Merchant Archive

Some of these you already covered, or at least alluded to, but here's my top ten list of merchant related issues. Please add some on to your list to submit.

1. Vendors: Merchants can not place vendors in other people's homes even on access list. Only workaround currently is to create a machine type vendor (droid and NPC don't trade) and give it to the homeowner to place but that was nerfed.
2. There is no verification on the "Destroy" button in the vendor radial menu. More of us have come to grief from this than can be imagined.
3. "Ghost world items". If you destroy or remove a vendor who has stock on them, the stock remains in a perpetual ghost world. Nobody else can see it, but it clutters up your inventory, and it can not be retrieved. It's just stuck there.
4. Stockroom merchandise falling into the Ghost World. See number 3 above.
5. "Barking" by NPC vendors for merchants with Advertise 1 doesn't work. It either fails entirely, or the vendor "barks" for a little while then stops. Some have reported the vendor not being able to sell at all after barking ceases until server reset.
6. Customized Barking at Advertise 2: Not customizable... enough said.
7. Display of Merchant on Planetary map is not persistant through a server reset.
8. Effieciency 1 through 4 is currently a question mark. Stability of realistic maintenance fees on all merchants is required before we can evalute if any of the efficiency skills are really worth anything.
9. Vendor placement. When dropped, vendors can't be moved around correctly like other furniture and items most of the time, even before being initialized. This severely limits where you can set up, unless you want your vendor standing with their nose in the corner.
10. Split resource containers on player made vendors are still a crap-shoot as to whether or not they will really contain the amount specified, or will show up empty.

More stuff to add to the list.

#1 I'd like to see Efficency I move to Business 3 and leave vendors to Novice Merchant ONLY. Give merchants something unique. Novice = 1 vendor then 4 for vendor tree and 6th vendor at master. That reduced bazaar fees stuff would help in lower stages. Make Business 3 and Business 4 the reduced bazaar fees. Make the 2 in effiecent that do bazaar 2nd of vendor maintance and structure maintance or something.

#2 Hiring 4 is broke with no new NPC's and giving them items only works 10% of the time.

#3 Poofing off Plantary map at server reboot is yet another annoying thing.

#4 NPC's can be incapped.

I agree with you VergeEC,

The fact that the merchant profession is really no different than any other is a little frustrating. Sure, you can say 'why did you pick it then?' But the profession is there... why shouldn't we be able to play it? The fact that any craftperson can get a vendor (very easily, i should add) why even have a merchant class?Most people could care less whether or not the vendor is an ugly machine or a Wookie.

With thebugs fixed as suggested by Marquie (which I think are a great 4 to pick so far) the Merchant might be a little different, but if you look at it it still won't do anything spectacular. All the other professions get at least 5 or so (sometimes less) skill additions or abilities per box... Merchants are lucky to get one.

To me this is a major problem. Maybe not a bug, but in a sense even if the "real" bugs are fixed we're still left with a weak profession that has WAY more potential.

So it is my suggestion that the #5 fix should be a look at the merchant skill tree. Marquie, I think you can agree with me that even with some of these 'bug' fixes, it still doesn't fix the profession constructively. Could you please make notes on players' suggestions on profession additions? They can be found on almost every page of the Merchant message board. Thank you

Everything everyone has written so far I agree with. All good stuff. I particularly like #4 of your post Marquis, separating Merchant shops from regular homes.

I would particularly like to see an increase in the number of Bazaar Items and the Bazaar Price Limit forMerchants. Not too much just aenough to be able to spread your wares out a little more.

I also thinka major problem with bazaar's and vendors is the lack of Searchabily.A quick fixcould be to remove Menu Items that don't contain anyItemsof that type for sale. This way when youvisit my vendor and you seethetypes of Items I'm selling onthe vendor.

Good Luck

Wow guys a lot of great feedback. I will send my email off to them this afternoon. I will post what I send for you to see.

Please keep in mind, I have to come up with 5, so not everyone is going to make it. But, I do this every week, so we have time.

