Merchant Archive
Thread: Vendors and private houses
TEMPORARY WORK AROUND TO PRIVATE VENDORS
Add an access fee to your building after making it public. make it like 1000 cr per 15 minutes. Putting people on the entry list allows them to bypass this fee.
Building has to be public to put an access fee on it so you can put a vendor in there. This cant be nerfed because it will destroy possible "cover charges" for nightclubs that want to run robo-bartenders.
If someone pays the 1000cr fee (or whatever you set) then the more power to them. Just set it exorhbantly high.
umm.. so what happens to the vendor in our PA hall (the hall is NOT public)? It's still there, people can offer items to it and I can accept and put said items out for sale. Will the vendor, with all its contents, simply vanish one day unless I make our hall public?
Why not make vendors in private buildings simply not list their objects on the bazaar, and limit their contents to say 250-500 items if not placed in a public house? That would be sufficent for us to keep the all the "free stuff" we hand out inside our PA.
For me, I have too many items...
As Architect I want to show my guests what say can buy from me. I want to craft my items at home. So if I want to have this I have a problem because this will be too much items.
Why could backpacks count as one item? Also having other items in it.? So we can store more items in the backpacks. If I equip my backpack the items in it don't count as items in my inventory. Why can't this be in house? That we have a option on the radial menu of the backpack when we are in our house to suspend the backpack from the wall.
A better opportunity is extra space in furnitures!
Why can an Architect make furnitures like chests? Ok, a house looks more fimliar with it. But why can furniture have other advantages than sitting on a chair? Why can chest and other furniture can't bring you extra storage place? Some furniture should only have storage for speccial items like the tool chest or what it called only for toolshave like the survey and crafting tools. Perhaps there has to be maxiumum acertain number of this storage furniture in each house. That would increase the importance of furniture and support the economic. Think about it!
This goes well beyond the thread subject of "vendors and private houses" - it goes to the root use of vendors, the storeroom and storage limits. It also delves some into the mechanics of the Merchant class. At the end of this post I will propose what may be a viable solution, although I realize any change has unforeseen effects.
I have four vendors. Three are in a public structure and one was in a private.
The private vendor was in our local doctors house so that I could sell him resources for medicinal crafting at reduced rates. He does not have his own vendor as he is not an artisan and can not create his own. I also did not desire to chance someone else purchasing them from my public vendor for these low prices.
My other three vendors are in my large Tatooine house. Two are very accessible - in the main room when you enter - one for equipment/misc items and the other primarily for resources. The third is upstairs in my workshop and I use it as a closet - in fact, it is named "Ewach's Closet."
Yes - I am among those that are using their storeroom for excess storage - there are reasons I was forced to do so, as I will explain below. My vendors have over 230 items stored in the stockroom - until this most recent thread started I was not even aware that was outside of their intended use. Seemed to make perfect sense to me.
I personally chose NOT to pursue an advanced crafting profession (armor, guns, architect, etc) but instead decided to be a Businessman (Master Artisan/Master Medic/Merchant with some combat skills). I enjoy the support role of being able to heal friends in combat, as well as heal customers that visit my shop while I am there.
However, that means that I can not produce any high value items that bring in significant cash flow, as the architects, tailors, et al can do. Instead I act as a middle man. Some elite crafters choose not to pursue business and do not have their own vendors. I am their answer.
They offer their items to my vendor for 1 credit and set the price they wish to sell the item at. I in turn put the item up for sale and, when it sells, I give them 80% of the selling price, keeping 20% as commission for my services. (This is not unreasonable when you consider that real world retail often works on a 100% markup principle) Often they make items faster than I can sell them, so if I get 10 Scout Blasters, perhaps I put three up for sale and maintain the other 7 in the storeroom.
Multiply this by armorsmiths, spice makers, droid engineers,etc - I intend for my vendor to carry a diverse product line. In order to manage my inventory I *HAVE* to use the stockroom as a stockroom - holding my excess goods until it is time to put them up for sale.
The same with resources - since I can not (under the current stacking rules, frequent resource shifts and house limits) store my resources in my house, I keep many of them in the stockroom.
That said, I still only have the front room of the large house furnished as I am not able to drop any more items, due to the amount of goods stored in my workshop. (I craft myself as well - medicinals, powerups, low level clothing, etc)
Possible solutions:
1) Fix the crafting machines so that the input hoppers actually work - that way resources do not have to be left lying around, in backpacks hanging on the wall or in unlocked containers. Fix it so that resources stored in these hoppers do NOT count against house limits - that way crafters can have furniture too!
