This is the discussion thread for the Erinn Ore Exchange. For the list of Ruairi participants, see
this forum topic. Please post your trade preferences in the appropriate thread.
I have never liked the ore marketplace in Mabinogi, partly because no blacksmiths are high enough rank to use up the rare ingots yet, and also partly because of the vast difference between drop rates and the perceived "value" of ores to refine trainers (most of whom are not statistics whores like me, nor do they have even a basic understanding of economics). Add to this the fact that no one really does Barri just for massive amounts of ores to fuel the economy because Chinese sweatshops do it for them, and you end up with an ugly mess of an economy that I have never understood or wanted a part of.
A line from early in the Bible has always stuck out at me. "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread..." This is after Adam and Eve are cast out from the Garden of Eden. This short piece of text taught me that part of life is earning your keep instead of having things handed to you on a silver platter, and I've applied that principle to Mabinogi. I mine all my own ores and gather my own wool/cobwebs whenever I can, instead of paying someone else to perform menial labour. I believe in being rewarded for effort. And while I was collecting data on ore drop rates, I came up with a crazy idea.
The Erinn Ore Exchange. I successfully powered my way through ranks 9~4 inclusive of Refining using the tentative test version of the Erinn Ore Exchange, and now you can benefit from this system too.
This is how the system works - the participants acquire their ore by any means (most likely mining). Instead of selling for coin, they trade the ore with other participants based on effort performed to obtain that ore. In other words, a trade based not on wonky market values, but solely on the drop rate of the ore itself.
Need an example? Each time you mine floor 1 of Barri Normal, you will get 40 ores. That is 40 ores' worth of effort. Out of those 40 ores, on average 29.384 will be iron, 5.968 will be copper, 3.072 will be silver, and 1.576 will be gold. Based on the drop percentages I've collected from 5222 ores (so far), I have determined the ratios between each type of ore to be approximately as follows:
Iron:Copper 5:1
Iron:Silver 9:1
Iron:Gold 19:1
Copper:Silver 2:1
Copper:Gold 4:1
Silver:Gold 2:1
So, the way exchanging works is you trade using these ratios. Why is it economical to trade 95 iron ores for 5 gold ores? Simple. At rank 8 Refining, you get 20.00 training from a single gold ingot success, while only getting 1.90 training from 19 iron ingot successes. This trend continues all the way through rank 4. Thus, at some ranks it is beneficial to trade up for skill training efficiency--by comparing the ratios on all six types of trades with the amount of skill training you gain for each, you can determine which direction on that basic trade is beneficial to you, be it trading up or trading down.
What do you do once you know what ores you need to get, and what ores you want to give for them? You find another person willing to make that same trade in the opposite direction. While trading up this is so easy it is ridiculous. Blacksmiths will always happily trade a small amount of gold ore they picked up for a large amount of iron ore that would have taken them time to mine, or money to buy.
Once I get to rank 1 Refining and finish iron ingot training, I will be trading up progressively toward mastery. At the point of mastery, I will be starting a guild for elite production characters. The guild site will include a section for the Erinn Ore Exchange where you will be able to see and search the trading preferences of all participants. In the meantime, this system can only grow by word of mouth.
Here are some of the pros and cons of this system:
PROS
- All participants are rewarded based on the rarity of the ore dropped. Getting gold ore is now more exciting than "yay, I can sell this very rare ore for 1500 gold, whoop-de-doo" scenarios.
- Participants do not need to pay cash for ores.
- By making ingots through ores mined, participants are making money with a money-making skill (the way devCAT intended), rather than spending millions of coins to do so for a few points of Dexterity and faster training.
- Those who need only iron ore (blacksmiths, for example) can now obtain a large amount of it cheaply by giving their rare ores to the deserving self-mining refiners, allowing them to spend less money to rank their smithing and getting them a large number of ingots. This allows the smithing capability of the server to increase, and the cost of production to decrease, stimulating the market for smithed goods.
- All the rare ores being traded in this system stay where they should be--in the hands of the participants, who eschew the moronic "economy" and put forth effort to rank their profit-making skills in a profitable manner.
CONS
- At extremely high ranks, only trading down is profitable, which means high-rank refiners will have a hard time finding trading partners if they do not network extensively among other refine trainers.
- On the open market, 19 iron ores are worth far more than 1 gold ore. This holds true for all upward trades.
Pro Rebuttal: But if all blacksmiths and refine trainers used the Erinn Ore Exchange, there would be no need for the current ore economy, and with enough participants, the economy can be ignored anyway in favour of simply trading among the "enlightened".
- The system is easy to exploit by buying gold ore, trading down for iron, and selling the iron.
Pro Rebuttal: Since a dedicated participant ignores the economy anyway, someone doing this is not detrimental to our work in any way, shape or form. In fact, it is actually beneficial. it takes the expensive copper, silver and gold out of the economy and puts it in our hands, where we can deal with it in our own manner. This ensures a constant and steady stream of rarer ores, as fast as you can mine iron to give them for it. This also ensures that the Erinn Ore Exchange will gradually become more and more popular as the source for rarer ores, since people will begin to see it's a better way to get rid of their ore than selling it to the "non-believers" for a mere pittance of coin. As more and more miners get on board to trade down, the popularity of the system will only grow, and if enough popularity were gained the Erinn Ore Exchange could theoretically reach "critical mass" (so to speak) and destroy the standard ore economy altogether, replacing it as the default.
Phew, that took some effort to type. So, what can you do to help the Erinn Ore Exchange? Use the system. Abuse the system. And most of all, talk about the system. Point other refiners to this thread. Point blacksmiths and ore sellers to this thread. Post in the other thread (see the top of this post) so others know what you are willing to trade, and edit your post when your needs change based on continual growth of your skill rank.