Merchant Archive

All things considered, I'm OK with Merchant stuff not showing up on Bazaar.

BUT....
I'd *really* like some way for merchants to make better use of the bazaar with more experience! The 25 item limit is just way too low, especially for people like me. I'm a tailor in Kor Vella, with a very good local business. The bazaar is something I actively use to give shoppers a "taste" of what I can do, with as broad a range of clothing as I can show. Works pretty well for one city's bazaar - 25 items lets you show a decent range, including a few color coordinated separates and the like.

But I'd really like to expand my market more to all of Corellia. Sure, I could build a second shop near Coronet or something, but it'd entail a lot of busy work maintaining them, and I'm not even sure it'd work - maybe the Coronet market already has established entrenched tailoring shops, etc.

What would be great is if I could have 25 - or even 10 - extra bazaar "slots" in each city, that I could use to widen my market.

Even something as minor as giving 5-10 additional bazaar listing slots per Effeciency box would be nice....

I'll through another idea in here..

I am assuming that one day merchant sales WILL show up on the bazaar.

How about a skill tree dedicated to item delivery ?

i.e. the merchant can place items for sale on his vendor as usuall. These items show up on the bazaar. However at purchase, teh buyer has to option of having the item "delivered" to his current bazaar terminal.

This could be worked as a whole skill tier, where say the merchant listed a 10,000 house on hios vendor on Naboo. Someone on corellia buys the house (for 10,000) - now because the merchant enabled delivery when he listed the item, the buyer can choose to have the item instantly delivered to his current location.

At tier 1 - This option becomes enabled and costs the merchant say 30% of the sale cost (Buyer pays 10k, merchant gets 7k)

At tier 2 cost is 20%

At tier 3 Cost is 10%

At tier 4 Cost is 5%

At Master Merchant Delivery cost is 0%

Either this, or the ability is only given at Master Merchant, and the merchant pays a flat rate (Percentage)fee for each listing with Remote delivery enabled ???

Oddly I just thought up a similar idea to what sue had just a few minutes ago.My idea went along the lines of 5 to 10 new spots on the bazaar as well as increase in price limit (up to 5000 maybe) and the ability to list items in different places. (so you could list something on Naboo while on Tatooine).

I'm not sure if these things actually will be done because the bazaar has a bunch of issues with it and new features to the bazaar (even class-specific ones) likely won't occur till the current issues are fixed. But who knows, supposedly they are working on revamping the bazaar system to make it easier for people to find what they are looking for. Maybe in the process they will make it so premium sales work, and make it easier to add other enhancements in the future if not add them outright.

My two suggestions....

1) At an appropriate skill box, give merchants the ability to _remotely_ pay maintenance fees and deposit power to their harvesters or power collectors.

2) Ata slightly higher skill box, give merchants the ability to transfer a harvester or power collector hopper into a special container _remotely_.

Possible restrictions: Distance (must be on planet within X distance), Cost (perhaps fees associated with remote operation)

Possible new building type: Cargo facility (or some other name)...required for remote operations on harvesters/etc and on transfering resources from harvesters to the facility or fromone facility toanother one(owned by same or different person)

instead of 2nd bazzar reduction at Efficency 3 give us reduced travel costs. After all We are frequent Flyers in Business class

I like the reduced travel cost idea. Instead of decreasing the cost to bazaar, increase our limit to 50 and raise our price limit.

As it stands I am looking at pulling out of the Merchant profession. There is nothing about the class thats really working and even if it was all working, what you get for the amount of invested skill points... its hard to say its worth it.

So far I have more vendors and more variety, this works, atleast to some extent. Vendors are still buggy and problematic, furthermore there are several ways you can have your vendor stuck in a destroyed house, destroyed droid, someones pack and have no means of destroying them or placing them again.

Premium sales does almost nothing. If I use it I notice once in awhile my items will go to the first page, however most of the time they dont, so basically I am just deleting 100 credits.

Advertising I and II dont work. I works for a bit then stops, and when it stops it makes the vendor so you cant retrieve items from it until you disable ad barking. I have yet to get II to even work once.

The line that reduces costs is a joke.

I have no idea why I would need as many vendors as there is skills to give you, but I suppose its good to have options.

Master is a waste of time to get.

Cul

Here's another basic thing. The fact that you have to laboriously withdraw and retrieve items in your vendor one at a time is almost a game-breaker in its own right. Given that every time you qualify for a new vendor, upgrading requires withdrawing, retrieving and reloading items, a decent amount of the merchant's time is spent just working through the clumsy interface.

It's seriously the dumbest profession in the game. Others, like commando, may not work right, but at least the design is sensible. Merchant in its present state is like an archaelogical remnant of four or five different eras in the game's development. The fact that it made the live game in this state is emblematic of the sloppy, rushed process that Beta3 slouched roughly towards. But it's a low priority now, and legitimately so, given the kinds of bugs and problems the game is burdened by.

Oh, like the rest of you, my vendor's ad barking works once in every three or four game days. Great.

I would really just love it if some developer said, "Ok, yes, we're aware of all of these problems, we're tracking them, and when the more urgent issues are cleared, we'll really be giving this profession some attention". That would be enough to satisfy me.

Something that I thought would be interesting is givving us an NPC or two in each city that we can sell ANYTHING to. Sure it would be for a low cost, but it would help out all those grinding artisans that are making CDEF pistols by the hundreds for skill ups.

And hey if we take 10% or so off the top for handling fees then its good business for us too.

I gotta say I like the reduced travel cost... but how would you stop ticket scalping then? Or would you want to open a second business line?

Ticket Scapling! Cool! though it would be time consuming. I guess you could put them in the bazaar.

I just found another issue. Vendor items apparently have the same 7-day expiration period as bazaar items!

It's highly annoying to have dozens of items in the stock room that have to be laboriously put up for sale again, descriptions re-entered, etc. Granted, the fact that they've not sold in 7 days is a decent tipoff that this stuff isn't selling, and that maybe the price should be lowered or whatever (so delisting wouldn't be a bad *option*), but if it's my vendor, I should be allowed to keep stuff up there as long as I want!

They just make NO DROP items like EQ to fix ticket scalping.