Merchant Archive
Thread: Nobody likes Merchant because they're doing it wrong
From the very beginning, the Merchant profession was supposed to be someone who bought crafted items and resold them for a profit.
But I've been reading more and more from people wanting the Merchant profession done away with because they're doing it wrong.
I've been reading several posts of people who are using SOMEONE ELSES VENDORS (that person has the merchant profession), paying them a small fee to stock the vendor and set adbarking, etc. But in reality the CRAFTER is controlling things and the MERCHANT is simply acting as stockboy.
In the above method of operations, I can see how the "merchant" is more of a pain since it's still the crafter doing the work, but having to do it through another person and coordinating schedules, etc.
But is this really the way the Merchant is SUPPOSED to be played?
The succesful merchant buys in bulk and resells the items at a marked up price.
I have a contact who supplies me with Spice. I go to him once a week and say "This week, I need 20 crates of Muon Gold and 10 crates of Neutron Pixie".
He says "That'll be 210k credits (at our agreed upon rate of 7k per crate).
I pick up the crates (or he delivers). This is the end of the crafters involvment. He doesn't deal with customers, he doesn't pay vendor maintenance or shop maintenance fees. He simply supplies bulk amounts of crafted items and makes a good profit for his troubles.
Iplace the crates of producton the vendor at 11k.Set ad barking, send out emails of specials to regular customers who have requested them, pay vendor maintenance, etc. For my troubles, I make a 4k per item profit, minus maintenance fees and time spent dealing with customers.
So why is it that this arrangement is looked upon as undesirable by so many crafters? It is these crafters who want to sell their OWN products without investing the skill points in the Merchant profession that are complaining about the idea of only Merchants having vendors.
Am I the only onewho sees the above explained arrangement as being desirable? Especially for weaponsmiths or armorsmiths who hate being bothered by their customers. Simply supply your goods to a merchant and let them deal with the crazy people.
Enix_Dayspring wrote:
From the very beginning, the Merchant profession was supposed to be someone who bought crafted items and resold them for a profit.
But I've been reading more and more from people wanting the Merchant profession done away with because they're doing it wrong.
i dont want it "done away with", just moved to Buiness in Artisan
I've been reading several posts of people who are using SOMEONE ELSES VENDORS (that person has the merchant profession), paying them a small fee to stock the vendor and set adbarking, etc. But in reality the CRAFTER is controlling things and the MERCHANT is simply acting as stockboy.
Sadly that is what retail is
In the above method of operations, I can see how the "merchant" is more of a pain since it's still the crafter doing the work, but having to do it through another person and coordinating schedules, etc.
But is this really the way the Merchant is SUPPOSED to be played?
The succesful merchant buys in bulk and resells the items at a marked up price.
I have a contact who supplies me with Spice. I go to him once a week and say "This week, I need 20 crates of Muon Gold and 10 crates of Neutron Pixie".
bully for you....i get contacts set up and then they dont log in for weeks or vanish/quit change professions or want to do business when i am at the bottom of a cave on endor
He says "That'll be 210k credits (at our agreed upon rate of 7k per crate).
I pick up the crates (or he delivers). This is the end of the crafters involvment. He doesn't deal with customers, he doesn't pay vendor maintenance or shop maintenance fees. He simply supplies bulk amounts of crafted items and makes a good profit for his troubles.
Iplace the crates of producton the vendor at 11k.Set ad barking, send out emails of specials to regular customers who have requested them, pay vendor maintenance, etc. For my troubles, I make a 4k per item profit, minus maintenance fees and time spent dealing with customers.
So why is it that this arrangement is looked upon as undesirable by so many crafters? It is these crafters who want to sell their OWN products without investing the skill points in the Merchant profession that are complaining about the idea of only Merchants having vendors.
most crafters can get a vendor with only 9 skill points. why would you go thru a middle man? if you can get 11k for your product yourself. its really just GREED. most things i buy in bulk i buy of someones VENDOR. we dont have to talk or meet. Or if we do they just put it on the vendor and i pick it up at my convience
Am I the only onewho sees the above explained arrangement as being desirable? Especially for weaponsmiths or armorsmiths who hate being bothered by their customers. Simply supply your goods to a merchant and let them deal with the crazy people.
you dont have to "deal" with people. i craft my goods and stock my vendor. if anyone "bothers" me i just send them a waypoint and tell them that all i have is on the vendor.
i am usually most bothered by people when they are AT the vendor.
so teh same people are just going to be messaging ME Asking, can i get that in blue, do you have any with X stats. etc
i think merchant works just fine the way it is. most people, aside from a few here are happy with it. it works. it adds to everyones gaming experience.
people are just trying to make merchant more because it exists i think.
it is a nice add on to your artisan skills
those that dont want to sell their own goods can already go thru a merchant for sales. those that want to have a shop can. the shops add to EVERYONES experience and not the small minority who want to be solely merchants.
if you have good product, your stuff will sell with little effort from you.
