Merchant Archive
Thread: Why Aren't Merchants Filthy Rich?
I just finished reading an interesting thread over in the Radiant forum discussing the professions of the richest characters on that galaxy. Veterans of this Merchant forum will be unsurprised to hear that there there wasn't a Merchant among 'em.
Consensus had it that Master Weaponsmiths raked in the most filthy lucre so far(around 20-25 million), with Master Armorsmiths close behind. Of course these were just the people who participate in the Radiant forum messages, but for this situation they're probably representative.
Based on this, some questions come to mind:
Assuming they play as intelligently as Weaponsmiths and Armorsmiths, should Merchants typically be the richest profession?
If so, then why aren't they even near the top ranks of the wealthy?
If not, then is that a problem with the design and implementationofthe profession?
--Flatfingers
I think it is complex. The weapon and armorsmiths can be merchants themselves for one, which makes the use of us as resellers unnecessary. They don't even have to become merchants if they choose, because of the terminal vender they can get in the Artisan tree, which is all they need if they only sell one kind of product. So, they can be their own freestanding Merchant.
I think the problem otherwise is, the other things aren't useful or haven't been used enough. Droids at this point, other than maybe an occasional probot or BH droid are not easily sellable items, they just have too many weird things going on with them (which I think has to do with how closely related to actual CH pets, which I think was a bad way to implement them in game). Spices and food just don't seem to sell at all, almost as if people don't think they are worth it, unless you're selling food as pet food. Medical supllies, well, the problem there is, medics are the ones who use medical supplies, yet, they are the ones who can make them...so...why do they need to buy them from anyone? Tailors, well, why be a tailor and not be an armorsmith at the same time?
Architects, I'm not sure about. I feel that they should have their niche in the market, but one problem is, there are only so many players, and when one person upgrades their house, they typically pass their house on to the next guy, so the housing business may feel the effect of those who sell their old houses, but with all the installations, it does surprise me they aren't doing as well.
Basically, Weaponsmiths and Armorsmiths own the market right now in my opinion, because they create products that work and are widely seen as useful. The other crafting professions that would need the help of a merchant in order to sell things, don't have anything worth selling at this point or simply use what they craft for themselves because it applies to them or people don't understand how good spice and food are yet. When crafted items become more useful, I think the Merchant might slowly rise on the pay scale, but the Weaponsmith/Merchant and Armorsmith/Merchant will always be on top, because almost everyone has armor and even more have weapons, unlike other products.
I agree that weapon/armorsmiths are likely to also be merchants. Also, probably most big-ticket sales (crates, full armor sets, PA halls, etc.) happen as special orders, and mechants have no advantage in special orders. Not that a special order vendor ability wouldn't be a nice thing...
As for what sells or doesn't sell.. My biggest sellers in order at my vendors are probably:
1. Stim B's. Meds do indeed sell extremely well, since a lot of people have novice medic and only a few people can make really nice stims. I think it would be fairly easy to make millions on meds if I really focused on it.
2. Tatooine Sunburn (food). The one chef item that does very well.
3. Fishing poles. I'm not kidding. Every time I throw a pole on the vendor it sells within the day.
4. Other random foods.
5. Backpacks
6. Spice. I just started the spice vendor though, so the word hasn't spread yet.
7. Fireworks and creature habitats.
8. Other random clothes and toys.
Osmol is correct is saying that there are many factors to this issue, the biggest being that anyone in the artisan tree that trains Business III gains the ability to place a vendor in any structure that they have Admin Privaledges to.
The Merchant Profession is the worst professtion in the game as it is a profession that offers no services that anyone actually needs and it does not produce anything. The ONLY way to make the Merchant profession viable is to remove the ability to get a Vendor until you actually train Merchant. Many folks do not want to do this because now they would have to Master the Artisan Profession and then train Novice Merchant.
This is what I mean....let's say that Mr. Weaponsmith wants to be a Master Weaponsmith, Armorsmith and Architect (Being that these are the most sought out professions for purchasing Items.) That is a total of 189 Skill Points. You have 235 Points after you enter into the Artisan Profession. That leaves you with only 46 Points. You need 77 total points to Master the Artisan profession and another 6 to train in Novice Merchant. It can't be done. However, if you train all of the Engineering and Surveying trees you still have 18 points remaining. You could then train Business III which would leave you with 9 points. And even training business IV would still leave you with 4. Now....I can be all of the Master Professions that I want and never need to train Novice Merchant, I would still be sought after in the open market, have reduced Bazaar Fees to sell my items with and a Vendor. If the Merchant Profession was the only way to gain a vendor, then people would have to choose which Profession not to master in to be able to get a vendor to sell their stuff.
