Merchant Archive
Thread: Proposed Alternative Skill Tree (Long Post)
My views on the possible modification of the Merchant Tree
Below is how I believe the merchant skill tree should look. It incorporates many of the good ideas that have been suggested on these boards. Please feel free to comment on, or propose your own versions of the skill trees.
There are a few functional changes I would make –
Firstly the merchant doesn’t have a set number of vendors, instead he has a set number of Staff… (see later)
Second Vendor items (both listed and in the stockroom) do not count towards a buildings total number of items.
THE SKILLS
ARTISAN BUSINESS SKILLS
Business 1 – (Reduced Bazaar Fees) – The Merchant gets a 20% discount on normal bazaar listings.
Business 2 – (Premium Auctions) – The Merchant Can Place Premium Auctions. – Premium Auctions have a 5,000 Credit Limit, and appear first in the listings with Bold titles.
Business 3 – (Frequent Traveller) – The Merchant Gets a 20% reduction in all travel fees (frequent Flyer bonus!)
Business 4 – The Merchant gets his first staff member.
NOVICE MERCHANT
The merchant gains an additional staff member
ADVERTISING SKILLS
Advertising 1 – (Basic Local Advertising) – Ad Barking is enabled on Vendors
Advertising 2 – (Advanced Local Advertising) – The merchant can assign customiseable text strings to vendors.
Advertising 3 – (Planetary Advertising) – The Merchant can list his BUILDINGS on the planetary Map. (only buildings with an active vendor can be listed)
Advertising 4 – (Advanced Advertising) – The merchant can purchase or make an Advertising droid to follow him around. The droid will “bark” a customiseable text string every 3 minutes. The droid acts the same as any pet, and can be killed in the wilderness, and in PvP.
EFFICIENCY SKILLS
Efficiency 1 – (Reduced Bazaar Fees), Premium Auction Fees Reduced 50%
Efficiency 2 – (Bartering Skill), Vendor Maintenance Fees Reduced (50%), Travelling fees reduced (50%)
Efficiency 3 – (Increased Capacity) – Vendors start with pre set limits to the numbers of items that can be for sale (terminals 50, droids 75, Basic NPC’s 100, Advanced NPC’s 200) – Efficiency 3 adds 50% to all of those limits.
Efficeincy 4 – (Maintenance Efficiency) – The merchant gets a reduction in Structure & Vehicle maintenance – (50% Shop Buildings, 25% Houses & Harvesters, 0% PA halls) – 25% all vehicles. The merchant can also specify a percentage of all sales to go directly to his vendor’s maintenance pool.
HIRING SKILLS
Hiring 1 – (Additional Staff) – The merchant gets an additional (3rd) staff member & more vendor options
Hiring 2 – (Advanced Staff) – The merchant gets an additional (4th) staff member. & Automatic re-stocking. If the stockroom contains multiple identical items of items for sale, they will automatically re-stock the for sale item when bought, this would negate the need for multiple listings of the same item. (items in stockroom do not count towards vendor total – set cap of 1000 stockroom items in each building.) –The merchant has to dedicate a member of staff (per building) to this task for it to work.
Hiring 3 – (Clothing Options) - The merchant gets an additional (5th) staff member. & Vendor Clothing – The merchant gains the ability to hand items of clothing to NPC vendors to wear.
Hiring 4 – (Trained Staff) - The merchant gets an additional (6th) staff member, additional NPC options & NPC Criers. The merchant can employ criers as staff members. Criers can only be place on the front porch of the merchants building. Criers can be taught 4 different strings of text, The crier will bellow a random text string each time a new PC comes within 20m – (max once per 3 minutes to prevent Spam.)
MANAGEMENT SKILLS
Management 1 – (Sign Management) – The merchant gains the ability to place a sign on the steps of his building.
Management 2 – (Remote Delivery). The merchant can pay a 20% premium to items he buys from the bazaar, and have them delivered directly to the vendor of his choice.