I say it works for the game. LEAVE IT ALONE.
Now ---
If interplanetary travel wasnt so quick and easy, if every crafter couldnt make the exact same items, if the same resource didnt spawn on severall planets at once,. if different planets had different tax ratesthere might actaully be a real Trade, real supply and demand etc.. What i mean its that water might cost 10 cpu on tattooine but 5 on corellia, teh products made with it would follow suit. But the price is constant everywhere
But the truth is that those spices that you bought are the same as all the other spices. you cant spit without hitting someone selling Muon. its like Coca Cola, you can get it anywhere.
The market for goods is just not dynamic enough to support a vibrant merhant class.
People buy from you because it is convient or because you are usually well stocked, because you have good prices or you get good word of mouth. It is about your SERVICE and your PRODUCT, not about the merchant skill tree,
I can't figure out the point of this post...
I have very little desire to sell things that others make. I like selling things I make. In only a couple instances have I made an arrangement to sell someone else's goods.
I like the profession...till the vendor caps hit anyway... If you don't like the profession, why don't you move on?
Putting all vendors in artisan is a crappy idea.
Zanholo wrote:
Putting all vendors in artisan is a crappy idea.
why is that...why does merchant need to be a full blown profession as opposed to a common skill like Surveying.
The people who want mining brought back want to take surveying away from EVERYONE except miners.
it is the same priciple of giving all those skills to merchants
What would be the harm is everyone could have say 4 vendors with Buisness 4. cap the vendors at 4 instead of 6. make the limits like 500 items.
The game would not fall to pieces or be harmed with no merchant skill tree, in fact idoubt any thing would chnage from what we have now. And i dont see any problems with what we have now.
well doc... a couple of games have nearly done that.
they dont make you never ever have combat skills if you take say trade skills...if you have the time and inclination to EARN the points you can do whatever you choose.
that is the wave of the future. not the restictive you can be X but if you do you can never be Y, pigeon holed, dinosaur method SWG uses.
but seriuosly...
please give me a good reason why MERCHANT skills should not be treated as the survey skills are.
What about merchant actually warrants 20 skill boxes?
it is simply an add on to our artisan skills. it just seems like people just keep fishing for reasons to make it a full blown profession
It would simply add too much to a BEGINNER skill tree. Rather than having a million horribly stocked vendors, I would MUCH rather have 1000 vendors that are actually stocked by someone who actually WANTS to be a merchant.
What I can't figure out is why those who are not merchants get so bent... You get a vendor at bus 3. What more do you want? Oh yeah...four vendors...not likely.
They aren't fishing for reasons to make it a full blown profession. It already is one. It is more like there are people trying to take advantage of the fact that it is currently weakened by bad design which is being abused, in order to get a free extra profession.
Just because you don't value the current skills doesn't make those skills invalid. The Hiring tree isn't any more useless than some of the other skill trees in the game. By your standard the architectural skills trees have a complete line that is entirely fluff (Furniture..there isn't any practical use for any of it). The entire tailor profession is pretty much fluff too..everyone can just wear noob clothes.(They have an entire skill tree for color!!) Image Design another fluff profession.
If you want all merchant skills in Artisan the place to debate that is Artisan..not merchant.
well doc... a couple of games have nearly done that.
they dont make you never ever have combat skills if you take say trade skills...if you have the time and inclination to EARN the points you can do whatever you choose.
yes lets just say **** the player economy and let everyone do everything at the same time. NICE IDEA
that is the wave of the future. not the restictive you can be X but if you do you can never be Y, pigeon holed, dinosaur method SWG uses.
No its not the wave of the future its the wave ofBS
but seriuosly...
please give me a good reason why MERCHANT skills should not be treated as the survey skills are.
The profession is IN THE GAME so it deserves to be treated like a real profession. In a mmorpg you dont just delete professions that people worked hard to get. You work to fix them and make them fun like they did with commando.
