Merchant Archive
Thread: Make Merchant real or roll into elite crafting profs
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Nodo_Wavinglight wrote:
Ok I am sure to get flamed over this but here it goes.
There are hundreds of posts here on how to make Merchant a viable profession and yet we see nothing. I would like to see merchant removed and the skills acquired added to the 4 trees of each of the Elite crafting professions, OR make them part of Artisan. Doing so would make sense as what true crafter does not also have to have merchant. I could understand if they would make it so that a merchant can consign or sell things for others, but as the profession stands now it is really a requirement to be a crafter. Sure I could be a DE and not have merchant, but how can you sell enough to support anything without it. Considering there is no advantage to mastering rolling our merchant skills into either artisan (which would help that profession) or the elite classes, makes perfect sense.
There are several threads with awesome ideas for making merchant an fun and rewarding profession, but as I see what the CU has done to we crafters, I am not counting on it
Just my 2 cents.
In your suggestion, you may want to consider those of use that are just Master Merchants, not just those with crafting profs
I will never support an idea which stems merchant directly from crafting
every combat class no matter their level should have rights to merchant the same as any crafters does
and no master crafter should 'get more' then a novice one
Either sink points into Merchant or do not, it is your choice, and should be open to everyone to do the same.
but the point is that Master merchant means nothing right now. we need something to make merchant worth mastering. and IMHO that means making every other player come to the merchant for selling things. cap the bazaar at 2000 credits to everyone but merchants. make it possible to consign item on vendors, or better yet give merchants the ability to make vendors take a percentage of a sale that someone places on thier vendor, or add a markup. so if george puts up an item on my vendor as a consignment sale i can either charge george 20 credits for the service, take a percentage of the amount of his sale, 3000 credits at 10% is 300 credits i get, or i add 10% to his selling price on my vendor to get a total sale of 3300 credits, 3000 goes to george and 300 goes to me.
this makes merchants useful to others. if i was the dev making the decisions i would get rid of the bazaars altogether or make merchants the only ones with the skill to use them. this makes the profession more viable as something interactive and fun. IMHO.
here is hoping something changes...
DawnTreader777 wrote:
but the point is that Master merchant means nothing right now. we need something to make merchant worth mastering. and IMHO that means making every other player come to the merchant for selling things. cap the bazaar at 2000 credits to everyone but merchants. make it possible to consign item on vendors, or better yet give merchants the ability to make vendors take a percentage of a sale that someone places on thier vendor, or add a markup. so if george puts up an item on my vendor as a consignment sale i can either charge george 20 credits for the service, take a percentage of the amount of his sale, 3000 credits at 10% is 300 credits i get, or i add 10% to his selling price on my vendor to get a total sale of 3300 credits, 3000 goes to george and 300 goes to me.
this makes merchants useful to others. if i was the dev making the decisions i would get rid of the bazaars altogether or make merchants the only ones with the skill to use them. this makes the profession more viable as something interactive and fun. IMHO.
here is hoping something changes...
I would scream bloody murder if they nerfed the bazaar. Half my income is from the bazaar and the other half is from my vendors. I also get some good deals on loot from the bazaar (like 8 +15 geo agents for 20K).
Without the bazaar to advertise my business I would be forced to spam at the starport. I don't think anyone here wants to see more of that.
Ani,
You are missing the point here. What good is a merchant without a supplier, and in the same aspect what good is a crafter without the ability to sellwhat we make. I just want them todo SOMETHING with the merchant profession so that as crafters we do not HAVE to have merchant. Face it, if you are a crafter, you also have merchant.
I would like to be able to go to our guild merchant and have them sell my items for me. The way this works now is just NOT working, as how can I expect someone to first BUY all my listed items and then SELL them, hoping they sell.
I would actually like to see the merchant tree moved into Artisan as I stated before, so yes EVERYONE would still have this ability and it would bring life back into the Artisan Profession, which is now only mastered if you want to make bikes, or should I say SWOOPS
PaladinX333 wrote:
I would scream bloody murder if they nerfed the bazaar. Half my income is from the bazaar and the other half is from my vendors. I also get some good deals on loot from the bazaar (like 8 +15 geo agents for 20K).
Without the bazaar to advertise my business I would be forced to spam at the starport. I don't think anyone here wants to see more of that.
Ahazians
Andymantium wrote:
Merchant as a class needs improvement. We need a new UI, new interfaces, andbetter transaction mechanisms. Such things would be a big step in making the merchant profession "valuable" relative to its current state. I'd rather they do this instead of marginalizing it further, by rolling it into crafting profs.
Ok, so this is all good and fine, but seriously how long have we been waiting for this? I count 2ish years, how about you.. You don't have to subscribe to my logic but there comes a time when the whole pie in the ski idea loses it's lustre. Would I love to see Merchant turned into some sort of glorious trading/galactic stock broker/galaxy commodity and hedge fund trader/pure credit management style professionwith soo much content that we're the envy of all the crafting professions combined? Sure!! I mean how cool would that be if Merchant was annalogous to some kind of modern day/futuristic high stakes wall street trader!
However I think most ppl know as well as I do that this is not going to happen. I'm mean I'm a patient person, but seriously it's been over 2yrs and we're not the only ones, have a look at the ranger forums amongst others and you'll see what I mean but I suspect you already know this.
Perhaps completely rolling merch into the crafting profs isn't the way to go, (hence my suggestion of lowered sps), but being able to use the full functionality (however limited that may be atm) of merchant by current crafters would at least let those who do use merch to use it fully.
Andymantium wrote:
You also don't need master merchant, you know. Drop a few skill boxes if you need the points. Master armorsmith, weaponsmith, merchant for me. If I dropped a few boxes, I could get master artisan too.
Yep, so this is a fair enough statement which actually reflects the point I was trying to make in an earlier thread. Currently using your example, (as, ws, art, merch), you'd most likely be looking at either being a 4304 merhant or a 3404 merch depending on what skills you wanted. And you're right, this may be more than enough merchant to satisfy your needs and everyone walks away happy. However, given a choice it would be nice to fill out the merchant trees and just enjoy the full robustness (again however limited that may be atm) of merchant and be done with it.
Some ppl may think that sounds greedy like a jedi wanting to be a master of all 5 skill groups, but again, I see merchant as a necessary component of the various crafting trades.
Andymantium wrote:
Granted, the profession is not as useful as it could be right now. Unfortunately, that's the way it is. Until they get around to working on it, we just have to live with it. Pick and choose, you can't have everything.
) that diagram was a way of "seeing" the way the professions were going to benifiet each other. imagine customers in the middle, with merchants on one side surrounding the customer circle in the middle, and the bazaar the other side, and all thecrafting professions around them in an outer circle.