Merchant Archive
Thread: Vendor Maintenance Fees coming – your input request
Oh - I am hoping the devs will actually pay attention to feedback this time, instead of repeating what happened with the "Requesting T21 feedback" thread in the weaponsmith forum. They posted a proposed change, nearly everyone said it was a horrible idea. The thread never got any further dev posts, and the change was implemented a few days later exactly as proposed, making the T21 useless, and the riflemen were extremely displeased. After another few days with dozens of posts about it on the rifleman and general boards, they reversed it.
Vendor maintenance would cause even more of an uproar as there a hell of a lot more crafters with vendors than riflemen with T21s.
I'd just like to add a couple of more comments to my earlier post (which is currently the first post on page 4, if anyone wants to read it).
I've had a few more hours to think about the economic effects of this proposed change. First and foremost, EVERY SINGLE POSTER -- and we're talking about hundreds of people -- can clearly see that this change would be an economic catastrophe. I guarantee that all of these people are not Ivy League Economics professors -- because the plan is SO bad that even basic common sense is enough to see how bad it is.
To reiterate, the problem ultimately isn't that it's too high a fee -- it is, but that's not the biggest problem. The problem is that the fee is front-loaded. Maintenance must be paid up front in order to even have the potential to sell the item on the vendor. Say, for example, you'rean architect who has crafted up to master, and who now wants to open up a small shop to sell your wares. Assuming you want to stock one of each type of deed at market price -- you're looking at at least (at LEAST) 500K-700K of stock on your vendor. At the proposed rate, that stock would cost in the vicinity of 60,000 credits a DAY to maintain. In other words -- you'd have to be one of the wealthiest players on the server TO BEGIN WITH to even contemplate having a vendor for a week. Fora single week!!!! This isn't a fee that's paid due to the architect's success -- it's a cost that's payable irrespective of whether a single sale is ever made.
I don't like to be personally disparaging to the development staff, whom I know are hard workers -- but Iknow that one of the intents of SWGhas been, from day 1, to have a functional player-based economy be the backbone of the game. And to be perfectly frank -- this proposal is so utterly, hopelessly flawed from an economic standpoint that one is forced to the conclusion that none of you have any basic economic knowlegde, let alone an economics background. Any freshman college student who hastaken half a semester of introductory Econ could pick your plan apart like aMarine taking on a herd of bunnies with an M-1 tank. Honestly, sincerely, and respectfully: it's THAT bad. But I think you're probably getting that picture from the posts on this issue.
Ironically, you folks are faced with the same problem the world economy faced in 1929. Then, there was too much money in the stock market, much of it 'phony' money representing margin borrowing or other speculative, unsecured loans. The Hoover government was pilloried for not acting when this house of cards started to crumble, as investors lost faith in the boom, started to make margin calls, and found that the 'phony' money was just that -- phony. Result? Collapse, and depression. Ironically, your plan -- when faced with a similar inflationary situation -- is to collapse the system yourself and immediately trigger the depression. Not good.... not good.
Sorry to sound like a know-it-all -- but to be frank, it's clear that I DO know more about this topic than any of you, based on your proposal. I'd ask that before taking any action, you at least consult with someone who has a background in economics before making macroeconomic changes to your nascent player economy. I'd be happy to help (just PM me or email me), but I'm sure some of you have personal friends with such a backgroundwho would be willing to give you advice.
Don't destroy your own game. Please.
PLEASE READ THIS!!! INNOVATION!
Here's an even better idea!!!! In addition to the sales tax, make a 'taking items down' tax!
For instance: I used a vendor for storage the other day while I was setting up my new store *gasp!*..(yes I admit it).. to make things more difficult in case someone got to the vendor I marked each backpack full of stuff at 150000. This is exactly the kind of storage we are trying to prevent!
So what if I had to pay taxes on that amount when I removed it from the vendor? At say...6 percent? (Florida tax rate..) .06*150000=9000credits to take the bag off the vendor. Would I have paid it? Sure..the value in the bag was high enough to offset the additional cost. But would I do it for a FWG pistol? No..I'd buy a new pistol before I'd spend 9k to recover my old used one.
This is the kind of risk vs. reward that will limit abuses on the vendors!
Maintenance fees should be a sales tax, let's say a 5%-10%, and maybe a small fixed vendor fee.
This way people will get used to paying the sales taxesthat they will be charged whenplayer cities are implemented.
A person trying to survive on markup buying from other players.
No way in hell you could do it.
As one of my characters being an Chef, I can say that I don't think the vendors should have a set charge no matter what, I do believe the items and prices of the items should affect the price to maintain the vendor. Also, by doing this some professions that have expensive items to sell like Weaponsmiths would be extremely hurt by a pricing based on the total cost of the items in the vendor per hour or any other amount of time. The easiest and what seems to be the fairest way is just charge a tax everytime an item is sold.
Okay, people are selling expensive items nowadays.
