Merchant Archive
Thread: Vendor's not Allowed in Private Buildings
Gallbearer wrote:
IN BETA he said that, but about 3 weeks ago he said it was to stop people from using vendors as storage.
Actually he said it on 8/14/2003, well after beta.
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=merchant&message.id=4261
Here is what he posted:
In this update, vendors can only be in public structures.
The first problem with vendors in private houses was that people were getting griefed using them. They were putting items up for sale which were reflected on local commodities markets and purchased, but then were not available for pickup because the vendor was locked away behind closed doors. The result was people getting gypped out of their money.
We plugged the grief hole short-term, but the long-term thing that needs to happen is probably having a PA-only vendor, if there's a big need for it. Can you explain to me what purpose your PA vendor serves? That would help me design the replacement.
The second problem: For what it's worth, vendors were always intended to be a "public structure only" feature. That's because they are not intended for storage, but for commerce. At the same, we can appreciate the desire to have drop-off facilities for PAs, or the ability to deny sales to specific groups (such as those scummy Rebels).
This is why the maintenance fees for vendors are scaled off of the price of the goods--since anyone can get to them, to keep an item safe in one, you have to price goods exorbitantly high, which results in high vendor fees. If you price it cheaply to avoid the fees, then you run the risk of someone buying the item at a steal. This mechanic only works if the vendors are publicly available, of course, so that's a big reason why we didn't ever plan for private vendors.
Can you explain what you were using the vendors for? Was it storage, sales to PA members only, or something else?
-Raph Koster,
Creative Director
I stand corrected on Holo's statement.
Holo must have been half asleep when he wrote that first paragraph since to my knowledge sales on private vendors haven't shown up on the bazaars since mid beta 3. Perhaps he was confused by the fact that they show up in the available tab for no reason since you can't retrieve them from there.
Now, that being said. Don't let anyone kid you. The database is the reason most things relating to crafting, structures, and merchant get done.
The statement about it being more efficient to store things in a vendor came later as an explanation on why they were backing down from the 1%fee for all merchandise on vendors (or rather putting it on NPC's as well as non NPC vendors).