Originally Posted By: Tasorin
Why not just offer the refined goods instead of the common material?

This way we get our people to skill up on the turning iron ore into iron ingots, and we get a higher sale price per unit of iron ore if we sell them as refined.

Iron Ore = 2gp

Iron Ingot = 5gp ( 2 iron ore = 1 ingot. hence we get approx 2.5 gold per iron ore instead of 2gp per iron ore)

With a messed up fail rate system I expect that even with a moderate skill in refining ore into ingots, we will still be making more gold per iron ore if we sold only the ingots.

When you start multiplying and leveraging this with a large volume of inventory in excess iron ore you begin to magnify the price return and get a good profit multiplier.

The difference being, if we sold 100 iron ore, we would get a flat 200 gold. No cost would be associated with this other then the time it took to mine, and the consumption of the pick axe. Since 99.9% of us don't waste money on buying pick axe's and get them from chests, the cost of the tool is moot.

Now, if we took that same 100 iron ore, and flipped it into ingots we could get a maximum of 50 iron ingots. Factoring in the failure rate we would probably end up with approx 43-48 iron ingots. This would give us between 215-225 gold for the same 100 iron ore, and be a 10% gain in gold.

We would as well reap the benefit of giving someone some more stats and skill in the iron ore to iron ingot process.

**Edit**
Forgot about the demand side of this equation until after I read my post. All crafted items that require iron, pretty much require the refined iron ingot, and not the base material. Especially anything worth crafting for clan advancement and supply. That being said, why give someone else the skill up and stat up on the turning of iron ore to ingots. I would think that the first choice if given ore or ingot for sale would be the ingot, due to it saving the purchaser time in refining.

Just a lunchtime thought, take it or leave it. Just trying to maximize our efforts, and my logic my be flawed due to missing some information.
your wrong, 5 iron ore gives you 2 iron ingots. SO for 100 you would get 40. So, the max you can get for the same 100 iron ore, for processed, would be 200 gold. People are paying a premium for unprocessed product, and i feel let them take the loss on processing it. In the end, the raw materials are a better sell for us, no matter what you say.

Now to those that are talking about keeping the resources for the guild, so crafters can gain skill, i aggree that in the future, the guild can give out resources, but i thought that our main concern was for building this city. I also feel, that crafters, if they want to level up, raw mats such as iron, wood should be gathered themselves, and parts of other mats can be given.

I have ranked up a lot of my skills, bowyer is 50+ and not one donation from the guild.