Merchant Archive
Thread: can this be addressed w/o being flamed
You're already artisan, skill cost isn't that big.
Factory are more usefull then vendor for storage.
Stop stocking thousands of Items, keep stock of finished products, in crates.
SargusQuintek wrote:
Just to back track to a few posts on what Songe said.
Politician does in fact let you use skills without having the points. When you set your city perks you can then drop your skills.
ID's have tons of stuff to do? I may be wrong but last I saw they could only alter appearance. Now they can do stats. That doesn't sound like alot of stuff. Unless you are talking about being able to alter eyes, hair, nose etc... I guess we can talk about those individually. But the same can be said about merchants if you want to itemize.
When the Jedi revamp comes we all get 2 characters. Chances are the poacher problem is going to go poof because with all the whining about it I'm sure most will go legit with that second character. Either those people will make a jedi to fight or they will make a full combat character to release the other spot for some kind of crafter/merchant. Just my rationale on the upcoming change. If that is the case how about moving poaching from the number 1 spot down the list and get some more viable change in its place.
Fundamental difference between the skills between Politician and Merchant.
The merchant skill is the ability to manage a vendor, not drop one.
In the case of politician you set city attributes and sturctures. Structures in this gamne do not go away arbitrarily.
If you drop a cloner it will stay there until it is not paid for, it is a structure. Same thing with a garden. The skill as it is defined is the ability to PLACE those structures, not MANAGE them. A fundamental wording difference. And yes if you drop the skill to PLACE those structures, if you redeed them you cannot drop them again.
Maybe the devs need to look at that aspect of politician also
SargusQuintek wrote:
Last I checked when you drop a vendor it stays there until you don't pay the maintenance. You also can't replace them if you drop your skills before pulling them up. Manage a vendor? Ok you put items on it to sell. I don't call that much management. The same can be said about factories. They are structures too.
Except a vendor is not a structure it is in fact an NPC/droid that is hired and to sell goods. So it needs to be managed. Hence the Management tree in Merchant.
Currently there is no factory skill nor a skill to drop or manage a factory so I son't see where you are going here. Factories are automated machines and not NPC's
Balkstar wrote:
Whether you will treat it as second class profession will not mean that I will treat it as a second class profession.
Scoooter wrote:
What would you say if the show was on the other foot and if Icould master weaponsmith, drop the profession entirely and still craft weapons. That would kinda make your profession useless wouldn't it. It's the same thing. The one skill that merchant is based on can be kept after dropping the rofession entirely which is wrong and the devs considered it a bug.
This has been covered. You can master weaponsmith, make a few schematics,drop the profession entirely, and churn out weapons just as good as any weaponsmith. In fact, if you do some AFK loot camping for some skill tapes, you can churn out BETTER weapons because you made your schematics with 12 experimentation points. I'm not going to give you my entire spiel. Suffice to say that weaponsmithing has its share of ways in which the value of the skills is dragged through the mud. Not to mention the fact that the skills can be gained in an hour with an AFK grinding macro.
Since when does a droid or a computer terminal need more "management" than a house?
Scoooter wrote:
Except a vendor is not a structure it is in fact an NPC/droid that is hired and to sell goods.
p4Samwise wrote:
Since when does a droid or a computer terminal need more "management" than a house?
Scoooter wrote:
Except a vendor is not a structure it is in fact an NPC/droid that is hired and to sell goods.
Droids with Harvestingmodules require scout skills to use
Droids with medical modules requires medic skills to use
Droids with stim modules require medic skills
Droids with Merchant Barker modules require advertsising skills
Droids with Entertainment modules require dancer or musician skills
Droids with crafting stations require that you have tools and schematics for that crafting type which come form skills
Droids with survey modules you need the survey skill to use.
hmmmm ... a pattern ..
The only difference are the above mentioned droids are created by DE's. The only reason vendor droids are not is so that does not conflict with pet counts and pet dynamics.
Scoooter wrote:
Droids with stim modules require medic skills
False.
Why would anyone ever keep Master Doctor when they can have a droid follow them around giving them stimAs? /boggle
Also, the crafting/med modules simply serve to make the droid mimic a structure (a crafting station and a med center, respectively). And structures don't require skills to "use", though "using" them might not be of much use unless you've got the skills that the "use" supplements. (Anyone can own and call a crafting/med droid.)
