Raw materials on consumable items in MMO tend to sell more than the finished products especially at the beginning of the MMO life cycle. The first is because crafters want to skip the harvest side and just level. Buying that last stack of raw material for the next level sound better at times. They are willing to pay a premium.

Provisioning has a kicker that Oats and Tomatoes only come from hirelings. You cannot harvest them. I tend to see those recipes matching to 1:4 rate on cost to selling rate. Also because we are still at the start of this MMO the amount of people leveling crafters is higher. This puts a glut of finished products on the market and drives the price down.

We also can’t see the crafting market in its entirety. There are pockets of profit inflation and deflation. Watch the buy sell rates difference between starter zones and PvP. Alchemy reagents even the top three can be bought at less than 200g in bulk. In this game outside alchemy and provisioning, the other crafts get a chance on bonus item(s) on the refinement. Hence the premium difference there.

The raw materials have no value. The crafters are willing to pay to avoid the harvesting but the end product consumer will haggle lower because that raw item has 0 gold cost to someone will to spend the time to harvest. It is a two edge sword. Let face it in the end some people suck at math also.

It's interesting that refine-able raw materials have a fairly high cost when compared to the refined crafting mats. Lots of players buy the raw mats for the bonus items you can get for refining, and have no interest at all in the actual refined material. As a result they dump them into the market at a fraction of what they might be worth otherwise.

Gyudan wrote: »

I think pretty much everyone is dumping refined materials into the bank. Harvesting and hirelings simply bring too many materials to use for crafts given the extremely low market. I always dump several stacks of void things everyday and vendor everything below v10.

You could do better : the lower materials from tier 2 to 5 or 6 give the best benefits for a crafter. An exception is clothing that is too expensive but take an example of WW. A stack of 100 oak can give 850 gold simply by making bows or staves and vendor them. For beech it's 840 gold, hickory 800, yew 800 etc, it goes less and less . If you vendor your oak at 400 you lose too much gold. Better craft yourself (or an alt) or put it for sale at 600 to 700 so you make a benefit and the crafter too . You can even put them for sale higher but you will sell less and slower, it's a choice. For BS steel and orichalch daggers can give 700 to 650 gold per stack so sell them at 500 or 600 if you can't craft them yourself. Dwarven gives 600 so the margin is very small but still selling at 550 is ok for all. If a crafter is levelling he doesn't mind even to not make any profit as long as he levels for free. But when he reaches 32 skill his only motivation will be money. Well hope it's clear. Too many people sell mats at 1200 par stack (default price) but it's too expensive for anything except rich players that don't mind the gold and need the mats urgently.