Merchant Archive

This board is looking pretty shabby. At one time we argued, advised, hypothisized, hoped, and dreamed. Now we quietly bitch about unfixed bugs and give brief answers to newb questions.

I think it's fair to say that we have lost faith in SWG. I can't remember the last time I logged on to the Merchant board and expected to learn of a new change or see an improvement that mattered. It's like the porch signs were the last straw..an insult that let us know our place in the pecking order. All of our good ideas have been ignored..and I feel sorry for those who repost 'new' ideas here..not knowing we've all suggested them long ago.

Today was the second time I couldnt make myself log on and re-load my vendors. It's just too many hours of work for dubious gains in a world where money is meaningless. Exploiters have made my efforts futile. I know this means I need another break..but for gods sake I played EQ for 16 MONTHS before I quit for a week or two to recharge.

Don't discount me as some whining child. I've put a lot of work into my store. I create my own content for my server. I am a 'mover and shaker' who almost every player on the server can identify by name. I put hours in that some people don't put in for their real jobs.

In the end I want to know that there's more than this. Every game has a next level. It appears that the only rewards in SWG are for combat min/max'ers and 'sploiters. Why bother making the most comprehensive player-run economy and artisan system every implimented, and then abandonand marginalizeit?

well when you gets posts from holo stating that the Smuggler Class issues seem to be the most important right now, you really see where the priorities for the devs are. Combat Combat Combat. I've said it before, I'll say it again, Vendors need KD and we'll get attention. Till then they don't give a flying fug.

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Skedoozy wrote:
well when you gets posts from holo stating that the Smuggler Class issues seem to be the most important right now, you really see where the priorities for the devs are. Combat Combat Combat. I've said it before, I'll say it again, Vendors need KD and we'll get attention. Till then they don't give a flying fug.

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Well I am a Merchant and a Smuggler, and I can tell you, although the Merchant class needs a lot of love, Smuggler is just plain broken. Seriously, every skill tree is broken. And as far as combat goes, Smuggler ceased to be a combat profession with the last big patch. The dev's nerfed Pistols accuracy, and because Smuggler's have no "+To Hit" modifiers, we basically became just-trained Novice Marksmen all over again. Sure, we can use better weapons, but we can't hit the side of the spaceport with an Ewok and a catapult.

The problem with merchants isn't so much that what we have doesn't work, in my opinion. It's thatwhat we have isn't enough, not nearly enough, and someone needs to sit down and really give us some advantages over your typical Novice Artisan with Business III.

I think the Smugglers caught the dev's eye with that 1000+ post thread on the Discussion board that just wouldn't go away, in which all the Smugglers on the boards got together and made some noise. I think that is what we the Merchants need to do as well to make our concerns heard. We need to organize, have our Correspondent take our concerns to the Discussion Board, and then all support that thread until it gets the response we are looking for.

Alternately, we could just close all our shops. I think the devs might notice the economy evaporating overnight.

Possibly.

Well, if some of the combat classes complain that they can't buy stuff.

....

Maybe.

"It's that what we have isn't enough, not nearly enough, and someone needs to sit down and really give us some advantages over your typical Novice Artisan with Business III"





A..frickiing..MEN

I'm so sick of having to compete with everybody and their brother who has buisness 3 and I am a master Merchant and the diffrence between us is very..very..small

The problem being is that we are such a worthless class that there aren't enough supporters here to do that and no one gives a rats ass about merchants other than merchants.

Look at the post count of this forum. I can post something here, leave for a week and still see it on the main page.

How can they be so proud of a player run economy when their mechant class is beyond meager?

Great post Csin. Could this thread be our 1000+ posts that gets some attention?

From reading the threads associate with Dev Tracker, I'm beginning to see that the responses to us (if not the actions of the dev team as a whole) are fragmented at best. There seems to be little if any communication among them, and for some reason Holocron is of the impression that his number of posts will convince the players that things are being paid attention to. Delegate, prioritize, organize, execute.

Perhaps I'm WAYYY off base with that impression, because they've kept to their goal of reducing the number of hot-fixes in order to spend time on long-term solutions, and we'll see the results of all this effort in the next big patch. If so, all he would have to do is have the Merchant designer shoot an e-mail to the correspondent (Marqie) at the least...and make their own post here, at the most. That would let us know what's going on. The worst fear is as others in this thread have said...that there's NOTHING going on.

Well ... I think the real reason that the dialog on this forum has dried up is what is there left to talk about that hasn't been beaten to death a thousands times already to no availe???

We all know the bugs ... we all know the lack of incentives to progressing in the skill tree ... what is the point of wasting bandwidth until the Devs wake up and decide to look at us again?

Not trying to be negative or cynical ... just realistic ... the devs just don't have time nor desire to look at us right now. Really reminds me of the Rogue class in EQ in the early days ... man were they unloved by the devs. But after a jillion years, the devs finally got around to fleshing out the class. I see the same thing happening here.

I dont think there is a Merchant Designer. At least I've never heard of one mentioned, but that could be because they never mention merchants at all.

Besides when we do get some attention it will be something like the following.

"Problems with Merchants? I wasn't aware that there were any problems with merchants."

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Skedoozy wrote:

I dont think there is a Merchant Designer. At least I've never heard of one mentioned, but that could be because they never mention merchants at all.

Besides when we do get some attention it will be something like the following.

"Problems with Merchants? I wasn't aware that there were any problems with merchants."

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That is defnitely the answer you'll when someone finally says anything about this profession. The chance to level the playing field was the correspondant system. They set that up and then completely ignored it. Now I read they are making plans for "relaunching it" Which means they are no longer even pretending that they are listening to the correspondant reports.

Well just look at how they responded to the first list of things from the correspondant.

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AD Skill Tree

The last big "cause" of our profession was when they wanted to fix the NPC vendor maintainance. Everyone really rallied around that, and eventually we were able to attract Holocron's attention, while he was on vacation no less. Still no official word on a sales tax, other than "we're looking in to it", which makes me worried I'm going to log in one day to find my NPC vendors charging me tons in maintainance. I'm really hoping that Merchants get some love in the next Big Patch (tm), because I'm 40k xp from hitting Master Merchant, and that last really cool thing I got was Reduced Maintainance. Advertising has been broken since the beginning of time, and while I used to get online 5 minutes after patching was finished to reset my Planetary Advertising, it just isn't worth it to me anymore. I only use 3 vendors, so Management is useless, even though I do get totally awesome new signs, yeah! And efficiency doesn't pay out big until you hit 4, and even then, you get dissed with the "Businessman" title, which I already got with Business IV. Obviously there is no Merchant Developer. The Devs have made it quite obvious that the "little bugs" that no one cares about are going to take a long, long, long time to get fixed, and it appears that the Merchant profession is riddled only with these "little bugs".

Hope they prove me wrong.

I've stopped vending for the moment. I used to craft my butt off in the furniture world, sold lots of it, but the taskings with little UI support gets tedious and boredom sets in.. Not to mention if you can't sublet your little vens to your housemates/PA/friends to sell items on, you have to be the human gate to the vendor with a 6 day timer on it.

Not my cup of tea. I'll going to ding master merchant and surrender most of it till I have just the essentials I want of the class, else its a pretty worthless class unless your new.

-C9-