2) Add a new concept of an "individual vendor" - every house would come with one. This would not be a TRUE vendor in the nature of how we understand vendors to be now. It would only be used as a one-way device - to make offers to the owner (or maybe admins) of the house. The owner would NOT be able to sell things from this "vendor" - only accept or reject offers. (Essentially, a vendor with the "sell" option disabled) That way, those that wanted to sell items to a specific person (or group) could make an offer to that persons house vendor. There's no worries taht anyone else can buy it, because the vendor does not have a sell option - only the vendor owner could accept the offer.
Please give people plenty of notice on this, so people do not lose there vendors due to lack of maintenance. Also look at revising maitenance cost. The 1% per hour will eat a 20% mark-up in less than one day. Also this makes it imposible to be a merchant and be a casual gamer. I have a hard enough time running my store as it is. Maybe make the vender maintenance be a flat per hour fee & a percent of sales.
Holocron wrote:
Have you looked at NPC vendors lately? Regardless of how much you dump on them, they charge 1 maintainance (0 if you have Efficiency III). People use NPC vendors to avoid maintenance charges.
Yeah, expect that to be fixed.
What we need to do:
- A way to distribute new uniforms (for free)
- A way to sell (not for free!) weapons and equipment to our pa members
- A way to distribute resources to members (couldn't be the actual access list)
Possible solution:
- First of all using pa vendors would solve all problems but...
- 1. & 3. Could be solved by new access list. Best would be the possibility to grant access to each room in the pa hall. So we could create a ressource room, drop everything there and give every member access.
- 2. For this we need some kind of vendor. Anything we can put in items and let buyers charge for.
For me the easiest solution (and most comfortable for a pa) would be the possibility to place vendors in private houses (maybe only pa halls to take away the possibility to 'cheat' by placing a vendor in a private home just to handle the new item cap).
This vendors (as mentioned by one of the other posters) should be invisible to the planetary market (should be possible with a single flag which is checked beforeshowing the available commoditiesat the bazaar).
Apart from I like the game, for me the pa featureis the most disappointing thing ingame at the moment. It becomes better with the latest patch (thanks for that). But this has to be the beginning... this vendor thing is the next, very important issue for a working pa.
Thanks in advance.
Forgot 2 things...
- A flag on items (only for pa members) is a bad solution. We need to have this 'Vendor' inside the PA Hall to increase the usage of this building.
- Please let owners of a PA Hall place the 'Vendor' or whatever the next solution is. This should be the 'Skill' of an PA Leader not a Merchant or anything else. As a Leader you have to handle this issue without skilling master Merchant. At the moment a Leader has to sacrifice 9 of his lots, that should be enough.
Good rule, now ... do we get the maintenance lowered ?
Any merchants here that have a PA hall up for sale on a non bugged merchant ?
I am using my vendor as a central resource collection and selling point for my PA.
my house is setto public, but i have a90k entry fee on the door (i will adgust this to reflect the estimated value of the inventory if need be.)
people. I was going to put a vendor in there to act as one of those little
refrigerators that you can buy food and drinks from in your hotel room.
The structure would be private, with admin access for the renters.
Now, you're telling me I can't do this. This makes a wookie sad.
Why would I want to do this? Here is why:
Because I sell resources to my crafting PA at extremely low prices. The cost to provide a resource is much cheaper than the prices reflect on the bazaar (directly after release). I was selling resources very cheap when one day I discovered that non-PA-members were coming to my store and buying everything up leaving my PA mates with our anything to buy.
My service as a resource merchant to my PA was not for making money, it was to provide them a one stop shop for all resources so they can craft their harts out. Having non-members take advantage of my store was not what I wanted…. So I discovered how to only allow members of my PA in my store using guild:avian in the entry line.
After that I had a store that sold cheap resources to only those that were permitted.
The problem I have with the no Vendor in Private house is not necessarily PA Related, but also works that way.
I am in a Business Partnership with a few other crafters, and I would like to use my vendor for our business trades. I would like to place items on the Vendor at a REDUCED price from retail so that only they can buy them at a savings. (essentially, our deal is to sell stuff to each other at cost so we don't take a loss, and we are helping our partners get the components they need to build an item cheaply and make a profit.)
I understand that it would be difficult to make the Vendors in a Private Structure not appear on the Bazaar, (I didn't know my stuff was supposed to be appearing on the bazaar in the first place, since I've checked and never seen my vendor items there) but........
Would it be possible to give us the ability to make our VENDORS private? To have a User List for the vendors like we do for the house? Any vendor that is private would not appear on the bazaars. And any individuals who have sales waiting to be picked up on the vendor are automatically added to the User List, and cannot be removed until their items are picked up, even if the Vendor is made private after the sale.