers talk about how efficient they can be with maximizing the gold per hour.
I started to think about it, gold per hour is so limited in so many ways.
Gold(profit) per effort would be a better way of measuring how much gold you actually earn.
Example time:
Inscription is an awesome market, even when the prices can be disgustingly low, the items still sell at a decent rate.
On the other hand, Jewelcrafting, is simple cut & repost, fantastic selling rates and requires a lot less effort to maintain, due to the fast(er) selling rates.
The time(effort) invested in inscription is a lot more, but you (can) get more gold for it in return.
Jewelcrafting on the other hand can be done in a few minutes, collecting mails & reposting/cutting is faster and more efficient.
After my most discussed post > Undercutting <, this made me even think more about the effort invested.
Undercutting with 1 copper and having to check the auction house more often to be sure your item sells (due to high competition, ah bots, campers, whatever reason), requires a lot of effort to keep your auctions going.
Your initial gold per hour is your crafting & posting time, but there's the auction/item posting maintaining time.
Would Undercuttin a bit more justify the thought to lower your auction maintenance and thus not increasing your effort to sell your wares and thus keep your gold/effort high?
This was the original thought behind that post, the effort in maintaining your wares by re-undercutting.
I have always thought of Gold per hour to be a pretty standard and simple way to rate ways of making gold, tho its a very basic system which doesnt take into account any kind of fluxuation which could occur either due to you pursuing that chosen methord of goldmaking, or external factors.
ReplyDeleteLike you say Effort is probably a pretty big factor aswell and I concor with your example of JC/INSC.
One thing about Gold per hour is that it implys you can get the same amount per hour, Which is rarely true as you would flood most markets.
I propose a new meausement of gold per ??
Gold per Involvment x Investment
xoxo anaalius
You're now thinking out of the box and I like what you said.
ReplyDeleteYour last formula is quite interesting too, but I think AFK/crafting time should be included too (probably could be in the variable involvement).
Because even though it is AFK time, it's time & effort people could've put somewhere more efficiently.
E.g. hiring crafters(people ask for low fees anyway) so you can spend your time on something more important.
I'm not sure what the distinction is here...gold/hour is a standard measure that can compare activities to identify what is most profitable. Any activity can be reduced to gold/hour...that's what makes it so useful. The challenge is that folks sometimes want to not include some real costs in their calculations.
ReplyDeleteTime spent dealing with undercutting is an integral part - and cost - and effort - of the moneymaking process. It should factor in!
[Let's leave aside for a moment anaalius's issue of marginal performance (i.e., activities where continued effort quickly leads to a drop in profitability).]
[We should also leave aside the issue of whether capital is required for a given activity, i.e., assume that the trader has gold to develop whatever inventory she is selling]
It's better not to think of time and effort and two different things. In other words, time=effort.
Separating the effort of crafting / farming / listing something from the effort of monitoring and relisting - in terms of calculating gold/hour - is cheating. Both should be included.
Farming out the crafting portion (or the auction house / relisting activity) most certainly cuts out the time involved, but also likely reduces the gold netted. What you've done in either(both) case(s) is to reduce both the numerator and denominator
g / hour
You actually may end up with a higher number, if you saved more time, percentage-wise, than you lost in net margin, percentage-wise.