Merchant Archive
Thread: Where is the Righteous Indignation?
My suggestion would be to remove the advertising line completly. As a skill branch, it's useless. take global advertising and add it to Master Merchant. Replace the line with Additional Lots. 1 lot per box. 1 more lot at Master. Personaly, I can't run 6 shops. 2 shops are plenty for me, and the game allows for this at novice. However, I have a hard time understanding what good 6 vendors sitting on 6 lots is if you only have 4 lots to havrvest materials to craft your wares. I know there are some merchants that retail goods they picked up wholesale, and more power to them, though I do believe they are the exception rather than the rule.
Efficiency as it stands isn't much of a boost. If you had the previously mentioned 6 vendors on 6 lots, you may save just enough to buy a shuttle ticket, as long as it's not off planet. The savings on vendors is next to nothing. The savings on 6 single lot structues isn't notable, either. And that 20% on your 4 harvesters? (provided you don't need a factory, btw) Well, that's your shuttle ticket. Enjoy the ride. Replace this line with something more useful to merchants, by adding additonal vendor tools on the radial menu. Tools that allow for private pick up, PA or Faction ban, vendor name changes, and intergalactic stock management. (selling, removing, and picking up items at all locations from one location). Not shuttling around the galaxy is much more of an efficiency savings than what is currently in place.
Hiring would be greatly enhanced by character creation, such as what we do when building our characters. Maybe add some options here to specify that the money/emails from certain sales go to another player. That would make our services much more useful to the comunity as a whole.
Management, IMHO works well. Too well. If they fix the EXPLOIT where you keep the vendors after dropping the skill I think it will work fine.
Eola wrote:
I must add how much our community benefits from having you here to tell us how much we suck.
Without advocating your position..this just made me laugh...
LISTEN: We are NOT here to snipe at each other. I am suggesting that we rise up with one voice and present a clear and coherent platform for change. I am calling for ideas, emotions, passions, and support. Not for who can most cleverly hijack the thread for their own flamewar.
Csin, all I was saying is that now is not the time to get our blood pressure up. And I don't say that because I think we need to stop growing or because we need to lay off of new ideas. No, we DEFINITELY need to keep up with the new ideas, and we definitely need to keep sending stuff to Doc, and he definitely needs to keep bugging the devs for it. However, I only cited the broken professions and the combat revamp because this stuff is just going to happen before we get any response, no matter how high our blood pressure gets. It's just a reality of the board. You saw how long it took them to fix our actual core issues, problems like xp gain, and maintence rates because they were busy with mounts, vehicles, etc etc. Well they've moved on to different design phases, and since our needs aren't as immediate it's just going to take a while longer (like once a few revamps and combat changes are made) before our efforts of screaming and yelling cease being futile.
And I'm only saying this because I've seen what this does to the community. If we start getting riled up now, by the time they actually get around to fixing us people will be furious, and disheartened. I've seen it on this profession forum, on the smuggler forum, in the discussion forums on the old boards, I've seen it a dozen times before.
Once again, please understand I am NOT advocating we keep our mouths shut. I am NOT advocating we stop coming up with ideas or sending those ideas to the dev's. I AM saying that right now if we crank up the righteous indignation, and the screaming and the mobbing (which ARE viable and effective tactics) then by the time those tactics would actually be useful, we'll have worn ourselves out. One of the great problems of this developer communication system is that we're never sure when we're a priority and when exactly they're listening. On the Smuggler forum for instance, we were told that we were due for some love. And to start compiling ideas and bugs. So we did. And we thought that when the profession passes came, it'd be addressed. And so we waited, and talked and discussed, and threw our TONS of ideas, and got our hopes up. Then the profession passes came and TH said about ALL of them, "We agree, what do you want to do about these issues? Start sending ideas to your correspondent." Which is what we had been doing for six months. Here we thought they were listening and taking notes, but really they weren't. Which is fine. They had the prior commitments of vehicles, mounts, and player cities to take care of. Cool. I just wish we knew that then so we hadn't gotten so worked up over it. And I don't want that to happen here.
I actually read something today that gives me hope that there might be a forum for all of our wild ideas in the future. I agree with JTGALpha that it won't be in the next couple to three months though because the items the devs already have on their slate is massive.
So..lets generate some ideas. I'm always for ideas. My only request is that we get them as clear and and tightly sumarised as we can.
I don't think there is reason to panic or get angry at this point. We have come from a severely broken profession to one where most of the major bugs have been repaired (not all of them and the loss of items continutes to be a problem) but we are better than we were. Now is the time to get some features added. The Top 5 this time was a mix of fixes, feature requests, and a profession breaking issue that needs to be fixed .
WIthin the frame work of the #4 question on our top 5 is a LOT of area. Please if you have ideas for this lets get them into that post so I can compile that list and get it in front of the devs.