Merchant Archive
Thread: Summing Up the Issues: Merchants, the Despised Class
1. Vendor bugs. Most of the ones from Beta are still around; any of them can cripple a business outright. They range from inability to place to weird consequences from deletion to strange maintenance costs to customers being unable to use or even delete items they purchased from your vendor.
2. Other bugs with Merchant skills. I haven't gotten up to vocalization yet post-launch but it never worked in Beta; I see from threads here that it doesn't work properly now.
3. Many "empty" boxes of no utility or significance. We have TWO boxes devoted to lowering costs of placement on the Bazaar. TWO boxes. When in fact no Merchant is going to use the Bazaar for much and when the costs of placement are negligible to begin with. Master Merchant, the pinnacle of the profession, is just a kind of dull bonus box, when *every other profession* that I know of gets something amazing when they hit Master just to recognize the achievement.
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Some suggestions:
1. Fix all the bugs. That's obvious, I won't belabor the point.
2. More importantly: get a dev to just sit down for two weeks and hammer out a design for some new skill boxes that actually make sense in terms of the game as it stands. My own suggestion would be that instead of lowering costs to place items on the Bazaar that the Merchant should get an entire skill tree devoted to lowering every other fixed "drain" in the game. Box 1 should lower training fees; Box 2 should lower factory fees; Box 3 should lower vendor and house maintenance fees; Box 4 should lower harvester fees *and* power usage.
Another suggestion: a skill box that allows a merchant to make credit loans to other players at a fixed rate of interest and fixed payment schedule.
Another suggestion: give merchants an extra ten lots for achieving Master Merchant.
And so on. There are a lot of things within the current design that would be meaningful merchant skills--and what's nice is that there is NO WAY to grind Merchant skills without operating a business. Sure, a PA can game the system a little by having all its members buy things priced at 1 credit to up a merchant member's experience, but that's soluable if it becomes an exploit.
1. Placement of signs in cities.
2. Customizable "skins" for store exteriors that would allow words or images to be placed on them.
3. Remote transport of cargos--allow merchants to "tip" large amounts of goods just like we do credits from Banks now, so that a factory crate from someone on Talus could move into the merchant's inventory on Tatooine instantly
4. Allow the merchant to build one special kind of installation, the "emporium"--basically a store building designed as such. That could be a good Master Merchant skill as well. It would help in the long run--right now you don't know whether a building is a store or a house until you try to enter it, if you just happen to come across it.
Make it optional. I have a low priced resource store for Avian. My doors are locked to everyone but Avian members. I would not like my sales visible on the bazaar. If they change Bazaar visibility options.... make it optional.
Not every good business strategy wants it visible on the bazaar.
I agree with EVERYTHING said here. If they want merchants int he game, and they need them for a player run economy, than they need to make changes. The skill boxes are just pathetic. If things don't change soon many merchants will just drop the skills. But look at how much attention is being paid to us now.. none. So I doubt tthings will ever change. It's so sad.
2. Need some way of our buildings standing out from the crowd - maybe a dedicated shop building that only a novice merchant can place.
3. Remove the ability for an artisan to place a vendor please - many crafters just plonk their own vendor down and bypass us merchants.
4. some reward for attaining master status would be nice !
5. Merchant sales SHOULD be visible on the Bazaar.
6. If a dedicated shop building is created, please create banking and bazaar terminals that can ONLY be placed in merchant shops (even maybe make that ability a reward of the Master Merchant.)
7. Keep up the good work fixing the games faults as quick as you can, just PLEASE can we have the bugs that BREAK the class fixed as a priority.. I don't know of any othe profession (except maybe Droid Engineer) that is as messed up as ours !!
Thank you for listening !
Ewok, that's a sure sign that your prices are WAY too low. :-) You may be trying to help the community by selling things cheap, but in my experience people would rather reliably be able to find what they need when they come to your shop, even if they have to pay more. It's not like money is hard to come by, and you'll be helping the economy (and making less headache for yourself) if you up your prices.
Khaldun, I agree with everything you said, and I like your ideas. We definitely need more "beef" in our skill tree. The Advertising (to III anyway, once they get barking working) and Hiring skill trees are neat, but I feel silly busting my butt to get one more vendor or 4 credits off a bazaar listing.
Oh, and it wasn't that there weren't any of us testing merchants in beta... it's just that until the last week, merchant experience was coming in at the rate of 5 xp per vendor per day. So no one got very far up the tree between character wipes.
Nice thought out ideas. I also think it would be nice to be able to "Retrieve All" or "Withdraw All", maybe with a double confirmation box: Withdraw all items? --- Are you sure?
Even a buy all or sell all, with the option of Turning Buy All on/off could be useful, say if you have 50 of Product X that you're selling for 20,000credits. Just some more thoughts.
Mike
Good post dude!
Merchant now is just a pain in the ass to play. Definytly needs to be re-worked. !!
Certainly I can see cases where you would *not* want to tie in, but there are other instances where you would.
I like Rogue's idea about just showing one item up for sale at a time. Most of us merchants are likely going to be buying stuff in bulk and we either have to put all of them in the vendor at once or hang on to a couple so that we don't flush the market. It's not a good choice. Having the choice to have either one or two show and the rest in the stockroom till someone buys one would be a great idea. I'd also like to have the ability on this to price them individually (so say you had a dlt20a priced at 2000 showing and a much better one in the stock room that you could price to 4000 when the 2000 sold.) or that you could mark individual items out of the group of items in the slot. Would be nice if this was only available to Merchants as well so that players will have less clutter if they go to a Merchant's store.
I always personally felt that they should merge the hiring and management lines as both in my opinion are a bit weak. Hiring is nice cause you can have some cool lookin vendors, however most people don't care how the vendors look, they just want the items they carry. Management is nice for the additional vendors but 2 or 3 is enough for the most part less you have the supply chain to handle a few shops on different planets.... The problem is finding a replacement, and they are having a difficult enough time finding enough use with what they got. Maybe Kruppe's delivery idea would work but I'd rather see a 25/20/15/10/5 scale causeI don't think it should ever be free for the delivery. This line could also have Khaldun's cargo transport idea in the line witha descending pay scale as well and perhaps further reach too (beginning with starting planets and moving towards the advanced planets).
Mypersonal solution to the problem that you can't differentiate from store and normal building is to create a beacon item that maybe engineer or master engineer can make that a novice merchant can place in his house that creates a blue icon above his house that can be seen from a distance.
Also I think it'd be good for merchant to get an extra vendor, and maybe an extra house slot or additional housing storage at master merchant. I think those would be good rewards for training up to master.