Problem 2 is PA backed players. I am all for PAs, I'm in one myself, but we are not big (6 players) and we don't do a whole lot of sharing. The PA owner has 2 accounts in order to have the Hall and even after the Hall is placed he only has 3 lots remaining. His playing account uses the 10 lots for harvester. I have 10 lots for harvester, minus the 2 lots for my Vendor Shop and 2 lots for factories. My cousin does not need lots so he houses my factories. Basically saying that the smaller PA or the Single player does not have the ability to gather the resources needed to make 25million credits worth of stuff. We have trouble keeping enough material to stay in business and grind to the next level. So where this problem rests is non-Crafting professions that have the ability to harvest for materials.
One of the biggest problems I see with the Artisan Profession is that there is no certification required. Look at Marksmen. In order to use a D18 Blaster without taking a HUGE penalty you have to have the D18 Certification that comes with the Novice Marksman training. Why is it then that anyone can place a harvester? Why is there no Certification for that? If I have to have a certification to pull the trigger of a blaster then a bounty hunter should have to be certified in operating the equipment that I need for my profession. This would cut down on peoples ability to just harvest for others. I think that everyone should have to do their own leg work. Now, if a Master Bounty Hunter (who has 33 skill points after he masters his profession) wishes to tranin Novice Artisan and train up the Surveying tree as far as his skill points will take him, and he wants to get into a side business of selling resources or gathering resources for his PA, then I have no problem with that because that Bounty Hunter had to pay for the training to the tune of at least 15 skill points.
This is getting long.
Lots of balancing issues here. Not sure if you have seen my proposal for balancing this profession along with some others, but I will post it here for you to see. Comment as you will and I can revise it.
Artisan Profession
Novice Artisan
- Grantsplayers 2 Building Lots for use of Mining and Harvesting Istallations. (Only the Artisan Profession can use Harvesters)
- No other changes
Engineering
- No Changes
Domestic Arts
- No Changes
Business
- Level 1: Access Fees
- Level 2: Premium Sales
- Level 3: Reduced Bazaar Fees
- Level 4: Reduced Travel Fees
Surveying / Mining
- Each Level in this tree grants players 2 building lots for use of Mining and Harvesting Installations.
- No other changes
Master Artisan
- Grants players 2 building lots for use of Mining and Harvesting Installations
- No other changes
Merchant Profession
Novice Merchant
- Grants players 1 Vendor to place in any structure that the player owns.
Ad Campaign
- Level 1: Ability to place a waypoint in the description of an item for sale on the Bazaar. (Waypoint to shop)
- Level 2: Customizable Vocalization for vendors
- Level 3: Grants players the ability to place their shop locations on the Planetary Map. A terminal would need to be added near the Merchant trainers to give players access to the Planetary Ad System. Must be maintained.
- Level 4: Word of Mouth - Grants players the ability to hire NPC character for a fixed Weekly Rate for bark advertisement.
Efficiency
- Level 1: ReducedBazaar Fees
- Level 2: Reduced Maintenance on Structures
- Level 3: Reduced Travel Fees
- Level 4: Reduced Maintenance on Vendors
Management
- Level 1: Selective Hiring - Grants players the ability to select from a wide range of Vendors. Random Creation.
- Level 2: Advanced Hiring - Grants players the ability to select form a wider range of Vendors. Customizable
- Level 3: Vendor Placement - Grants players the ability to place a single Vendor on the Planetary Map. This vendor is placed under a tent like structure that must be purchased from an Architect and maintained, but does not count against the players building lot total.
- Level 4: Advanced Plancement - Grants players the ability to place a second Vendor on the Planetary Map. This vendor is placed under a tent like structure that must be purchased from an Architect and maintained, but does not count against the players building lot total.
Hiring
- Each level in this tree grants players an additional Vendor.
Master Merchant
- Reduced Vendor Maintenance. Grants an additional Vendor. Grants an additional Vendor Placement.
This would help with the issues being brought up by people wanting the Miners to return. This allows the Artisans to be the only profession able to place Harvestors on the Planetary Map. Also, by allowing only the Artisans to gain building Lots for the purpose of mining....it will help reduce the amount of structures in the world. Other players that are not within a Crafting Profession (Artisan Profession) would not be able to place Harvesting equipment as they would need to be certified by training Novice Artisan to operate that equipemtn.
This would also make the Merchant class viable in that only the Merchant has Vendors. If someone (let's say an Armorsmith) wants to sell armor, but does not want to be a merchant...then he would have to find a merchant that would allow him the use of the vendor.
This would also help with server stability and the amount of data that the server would have to keep track of (Maybe)
Thoughts.....Comments?
