Merchant Archive
Thread: 150 ITEM CAP VOTE NO
Scream loud and long against this insane nerf to our profession, while nothing is done to stop the sploiters!
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Developers&message.id=18573
Arrya wrote:
I think we did our job already
Due to feedback, they are in the process of modifying the change, and are going to wait to release it later than planned.They are planning on tying the limits to the skill level of the merchant instead (no specifics yet though).
Btw, yesterday when they made us all correspondants for about 5 minutes I was able to get a couple merchant threads open on that secret forum... all I gotta say is - Go Doc! He is in there fighting the good fight for us behind closed doors
Dang Entertainer Correspondant Clones were everwhere..
I posted this on SwgCraft.com as well, but here is my view on this topic:
Business 3 = 1 vendor = 150 items.
Novice Merchant = 2 vendors = 300 items.
Management 1 = 3 vendors = 450 items.
Management 2 = 4 vendors = 600 items.
Management 3 = 5 vendors = 750 items.
Management 4 = 6 vendors = 900 items.
Master Merchant = 7 vendors = 1050 items.
If you are a Weaponsmith, an Armorsmith, or the like, you can now contract with a Merchant, and he can place the items on HIS vendors for you. Give him rights to your factories, so you can get around the 25 item limit with sales. Obviously, this is done with a Merchant you trust, a PA member or the like.
If not, sell the 25 items you can on the Bazaar for 6k each.
These are your choices. Take them or leave them. Master Merchant will benefit from this system. Crafters SHOULD have to use Merchant skill slots themselves to operate vendors OR contract with a real merchant. Plain and simple. I don't see a real problem with this new plan.
The problem with the plan is that Merchants that are also crafters won't even have room for their own goods, much less someone else's.
Glad to hear they pushed it back to think on it more. The 150 change would have meant the end of my crafting career and the life of my Tempest character. I am quite sure a LOT of merchants would have ceased playing with such a harsh change.
The change is bound to be harsh no matter what it ends up being. They want to drastically reduce the number of items for sale in vendors so they are going to come down with a small number. Scaling it will make it larger but I don't know what it will be. I would be surprised if it were as high as 1k items at Master but I could be wrong. With the scarcity of master merchants they may bank on few people having that number and that could help.
I think people are just going to have to learn how to stock differently. I am not saying it won't be a pain, and I am sure some people will just not do it. But if you want to stay in business you will learn to adapt to the new system. That is what we have to do when faced with changes we can't control.
Deal with it or just go play something else...
Depending on the final toll, I will chose accordingly.
Being master, hopefully I will be as lightly effected as my mch was with the pet nerf.
I too am a Master Merchant, and will continue being so. I don't expect to be hurt by this... and I may even be helped.
The ones screaming about the Creature Handler nerf were the non-Masters that wanted the biggest benefits with the lowest cost. Same thing here.
If you want the biggest benefits, you are going to have to expend the most points to get it, i.e. go all the way to Master.
There are ways to make it work, and it looks like they are fixing it more to make it even easier.
<rant>It's going to happen, Masters will be only slightly effected, if you want to maintain what you have, go Master, or contact someone that has.</rant>
Is there any sign of the devs realizing that not every profession is alike?
SueDenim wrote:
Oh boy, this sounds bad. Sounds like they're going down the path I most feared, making a change that requires painful belt-tightening for most crafting professions, while giving a death sentence to the Tailor profession.
Is there any sign of the devs realizing that not every profession is alike?
They are trapped by the realities of the database situation I believe.
I don't buy that tailors can't survive without hundreds of items on their vendors. I sold tailored items on my vnedors for months and never had more than 100 items on them. They all sold. It can be done. Is it optimal? Probably not, but you can do it and survive with fewer items.
I'm not saying this because I want it to be limited, I don't , but whatver they throw at us we have to learn how to play by those rules if we are going to continue to play the game.
Doc, it's not that Tailors can't survive without hundreds of items on their vendor, it's that it is easier and more fun for us and the customer too, if a Tailor vendor has something other on it than the top ten best sellers all in black. That is what a lot of tailor vendors will be like after this vendor reduction.