What about merchant actually warrants 20 skill boxes?
Not much until the devs pull their heads out of their asses and fix us. All i can hear from your posts is "wha wha wha me no want spend skill points on poopy merchant prof gimme all the benefits witout any of thework wha wha wha and delete all those real merchants who worked hard to get where they are wha wha wha"
it is simply an add on to our artisan skills. it just seems like people just keep fishing for reasons to make it a full blown profession
I agree merchant is gimped but a lot of profs in this game are gimped. This isnt a good enough reason to just get rid of them. Stop your bitching
Naufragus wrote:
Yolner wrote:
. In a mmorpg you dont just delete professions that people worked hard to get.
there is 0 work involved in getting merchant. it is nearly as easy as getting dancer points. no one works hard for merchant all you do is sit back and wait.
Well, Im not talking about POWERING my way to Master Merchent, Im talking about PLAYING a merchant.
Sure, you COULD throw a bunch of items on your vendor and sit and wait for the skill points to rack up. And if all you wanted was to power your way to Master just to say you did it, then you can. But if youre actually trying to be a Merchant and deal with your customers, and provide a service to them and you did what you say probably won't be very successful.
I put a great deal of effort into my shop. I try to supply as many different types of items to sell as I possibly can. That involves making contacts with suppliers, working out pricing, finding new suppliers when they cant meet the demand or quit, stocking the vendors, send out emails to customers who want to be notified of specials, interacting with customers who come by regularly because I provide excellent customer service. I have to constantly be seeking out new and better things to supply and make sure they STAY stocked.All this, not to mention investing time into doing research for ALL the items I sell to answer my customers questions and making sure they are getting the best product possible. A crafter selling their items only has to worry about what hes making. Currently I have to have in depth knowledge of 6 different professions to be able to answer my customers questions.
Then you have the fact that you are INVESTING alot of money in products that may or may not sell quickly or at all. If I pay 500k credits to a master medic to get stocked up on meds, they may fly off the shelf or they may not sell well at all. That money is tied up for as long as those items are sitting on the vendor while the medic already has the money in his pocket.
Or what if I try something riskier like a vendor of clothing or armor attatchments? I may pay a large sum of money for good quality attatchments. And they may sell well or not at all. Then youre talking about MILLIONS of credits being tied up.
There is considerably more time and effort involved in being a REAL merchent than most people think.
If you actually did what was intended, placing a vendor and trying to drum up business, it was pretty tought making it all the way to Master. True, you can probably grind it out like the Holo-Merchants are doing now, but that's not what many of us did.
As for the Wholesale vs. Retail debate, especially when it gets boiled down to the 150 for each vendor limit issue, the Crafter can place the items on HIS vendor, the one he gets at Bus 3, and maybe Novice Merchant.
He then would give admin rights for his factory to his Merchant friend, and the Merchant would place the rest on HIS vendors.
In this case, the Merchant would be a Supplicant to the Crafter, but he would probably be able to handle the "sloppy seconds" from several different Crafters.
If the Crafters will be able to keep their vendors, then theMerchant class will have to adapt to pick up the dropped ball wherever it may lie.
And kudos for the Dev team to come up with a "technical problem" to help knock the ball out of the Crafters hands.
enix i was just talking about points...
the exploiter that was directed at was impling that it was hard work earning the Merchant XP...that he some how had to slave and grind to be master...merchant i sabout the easiest profession to level
but you describe what i think being a merchant is about.
as i said, It is SERVICE and PRODUCT
no where in what you are saying do any of the "skills" we have come into play. it is all about YOU and what YOU do.
before i was holo grinding, i spent most of my time traveling the galaxy for good deals and good merch.
You would be a successfull Merchant with only Business 3
Most crafters do not se that the merchant does as "added value" to the product. Hence, any profit the merchant get by selling thair products is seen as "stolen" from them.
Until the merchant profession is changed so that crafters will se the merchant, as someone who can save them time and work by selling thair products for them, they will not like our profession.
I am both a weaponsmith and a merchant, and I can se this from both sides. For example it really pissed me off when a person brought a lot of cheap weapons I had made form below average resources, and the sold them at the bazaar for a huge mark-up (was selling novice profession weapons for 5cpu).
As a merchant, I can se why it was done... but low sell high, is the entire purpose of the merchant profession. However, as a crafter I really bugged me to the point that I send the person am email that if he ever did it again I would ban him.