Thank you all, and my your shops be so busy that your frame rate drops to 2!

I think what we also need to see as Merchants is the ability for our customers to purchase and retrieve items at Bazaar Terminals in other (perhaps the closest one to our shops) cities, perhaps as a function of one of the Skill Trees. I find it amusing that in a highly advanced, technological society, people can't find my items on the Bazaar in a town nearby, buy them, and retrieve them.

There may be balance issues with this, but it's definitely something that should be explored (perhaps it would only give 1/2 the Merchant XP it normally would, or would cost you a percentage of the listing cost).

Hassan al-Nasir

House al-Nasir

Good list so far..

Do we really get Merchant XP just from charging someone to enter our house ???

Can I add one request of you as merchant correspondent. Can you get the Devs to confirm one way or the other (I've looked but can't find a definative answer) - if Merchant auctions are ever going to show up on the Bazaar ?? (Even if just locally ?)

Ok ok.. 2 requests.

Can you also ask wether the plans for player cities include allowing Banking Terminals, and Bazaar terminals to be built / placed (I would imagine it would). If so this would be a *fantastic* thing to have as a high level Merchant only skill (i.e. only a Merchant of efficiency 3 or 4 could place a bazaar terminal, and only a master merchant place a banking terminal.. What the hell make them both Master Merchant perks).

Even though I applied for correspondent, I don't envy your task over the next month.. Good luck - we'll try and support you best we can..

Marqie

I think you have hit the highlights but want to try to push for us to not use one of the top five issues to list an enhancement that won't get done and will use up our priority requests.

#5 on your list is some sort of shop notification. WhileI agree wholeheatedly that we need it, I don't think this is very likely to get done quickly and would rather see this as an enhancement request rather than one of the top 5 fixes needed. My List:

1. Prevent Vendors with items in them from being deleted. Or allow us to retreive the items stuck in them.

2. Vendor Stability (retrieving takes forever, frequently I get bugged items (ownership is hosed and I have to push them back through the vendor to fix them. I dont' know what people without a vendor are doing))

3. Admin Rights (Allowing Vendor Listed people to put down vendors in a house now their own)

4. Fix Advertising so it works properly. (Barking flakey, Cusomtized Strings not available, resetting the Map registration all the time)

5. Attackable Merchants (very bad for business and is annoying me)

Among the list of enhancements I would like to see eventually:

Sales tracking tool (just a list of the most recent transactions would be nice)

Signage

Ability to change a price without withdrawing the sale completely

When Selling an item from the stock room the sale window should either go away when I click ok or it should load the next item. Having it sit there with an empty item displaying is a waste of mouse clicks.

A Reorder of the Item menu. Half the items are under "Misc" that is annoying. This is a holdover from beta when "Object" was showing at the top of the list and they moved everything to avoid loading it all at once everytime. Now they have "All' but they don't auto load. This makes putting everything under Misc just annoying and harder to find stuff you want to buy.

I am sure there are other items this was just what came to mind.

Here is my list:

1. Make things work the way they are intended to work.

Examples: Ad barking would always work, customers could always retreive items from vendors, etc. There is no excuse in having broken features that are documented as something you can do in the manual. We shouldn't have to list 5 broken features on our top 5 list - this should be one issue (it shouldn't even be an issue - things should work!)

2. Remove the skill of being able to place a vendor at Business III

This should be only available to Merchants. As it is, any artisan has the ability to place a vendor - why do you even need a merchant class then????

3. Revamp the Efficiency Skill set.

Saving 4 credits in a bazaar I'm not going to use anyway is worthless. Give us a skill set that means something. Usefull skills would be our local vendor listings showing up on the global bazaar. Outside signage of our shop so that it is readily identifiable.

4. Improve the vendor interface.

Let me retrieve all items at once. Let me change the price without withdrawing the sale (only on player vendors - not the global bazaar - this is the one good thing about the bazaar, it keeps a lot of the undercutting found in other economies at bay). Give me sale templates so I don't have to re-enter the info over and over. Let me rename my vendor, or get a new vendor type without going through an 8 hour ordeal.