Message Edited by p4Samwise on 06-15-2004 11:38 AM
p4Samwise wrote:
Scoooter wrote:
Droids with stim modules require medic skills
False.
Why would anyone ever keep Master Doctor when they can have a droid follow them around giving them stimAs? /boggle
Also, the crafting/med modules simply serve to make the droid mimic a structure (a crafting station and a med center, respectively). And structures don't require skills to "use", though "using" them might not be of much use unless you've got the skills that the "use" supplements. (Anyone can own and call a crafting/med droid.)
Seriously, though, all of the applications you list above have the droids functioning in a "support" capacity, not doing the work themselves. Vendors don't "support" anything the merchant is doing him/herself, they do it all. They're much more comparable in that sense to combat droids, which can attack on their own, regardless of their owners' combat skill.
Message Edited by p4Samwise on 06-15-2004 11:38 AM
Well a Master doctor would not use those stimdroids but they do require novice medic to use and are only useful to low level medics.
And a crafting station is not a structure, its an item. And yes they are useless unless you have the skill to use a draft schematic against them. Those draft shematics are gained by progressing up crafting lines of skill boxes and taken away of you drop those skill box's.
And yes the vendor iscompletely asupport functionality. They are basically the cashier and shop keeper so that the Merchant does not have to do that himself. If that's not support I don't know what is. The vendor is an npc/droid that collects the cash and distributes items based on the price you the merchant has told it to sell it for.
The combat module analogy is flawed because everyone has combat skills adn default attack..even if it is lame becauseof no combat professions.
Scoooter wrote:
No other "support functionality" can be used while the player is LOGGED OUT.
Mull that one over. "Support functionality" would be if the merchant player was there in the shop negotiating the price and the vendor was holding the items or facilitating the secure trade. No such thing is involved. Not even droids/pets will persist in the world after the owner logs out - only structures and items dropped in structures (including vendors)do that. Vendors are *far* more autonomous than anything else in the game.
And your point is? Does the fact that that they are NPC and more autonomous make them not a support item? Or are they just a good support item? Maybe its because they are so helpful it was the dev's intention that they require skill to manage.
The thing I was originally arguing against in this thread was your attempt to apply game-world logic to requiring skill to "manage" a droid or terminal vendor. The fact that they're so completely autonomous makes it ridiculous, from a game-world perspective, to require "skill" to manage them.
p4Samwise wrote:
Balkstar wrote:
Whether you will treat it as second class profession will not mean that I will treat it as a second class profession.
BS. We discussed this a couple of weeks ago, and you said your number one problem with vendor poaching was that it harmed the image of the Merchant class, andthatMerchant wasn't respected as a profession in its own right.
Yes. But I figure that no matter how much I argue on this point, you will still concider it 2nd class no matter what happens to the profession. Abit single-minded, don't you think? And you were supposed to be the one thinking outside the box?
I am willing to state that this profession still has the great potential to be a first class profession worthy of a primary focus to players once thesingle most terrible exploit is dealt with.
Balkstar wrote:
p4Samwise wrote:
BS. We discussed this a couple of weeks ago, and you said your number one problem with vendor poaching was that it harmed the image of the Merchant class, andthatMerchant wasn't respected as a profession in its own right.
Yes. But I figure that no matter how much I argue on this point, you will still concider it 2nd class no matter what happens to the profession. Abit single-minded, don't you think? And you were supposed to be the one thinking outside the box?
I am willing to state that this profession still has the great potential to be a first class profession worthy of a primary focus to players once thesingle most terrible exploit is dealt with.
And my position is that fixing the exploit won't make it any more of a first class profession. The people who treat it as a second class profession now will continue to treat it as a second class profession, because the tools don't exist for most people to be able to make it a viable standalone profession.
Interestingly, the lack of tools for merchants makes most crafting professions similarly unviable as standalone professions (lack of consignment sales makes it more trouble than it's worth to deal with a merchant, which defeats the purpose of inter-class cooperation), and all but forces them to dabble in merchant. The fact that they currently later surrender the skills is of little relevance compared to the fact that they don't really have interest in the skills in the first place - once the ability to surrender the skills is gone, they'll keep the skills, but the viewpoint won't change.
I would like very much to see merchant made viable as a first-class profession. In fact, I started playing SWG with the intent of being a full-time merchant. Unfortunately, once I started to understand the game's economy, it became apparent that the only way to sell anything would be to make it myself - and at that point, you're not a first-class merchant, you're a crafter who runs a shop.