Am I missing something or does it seem like everything in housing is sold at a loss? It costs ~300g for mats alone for head piece or legs, and a sell back of ~236g. On housing, most of these pieces sell for ~400g. Meaning that unless you get a 99% qual piece within the first 2-3 attempts, you're going to be losing money. I don't see how anyone is coming out ahead here.
You have a few people who are working off the wrong assumption that 99% are more frequent on this server based on shortterm luck. You have a few people who want to get out of the selling-armor game and are just dumping their stock. And then you have a few people who don't value their mats the same way you do if you buy them from the vendor. Maybe they farmed a ton of ROGs or they bought a whole bunch of epic armors for 1p each which would reduce the cost of each Arcanite (for Midgard) to 4g instead of 5.
I've had little luck in DAoC making any profit on Armorcrafting. I did corner the market for about 4 months on MP plate on Merlin and MP plate only sold at my price for that time (2003) but it was too much work buying up all the competitions MPs long term. I did make a fair amount of plat during that time though. The market has always been only about the MPs. For example, if I'm trying to make MP legs and they sell back to the merchant for a bit more than 200gp I can put 99 legs on the market for 300gp. That is still less than the cost to make them but at least I'm making 100gp more than I would have selling it back to the merchant. This unfortunately, undercuts anyone trying to make money on 99s.
I don't think there's any point in upping crafts on Phoenix when looking for money, for the most fo them at least, it's just a loss of time, specially now thet market is overflooded, the economy will be quickly totally broken soon imo.
Just think it only costs 120 gold on Hibernia to have all secondaries at 1100+, i've created my animist almost two days ago, she's allready sitting on 10 plats and not even lvl 50, while i've geared her up very nicely for PVE and a bit of RVR in decent conditions for a leveling char, and my income will rise even more at 50.
Phoenix isn't DAOC, there's way too much QOL for that, it's a kind of fastfood version of our game, but it's not DAOC and will never be, a lot of things do not have any real value here, even gaining RRs isn't the same here.
So go to the most simple and efficient, not sure crafting here is the best.
Most of my plats come from Fletching but that has dried up lately with less hunters out there or they already have the MP bow. I’d usually sell a MP 5.0 bow every couple days but it’s been over a week now ?