Management 3 – (Specialist Building) – The merchant gains the ability to place a specific shop house model. – Only a merchant with Management 3 can place this structure.
Management 4 – (Remote Access) - The merchant can access his vendors remotely. The merchant can perform all functions on the vendor remotely except retrieve items. (Accept Offers, Place items for sale from stockroom, withdraw sales etc.)
Master Merchant
Additional Staff Member (7th)
Bazaar Terminal – The Merchant can place 1 galactic bazaar terminal in a player city, where he is officially a member and resident there.
Banking Terminal - The Merchant can place 1 banking terminal in a player city, where he is officially a member and resident there.
Reduced Planetary Advertising Fees.
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I particularly like the idea of a master merchant being able to place a banking, and bazaar terminal in a player made city, in which he was resident. Should the merchant leave the city and declare residence elsewhere, then the terminals should be destroyed. Each MM should only be able to place 1 of each terminal type (so a city can have as many terminals as master merchants live there.) – Having a banking terminal in your shop would sure get a lot of people visiting…
My Biggest Change is to the Vendor / Staff Principal. Instead of having up to 7 Vendors, you get up to 7 staff… There are 4 types of staff member – Vendor, Advertising Droid, Porch Crier, and Re-stocker. – NOTE only Vendors generate XP.
(So the master merchant could have 1 Advertising droid, and two shop buildings with 1 vendor, 1 crier, and 1 re-stocker in each.)
These changes might need a bit of balancing as they would make running a vendor very “Hands-Free” at higher skills. Remote Access, Item Delivery, Automatic Re-stocking…. Maybe it could be implemented that if remote access is enabled on a vendor, the maintenance fee is increased?
Anyway, Thanks for reading, I hope you all like my proposals, but please feel free to suggest any other ways the Merchant tree could be made more worthwhile and interesting.
Very nice ideas though 
Just to chime in with my own ideas... I think a lot of the things in your post are sound ideas, haven't thought through them yet though, so I'm not signing off on anything.
Ideas of my own I HAVE thought about a bit... well, mostly related to the efficiency line...
Here's a snippet from another thread that I don't feel like re-stating, since I've done it once:
"
Right now, unfortunately, EVERY droid and Terminal vendor costs the same, and NPC vendors are bugged and don't seem to increase their fee when items are put onto them... and only 1 merchant skill changes this (efficiency 2). Vendor efficiency should be as it is now at business 3, to allow artisans to try out starting a shop, but required to go into merchant to make it more profitable... Business 4 in the artisan tree should provide a small maintenance cost reduction... basically, vendor maint cost reduction should be a 0 - 100 skill just like many others, which is increased by, say, +5 at business 4, +10 at novice merchant, +10 at efficiency 1, +10 at efficiency 2, +15 at efficiency 3, +20 at efficiency 4, and +30 at master merchant... this alone would make master merchant at least somewhat worthwhile. Add structure maintanence reductions at efficiency 2,3,4, and master.
"
For structure maint efficiency, maybe +10, +20, +30, +40, or maybe +20, +20, +20, +40... the downside to a ramping scale is that people will think they HAVE to get the entire tree to be effective while, for some psycological reason, the straight +20s makes people happy to stop at any point unless they actually want to progress up the tree... but master should definitely give the highest benefit.
So basically, I think changing some of the skills from instant grants to subtle benefits over a branch would be beneficial... spread maintenance cost reduction for vendors and structures out more over the branch, instead of being instant grants (have them be, as is typical, a 0-100 scale, 100 being the best reduction you could get, 0 being.. duh, no reduction and the base). This would allow someone who wants merchant simply for cost efficiency to benefit from every skill point they put in, while also giving someone who wanted to master merchant a pretty significant benefit from it.
Also,I believe that structure maintenance efficiency (either in its current efficiency 4 instant grant, or its ramping scale) should affect re-deed cost... i.e. the current formula of 100 times maintenance cost should hold true even when your have lower maintenance costs due to skills.
