Merchant Archive
Thread: What happens to my Vendors when I drop Artisan/Business III?
You shifted from circular logic to false analogies ....
Your car analogy is no more appropriate than if I asked "What if you built yourself a car and then sold your drill-press and welding tools ... could you still drive the car?" Of course you could, losing the tools to build the car has nothing to do with being able to continuing to operate it -- you just can't build new cars.
Simple analogies usually don't help much ....
Well, sorry that I'm not a believer in tautology, TimeLord ... saying it's true isn't the same thing as proving it's true.
I understand you believe it's true. That's not particularly persuasive, though.
I agree that it shouldn't be possible. I think if you give up Bus III you should lose the ability to operate vendors. But since you can, since vendors are such buggy sources of aggravation, and since I'm more concerned about servers eventually having too few vendors because of all the merchants who quit the profession in digust, rather than too many, it's not an "exploit" that gets me very worked up.
Deliberately duping millions ofcredits through some software glitch, that's an exploit I care about.
KzinKiller, your charge of "circular logic" is backed up by no evidence, but the "false analogy" claim is at least interesting... but we'll come back to that.
To dispense with the first claim: Since I made no use of any arguments of the type "it's true because it's true" or "X because Y because X" or any other such tautological form, nothing I've said is guilty of being circular logic. My argument is simple: first, there is an ethical principle that use of a thing requires ownership of that thing; second, since using vendors requires the ability to create them, the stated ethical principle applies to this in-game behavior; and third, that since using a vendor you no longer have any ability to create (because you've surrendered that skill) falls afoul of the ethical principle, it is wrong to engage in that in-game behavior.
Nothing "circular" about that. Please be more careful when attempting to use this term of rhetorical art, which has a specific technical meaning.
Now, as to the examples I offered -- your response is why I've pretty much stopped using examples in discussions. It's just too easy to misunderstand the intended meaning. (Deliberately or otherwise; either way the examples just get turned into distractions.)
In fact, it is your counter-example that is flawed, because it fails (as an attempted analogy) to closely model the actual behavior we're discussing. Business III has nothing to do with tools -- it has to do with granting a right to use a thing based on owning that thing, which is precisely what my two examples of owning and using a house and a car addressed. I ask again: please explain how it is ethically acceptable to continue to use a thing after you have knowingly given up ownership of that thing (which is exactly the situation when you surrender the Biz III skill).
Finally, you've attempted to find fault with the arguments of others, butIsee that you have not responded to my request that you explain how the developers could have intended for players to continue to use vendors after surrendering the skill required to create them. Again: If it's not necessary to have the ability to create vendors in order to use them, then why did the developers explicitly make creating vendors an ability that is granted only to those players who earn the Business III skill? Why not Biz II, or even Novice Artisan? Why not let anyone use vendors... unless that's NOT what was intended, unless the clear intent of the developers was that the ability to use vendors requires the ability to create vendors? How can that NOT require earning -- and retaining! -- the Biz III skill?
When you've fairly addressed that question, then perhaps you'll be ready to look for flaws in the arguments of others. Meanwhile I'm glad to read that you do, at least, recognize that giving up Biz III should imply giving up vendor operation as well. There may be hope for you after all....
--Flatfingers
(Incidentally, what did the poor Kzinti ever do to you?
)
What is with this guy? How can you be more polite in telling someone that they're exploiting besides "what you're doing is an exploit" along with a warning. And if he's ticked off because we're pissed and saying it's unfair, then he should try being a Merchant. It seriously isn't fair, and that's not even something you can argue about. Now if only he hadn't left...
I'm sorry you don't like the fact that it is unfair to continue to use your vendors without the skills to do so. I didn't accuse you of anything however. Merely pointed out why it is an exploit. It would be just as much an exploit if I had the ability to craft composite armor without being an armorsmith.
Gogo1924 wrote:
Eventhough this post was basically abandoned, I'm going to say something anyway. KzinKiller is actually right. There's nothing explictly saying you use Business III to operate vendors. The developers probably intended for you to need that skill. The ability to create has nothing to do with the ability to use. An Artisan doesn't need to be a Wookie to craft Wookie attire. The reason the developers probably haven't fixed this is they either don't know what to do with the items or the maintence costs. Implications are always open for interpretation, that's why it's always safe to assume there's none.
What does BEING a wookie have to do with anything. You have to have the proper Domestic skills in the Artisan tree to make wookie clothing. If you give up those skills you can't make them any more. If you are a scout and give up the skills you can't use the camps you made when you were a scout.
The bottom line is that allowing users who lack the skill to create vendors to use them is unfair. It allows players who are not spending any of their very limited Skill points on the merchant line to compete with the merchant profession instead of allowing a merchant to fulfill those needs. If this is fair I want to be able to use a flamethrower after I have given up commando skills.
Not a problem, KzinKiller... I disagree with you there; I think I spelled things out pretty clearly, but differences of opinion are what make life interesting.
And just to close this one out, of course you're right that use restrictions on vendors aren't fully spelled out. But that's only because, when properly implemented, the restrictions are built into the gameplay. For example (uh-oh
), you don't have to read in a skill boxthat "you're not allowed to fire weapons whose condition is 0" because that rule is built into the gameplay -- when the weapon's condition is 0, the game doesn't allow the weapon to be fired.
Similarly, if -- as I think most of us here believe -- the rules governing vendors were working equally correctly, you simply wouldn't be able to use a vendor after giving up Biz III; the game wouldn't let you. So the fact (which you've stated, and which is perfectly true) that this restriction on vendor use isn't communicated to us means much less than you interpret it to mean. Certainly the failure to print every conceivable rule does not mean that there are no rules! The lack of a stated rule telling you you can't do something is not evidence that you are allowed to do that thing -- can you imagine the anarchy if that were so?
OTOH, there does seem to be enough good circumstantial evidence on the other side of this issue to conclude that using vendors after giving up Biz III is NOT what the developers intended, and is NOT kosher. In the absence of fully-spelled-out rules (which, honestly, is not a realistic expectation), I don't think it hurts anyone to come down on the side of trying to avoid taking advantage of a game flaw. No, it's not the most damaging exploit, not by a long shot -- you're right there, too.
But it's still wrong. And that's good enough to warrant objecting to it.
Respectfully,
Flatfingers [Speaker-to-Inanimate-Objects]
Well said, DocSavag!
Keep fighting the good fight; as long as we get through to someone, it was worth it.
(The temptation to take what doesn't belong to usis and always hasbeen part of human nature... but when did it become OK for us to pretend that we don't know we're yielding to it? How long can a culture survive when making a distinction between right and wrong is taboo because someone might be offended?)
--Flatfingers
Flat -- you just use way too many presumptions and arbitrary definitions for me todebate them all. Particularly when I don't care as much as you do.
I agree that people who don't have Bus III or above probably shouldn't have the ability to operate vendors ... I don't agree that anything explicitly contained in the skill definitions prohibits them from doing so, for reasons I've already made crystal clear.
And Kzinti are dangerously expansionist carnivores bent on enslaving my people, so of course they must be killed.