ArcheAge Labor Efficiency Guide

ArcheAge Labor Efficiency Guide by Sufficiently_Insane

So I have a couple friends playing this game and I keep hearing from them “what’s the best use of labor?” While there will never be a cut and dry answer for this with variable market prices I can share with you guys what I find is a great tool in finding out what is the most efficient.

Acronyms used

AH – Auction House

WCP – Worker’s compensation potion

How to calculate labor efficiency: We have to consider two units of measure when calculating labor efficiency. Profit / Potential Profit and Labor used. This ratio shows how how much profit is being earned for each labor spent. The higher the number, the more efficient we are with our labor.

For spending labor there is a two step formula we can follow. The first step is the economics equation for Profit.

(Price sold) – (Expenses) = (Profit).

Expenses are the goods and services paid with gold needed to gain the profit. Expenses DO NOT include labor. For example this will be expenses for the crafting of the trade pack for a trade run, or the fee you paid for protection and transportation during the trade run. Next we divide profit by labor used to get our labor efficiency.

(Profit) / (Labor) = (Labor Efficiency).

It is to be noted that the units of (silver) / (labor) can also be applied when buying labor, either from WCP or having another character use their labor for you. The formula to calculate this is much simpler, dividing cost by labor gained.

(Cost) / (Labor) = (Labor efficiency)

There is a magic number labor efficiency when it comes to buying labor. Using the current prices of WCP in the AH we can divide the price of 1,000 labor by the cost of the potion. Doing this we get roughly 1.4 silver per labor. The significance of this number is that if you can achieve a labor efficiency of 1.4 silver per labor when spending your labor, then you can freely buy WCP at a profit once your labor is spent.

However, labor is not the only resource being used when making gold. What seems like a very efficient use of labor might take an incredible toll on other resources such as your convenience or time. If you wish to make gold in this game, you must not only know how to spend labor efficiently, but the rest of your resources as well.

How to calculate Nuri: We can graph the labor efficiency of all the hundreds of ways to spend our labor and graph them in respect to the time it takes to complete each action. With the resulting graph we can draw line of best fit. The result is the comparison of Nuri, named after my character (you can call this measurement of units anything you want, I just like pretending to be a scientist.) To calculate Nuri follow the two step equation

(Price sold) – (Expenses) = (Profit)

(Profit) / (Labor spent * Hours spent) = Nuri

The Nuri calculation of our action shows us the efficiency of our labor AND time. A trade run with a tremendous labor efficiency might have an abysmal Nuri score if it takes 5 hours to complete.

Now that we have two calculations for how efficient we can be with labor, we must now decide how much each of these calculations weigh in our decision to spend our labor. I suggest taking into consideration mostly the time you have to spend your labor. If you find yourself with plenty of time, you may prefer to have a high labor efficiency, and if not, actions with high Nuri scores may be preferable. Whatever the outcome, the point of this guide is to help you spend ALL of your resources efficiently.