Really I don't think harvester re-deed cost reduction and harvester maintenance cost reduction should be a part of the merchant tree at all, but rather of the Miner profession... however, since the miner and farmer professions were scrapped and their abilities all either given as common grants to everyone, or rolled into merchant skills, that kind of means that merchant also covers miner now, so it makes sense, in its current form, to include this in the merchant tree.
Here's the pieces of this excellent post that I have direct responses to:
Business 3 – (Frequent Traveller) – The Merchant Gets a 20% reduction in all travel fees (frequent Flyer bonus!)
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Advertising 4 – (Advanced Advertising) – The merchant can purchase or make an Advertising droid to follow him around. The droid will “bark” a customiseable text string every 3 minutes. The droid acts the same as any pet, and can be killed in the wilderness, and in PvP.
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Efficiency 1 – (Reduced Bazaar Fees), Premium Auction Fees Reduced 50%
Efficiency 2 – (Bartering Skill), Vendor Maintenance Fees Reduced (50%), Travelling fees reduced (50%)
Efficiency 3 – (Increased Capacity) – Vendors start with pre set limits to the numbers of items that can be for sale (terminals 50, droids 75, Basic NPC’s 100, Advanced NPC’s 200) – Efficiency 3 adds 50% to all of those limits.
Efficeincy 4 – (Maintenance Efficiency) – The merchant gets a reduction in Structure & Vehicle maintenance – (50% Shop Buildings, 25% Houses & Harvesters, 0% PA halls) – 25% all vehicles. The merchant can also specify a percentage of all sales to go directly to his vendor’s maintenance pool.
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Hiring 1 – (Additional Staff) – The merchant gets an additional (3rd) staff member & more vendor options
Hiring 2 – (Advanced Staff) – The merchant gets an additional (4th) staff member. & Automatic re-stocking. If the stockroom contains multiple identical items of items for sale, they will automatically re-stock the for sale item when bought, this would negate the need for multiple listings of the same item. (items in stockroom do not count towards vendor total – set cap of 1000 stockroom items in each building.) –The merchant has to dedicate a member of staff (per building) to this task for it to work.
Hiring 3 – (Clothing Options) - The merchant gets an additional (5th) staff member. & Vendor Clothing – The merchant gains the ability to hand items of clothing to NPC vendors to wear.
Hiring 4 – (Trained Staff) - The merchant gets an additional (6th) staff member, additional NPC options & NPC Criers. The merchant can employ criers as staff members. Criers can only be place on the front porch of the merchants building. Criers can be taught 4 different strings of text, The crier will bellow a random text string each time a new PC comes within 20m – (max once per 3 minutes to prevent Spam.)
MANAGEMENT SKILLS
Management 1 – (Sign Management) – The merchant gains the ability to place a sign on the steps of his building.
Management 2 – (Remote Delivery). The merchant can pay a 20% premium to items he buys from the bazaar, and have them delivered directly to the vendor of his choice.
Management 3 – (Specialist Building) – The merchant gains the ability to place a specific shop house model. – Only a merchant with Management 3 can place this structure.
Management 4 – (Remote Access) - The merchant can access his vendors remotely. The merchant can perform all functions on the vendor remotely except retrieve items. (Accept Offers, Place items for sale from stockroom, withdraw sales etc.)
Master Merchant
Additional Staff Member (7th)
Bazaar Terminal – The Merchant can place 1 galactic bazaar terminal in a player city, where he is officially a member and resident there.
Banking Terminal - The Merchant can place 1 banking terminal in a player city, where he is officially a member and resident there.
Reduced Planetary Advertising Fees.
My responses:
In general, I like this list because it's mostly very easily implementable in the current design. Some of my more exotic ideas would be more difficult to code and are not especially good for that reason. These things can all readily be done except perhaps some of the remote management options.
1. I very much like the reduction in travel fees. It's a crucial part of what the Merchant should be doing.
2. The advertising barker who follows you around, like a faction pet, is an absolutely great idea, a number of people have suggested it. It seems readily doable and it would add a lot of color to the game overall.
