Store pricing needs rebalancing
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Simply put: at 1 gold per 10 minutes, masters notes, buying rare ingredients, and picking up common ones, I can underprice most of the potions from diagon alley, quantity 1, and the store should be getting quantity discounts!
The store's prices are just too high.
Combine with the whole "large purchases fill your vault so you can't brew anything until you use them" which further impairs your brewing -- note that the purchases do not come with a temporary vault increase -- results in store purchasing being a bad decision almost 100% of the time.
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Just to clarify:
Would your suggestion still work if the "picking up common ingredients"-assumption wasn't there - or does your suggestion rely mostly on assuming that the common ingredients are basicly worthless?
I think comment was intended more towards "prices are to high".
Not towards ingredients are useless.
I always try to pick all my ingr. beforehand (if possible), exceptions are rare ingredients...
I know, @AndyRozman. But as an argument he used a price computation based on the assumption that common ingredients are worthless.
And I wanted to know if that whole post and argument would continue to exist WITHOUT that assumption.
It is not "common ingredients are worthless".
It is "There is no reason to purchase common ingredients for quantity 1 brewing".
For a store doing quantity 1000 to supply all of magical britain, sure, they are going to have arrangements with suppliers.
If a simple ordinary wizard, doing solo quantity 1 brewing, buying the rare ingredient, and picking up normal (common) ones from the roads or greenhouses, with just their own personal cauldron, can underprice the store, then the store is overpriced.
It is not "common ingredients are worthless".
It is "There is no reason to purchase common ingredients for quantity 1 brewing".
Which is basicly the same thing: To you, the value of the "common ingredients" is so insignificant that it isn't factored into the price of the final product.
And I consider that a naive fallacy.
Correction:
Your argument is a faulty generalisation (an informal fallacy) based on cherry picking. You dismiss data/evidence based on whether it supports the case, not based on whether it is relevant or true.
You've generalized your analysis of the situation to such an extreme extend that it is no longer representative of the actual situation. That generalisation you then used to argue that the actual situation is faulty and to suggest it to be changed to the faulty generalisation - thereby suggesting to remove the evidence that you dismissed because it conflicted with your argument.
No.
It is not "common ingredients are worthless".
It is "There is no reason to purchase common ingredients for quantity 1 brewing".
Which is basically the same thing: To you, the value of the "common ingredients" is so insignificant that it isn't factored into the price of the final product.
The key observation here: My opportunity cost of the commons is zero. It's not like you are expected to sell the surplus commons at 1 per unit, and use that to buy the needed rares. You destroy the surplus commons at 0 per unit. So if I can use them in a potion that I instant brew, they have a value of 0.
For quantity 1 brewing, the supply of the commons off the ground is more than enough to keep my cauldron brewing.
For quantity 1 rushed brewing, my cost is the 1 gold/10 minutes plus the rare. The commons are free from picking up off the ground.
For quantity 10 rushed brewing, I will run out of commons. So having to pay something because I won't have enough makes sense.
For quantity 1,000 brewing, there are no where near enough commons, and now they have to be paid for in full. This would also include hiring hundreds of wizards to do the brewing, and paying them for cauldron use. However, this would not be paying the full 1 gold/10 minutes, and there would be some sort of bulk discount pricing on the commons, and I'm sure that if they sell the rares to me for 30 gold, their cost is less.
The result: If I'm looking at quantity one, the cost of "Do I make this myself, or buy it from the alley", the question of "Could I sell this on wizbay (ebay) and undercut the alley?", or even just "Can I list this on amazon (what's a good wizard variant name here?) and sell as an individual", then the idea of buying from the alley is crazy.
The costs seen by small brewers and large brewers are not the same. But the large brewer has to be able to compete with the small.
I'm paying a surcharge for the rares. I'm probably paying more for the cauldron time, at 1 gold/10 min, than the store is. But I'm getting the commons for free. The store should be less than that, and more than just the rares -- so I decide if I want to spend time and not much gold, or more gold and less time, or buy from the shop.