TOPIC: 2015 Treasure Chip Market

Druegar wrote:

joshua baessler wrote: What does happen to all of the tokens that are sent in for transmutes?

Jeff and his minions use them to construct the giant token golem he's working on. It will eventually be the guardian of Castle Carbondale.

He must have multiple golems by now. Pics please.

Matthew Hayward wrote:

Druegar wrote:

joshua baessler wrote: What does happen to all of the tokens that are sent in for transmutes?

Jeff and his minions use them to construct the giant token golem he's working on. It will eventually be the guardian of Castle Carbondale.

Good to know - I had assumed they were making scale mail with them.

www.bambinart.jp/artists/ryota_shimamoto/2009_02.jpg

Josh Rayden wrote: He must have multiple golems by now. Pics please.

No, he's just building the one, but it's going to be really big!

joshua baessler wrote: Side question: What does happen to all of the tokens that are sent in for transmutes?

I haven't seen any official answer on this very good question. He definitely re-uses yearless tokens like trade goods. My guess is that the factory is able to strip the coating/label and re-use old tokens.

Kaledor wrote: I have a bunch of 2014 tokens that I did not get to use due to a family emergency. Do you want to purchase those?

They aren't usable after the year they are issued in. Since it was a family emergency, I suggest you PM Jeff to see if he'll make an exception for you on them.

Raywind wrote: I'm... not entirely certain what I think of this idea. It's yet another step in the direction of TD being completely controlled by financial motives, I feel.

Well, since this is Jeff's full-time job and since he has a family to support then I'd say it is already fairly controlled by financial motives.

But from a player perspective I don't see how this changes anything. People already buy and sell the stuff they draw from treasure boxes. The really cool thing about True Dungeon is that you can spend no money on tokens (just $48 on tickets) and have a blast. I have done 12 runs in 3 years, and for my first two years I only bought 3 10-packs other than the freebies I got on my runs. Each year I went to a booth in the vendor hall and sold all the tokens I didn't want to keep for next year. Most people can and do play and enjoy TD without spending money beyond tickets.

But for those of us who get into tokens there is a fun market that gives us something to do when we aren't playing TD. I enjoy buying, selling, and collecting tokens now, and building better characters, etc. But nobody is forced to get into that.

Based on some educated guesses I'd say that if there were no token sales then the tickets would be around $100/run. I'd say that non-collectors certainly benefit from token buyers.

Got home, got my spreadsheet, counted the tokens in this years set, used Lazlo's prices (except I used $30 for Aragonite), $7 for trophies and $50 for the average "special".

Assumed there are equal numbers of each of the rares and uncommons in the treasure boxes, which is probably wrong, but what can you do? I have a feeling that the loot is skewed by what people transmute, so they probably dump in more trash than good stuff.

Came up with the average salvage value of a random rare of $1.87, uncommon of $.89, and common of $.31

If we assume every 100th ten-pack has a $100 UR, that puts salvage value of a ten-pack at $7.71, and the average treasure pull at $3.16

Now, this ignores some very important factors, like time and expense of sorting, packing, shipping and converting them into trade tokens, and the time, expense, postage and PayPal fees of selling them. And this analysis is very sensitive to factors like market value of trade tokens and the mix of stuff being uniform. And the average value of the special is huge. Only TBTB have any clue what it really is, but every $10 change is a 10 cent delta per chip. So YMMV. A lot.

And it ignores the fun-factor, or the thrill of being the one to pull the 25k GP bar.

But I feel better having gone through this exercise. I've always just made wild guesses about what a chip was worth. It's still guesses, but they don't feel quite as wild.

You have to remember that using Laz's prices (or anyone's for that matter), you're not going to get what the tokens would sell for quickly. Obviously you can't quickly liquidate all those tokens at those prices, or Laz would have sold them all already. You may end up with a fairly large inventory of tokens that are priced in accordance with current market prices, but you may have to wait years to sell even a large percentage of them.

Last I looked, he was sold out. But maybe he has more.

But that's why I explained how I got the number I did. If you decide the balance of speed and profit you want means offering a 10% discount, a chip is worth 10% less than my number to you. If you're more patient and want max dollar, or are planning lots of transmutes, jack it up. The point was to give some sort of mathematical basis to the value of loot, rather than everyone picking random numbers based on nothing.

So yeah, if I'm planning on selling the loot I'm going to want vigorish for all the trouble I mentioned, so to me a chip is worth about $2, even though the alleged loot has a MSRP (for lack of a better term) of about $3.20

Brad Mortensen wrote: Last I looked, he was sold out.

I think he said he just put trade goods on hold until he finished transmuting his last order from 2014.

Kaledor wrote: I have a bunch of 2014 tokens that I did not get to use due to a family emergency. Do you want to purchase those?

If you can get me a note from Jeff confirming I'll be able to use them to pull treasure with them at GenCon 2015, yes.

Kirk Bauer wrote:

joshua baessler wrote: Side question: What does happen to all of the tokens that are sent in for transmutes?

I haven't seen any official answer on this very good question. He definitely re-uses yearless tokens like trade goods. My guess is that the factory is able to strip the coating/label and re-use old tokens.

A few years ago, at a True Dungeon trade meet in Carbondale, someone asked Jeff that question. He replied that Trade tokens were recycled. Otherwise, the remainder were sent to the landfill. Jeff's reply seemed, matter of fact and sincere. He added that it would be to expensive to recycle all the chips.