Lets take the following scenerios, analyze them, and see if they canbe applied realistically.
1. You are a powergamer, pretty well kown, have a lot of money but dont know what to do with all of it. You are an Armorsmith, but your business isnt thriving. You grinded Imperial missions for days, and you feel like selling a set of storm trooper armor so you advertise it, just so you can develop business relationships. Right now, on starsider, 1 faction point = 50 cr. I heard that Storm Trooper Armor is worth 700k, which seems reasonable to me beacause it takes a lot of time that needs to be spent to aquire the whole set. So you put the Storm Armor into your vendor, plus a few sets of ubese, padded, and bone armor. All your items equal to 1.5 million credits. Applying the suggested formula would lead to the following:
1,500,000/1000 every 45 minutes = 48000 every 24 hours. Now lets Add3 outcomes to this scenario.
A. Your business doesnt work, so you are forced to take off many items simply because there is not enough income and you cant pay the maintenance fee's after trying to sell all items in one day. Your financial situation gets worse because now you can't sell anything, and even if you wanted to you wouldnt be able to make a huge Store-like selection in your vendor simply because there isnt enough demand and/or variety in your vendor to attract and re-attract customers.This would force you to scream your lungs out on populated streets to get money and then attempt to start up your vendor again. Tough luck.
B. Your business works to an extent(at first), you sell an average of 50,000 credits per day, but you restock everyday keeping your load at 1.5millionto keep everyone happy, since your satisfied customers spread the word of your store and you want to make sure upcoming customers get any items they expected. What does that leave you with in terms of profit? 2,000 credits a day(a little bit discouraging). This goes on fora month or twoand eventually, you are better known and you have customers coming to you everyday so you end up stabalizing your market which leaves you with a profit of 30,000 credits a day after you develop constant customers. Sounds pretty good, you have earned it after all your hard work. And you are a power gamer so you have more paitence than the average player, your paitence has paid off, you are living well in the galaxy, and there is still a challenge
C. Your business thrives and the word of your shop has spread everywhere! You are making 500,000 cr a day after maintenance costs. You are so rich that maintenance costs dont scare you and you have so much money that you dont even know where to put it! I guess the fact that you play 12 hours a day searching for the best resources and churning out the best composite armor in the galaxy paid off! The game seems to get a bit boring because the challenge of keeping a shop is gone, so you have lost your will to play and head over to everquest 2 hoping for a new challenge. Goodgame
2. You are a casual gamer, a weaponsmith that isnt high up in the ranks because you dont have time to play that much. You just want to run a shop for fun, so you churn out some decent d18 pistols and some tusken rifles. Lets say you put out 100,000 credits worth of items.
100,000/1000 every 45 minutes = 3200 credits every 24 Hours. Now lets Add3 outcomes to this scenario.
A. Some newbs run by and decide to bag a pistol or 2 eventually. Great, you even out and get no profit, so in the end you are struggling to keep up a hopeless vendor.
B. Yes, you are casual, but you have been playing since day 1 and people just know you and they are casual gamers as well, so they check out your vendor and they decide to buy some cheap pistols/carbines/rifles occasionally because they arnt certified for the best stuff. You gain about 3,000 a day after maintenance , so you decide that SWG is still fun, lots of challenges ahead, so you keep the shop running hoping for some more buyers in the future, and you plan to get composite armor but it costs a lot so it will take you a while to generate the money needed to pay for it. Great! lots of fun ahead. Maintenance is reasonable because the money gets back into the system and it keeps me challenged.
C. You are a casual player but you have been playing for so long that you are a master weaponsmith, and you are pretty well known so mainetenance fees arnt a problem because your weapons are bought out almost instantly. Not much money going back into the system so money is not a huge obstacle in SWG.
In conclusion, the maintenance fees mightprovide a challenge to some, but for others that have many customers it shouldnt be much of an obstacle. I realize that there may be some contradictions in my theory, and i would appreciate it if the comments were kept constructive and helpful, I am a little bit tired right now so I might come back later to post some revisions and/or additions. Thanks for reading everyone.
P.S. Excuse me for the typo's, I am just trying to get a point accross.
They change all houses to 25 items per lot knowing people would go bullistic and then get praised for changing it to 75 which is still a unworkable number for most crafters. I am sure looking back on this that it was a planned strategy that was worked out prior to the change.
So here we can look forward to them changing it to /1000 every 60 mins. and they will come out looking for pats on the back and praise for what good people they are for listening to our concerns.
Bah I say, Bah!
Q,
One thing I learned in my years as a CFO, and even back in business school, is to look at the incentives that your actions cause. While I understand that you are trying to get money out of the economy, that is not what this action is going to cause.
My best estimate as to what the result will be of such an action is not that people will simply pay more money for their vendors, but that they will not use vendors.Thus, you will effectively be eliminating one of your professions as well as drastically increasing the number of spammers. This will make for a much less pleasant gaming environment for all involved.
