Merchant Archive

I have to agree.. This must be a united front between merchants and crafter's using vendors. The way things are it is way too harsh and discourages people from using the vendors as they were intended (for the sale of items over the bazaar limits). This is not just a merchant killer but also a killer of every artisan except maybe the weaponsmiths(atleast until the degrade bug is fixed if ever..).

I have to agree.. This must be a united front between merchants and crafter's using vendors.

I can agree to that one condition: that crafters using venders acknowledge that career merchants should have more efficiency at that, which means focusing on suggesting fixes to the Merchant skill tree, not just changing the base way that maintainence is calculated -- the difference cost and efficiency between a Business III vender and a Master Merchant should be as high as the quality difference between weapons made by an artisan with Engineering III and a Master Weaponsmith.

Because I do agree that this is a problem that faces both types of merchants ... but our unity of what the right solution will be (as evidenced by the occassional "remove venders from Business" threads) gets shattered if the solution doesn't take both needs into account, rather than just assuming that those needs are identical.

With that in mind, it does seem right that those "costs" should scale across three different factors:

1) How advanced the vender is -- venders should cost more than NPCs (although certainly not as radically different as they are right now)

2) How much inventory is on them -- in order to deal with the "using it as storage" issue of the developers (both groups should be able to deal with this percentage scaling with the value of inventory, it's the "retail risk")

3) How advanced the merchant is -- whether this is because of better venders (see 1) or because of Efficiency line improvements (an artisan should not be able to sell for a lower maintainence cost than a Master Merchant)

Do people think that the current non-NPC rates (the nasty high ones) are right for the "baseline" (ie, the rate an artisan with a bulky terminal and Business III would have)?

Do people think that those costs should scale down to near 0% at Master Merchant? at Efficiency IV?

Carvin Abrok, Merchant/Smuggler (Lowca)

Anyways if you want to use a vendor for stocking purposes all you need to do is to offer the item for sale, and put it in the stockroom immediatly. then it is not counted as an item and it cant be bought out. You can do that with stacks of 50 items in a backpack.

So your taxation doesnt prevent the phenomenon, but does prevent pure merchants as being a viable option. Come on, give us something worht in that tree, we offered you so many ideas that are not htat difficult to implement...

How about increasing vendor discount at master merchant ?

from 20% to 50% ??

I think you should get better discounts thru the efficency tree and at master get another discount. Minimum of 50% reduced at master. If artisans are going to get to keep a vendor they need to pay thru the nose to keep it. Those of us who do merchant should avoid that hassle because we put in the time, money, and points to avoid it.

Using vendors as storage is not stopped at all by doing this, All you have to do is enter something into the vendor a 1 credit, and withdraw the sale. It can set in your stockroom forever. It has no value, or a remember value of 1 credit, and can not be bought!!!!!

The ONLY people this hurts are people who use there vendor to SELL THINGS!!!!

why is usinga vendor as storage even an issue...

that should have noting to do with vendor costs!!!!

i am sorry but that isnt the Merchants problem...if the devs have database probl;ems they need to find a real solution to that problem and stop creating roadblocks for all the professions in a vain attempt to stop the bleeding....

many of the changes the past month have been about the database and not the gameplay...i am beginning to think it is not so much hardware related as it is the way things are programmed.....

as an example i went fishing this morning...i now have 10 items of Churn bait.....they dont stack...so thats 10 items the db has to track instead of 1...fix these issues and dont make merchants pay the price for the devs errors in judgement..

Hollow has managed to screw up every profession i have tried....its getting old...i know i am not the only one who is about ready just to give up...everything is becoming a hassle and a frusration and the fun is fading fast...

I just want to add my 2c here for the Devs to read.

I've always loved the SW saga..but I wasn't a die-hard fan like some people. But during some down-time I spent a little time reading the back-stories and splinter worlds of Star Wars..and I realized that the entreprenurial spirit was one of the core values of the SW characters.

I've mentioned the our friend Jabba and his Merchant empire. Sure he wasa criminal, and a slave trader, but he was also a mercantile genius who out-manuvered savvy opposition to claw his way to the top.

Lando Calrissian: Sabaac player and businessman. Won a ship in a card game, and built a very fine shipping business out of it. Learned a thing or two about piloting from a young pilot named Han Solo, who beat him in sabaac and chose the MF out of Lando's fleet. Then Han built himself a nice smuggling business moving spice from Kessel to the imperial interior, while Lando took up Mining in Cloud City (which he also won in a sabaac game). Cloud city had hotels, shops, restaurants, upscale housing and was home to a resource empire. Sounds a lot like SWG should be.

Lando didn't have to worry about his labor pool putting him out of business through exorbitant vendor costs. Nobody was selling faux Bestine gas and ruining his trade. At no time did the miners, cooks, and artisans of Cloud City tell him he had no right to exist.

Merchants are the key to what made the Star Wars world a living place: Bazaars, Stores, Junk Dealers, Spice Miners, Casino Owners, rogues, and traders of every sort.

Please don't abandon us.

If they want to stop all this problem with vendor storage simply remove the +1 vendor from the artisan tree. I know thats controversial too but stops every Tom, **edit** and Harry fromgetting a free storage container for their house. This would make peoplewho want to make money selling things at leastget novice merchant. And would make a market for items,people who didnt want to be serious wouldnt set up shop and would instead look for a real merchant to sell things through.Putting that vendor at business 4 instead of 3 and limiting the storage to 5 untill tou getinto merchant levels would also work for me ....

--Dolomite

as chef i can say :

you are beeing ignored. you're a minority playing this game. you dont pay as much, you wont be heard.

ranger/command/squal leader/chef are the professions beeing ignored.

"we work as intended" ....

well hope is lost ?

Here we go again.

*sigh*

Actually merchants are a majority, but the pure merchants keep trying to hit the majority of merchants, crafter merchants and part time merchants, on the head with a hammer. It's counterproductive because splitting the merchant community splits the power and leads people to just ignore merchant issues.