3. I like everything in your version of the Efficiency tree except Efficiency 1. That still seems pretty useless to me.
4. I like your hiring tree quite a lot (along with the general switch to "staff members".)
5. Management is the currenttree that needs a complete rethink; you've done a good job of using it as the holder for a lot of the good ideas that people have suggested in various threads.
6. I think that your version of the Master Merchant is still missing that "something special" that most other Masters get. Compare with the sorts of things that Master Armorsmiths, Weaponsmiths and Architects get. There needs to be some unique, special, distinctive thing vested in the Master box, and I don't think your suggestions quite qualify.
Interesting ideas, this part is the only thing I don't really like:
Efficiency 3 – (Increased Capacity) – Vendors start with pre set limits to the numbers of items that can be for sale (terminals 50, droids 75, Basic NPC’s 100, Advanced NPC’s 200) – Efficiency 3 adds 50% to all of those limits.
I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who, for purely aesthetic reasons, would like to have vendors a specific type.. npc, droid, whatever... However if there are limits based on droid type it would penalize those players. For example, a droid engineer wants to use droid vendors because they are more in keeping with his profession and his merchandise. He would be far more limited in the amount of stock he could keep in comparison to someone using "Advanced NPC's". The same could be true of an "Imperial Shop" that only wanted to use human npcs.
I think if you want to place limits on the amounts of items that vendors can hold, it would be better to base those limits on player skill and not on vendor type.
Another thing that would be nice... split lots.. right now, we have 10 lots, which for merchants cover larger or multiple shops, for 'miners' cover harvesters and power gens, for crafters cover factories, and for large guilds, covers using fighting characters for free lots... I see issues with all of this... lots should be skill grants... each character should maybe have a certain allocation of general purpose lots, which maybe could be used for just houses, or MAYBE could be used for personal harvesters or wind gens...
And different skill trees would give you access to specific lots... crafting trees give you access to production lots (harvesters and/or factories... you could split these into 2 types of lots, or keep them using the same lots), merchant give you access to 'shop' lots (explained in the next paragraph)
Shop lots:characters were SUPPOSED to be limited to one house, except merchants who were supposed to have the ability to have multiple houses... development didn't even REALIZE this wasn't the case until recently, and it was too late to fix at that point, so everyone can have multiple houses.. however, if we can get some type of differentiation between 'house' and 'shop', either in look, some sort of flag, only allowing vendors to be placed in shops, or something, then 'shop' lots could be useful... allow every character to have a single house regardless of lot count (doesnt count against their lots, assuming a no-skill character has lots at all), disallowing vendors in it and not allowing any 'shop' options like a customize sign or banner, other look, etc... grant 'shop' lots to merchants that can fit any house and allow it shop options. And have general purpose lots granted at the same time in the trees, so a merchant CAN have a harvester or a few, maybe of limited scale (allow general lots to only be used for personal harvesters, MAYBE medium), etc. variable lots would be a good incentive to go up a specific tree, while giving people in that tree the advantage in that area over those who have no skills there, and also keep guilds from using fighter characters simply as a means of gaining lots... sure, this gives merchant guilds a reason to recruit fighters, but.... come on, if I am running a company, why would my ability to get raw material increase if I hired a security guard? (well, I guess he could be assumed to eliminate or curb a lot of theft of materials that might otherwise have occured, resulting in a higher input of usable resources, but.. that doesn't quite fit in the lot scheme. 
)
This is, of course, something that might be anywhere from somewhat difficult to next to impossible to implement with the existing code... not knowing how things are done behind the scenes, how objects are set up and interact, I can only make guesses as to how _I_ would have coded it and go from that point... but with something as complex as this, there are so many ways the same thing could be done, there's a good chance I have no clue how it is really set up in code.
Anabelle
I personally think 50-100 lots is perfectlyacceptable for a non Merchant character. Especially as they can get 2 at Novice Merchant.
Also - if you couple this with the aut re-stocking ability / staff member then as long as you don't have more than 50-100 UNIQUE items then you have all the space you need (1,00 o items in the stockroom).
