Merchant Archive

ed

I wouldn't mind a fee based on percentage of the sale only.

Many things just sit on the vendor for days, i.e I have to keep linking my vendor to the planatary map each time I log on. So why should I pay a sink if my vendors are not advertised 24/7.

edAs an architect I feel that avariable ratefee as you propose is incredibly crippling to our already fragile economy. Structures sell ata slower rate than any other item in the game. This along with the highest posted price tag would make running a vendor unfeasible. I would ratherthat asurchage be added to the purchase price of the item. This would allow a proportionate amount to be taken from the system all the way up the chain from clothes to harvesters. Furthermore you can have a small postage fee, much like the bazaar. However having a continuous drain on the player that is based on the cost of the goods is unrealistic and too costly.

ed

A fewthoughts:

1) Should be a point of sale tax and not a daily fee.

2) Sounds like you are just trying another way to cut down on number of items in the world (indirectly).

3) You wanna cut down on money in the game - lower the ammount you get for all missions across the board - 25% decrease.

Wigs
Kettemoor - Tatooine

st

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Steuben wrote:

I know this won't help with those who abuse vendors as additional storage, but, that is what creative game developers get paid to do

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This is a non-issue. Vendors are already gated. In order to have just one you need to invest 24 skill points for the non-crafter types. If people want to use it for storage, let them. You can only have so many.

st

If this change goes live I think the merchant profession should be renamed. Renamed to "Anti-Merchant". Because you see, with these vendor costs, instead of me having a shop that people can come to and buy stuff, I will just take custom orders and offer the stuff to THEIR vendor.

Zero cost to me.

ed

This will draw some flames for sure..........

It seems to me that this vendor changeisn't really going to do whatthe devshope it will. I would imagine that the credit sink is to prevent rampid inflation. Well that comes from the rich having too much. The masters who sell the top end stuff arnt really hurt by this they will just raise their prices. This will just put more things out of the reach of the lower class and keep the middle class out of crafting for profit at all. Even a sales tax wont help this or a fixed price on each vendor.

A better idea and a better money sink would be an INCOME TAX. Say 5% weekly, thats not a big deal to those of us who keep say 50k in creds(2500 can be made easily), but would take large chunks of creds away from those who are multi-millionaires. I am not a finace wizard but isn't this what happens in real life?

The dev's gets their money sink, the rich will either have to spend the $(spreading the wealth around) or lose vast sums. The mid class will see some of those creds and the prices wont go up on the lower end stuff so there are still things for the new players and casual gamer to buy.

ed

I wouldnt read through the dozens of pages to see if it already has mentioned before, and I don't think anyone will read this, but as usual your changing things at the wrong spot. If you ever played a merchant, you would know it is crucial to have items on the vendor in good supply, which means more than 2-3 items of each kind in for example a furniture vendor. Imagine someone sees the vendor on the planet map, comes by to see if you have this and that item, just to find that its not on the vendor anymore because someone beat them to it. So now you have a dissatisfied customer that probably wont come back for some time. So its completely wrong to punish the merchant to keep his vendor well stocked. Instead use a fee that is withdrawn for every sale or something. Oh and by the way, I dont believe its a money problem but I suspect its rather a database problem (what a surprise :smileymad and that way you can effectively keep people from having too many items in their vendor. Case closed, SOE wins...

On a sidenote I think the price is too high anyway, if you have 100k in items on the vendor, you have to pay 4800cr a day for maintenace, this may be viable for Weaponsmiths or Armorsmiths or House Vendors who sell goods priced at around 10-30k, so one sale a day would be more than enough to pay the maintenance, but would seriously cut the furniture/misc items dealer who has to stock about 100k in items too but will have to make about 5 times the sales to even get close to 10k income. I havent got a viable solution at this point since I'm at work having to think about other things, butmaking item count go into the calculation seems to be a bad idea though since that leaves too much room for exploits.

Leon McNamara

Master Artisan//Master Architect

st

I must say I don't think a sales tax is a good idea at all. What you need is a flat wage, like a set hourly fee same as what is on houses and harvesters. You don't pay more maintence on a harvester if it is on a really good spot do you?

