Merchant Archive

ed

I propose:

#1 a small maintenace fee... fixed (maybe diferent for vendors from hiring 1, 2, 3, 4... I.E. the "fancyer" the vendor, the more their sallary is.

#2 A "sales tax", like 3-5%...

#3 a "restocking" fee of 20%...

The restocking fee is ONLY if the item is REMOVED from the vendor.

This would... charge the merchants a resonable rate, but allow them to have high price items without going broke. Aditionally, it would prevent people using the merchant as storage.

The only problem this causes is, an extreme cost of moving a merchant. *BUT* this could be fixed by allowing us to "reclain" a merchant, with thier stock, and have it re-apear when it is placed.

ed

I think I will be getting rid of the pointless class called "Merchant" and be doing my sales by hand once again. You could have implemented money sinks in a dozen other ways, but you decide to hurtnot just thefew incredibly wealthy smiths, but anyone thatuses vendors for theease of letting people come to their shop at any timethe seller isn't available. Thanks for giving me the ability to start over again....AGAIN.

I have an idea... How about you hurry up and get all the nerfs out of the way so we can figure out what isn't going to be a waste of our time or suck a couple weeks down the road?

st

---

Rosso6 wrote:
ed

I'm not in favour of any maintenance increase in vendors until:

A> VEndors are fixed. Vanishing items after they are bought and items being stuck on vendors make them unuseable.

B> Bazaar sales are nerfed. Currently, too much is sold too easily on the bazaar. There is little enough reason to have vendors for low cost items (chef or tailored goods)

---

Make the Bazaar terms act as a "phone book" of all player vendors. Find your item, see the price and get a waypoint to the vendor...

ed

is that the current formula being used in vendor droids?

shouldnt droids cost less to run than paying a mob vendor?

what about allowing vendors in nonpublic pa halls?? Weve had one in the past.. used as a company store.. since there are so many PA related bugs.. throw us a bone..

Alot of players I know only have vendors in their house to use as storage.. since you dont provide enough inventory capacity for many crafters.. yeah I know.. database issue.. but your database limitations are making it tough for me to enjoy the game.. when i have no inventory space anywhere.. crafters need an inventory boost.. either double factory input inventory .. allow us to place storage modules..(with about 250ea) or grant some other storage or lot bonus for those of us who rely on them to enjoy the game

--you notice that players have too many items.. more than expected.. so you cut melons and grant experimentation to reduce strain on your storage system... but what about the fact that it shows players have greater need for space then you thought?? i guess that didnt occur

edWOW!

That's an IMMENSE figure, Q, and if you institute anything even approaching that, I'm cashing in my Business skills and just selling door to door.

I currently sell about 30 items at a time on my basic Business IIIvendor, and very little on there more than 1500 credits or so. I already feel like I spend massive amounts of credits to mainatin the vendor, maybe 2000 per day. If anything, I think the rate should be slightly decreased - I tend to sell things sporadically, since my vendor is in a remote spot by a POI. When people comes through,business isgood, but when nobody visits, things sit there moldy. I like the tax idea as a supplement, but I know there has to be a basic fee, as well - otherwise, people will just drop all their junk in the vendor and we'll take up valuable server space for, say, 10,000 CDEFs that will never sell.

So I'd prefer a very small flat fee for keeping an item on the market (enough to keep out riffraff like CDEFs and knives), combined with a more moderate tax for every sale, perhaps with higher brackets for higher prices (a luxury tax, for instance, on anything over 20k).

ed

As an architect, obviously I'm not extremely fond of the vendor fees based on listing prices. Nor am I in favor of sales taxes. Even 10% takes a major chunk out of deserved profits.

I support the idea of standard maintenance fees based on the type of vendor. Bulky vendors being the cheapest, NPC's being more expensive per day. The commission idea would be good if these vendors were actually persuading anyone to do anything. Vendors are more like a parts room clerk that runs and gets the item, no persuasion or push for sales.

If the sales tax idea is used, the sales tax should be pushed onto the buyer rather than the seller as it is in real life. The item is listed for 1000 credits, for instance, but the buyer must pay the extra 100 credits for a 10% sales tax.

edIt should be something more along the lines of

(TotalItemValue^2) / 1000000

or

(TotalItemValue^3) / 1000000000

every time increment, however long you choose that to be (45 mins in your previous example).

