Architect Archive

I don't think a minimum price limit to vendors is a viable solution. I sell many things for less than 500cr.
Possibly an upper limit of say 500k (or whatever the high end pricing for a guild hall is).

That will, for the most part, let crafters sell anything they can make and will force the rareloot drops and such into the auction channel or trade forums. It will also eliminate people putting things on sale for 99999999 just to store them.

Or, maybe instead of a limit, levy some sort of "tax" for items priced over this upper limit. Increase the maintenance fee of the vendor by like 1% per day for EACH item listed over the capped price. Items under the cutoff price would not increase the maintenance at all. Vendors in need of repair should go "on strike" stop offering items for sale and once they decay to 0% they should be destroyed.

Either way, my proposal for item limits can be found by clicking on the link in my sig.

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Elyssa Alexander (Elder Merchant Correspondent)
12pt. Master Structures Trader / Elder Jedi / Mayor, City of Metropolis
Shop Crazy Durni, Inc., now open in Metropolis, Corellia (885 -6605 Gorath)

"Why the big secret? People are smart, they can handle it."
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."

Elyssa was 1000% correct
-Pawlin

Another day, another try:

Here is the deal "as I see it".

Sony, "the devs", whoever, have 3 issues they are trying to address (in no particular order):

1. Empty Vendors
2. Vendors posessed by people who do not currently have the proper 'certification'
3. Vendors used as storage and not as sales venues

They ARE going to make changes that address, to their satisfaction, those issues.

WE need to steer the solution in a way that first lets them accomplish what they set out to do (because if we don't propose a solution that will help them resolve their issues then our solution is no solution) AND keeps us viable as a crafting community. I suspect that prior to their 'first pass' attempt at a solution, they had only vague ideas of our needs and contextless statistics to deal with. So, lets help them with a win-win solution.

1. empty vendors are a nuisance and really what can we do to discourage them? Make them harder to acquire and the ones that are in the game more likely to have items on them by having fewer items per vendor? Well maybe that will work.

2. this is a 'rights' issue .. people without the appropraite certification, who have vendors, are making the value of those vendors less to the people who do have them .. and really, I suspect are working the game system in a way unanticipated by the designers. If we could come up with a way to seperate the way 'loot' items vs 'crafted' items are/can be sold, maybe that would help?

3. yes, lots of people complain about not enough storage ... the enough/not enough storage & number of items in the universe and database issues have been hot topics for some time in all crafting forums ... but the current issue is: some vendors are being used by some people as substitue storage and that needs to be discouraged. (rightly or wrongly isnt the issue, that is what they want to do) This seems to be the hardest issue to address.

What do we suggest? What will work for us AND for them? It's easy for some to say things like, your change sux, or if you do this I will quit, or you guys are destroying me. I but I suspect that gets tuned right out. Lets be thoughtful.

A minimum selling price of 500 cr per item on a vendor might help. None of my items are priced that cheaply and yet I see vendor after vendor with CDEF weapons and survival knives on them? Why put loot drops on your vendor? I can imagine someone thinking 'heck someone might EVENTUALLY want to buy it for 20-100 credits' - but I certainly hope they wouln't feel abused if they couldn't anymore. Why put low end items that any dabbler can make on your vendor? There are already plenty of those on the bazaar, and yeah, if my vendor(s) under the new scheme aren't filled with more meaningful/valuable merchandise maybe I'll put some low-end merchandise on my vendor too, but that's not where I'm going to be making my money or concentrating my effort. I am not going to miss the few K a week I might make from low-end sales. Especially if the changes bring me more customers or better selling prices!

A good startting point would be the scheme like they have for CH where at almost every level of advancement there would be a benefit of +X items per vendor and occsionally +1 vendor. There could also be a cieling price limit for items on the vendor which would also increase with skill advancement. This would discourage using vendors as storage. And before you ask how would my master artisan sell that uber T-21 for anything near what it is worth .. I do see plenty of sale/auction posts in the forums, and there is the planetwide auction channel as a few remedies for that situation. This scheme would be slanted towards merchant, as really it should be, but would be part of the crafting trees too.

No solution is ideal, obviously some are better than others. I suggest mine as a start, please improve it in a reasonable, do-able, acceptable to 'them' manner.

And of course, be prepared for none of what we may suggest to appear to be taken into consideration. At least that won't be because we didn't try