Who said a merchant cant get rich???
I was selling out of small naboo house.. sold nothing.. said screw this and went HARDCORE...
I opened a medium house... styled it.. and then;
I opened my business less then 5 days ago.." be it i already had 2 vendorswhen i did "
Now I have 5 vendors.. full to the brim with everything possible.. ( the way a shop is supposed to be )
Ive made over 400k in last 4 days. ( thats without selling any houses )
I buy 60% of the stock i put in my shop.. which means i run threw about 100k a day in orders.. ( includingbuying ore fororders of harvs and houses )..
Right now i have closeto 1 million worth of goods ready to be sold..Thisis in 4days.. and my business isonly gettingstronger... Give me amonth , and ill be up there.. maybe not themost wealthy.. but ill be shocked if i dont break 1 million by next week., and then 1 million each week after that.
p.s. Ive got orders out the wazoo for at least another 500k worth of products which i alreadyhavethe material i need. Means all profit.
current bankaccount : roughly 200,000. vendors:600,000 bazaar:50,000 crated: 400,000
If you play the part of a merchant rightand youprovide good business.. You will alwayshave a chance at beingricher thensomeone selling only 1 thing... I sell 100's of things, and make money on all of it.
Tell me how you experience life as a merchant..
The suggestions to restrict access to harvestors to people in the artisan tree is just one of those things that brings up huge nasty issues. The problem is there are several professions with huge dependency on resources that have no artisan prerequisites - those being the medic professions, bioengineer, and smuggler. I'd also note thatmedics in particular cannot afford to buy resources off the bazaarunless they are master docs running amedical business - having to pay for everyhealgetsreally painful - and have really really challenging resource requirements.These guys already have a huge beef with their difficulty to get resources and their lack of skills to help with this (medical forage being useless). But at least they can currently hire a surveyor to scout out a harvestor spot for them.
Osmol, you make excellent points, which I think ultimately add up to there still being numerous questions of skill/profession/economic balancing still to be resolved.
One pointworthy of maybe a little further discussion is the (apparently) odd gap between weapon- and armorsmith profit and that of architects. I think I can see a number of reasons now why this is so:
1. Houses are more expensive than (most) weapons and armor.
2. Homes (and advanced harvesters)can be redeeded, but weapons and armor degrade over time despite the use of repair tools. This eventuallystifles the home/harvester market, but insures the need for constantpurchasing of new weapons and armor.
3.There's much more varietyin weapon and armor types than inhome types. To consider just weapons (and this may explain why weaponsmiths seem to do even better than armorsmiths), consider that there are three general categories of melee weapons and three general categories of ranged weapons, and that within any particular category may be seven or eight different specific types of weapon, and that different examples of the same type of weapon will exhibit different operational characteristics... and then compareprofusion of choicesto the (roughly)four types and three sizes of house. Architecture is actually interesting, but it has to look pretty tame by comparison to weapons and armor.
4. To continue the last point, two key human/player behaviors are "trading up" and "best tool for the situation." Both goals are supported by the wealth of armor and weapon types. Considering just armor, every combat-oriented playerlusts for the next level up, from bone armor to ubese to chitin and so on, and the number of armor "levels" supports this economic turnover. Similarly, because there are different kinds of environmental dangers (energy, electricity, kinetic, restraint, etc.), players want to have multiple types of armor to best fit the circumstances... but who can afford to swap home styles as the mood takes them?
Basically what all the above tells us is not just that architects are at a sales disadvantage compared to armor- and weaponsmiths, but also that the latter are simplyin a fantastic sales position. They've got the biggest market to sell to (combat-oriented players), and even the "laws of the universe" (weapon damage, multiple damage modes) promote a wealth of variety in product.
So (comes the inevitable question) how come the advanced sales profession (Merchant) can't seem to take advantage of this? Obviously: weapon and armor crafters can and do sell their own stuff.
Would it be right to prevent them from doing so? It would mean taking that lone vendor away from Artisan, but frankly the problem is bigger than that. If Crafting and Sales are supposed to be significantly different (i.e., independent) play styles, then you're basically talking about imposing an artificial limit on the price anyone but a Merchant can charge for any item, because that's the only realistic way of insuring that a meaningfulproportion of money goes through a Merchant's hands/claws/tentacles/pseudopodia.
Or is there some more positive (but still effective) approach that instead of coecive and arbitrary price capsrelies on encouraging crafters to use merchants because they (crafters)get something they want that way that they can't get in any other way?
What might that "something" be?
--Flatfingers
Great points, ThunderBlade.
While I might differ in a few details with your revised Artisan and Merchant skilltrees (I think a Miner profession seems called for at this point, for example), overall I think it would go a long way to correcting the current deficiencies in the Merchant profession.
