Merchant Archive
Thread: Is Merchant a Colossal Waste of Skill Points?
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AnzelVincir
Thu Mar 24, 2005 11:12 am
#1
As a customer I love the Galaxy Wide Search. No more driving all over the galaxy like an idiot looking for a crate of bofu treats. No more jack-legs spamming in Theed/Coro. It will save literally thousands upon thousands of hours for players looking to make a purchase.
As a Merchant I think it really sucks. Not because Imind listing my items next to other vendors. Most customers already know what something should cost and so do crafters so it's really a non-issue for me. My prices are competitive and I'm in it for the long haul so fly-by-night undercutters don't effect me either.
What kills me is that I wasted all of these skill points on Artisan/Merchant to list my vendors on the global map. Should I basically just drop the majority of Merchant? Vendor management is a complete joke, the advertising line has been nullified, and who really cares about reduced fees?
I think that Merchant should either be 0 skill points or they really (really) need to give it an overhaul. Merchant could be such a cool profession but right now it just seems like a total waste of SPs to me.
wra-aith
Thu Mar 24, 2005 11:30 am
#2
Totally agree..
I suspect the skill point cost is more to do with "encouraging" people to purchase new accounts.....
Ragnaat
Thu Mar 24, 2005 11:33 am
#3
Always has been a waste of skill points to one degree or another
Whether its been the many, many months that you could drop *all* merchant and artisan skills with no detrimental effect.
Or the lack of need for advertising if you're in a large mall
Or the ability to drop hiring once you've placed the NPC styles you wanted
Or the lack of need for efficency if you have large cost / low volume sales and don't really need the 4000 item cap
Its all relative to what you're doing... and this last patch changes none of that IMO
Whether its been the many, many months that you could drop *all* merchant and artisan skills with no detrimental effect.
Or the lack of need for advertising if you're in a large mall
Or the ability to drop hiring once you've placed the NPC styles you wanted
Or the lack of need for efficency if you have large cost / low volume sales and don't really need the 4000 item cap
Its all relative to what you're doing... and this last patch changes none of that IMO
BruSwillis
Thu Mar 24, 2005 11:39 am
#4
Hmm, how can it be a total waste of skill points if it determines your vendor and sold item limit?
Dimear
Thu Mar 24, 2005 11:44 am
#5
As I see it, there are (were) 3 benefits of being a merchant:
1) Vendors that hold more items.
The vendor item limits are too low, but this is still an advantage of merchant.
2) Spambots that people can't /addignore. (even though it prevents us from using JTL)
Now that everyone has global advertising, spambots aren't as important. They will still draw some customers that are too fed up with 245823 pages of crap to filter through on the bazaar though.
3) Vendor listing on the map.
This is now pretty useless.
However, I would disagree that they should make merchants 0 sp. Then you'd have 12523 spambots running around every city. And another 2385242 vendors full of 99999999 credit storage crap, listed on both the overhead map and on the bazaar. Would bog down the system even more. What they really need to do is go the other way. Make merchant more valuable. Make the bazaar listing tied to the merchant advertising tree, with galaxy-wide listings at master merchant. As is, I don't think I can say that merchant is worth the sp. But making merchant 0 sp would be very bad.
AnzelVincir
Thu Mar 24, 2005 12:08 pm
#6
Dimear wrote:
As I see it, there are (were) 3 benefits of being a merchant:
1) Vendors that hold more items.
The vendor item limits are too low, but this is still an advantage of merchant.
2) Spambots that people can't /addignore. (even though it prevents us from using JTL)
Now that everyone has global advertising, spambots aren't as important. They will still draw some customers that are too fed up with 245823 pages of crap to filter through on the bazaar though.
3) Vendor listing on the map.
This is now pretty useless.
However, I would disagree that they should make merchants 0 sp. Then you'd have 12523 spambots running around every city. And another 2385242 vendors full of 99999999 credit storage crap, listed on both the overhead map and on the bazaar. Would bog down the system even more. What they really need to do is go the other way. Make merchant more valuable. Make the bazaar listing tied to the merchant advertising tree, with galaxy-wide listings at master merchant. As is, I don't think I can say that merchant is worth the sp. But making merchant 0 sp would be very bad.
