Merchant Archive

This whole system of vendor costs makes absolutely no sense to me. I don't mind paying a flat daily rate to operate a vendor, but as an architect it is pointless to put any big ticket items up because all profit is given back to the system. So this is my proposal.

Vendors should have a flat rate of:

• 500 creds/day at Business III


• 350 creds/day at Efficiency II


• 250 creds/day at Master Merchant

That is just a standard operating cost. Then say you post an item for 1000 creds. The game automatically tacks on a 1.5% sales tax. When that item shows up onthe vendor it is now 1015 creds. This way the game still takes out a lot of money on actual sales, but doesn't kill us if we don't sell anything. Possible comments:

"Well people will just use vendors for extra storage then."

I don't see this as being an issue. First of all, unlike UO, vendors require some sort of investment just to get one. No player is going to waste 27 skill points just to havesome extra storage space. Furthemore they still will have to pay the 500 credits a day for that storage.

"I sell blank item and this isn't an issue for me."

This is an issue for everybody. Even if you only sell items for 500 credits each, it would be nice to load up the max amount and not have to worry about paying a small fortune even if nothing sells. Like I said, as an architect, it really isn't cost effective to put big ticket items on the vendor, eventhough, it should be. I shouldn't have to sell everything just when I'm online.

So what does the Merchant community feel about this?

Sadly nobody else thinks this is a noteworthy idea?

No, I prefer to pay my 24cr a day, 500cr a day just to be able to sell things is absurd. Train Novice Merchant and use an NPC. Not everyone sells goods for tens or hundreds of thousands of credits, so your prices for merchants is way more than I want to spend as a tailor merchant.

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Kylania wrote:
No, I prefer to pay my 24cr a day, 500cr a day just to be able to sell things is absurd. Train Novice Merchant and use an NPC. Not everyone sells goods for tens or hundreds of thousands of credits, so your prices for merchants is way more than I want to spend as a tailor merchant.

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\You're using an NPC merchant and right now they are bugged. They are not suppose to cost 1 cred an hour. Their cost is suppose to be associated to how much in goods you have on them. If you have around 100K creds worth of goods it will cost you about 2400 creds/day to maintain that vendor.

As someone wishing to be a real merchant and not just training merchant to get listed for global advertising and somewhat cheaper vendor rates, I think this is a horrid idea... Merchants are darn near worthless as it is and you are pretty much taking away our efficiency line now. Of course you like the idea, you don't have as much of an interest in being a real merchant, you just want to not have to train up the efficiency line anymore=P

Now I don't mind having Master Merchants get a discount on vendors large enough to make the vendor more managable when you have large amounts of high price items on em. This could actually be the case though, we don't quite know how much of a discount masters get. If/when this becomes true, I'd say maybe you shouldn't sell your items yourself, maybe you should find a merchant, that is the reason they are in the game to sell an artisan's stuff.

Ok, I just don't understand how this is getting interpretated the wrong way. I have every intention of being a Master Merchant. My issue still lies with the fact that as an architect vendors are entirely too costly to run. I can't load 12 factories at 60K a pop on a vendor. If I did it would likely cost me 40K a day to run that vendor, hell even if it was half at Master level, that's still 20K a day. Considering I only plan on selling a single structure every 2 - 3 days on average, that is an entirely unacceptable cost. Like I said, I have no grievance with taking money out of the system, but the majority of it should be taken out when an item is purchased, not when an item is on the vendor.

If you are only selling 1 every 2 or 3 days, I don't quite understand whyya need 12 on yer vendor at a time.... I realize there are different types but there are creative ways to leave customers a message that you are a master architect taking orders.

I do understand the plight that architects are having with vendors and selling their structures, I just don't think it is worth sacraficing the entire merchant profession for that one rather small problem that architects have. (After all architects are still fully functioning without vendors, merchants without something to distinguish themselves from a newb artisan with bus 3 are nothing.)

My best recommendation I could give would be that atNovice Merchantputting a cap on how much an item could add to the maintance cost at say 60 or 50, and then lower it 5 or 10 at efficiency 2 and master. Thus lets say it caps at 50 for Novice... each of your 60k items could only add 50 to the cost of yer vendor maintance instead of the 60 they currently are. Then at eff2 that is brought down to a 45 cap, and finally I'd say atMasterMerchant maybe bring it down to 40 or even 35 (as the bonus should be bigger for going all the way up)not much but it is helpful especially for even higher cost items like PA Halls which I bet sell rather slowly. This sort of plan would also keep Merchants useful and keep the cost of vendors high enough to not only take money out of the economy, but also to keep prices of things that should be expensive, expensive. (Houses should cost more than they currently cost anyway... hate to say it but it is true there are way too many houses littering the landscape as it is, although I am a firm believer that structure damage from not paying maintance should be permanent.)

I think that 2400 credits a day is outrages. I mainly sell food and powerups, all less than 200 an item. This would kill me.

I not sayin the prices aren't too high as is, I'm just saying flat rate would kill the Merchant profession. I do think that more needs to be done to lower the rate, especially for Merchants.. personally I think to get cost down for everyone the best idea would be to increase efficiency to TotalItemValue/2000 for eff2 (although to be honest if they give this much of a boost I would like to see vendor efficiency moved up to eff3) and TotalItemValue/3000 for Master or something similar. I been sayin this for awhile, I just think for those high costing items that putting some sort of maint cap on for items would be another good idea.

My vendors have been bugged for days - charge me 0 nada zero - my exp has slowed to a trickle - I would pay 500 a day flat or a % of items in vendor but please give me exp for it...

i would rather a flat rate and keep the guess work out of it.. and as you go up the hirling line mabey some vendors cost less. like a bulky vending machine should cost more to run then say a bazzar like terminal. We already have a flat rate to pay for our housing as it is. what woudl a good maintence rate be on a vendor... 20? thats a lil more then a medium house and 10 less then a Wind/solar collector. 30? equal to an energy collectors maintence about twice that of a medium house? Well an NPC has wife and kids at home so shoudl be enough to be able to pay thier own "rent" so I think somehwere between a maintence rate of 20-30 would be very fair for an NPC vendor (even though mine is just a fraction)

Still the system needs to be changed. It can still be made to be acceptable to you and acceptable to me at the same time. We're only paying 24 creds a day right now, but that will be changed sooner or later. Let's get it so we are all happy when they do fix it.

I agree that something needs to be done about maintenance. I like your fee schedule, too.

I sell lots of high-end merchandise (mostly weapons, spice, foods/drinks, etc) and I'm pretty much a 'pure' merchant (I'm a Master Artisan, but I don't really make anything I sell, now). When they nerf (I mean fix) NPC vendor maintenance rates, I'll probably have to close shop. I'm able to make aprofit now, but my travel expenses are large (the Corellia to Lok run isn't cheap and that is where my two current stores are) and paying an extra 2.5-5k per day in each store would take the profitout of it for me(I'm not going to run missions in order to keep my stores open).

A snack machine costsno more to run per day when it is full versus when it is empty. There is no retail store I know of that bases employee compensation upon the value of the inventory that is in stock at the moment. I quite honestly don't understand where theidea that vendors should cost more based on your inventory came from.