The reason for this is to weight vendor "taxes" more heavily on those who sell more expensive items.

I would point out, though, that for items 3000 credits or below, it is still far more efficient in most cases simply to place that item on a normal bazaar terminal. Even at your suggested rates, an item would have less of a "tax" on it sitting on a bazaar term for 5 or so hours (at a flat 20 creds) than on a vendor.

st

The proposed formula will kill the idea of providing good customer service, period. As the calculation stands it will really just make people mad. Not just merchants, everyone.

If you are a character that needs to purchase items from shops, when you go shopping you want to find vendors stocked up! This will kill that idea all together. Base the maintenance on sales, so that a merchant can keep their vendors stocked up.

The formula you have proposed penalizes the hard working merchant who takes the time to stock is vendors up so he/she can go do something else. There is no way you should penalize a merchant for keeping his vendor stocked. If you want a money sink for merchants who are the wealthiest characters in the game, tax sales, period.

ed

I don't have a vendor cause I'm not a crafter. This doesn't effect me...

However, I'd rather see insurance turned back on and the cost lowered as someone else pointed out. Like they said, if the price was 2K for all items, then people would use it. As it is now, (when we HAVE insurance) I don't use it because it's too freaking expensive. At most, I have like 8K on my person at all times. One GOOD blaster for me is like 12K. You can see that I'm a pretty poor guy. I can't afford the 20,000+ credits it costs to insure all so I usually don't insure ANYTHING. The interface for insurance is too aggravating to bother insuring individual items (since you have to access the terminal with the radial menu EACH time you insure an item).

Turn insurance back on and lower the cost. THEN, add the vendor maintenence (something I thought was in the game from the beginning actually ) and see how the money sinks go.

edI've only read a few of the posts but most seem to say the fee should be a sales tax rather than based on the total value of all items posted. I just want to say I agree. The current ( if it weren't bugged on NPCs) method makes it too expensive to put up many large items. A combination of the two fee types would be the most like reality andmight work well too, I think.

ed

As I merchant I sell items for all the rest of my PA. I have 4 different vendors and on one alone, you are talking about charging me 16K/day. We are 2KM outside kaadara waiting for player cities so we can add a shuttleport and actually get business. In addition, I have a store on Lok that I am shutting down because every singel day I have to fly out to Lok and reregister my vendor on the planetary map.

My new vendor (singular) will now have 100 chance cubes each for 1cr with a descritption of my stock and a person to get in touch with.

Basing your fee on the total value of items on the vendor is ridiculous. This hurts the people who are selling on the tightest profit margin (architects) and those that are trying to play the merchant class the way it was meant to be played, as a hub for others to sell their goods.

Sensi, Master Artisan, Architect, Merchant

ed

with all the bugs in the **edit** vendor, instead of charging for a vendor that sometimes you the owner, can't even access, a time-rate is not a good idea. If the vendor was working 99% of the time..maybe. But I'd say put the interval at 60 min, so it's easier for us to figure out. And if you do this, you better allow us to have a total at the bottem of the screen, so we don't have to manually add up 250 items.

Now, I'm not in favor of that. I'd like to see a tax placed on every item that gets sold. Two options...either the customer pays it (and if he doesn't have the tax money then he can't make the purchase) or the vendor pays it. I think it should be something like 5-8% of the item.

So, if you sell a 100k large home, 5000-8000 would go right into a game moneysink. I wouldn't be opposed to some kind of combination of these two ideas either. But make the customer pay this one. Vendors have enough items already that they have to remember to constantly pay maitenance on.

ed

Wow, that last suggestion sounds like it'd be a pain to implement in code.

How about something nice and simple: straight sales tax and a nominal (like 1cr per hour per item) maintenance fee. Nice and simple.

Money is taken out of the system AND merchants/artisans can have highly-stocked vendors without paying huge amounts of money per second.

Also, if you really want to get money out fo the game, make items degrade. Degradation will force people to buy new items ... that will result in more money going into harvesters and out of the game.