To take your example, there more than what, 20?? different droid designs? so even a basic terminal could handle this quantity easily..
I don't agree with giving the majority of merchant abilities (multiple vendors - lots of capacity) to charcters that aren't merchants as a primary profession.
Other comments... similiar to what Anabelle said, I think abilities of your vendors should be based on your skills, NOT the type of vendor. Sure, it makes sense to have a bulky terminal have higher upkeep cost than higher end terminals, giving a reason to upgrade (though the means of upgrading right now is so painful that the selective hiring line is nearly useless unless you at the same time go up in the management/# of vendor line).
However, I don't think a Master Merchant should be penalized for having an affinity to a bulky vendor.
Ideally, a mix of the 2 ideas would be perfect. Have each model have its own base stats, while (as mentioned in my earlier post) having the efficiency line lower the relative cost of all vendors... so that as a merchant gets higher, he can still go with a lesser vendor, but still be better off than a low end merchant who is FORCED to use the lesser vendor. At the same time, this would still make a master merchant who chooses to use a bulky terminal have higher costs than one who min-maxes and doesn't care about how his place looks and just goes for the best price (which, really, is what makes a great merchant a great merchant... )... with that argument, I'd say eliminate the differences in models all together.
New idea, best one yet, but probably most difficult to implement... make vendors craftable... this is going to take a little explaining... first, keep things as they are, allow create vendors from structure to work as it does, have each model have base stats so that the later grants are more efficient, and have the merchant skills themselves lower costs across the board in a relative way (a master merchant using a bulky vendor still has the worst vendor he can have, but it costs him less than a novice merchant using the same vendor).
Now the crafting part.. allow players to use crafted merchants instead of generic created ones. Have Droid Engineers able to craft droid vendors, have bio-engineers able to craft NPC vendors, and have architects able to craft terminal vendors. Have these vendors have qualities, so a droid vendor made by a master droid engineer with high quality materials would have the base cost of that vendor type modified until they reached some maximum efficiency (either a global max, a max based on the merchants skill, or a max based on that vendor model, I'm not sure which would be best)... thinking about this, I REALLY like the idea... and it might be REALLY hard to implement, depending on how vendor objects are written.. it might also be really easy... it would bring non-forced interdependance between merchants and these 3 classes, it would give early merchants a reason to use higher end merchants, while at the same time, allow higher-end or well-to-do merchants free selection of what type of merchant to use without having to sacrifice for it!
Huh... wow, I suppose that was an epiphony.
Crafting Vendors, Nice idea I like that..
also the capacities and vendor fees could easily be linked to an ever decreasing scale as you go up a tree.. Which would definately be another way of implimenting it. It tried to make it so each skill up had a significant (read noticable) effect. Seems to me the biggest issue with the skill tree as it stands is that skill upgrades don't really do anything at the minute..
Now if only the devs would take the best of all our ideas *sigh*
I don't think NPC bodyguards are too much to ask. Make it a Master ability.
At the very least I want some 'boys' to keep a 100 meter radius around my shop clear from mobs. AND if I ever decide to go faction, a Merchant would be a tasty target. if I ever want to be a rhett butler type supplying my comrades-in-arms against the evil empire..or vice versa I'm going to have to accept getting my butt kicked around the block every five minutes.
Who was Han Solo afraid of? Jabba
Who put Leia in a chainmail bikini? Jabba (thank you!)
Who was such a force that even the Empire didn't challange him? Jabba
And while you're at it..give me a little rat-like sidekick to torture, and a chick in a chainmail bikini too.
Maybe have some interesting merchant ability cause mind, health, or action wounds (add enough of a benefit to make the whole thing at least somewhat worthwhile)... haven't thought about it long enough to have a good solid idea, but I've long missed needing to visit a cantina or hospital. Maybe I'm just sick... hmmm, I guess that's one reason I need to visit a hospital. lol
How about going to the hospital or bar because we're so stressed out over the plethora of bugs in our profession?