Merchant Archive

Tools Merchants have to advertise effectivly without spamming

• Planetary Map vendor locations


• Vendors that shout what products your selling


• Galaxy Trade Forums


• Auction chat channel


• Droids specifically designed to give the merchant ability to have a droid make an announcment, and give the wp to the vendor


• House signs sticking outside of the house for advertising


• Bazzar's that now give players very good access to your products with the click of amouse.

Now I ask any merchant out there to tell me 1 reason spamming is the most effective means of selling a product better than all these tools combined.

1 Thing I will say though that may help is the "read sign" feature. Merchants should be able to place text of products in stock.

---

Dimear wrote:

Who has the bazaar? It didn't go to the merchants...

Merchants do have spambots. And in my opinion, these are great ways to advertise, since they have appropriate limits and can't be /addignored (they're running out of ways to nerf merchant though - this is probably next). Most of the afk spammers you're so upset about aren't merchants. They're people who have product to sell, but don't want to invest the large number of sp to get a merchant spambot. Honestly, I can't blame them.

Even merchants who use spambots sometimes afk spam in another city. One of the recent merchant nerfs was that we can't play the game while we use spambots (at least we can't use JTL). So some merchants (myself included) set up a spambot in 1 town, go to another planet, and afk spam all day (or several days - until I want to actually play again).

The truth is that most of the other advertising methods you mentioned suck. Bazaar vendor listings are flooded with crap (much of it mine). It's a waste of time to use. Vendor listings on the map only show up if someone has initialized your vendor that day. Even then, they are only effective if someone happens to drive by your shop. Same with house signs. House signs are even more misleading, as there are lots of houses that have been vacant for 6 months that still have "Joe's uber foods - recently stocked" listed as the sign name. And you only see the spam from vendors if you initialize them - you drive by hundreds of vendors that are spamming to you, but you'll never know unless you go in their respective houses. Auction chat channel is a joke - nobody has actually ever read anything on that channel. Galaxy trade forum posts get bumped to page 13 within an hour. These can be somewhat effective for specific items, butit only hits a very small audience each day.

Afk spamming, however, is effective. And from a consumer point of view, it can sometimes be the fastest way to find what you're looking for. If someone is spamming that they have something, they probably do, or at least did when they started spamming. And it's not against the rules. The rules say "excessive" use of spatial communications. Effectively advertising a product once every 1-5 minutes isn't excessive. If you don't like it, you can always turn off chat from afk players or /addignore. Personally, I rarely /addignore anyone unless they don't know how to use a macro and spam something every second. I'd rather see what people are advertising - I might need it. Sometimes it's the only good way to find something.

---

---

eminemrapman303 wrote:
You cant get away from this spamming. It's against the rules of the game:

"Area Disruption is defined as any activity, intentional or unintentional, which harms or inconveniences a larger number of players. Causing a disruption may result in disciplinary action being taken against the account that may include official warnings, account suspensions, or account terminations depending on the severity of the incident which will be determined by a CSR and a CSR Supervisor. Multiple suspensions or account termination will result in the termination of all SOE game accounts

• Deliberately blocking a doorway or narrow area so other players cannot get past.


• Making excessive and inappropriate use of spatial communications, i.e. spamming. "

---

---

Elyssa wrote:

Ah, if only starport spamming required skillpoints.

---

---

Elyssa wrote:

How should the skillpoints be divided?

At what level do you gain the ability to speak in spatial in a "spam zone"?

How should the distribution of boxes go to allow more characters or more frequent speaking?

What skill do you need to get the ability to repeat text in x amount of time?

What skills reduce the amount of time between identical text?

Does a master have unlimited speaking ability or should there still be a timer/character limit?

Would this ability be limited to artisan/merchants or should there be some skill distribution into the doctor tree?

What about entertainers? Clearly they should be allowed to speak in cantinas, but how would their "spam points" be distributed?

These (along with "what are you smoking") are some of the questions that would probably come up.

---

---

Parody wrote:
Humans all default to Basic, so I don't think a whole lot will change.

(Beware, old subject coming back!)

It's too bad languages are free; I think it'd be more immersive if they cost a skill point each. (You'd get both speak and understand for a single point.)

Protocol Droids could then be given a translator module which would make them echo other people's speech in a language of your choice and echo your speech in a (potentially different) speakable language of your choice. Perhaps the DE would have to have all of the language skills in order to make such a module, or maybe they'd consider it off-the-shelf parts.

This could have worked into quests from non-human NPCs: you'd have to know a language they can speak or have a protocol droid w/translator out in order to talk to them and get/finish quests from them.

::shrug::

---