Ok, I don't have 5 because I'm not wasting them all on bugs that should never be there in the first place.

My perspective is that of a Tailor/Merchant, which may be slightly different from a lot of you.

The key for me is that I have a pretty high volume vendor, with a large quantity of (relatively) low price items. I usually have 250-300 items on my vendor, which makes a lot of things particularly annoying, more than they would be for, say, the weaponsmith vendor that only has 20 items on it at any given time. I also have no particular desire to have more than one vendor at a time, or more than one shop.

1. I'd like to just be able to Change or "Upgrade" my current vendor as a one-step process. As a related problem, the fact that all items on a vendor become permanently irretrievable once the vendor is Removed is intolerable, as is the prospect of: First, create a new vendor, Vendor 2. Second, remove 250 items from Vendor 1 one by one. Third, re-list 250 items on Vendor 2 one by one. Fourth, remove Vendor 1. It should be a hell of a lot easier than this.

2. Please get rid of automatic delisting of items from my private vendor! I'm sick of having to wade through 20-30 "This item did not sell" messages and the laborious process of relisting them every day. Especially since I can't even see when an item is set to "expire."

3. Vendor Interface improvements. Please, give the Clothing category some subcategories! And while you're at it, since it now is a "Major" category, please remove Clothing as a subcategory of Miscellaneous. I sell some other Miscellaneous stuff (Wearable Containers, e.g.), and it's really tough for people to find those things, because they're obscured by all the Clothing. Also, any helpful things like Item Description templates would be very welcome.

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Lionicus wrote:

2. Remove the skill of being able to place a vendor at Business III

This should be only available to Merchants. As it is, any artisan has the ability to place a vendor - why do you even need a merchant class then????

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For the record, I do not aggree with this: I should be able to sell my own things without having to either use the bazaar for items up to 3k, start a street-market-selling-from-my-backpack kinda operation or find another pc willing to sell my stuff. It just makes it that much harder to sell things at all. (I am an Armorsmith +Novice merchant with Vocalize I, but that is besides the point)

My top 5 has pretty much already been mentioned, except for 1 thing:

1. Make factory crates on vendors show the amount of products in the crate. If the seller absentmindedly forgot to mention to mention it in the description, it's a risky business for the buyer to have to "assume" if it's a 10, 25 or 50 item crate.

Another Bug I've thought of which is upsetting my selling style..

Items for sale on vendors count towards the total number of items in a house..

I'm all for individual vendors having limits, but whats the point of having 7 vendors where you can only fit 20-30 items on each one.. Why bother getting 7, when you can list the exact same number of items on 1 vendor ??

I'm sure this is a bug as my house status panel says ive only got 2 items in the house (my 2 vendors) but I cannot load any more than 248 items onto my vendors. I can either put 248 into one vendor or split 248 accross many vendors.

Why not make it so each vendor can have a maximum 200 items each - Then there would be a better reason to progress the management tree..

Or an alternative aproach would be to have a shop model house where the item limit is far higher than a standard house.. (1000 as opposed to 250)

I know this wont make the top 5, but please add it to your list for future..

Thanks

I had a long list of profession-halting issues ready, but they have all been covered already, so I will put my lsit back down and simply add thanks here...

Thanks to the dedicated merchants, tenacious and smart, who have persevered and are a source of fantastic info.

Thanks to SoE for offering us the 'Merchant Correspondent' position so that they only have to address the distilled facts of our many, many posted issues.

A huge thank you to Marqui for stepping up and acting as our Merchant Correspondent.

I have to admit that even with all the bugs, I love the profession and the interaction it provides with my fellow players. TCON's Body & Soul is a hopping place because of our many vendors!

Bhin'der

Manager, TCON Body & Soul

serving Wanderhome from Consortia, Corellia, -3325, -2625