Merchant Archive

As a Bounty Hunter on Starsider, and a Commando/Architect in the past, I have had need to purchase specialized weapons, armor, and resources for much of my career. I have had endless hours of frustration running from merchant to merchant to merchant when I needed something specific for my profession only to find the merchant is inactive, or has sold out, or doesn't even stock what I am looking for that day despite what the name of the merchant is or the category of merchant it is set as on the map.

The major merchants that do serious volume business, including those at Whizbang's Mall, have been a tremendous asset to me. Not only do they tend to have a good variety of things they offer, but they are stocked and often have several choices available to me. There have been times I have to scroll through several pages to find the item I want on a specific vendor, but they will almost *always* have it. These merchants also tend to pull in other merchants and crafters to the area to further enhance the offerings available. I am much more likely to return to these merchants and offer them repeat business time and time again which not only enhances MY game experience and brings it closer to a RW economy, but enhances THEIR game experience in their chosen profession. Not everyone wants to run around in an eX7r3m k0mb@t template. These are the people who are willing to do more than "dabble" in the artisan and merchant professions, these are the people who make good quality crafting, excellent salesmanship, and customer follow-through their game!

Limiting the available items for merchants that severely will dampen their ability to provide the volume and quality of products currently available in the game. It will decrease the value of sellable items as people become more likely to destroy them or put them on the bazaar for 6k credits. It will add to the other economic problems facing the universe as more and more money pours in while there are fewer and fewer places to spend it or transfer it to other people. Or, perhaps it will cause an extreme inflation as the items that ARE still for sale skyrocket in value, far far past what the beginning characters can even dream of affording without the help of others who have been playing for a while. It will increase the number of people sitting and shouting in the cities for people to buy directly off them rather than off their vendor (which I still see a great deal of despite the new chat channel). It will also hamper "guild vendors" where the guild breaks up the job responsibilities to allow players to focus on what is important to them with their other skill points.

~Evekia

At no time in my over year of playing this game have I ever heard the following commant:

" Dammit this merchant has just too many itmes for sale he so needs to be nerfed"

I like to use vendors that sale quality products, those vendors easily sale more than 110 items every hr.

Instead of visited a particular vendor the day they stock now we'll need to know the hour.

This whole item limit idea was crap to begin with, let the loot mongers store there crap, I play this game to have fun and never is visiting 20 empty vendors fun.

i am a customer to almost every decent buisness on kettemoore and i can say that this is total gimpage to all companys

*dons asbestos suit*

I don't think this nerf is as big of a deal as some people are making out. With master merchant you can still have 660 items "in stock", and that's a fair number. I think what this nerf really does is force more inter-dependance upon players and encourage more social interaction. It also pushes you to make the hard choice of just what market you're selling to. Being in a guild, I plan on donating as much storage space and vendor space as I'm able to our crafters and I would expect other guilds will do similar.

Now, with that said I think there is an easy way to mitigate the impact of this change. Vendors should be crate-fed. I have already sent feedback about this and mentioned it on another forum, maybe it'll get picked up. Basically what you do is slot in a crate of any given item and the vendor interface will be smart enough to extract one when someone makes a purchase. You could go further and allow an option for players to buy multiple "copies" of the item and keep them in the crate. This would be useful for things like PSGs and especially for weapons and armor when people want several pieces in order to get them sliced.

This system would not only benefit the buyers but it would also make re-stocking of the vendors a lot easier. I imagine some sort of setup where you could have 2 or 3 crates of any given item on the vendor at a time, that way if you keep it up you should always have at least one full crate worth on hand. Also, as far as I understand it, this would help lighten the database load as well (half the point of crates, right?).

There is also one more thing to adjust in the upcoming change to make it more reasonable and palatable to the player base, and this goes for merchants and buyers alike. Don't limit the vendors to 110 each (except at the base level of course). The vendor limit should match the total item limit. That is, the master merchant should be able to put all 660 items on ONE vendor. Furthermore, with the crates counting as just 1 "item", 660 would be more than enough room for any crafter I would expect.

Anyway, those are my opinions and ideas. Good luck to the merchant and crafting classes on this one. I've heard a lot of people say they'll quit if it goes live as-is and that just plain sucks because a lot of those people are my friends, guildmates, etc. Here's to hoping a developer reads this post.