If you notice, my character has absolutely no artisan skills, thus this will have no effect on me directly. However, I believe that the overall impact to the game will be extremely negative.
If you would like to discuss this with me further, please feel free to contact me. Otherwise, for the sake of the game, I urge you to reconsider.
-BS
This proposal is absolute bs when it comes to the profession of architect. When I'm listing 3 halls, 20 large harvs and a few houses, the calculation you are suggesting is just downright unfair. The game should not force architects into entirely private sales...some of us have to work and cannot be on all the time dealing with customers. That's a big reason why we have freaking vendors. As if the merchant skill doesn't suck enough. Unconscionable idea.
Bernard Reiux, Master Architect, Chilastra Server
While having such extraordinary fees might seem like a good idea, people will just start using the trade feature instead of taking up the merchant profession. I would like to see the entire picture before making a final hudgement. How would a vendors skills reduce the fees and how much would they be reduced by?
currently there are 32 time periods in a day and you are charging .1% of the item value per day. Therefore you will be charging 3.2% of an items value per day. For a week (assuming the item doesn't move) will cost the merchant 22.4% of the item value.
Seems to me that a more casual player (such as myself) will be greatly hurt by this. Granted we will see fewer items placed on the vendor, but I like to give my patrons a range of items/prices to choose from. I typically have about 100 items on my vendor with a total value of say 400,000 cr. that means I will have to spend 12,800 cr per day to just have a fair selection of items on my vendor.
Another issue is that if you have 1 vendor per item the cost would still be almost the same?
I can tell you that I typically make perhaps 20-30,000cr per day. So I will either have to crank up the cost of my items, close shop, or sell my items at a loss as I have to buy the resources in the first place to make them. I understand you want money sinks, but it seems like you might be hurting the crafters/merchant profession thus rendering it close to useless. Also, I beleive that we will have fewer vendors (and that may be a desired effect), but will they want to keep their wares stocked?
does this mean that a person will stock items cheaper items to be available for lesser skilled players? On the contrary, you will only get the items that move very fast and not a great selection at that. Think about how it affects the economy and entire playing community. Post those issues as well and let's talk about them.
There has to be a better way. The Post-Sales Tax on a ales seems like the best way to go.
I can imagine a couple of things: first, there *does* need to be some penalty to using the system as storage with outrageous prices. Second, a price per sale *would* be much more fair to people who need to have a great variety of items stocked in order to provide a good service. As an example, I listed 98k credits sell value of resources on my vendor today. A good chunk of it sold. If it had not, I would have lost nearly 5% of my sell value to upkeep costs for one day's listing (in the current scheme), or about 4% of my sell value to upkeep costs in the 1/1000 per 45 minute scheme. Based on that and on the range of markups I'm *trying* to use, I can go for no more than 11 days without a sale before my entire profit margin is eaten up: if it's a good quality product, I might be able to go longer (as I charge a higher markup there.) This is, I think, too high.
What I think would be fair is to charge a fixed sales tax (paid by the seller) of 5% per sale: this is higher than I would like, really, because if you layer a player city sales tax on top of it, things start to get rough for people who work on low profit margins. The exact number can be worked out. One useful effect here is that the cost of doing business is easy to calculate: I have to factor in the 5% cost ahead of time when figuring out my margins. With the 3.6% per day, I have to figure how long before someone wants *this specific item*. It will encourage stocking only when you know a customer will be coming over later to pick it up. (That is: negotiate in email or the like, then say "okay, it's on my vendor and pick it up whenever.") I'd much rather be able to list my entire stock for sale at reasonable prices.
That part isn't new. But I think the next part is:
Removing an item from the sell list before the sale times out (a week, isn't it?) also charges you this tax, while waiting for the full time does not. This has a couple of effects: first, a seller should be sure that they mean to set a given price (changing prices will have a cost.) Second, putting totally insane prices in for storage will also have a cost. (I saw my first NPC vendors with "DO NOT SELL - Armor Inside" listed for something like 999999999 credits the other day.) In this case, you can store things that way: as long as you're willing to take two weeks before you retrieve it.
A final option is to set the rate based on the single highest price listed on the bazaar. So, for example, an architect's rate would be set by the cost of their most expensive item, rather than sum of all of their items. An architect still pays more than a chef, but the cost is fixed by the level of price involved, rather than the full quantity of goods listed. The one drawback I see here as a resource seller is that is *discourages* me from providing a bulk discount for extra large chunks bought all at once. Let's say I hareg rate x for 1000 units, but I want to give a 10% discount to people who buy 10000 units at a time. If I do that, my rates will go up significantly, because my max price will be 9x what it was before.
Anyway, I'm *willing* to pay the current vendor rates, if not happy to. We'll have to see how things go.
oh by the way.. also.. if the current system is kept in place.. (ie an rate based on every 45 minutes).. i would like to propose that the items that are sold on the bazaar suffer a similar fate.. this will surely put a "money sink" on things..
-guan