I would really like to see Merchant get some primo development time. The economy is such a central and vital component of SWG I can't believe it's such garbage right now.
- The GWVS should be in the fourth box of advertising (if it isn't already) after the planetary ad campaign
- We should be able to list and relist multiple items of the same type/price
- Merchants should be able to conduct galaxy wide auctions of high end items with no limit on price
- We should be able to have more control over the look of our merchants. Maybe use ID interface to actually create them
- We should be able to MOVE merchants within the building they exist like furniture
- We should be able to drop a small warehouse type building to store only items that we produce. Items placed in the warehouse will stay there as long as mantenence is paid on the structure however the number of items will be subtracted from the number of items you can list on your vendors.
- We should have some sort of vendor ranking system sort of like Elite or X2. Maybe have it be like a badge when you examine a vendor you see something along the lines of "...Has sold239 items to 127 unique customers for 28231 credits". When you've sold a certain amount of items to to a certain amount of unique players for a certain amount of credits you get certain titles like "Sales Associate", "Salesman"...., "Mogul".
Man, merchant could be so cool...
Doug123
Thu Mar 24, 2005 12:13 pm
#7
Well ok the present system is pretty cool, but it is at the expense of an entire class. I will never run to any vendor now ever, and see his dressed vendors giving me the specials of the day. This new huge ability should of been a dream to the merchant class. What a great opportunity to make the merchant a viable profession. Instead any artisan with business 3 can list his wares and bypass all the merchants in the game. Why not just allow the merchants to respec because the class is now totally useless. This is one of the worst ideas I have ever seen as a publish in the game. What could of been a great publish requiring master merchants has totally destroyed the profession. All the hours spent adding art to a selling location, dressing vendors, adding some really cool content to the game has been moot. I feel bad for all the merchants on the server, this has been a very sad day for the game, and all the people that thought merchant would be a really good class to play. I hope everyone will take the time to read this post and make comments whether good or bad, and we can get sony to realise that a change at the expense of a class is ruining the game, and they need to put more thought into these changes. Sony seems to think that adding a great feature to the game will help everyone out, yet again they failed to think about the longterm affects of a change like this.
Tessha
Intrepid Server
Shadowace156
Thu Mar 24, 2005 2:06 pm
#8
if you want to sell stuff just get novice, if you want to have fancy venders just get 0-0-4-0 merchant
Aono
Thu Mar 24, 2005 2:08 pm
#9
ive got a bigger problem 
im master doc and master merchant, and sellin stims and med stuff, well my character is totaly useless after cu
im master doc and master merchant, and sellin stims and med stuff, well my character is totaly useless after cu
pykescylla
Thu Mar 24, 2005 2:32 pm
#10
Well, for me the item limit is certainly the key since I do use a vendor for storage so I don't see dropping much merchant any time soon. Not sure what I'd do with the extra SP's. Maybe master artisan.
However, with the number of factory crates listed on Scylla's GWVC approaching 7200, I think people are going to get tired of this system. Even something like Armor=>Body isn't that helpful because my listings alone take up three pages. You might want a comp chest plate but you have to look through my ubese and wookiee armor to find it. And armor is one of the better sorted categories.
However, with the number of factory crates listed on Scylla's GWVC approaching 7200, I think people are going to get tired of this system. Even something like Armor=>Body isn't that helpful because my listings alone take up three pages. You might want a comp chest plate but you have to look through my ubese and wookiee armor to find it. And armor is one of the better sorted categories.
SystemJinx
Thu Mar 24, 2005 10:57 pm
#12
If merchant went to 0 skill points, everyone would master it just for the 4000 item storage limit. It happens to a lesser degree now, but requiringskill points discourages it.
Just imagine what would happen to the vendor item database if everyone had at least 1000 items stored in a vendor...
Akkori
Thu Mar 24, 2005 11:14 pm
#13
I have traditionally been opposed to this, but I think they should just cert the crafting professions for vendors and scrap Merchant. Artisan wont change, but they get more vendors, hiring skill, item cap increases the farther up their Elite crafting prof. It sucks to even say that, but we are looking at another year probably before Merchant will get any more attention after this. There are too many professions that havent gotten any attention. Too bad our "attention" was so horribly misguided.
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