The current proposedchanges will kill the merchant.

ed

As a mid-level tailor struggling to get my shop on the map, this high amount would kill me. I spent my entire savings buying extra resources to get my vendor stocked. I try to keep my most popular items in stock in at least 4 different colors so that my customers can have a selection even when I'm not there. I'm still trying to spread the word about my store, but I have to keep it well stocked while I'm working on that. If someone runs all the way out to it and only finds a handful of items in the vendor, they'll never bother coming back.

If this change goes through, my options will be either running missions during my entire online time just to afford my shop, or to close it down entirely. Please don't take my store away.

I agree with the earlier suggestions, maintainance should come as a percentage of sales, not a percentage of our in-stock items. If you want to limit folks using vendors as storage, therehave to beways to do it without hurting those of us who use them as intended. Placing such a high vendorcost would just be one other thing that will make crafting professions feel like real-life work instead of play. And it will put running a shop out of thereach of casual players, and players like me who love crafting but also enjoy taking time out to do other things in-game.

edwhile i feel these fee's are too high there is a flipside to this argument... it may simply drive people to diversify... ie crafters craft and biz men make 'malls' or pc cantinas start to have the vendors for the city which would help the pc cantinas have lots of volume thus making the entertainers more money solving that. the more i think of it besides the 45 min vs an hour its a ok thing. But i agree if you are going to do this then if feel that there should be better methods of advertising and placing vendors in others houses ect

ed

there should not be a maintanance based on total items on the vendor.

i think it would be way nicerto have

afix fee, like for houses or harvesters

why? a vendor how i see such is a droid, person or machine who sells for you and so a worker, most workers get a payment which is fixed no matter how much or for what prices they sell, the company pays for the work and the leader decides the prices not the merchant. so a fix "income" for the vendor would fit mosty real economy.

and no, you dont need a bigger money sink really, the prices and minds of the players about prices are just out of the line. ppl sell resources for 4cr per unit (what is totally fine) but same ppl complain about prices from example architect, who have for example to spend like 3k resources for a small house (without counting failures) that would mean 12k for pre resources to gain same win as persons who just sell the resources. so u have to add a win, but players complain about 15k cr for a small house is way overpriced.

so imo its not a need of more money sink, its a question to enlighten players about what is worth what.

that u cant do with nerfs or wannabe fixes.

ed

ok you say you need more money sinks well take a page from real life . INCOME TAXES. this why us architect dont get bent over. let face it if a architect places just three or four high prices items on there vendors then they may only have 2 to 3 hours to sell it and still make a profit before they are looking at a lost. infact the only way to stop this is to simple remove everything from the vendor before you log.

really the best plan would simply be a flat fee per hour that the vendor is running say maybe equal to a medium harvester maintance and then charge the buyer a nice 10% sales tax.

But let face it the income tax would be a better way to remove money from the game. a nice 10% flat tax for anyone with more then x credits. this would effect everyone the same and not just the player you run a bussiness. casual player will be effect the same as your hard core power gamers. and best of all the merchant class will not be poor , and fighting over penny while other player with almost no need to spend there credits can have large huge bank accounts

sotram

Ahazi

ed

I am a Master Weaponsmith. I run 8 factories and I only sell wholesale to 8 merchants.

My stocks are fairly low right now because of the factory bug, but I checked my vendor and it has 1.35million credits in stock on it. This means the new system will cost me about 43k per day. My prices are quite reasonable, so this in about 15 weapons on average. Seems like a lot of weapons just to run a vendor.

Alternatively, I can sell personally to my retailers and it costs me nothing. At the same time I recover a bunch of skill points I can readily use elsewhere.

The real question here is the purpose behind this change. If it is just to get money out of the game, then make it primarily a sales tax or commission. This is far more realistic and makes us pay for the real purpose of vendors - selling on our behalf when we are not there. Any sensible turnover fee is acceptable to me.

If you want to limit the use of vendors as storage devices, this won't work. We still have the stockroom, can create virtual private vendors with unrealistic prices and get around it a hundred other ways. Why not just limit the number of items each vendor can hold if you really want to do this?