Just assomething against which to compareyour excellentsuggestions, I wouldn't mind seeing the Merchant class subdivided into the following categories, with appropriate skills for each kind of businessactivity with whicha real Merchant must be concerned:
* Supply
* Production
* Sales/Marketing/Advertising
* Management (Employment, Contracts)
For the sake of discussion, I'll toss out some of the other ideas I've had while going up the Merchant tree (and browsing this forum, of course).
CONTRACTS: It seems to me that the key to the Merchant -- what really distinguishes the merchant from a crafter who sells things -- is the ability to contract to sell a certain item at a certain price over an extended period of time. I wouldn't mind if everyone could do one-shot sales if only I could establish long-term deals. That way instead of spending my time focusing on getting rid of stock, I could focus on the much more valuable process of building business relationships. Let the fly-by-night guys have their "rip-'em-and-run" deals; I'll do far better over the long term by achieving the Holy Grail of sales: repeat business. The in-game ability to establish binding contracts would help to create that opportunity.
SERVICES: One of the important but under-recognized stories of the Information Revolution has been the transformation of economic activity from goods-related to service-related. It's no longer about building smokestack industries to mass-produce gazillions of widgets -- it's about providing services that give individuals (and businesses) more of the most valuable resource of all: time. Why should the Star Wars universe -- or, more importantly, Star Wars Galaxies -- be any different? The whole notion of creating a Miner profession is gaining currency because we're now realizing that high-level crafters are willing to pay others to take the time to gather specific resources for them. Miners provide a service -- why can't we define (or at least identify and recognize) other desirable services, and find some way to place the ability to provide those services under the Merchant umbrella?
INCORPORATION: The PA system, as noted, will always swamp the solo player. It's unfortunate for the solo player (and as one, I feel my pain 
), but frankly, organization ought to offer benefits, financial and otherwise. Having said this, however, are PAs really the right way to do this? The pre-launch theory was that some PAs would be like crafthalls... but honestly, is there any PA out there that is solely dedicated to being a crafting or sales PA? I haven't heard of one -- every one seems to be primarily a combat-oriented organization; if their members do anything else it's on their own time. Shouldn't there be some game-supported way of organizing the labor and resources of group members, similar to an incorporated business in our world? Think about it: there could be small, private, start-up companies satisfying local needs, medium-size companies competing to sell goods and services on a planetary scale, and even large, publicly-traded companies which would be the only entities capable of constructing the largest objects in the game -- things like space stations (or even capital ships).
I'd think an incorporated organizationwould also lend itself towell-defined roles matrixed into position levels, much like factioned ranks. I'd like to see something like the following four roles, each split into four levels, all corresponding roughly to the four Merchant branches I named at the start of this message, and each with specific requirements for entry (sufficient earned "corporate" points, open slot, etc.):
Supply: CTO, VP for R&D, Resource Manager, Supplier
Production: President, Program Director, Project Manager, Crafter
Sales: CFO, Regional Sales VP, Sales Manager, Sales Rep
Corporate: Chairman of the Board, Board Member, Venture Capitalist, Investor
(Naturally, at the top of the heap, probably selected from among the top four positions, there'd have to be a CEO.)
Or is all that a little too much like the Sims, bringing work into a game?
At any rate, enough of that for now. At least I think it's safe to say most of us (with the possible exception of Lrak )agree that the Merchant profession definitely needs some significant enhancement to make it a viable -- to say nothing of interesting -- member of the SWG professional community.
--Flatfingers
Ida:
I didn't realize that other professions needed this ability to work Harvesters. This is answered by this. If a Smuggler needs materials....then the Novice Smuggler would get this Certification. Medics also at the Novice Medic Level.
This would still work if only those that needed the Harvesters had access.
Easy question, easy answer.
Merchant skill tree is poor and doesnt give any real cost advantage to merchants. Merchants can afford 20 to 30% margins on average while weaponsmith margins go up to 5000%. Another problem is successive patch upgrades : when stocks become worthless after an patch upgrade (commando weapons, armors, etc etc), the crafter only loose the raw material and can afford to get rid of former stocks at very low prices, while the merchant looses all his stock value and actually looses lots of cash selling it at discount.
Basicly the merchant profession was undertested over beta, and now, as it doesn t bring any advantage, we are too few, so undervoiced to get heard and be prioritarised in designers schedule. The basic evidence is the revamping of rangers and smugglers skill trees while ours, obviously giving way less to make a living, has never been reported by any designer to be eventually thought of being revamped any day soon....
Do we have a developer dedicated to following our forums? I still fail to see a name here...