Customers who browse tailor vendors are impulse shopping, know exactly what they want, or have no clue what they want. If we don'tlist a wide variety ofitems in a wide variety of colors, they often just leave without buying anything and go see what is on the next tailor's vendor. And that gets really tiresome to a customer. Also, most vendor shoppers are doing so because they do not want to hassle around or wait on a custom order. They just want to find it on the vendor and get on with doing something else.
You betcha: I could list 10 decorative vests, 10 two-tone skirts, 10 modest skirts, 10 tipless gloves, 10 uniform boots, 10 sunguards, 10 sandals, 10 paramilitary camos, 10 gunman's dusters, 10 spec-ops dusters, 10 muscle shirts,10 Wookiee smocks, 10 Sage's Hoods, 10 patterned Wookiee gloves, 10 light bustiers... in all black... and they would all sell out every day.
If I had more than one vendor, I could list like that for up toas many colors as I have vendors. I have over 200 schematics and 255 colors. But the vendor limit would forcea tailorinto listing only 15 items in the one most popular color. Or 6 more colorsor 15 more styles for each vendor, but in all black -- ifone hasMaster Merchant as well as Master Tailor.
Boring. Boring for me. Boring for the customer. More work for me and the customer too. Because if he/she wants something other than black, gotta go to the next vendor over, orget a custom order. And most just won't bother.
There just aren't very many tailors that really want to be a master merchant too. They want to dance and image design and hunt krayt dragons. Well... if they want to be a tailor first, and have a really outstanding shop and customer service... they can't, unless they drop everything else and take master merchant too. And no, I'm sorry, but it just is not the same if you bulk sale to a true merchant. Having a Tailor shop is a whole 'nother beast. It's an ambience and interactive relationship with our customers, of which our vendors (and how much is on them) is only a part of. That is why tailors are getting so upset over this. It is a profession... uniqueness. It's a bit game play and a bit role play and a bit of the creativityand perfectionist and micro-managing kind of thing that drew some of us to the tailoring profession and this game to begin with.
This vendor limit is the lament of Tailors. We deplore it. But there's nothing we can do but adapt. Or quit.
You are all thinking 1-dimensionally on this issue.
One, the 150 limit applies to ONE vendor. At Master Merchant, how many do you have available-- 6... 7? That's 1050 items.
Two, Tailors are meant to be wholesalers, and all other crafters in that matter. The Tailor class has no bonuses to Vendors or Advertising or anything like that. It has bonuses to MAKING the clothing. If you want to supplement your Tailoring MAKING with some Merchant SELLING, so be it, but unless you go full Master, you will not have the same benefits as the other Masters.
This change makes it possible for most "non-Merchants" to sell their wares on the Bazaar, and the rest of us "Merchants" can get hired out by Wholesalers to have OUR vendors stocked with THEIR items. Like I said, give me rights to your factory, and I'll toss your things up on MY vendor... that's what I, and several other Merchantsdo.
To be the best Tailor, you have to be Master. To be the best Merchant, you have to be Master. They are just polarizing the class more now. Before you could be an okay Merchant with Business 3, or with only Novice and Advert 3. Now, to compete with the best, you have to be Master. That's what the point of the class was, or so I thought.
There simply isn't the sort of good practical division between the "making" and the "selling" for tailors - they're nearly inextricable. Hundreds of schematics times hundreds of color slots times hundreds of colors. Simply figuring out what you *want* to sell is an art. Plus, again unless you're doing the "any color as long as it's black" top ten approach to tailoring, most of our items aren't going to have a really fast turnover. So I doubt there'll be a lot of "pure merchants" who want to bother with being the middleman for a tailor, especially when there are so many faster-selling *and* higher profit margin items he could be marketing. A tailor is already sort of required to be a merchant too, and this doesn't especially upset me; what does upset me is the idea that a tailor is required to be a *Master* Merchant just to do business.
The basic point we've been trying to get across is that tailoring really *is* different from all the other crafting professions, and the rules that might apply well to Chefs and Weaponsmiths and Pharmacists don't necessarily make sense for us. Our stuff can't be experimented on, and has no *inherent* gameplay benefit. We *have* to deal in style, color, customer service, and variety to succeed, because we don't have anything else!