Merchant Archive
Thread: Revamp proposal, draft 1.. comments please!
p4Samwise wrote:
First let me say I can tell you did a lot of work here. My time is limited so I'm limiting my comments to the problems I see, but there is a ton of good stuff
The revamped Merchant profession should:
3) Make all branches and skills of the Merchant profession provide benefits that directly relate to selling goods.
If you're talking about existing benefits, they can all beviewed as being directly related to selling goods depending on the Merchant's style. Not to say some couldn't use some strength training
but they are all useful in some way.
Skill tree revamp
- High-level merchants should be able to make more money than lower-level merchants.
- All skill boxes on the way up the profession should contribute to this effect.
I'm iffy on this one depending on what you have in mind. Merchant should provide the tools for selling our goods, but how much money is actually made should still be dependent on how those tools are used. There are many factors that come into play in making a successful business which is why many real life entrepeneurs with every resource at hand can fail while an upstart working out of their basement can succeed.
Vendor Changes
The most commonly requested solution to the problem of crafters finding it easier to run their own vendors than go through a third-party merchant is to offer "consignment sales" as a vendor feature. Selling via consignment would involve the following steps:
1) The merchant negotiates a deal with a supplier, including:
- Percentage of the sales revenue that goes to the merchant
- Amount of stock that the supplier is to deliver
2) This deal is recorded on the vendor.
3) The supplier drops goods off at the vendor.
- Attempts to drop goods off without having established terms with the merchant will fail.
- Attempts to drop goods off that exceed the pre-agreed limits will fail.
4) The supplied goods are then instantly available for sale.
- No manual stocking/pricing needed by the merchant, as terms have already been negotiated.
- The agreed cut is automatically deposited into the merchant's bank account.
- The remainder of the sale is automatically deposited into the supplier's bank account.
Neat idea, sounds like a lot of coding work.
Scaling vendor capacity to merchant skill involves creating seven "levels" of vendors that are basically functionally and cosmetically equivalent, but have differing sale/storage limits and maintenance costs.
Cosmetically equivalent? That doesn't sound good.
Skill Tree Changes
The largest change in this proposed revamp is removing the Hiring tree entirely, and replacing it with a "Finance" tree. The reason behind this shift is twofold:
1) All skill boxes should provide benefits to the act of selling.
As a Merchant I would never support the removal of current skill boxes and/or abilities, especially one so enjoyed by many Merchants. Hiring is a commonly selected line for a reason, people enjoy having aesthetic vendor benefits. And there is a real mercantile advantage to having aesthetically pleasing vendors, whether we're talking employee dress code orshop theme. If anything Hiring should be plumped out
I don't know what kind of business you run, but I'm a Tailor and there is a definite advantage to selling by having attractive NPC vendors in my fine couture. Customers tell me they enjoy coming to my shop because of how it looks (displays, vendors, decor) and that's with me keeping a sad stock at all times (<150 items).The Hiring perks are valuable and are seen as valuable and that's why when you ask non Master Merchants what their merchant profiles are they almost always have some if not all of the Hiring boxes.
2) Selling capacity should vary with the skill level of the merchant.
See above section for details on revamped vendors. It is suggested that the former Hiring tree benefits be simplifed such that all non-NPC vendors are available to artisans with Business III, and all vendors (including options to equip clothing/weapons/armor on NPC vendors) are available to all Novice Merchants and higher.
This would be a problem for architects and others with high value goods. Just because someone is a low level merchant doesn't mean they are a low level artisan. Perhaps better would be to put a limit on how much any given item could be listed for, though then you run into problems of people selling packs of goods. Should any new abilities ever be added they can be tucked into an existing line. There is no need to knock any existing lines out
Advertising:
Note that vendor barking has been removed from this list, since it does not directly pertain to advertising. It is suggested that these abilities be moved to Novice Merchant.
Again vendor barking is an extremely valued and useful skill. There is no call for it to moved to Novice Merchant. And it is most definitely a form of advertising for most Merchants. The only move I could maybe see is to the Hiring line but there would be no point really. Why do you want so much moved to Novice Merchant? The goal should be to make Merchant skill boxes things people WANT to get.
Efficiency:
All benefits are cumulative, so a Master Merchant will be able to operate vendors for 50% of their normal price, and structures for 75% of their normal price.
Sounds high to me. There are already too many credits in the game and I can't see the devs going for this high of a discount. I do definitely agree the current skillbox benefits are not very useful at present. This is the line I've completely done away with to accomodate Master Tailor/Master Image Designer.
DocSavag wrote:
You can't allow me to sell all the market will bear while giving me an artifically arrived at number. 10 million on one server migt be far and above 10 million on another server and either way changes to the economy would make those numbers fluctuate in their meaning as the value of a credit changed over time.
The only thing I like about a credit limit, and I would argue for a current sales limit not a weekly sales number, is that it would solve the storage issues. There might be better ways to do that. One that comes to mind is maintenance costs that increase if you exceed the "limit" What if all sales over the "limit" were charged additional maitenance ( i.e. [Sales Amount]/1000 per hour ).
Having the limits be allowed to bend (at a heavy credit cost) sounds reasonable. I posted my reasoning above for the weekly vs. current limit - any comments on the frequently vs. infrequently logging in players? Do you feel that it's not an issue, or that there are better ways to accomplish the same goal, or...?
As for the cosmetic stuff. Skill boxes should have features that are desirable and obviously those cosmetic features you toss down into boxes you can get in a few hours with no effort at all are very desirable and are nice features to give to merchants who have put in the time and are attempting to make a career out of this profession. I agree that having an entire tree devoted to them is excessive. But putting them in to management or even advertising would be preferable. It is a perk for attaining skills in the mercant profession.
As long as we're agreed on getting rid of that Hiring tree. (I'd still rather have more visual variety in vendors at all levels of play, though.)
Oh and I missed the consignment part that has someone putting something on my vendor without approving it. Yea I don't support that. Everything that goes on my vendor that I manage gets my approval. Even if its just highlighting a bunch of them and clicking "Accept" I want the power to choose. If you decide to sell in competition with someone else after we have agreed that you woudln't do that I will have the right to refuse your items and end out agreement. It is my job to manage the vendor. Give me tools to make that happen, give me tools to make that easier, give me tools to make it almost automatc, but don't try to take the managment function away from me...its the service I am supplying to the crafter and our joint customers.
What if that were an option? E.g., the terms of your arrangement with a supplier can optionally include an "auto-accept" feature where items offered by that particular supplier are accepted without requiring your manual approval, but if that option is unchecked, you still have to approve everything before it goes up for sale? I included the "auto-approve"because I can see the requirement to manually check off every item becoming tedious after a while - if you have a supplier you have a good relationship with, and he delivers the same goods every week at the same time, for the same price, it seems unnecessary for the system to require you to manually accept each and every time.
Kwee wrote:
p4Samwise wrote:
3) Make all branches and skills of the Merchant profession provide benefits that directly relate to selling goods.
If you're talking about existing benefits, they can all beviewed as being directly related to selling goods depending on the Merchant's style. Not to say some couldn't use some strength training
I should have clarified that - "benefits that directly relate to selling goods and are proportional to the number of experience points invested."
Everyskill can potentially have some infinitesimal benefit, but I'd like to see them evened out - it prevents "cookie cutter" templates within the class, and prevents would-be Master Merchants from having to gain as many skills that they don't desire in and of themselves.
Skill tree revamp
- High-level merchants should be able to make more money than lower-level merchants.
- All skill boxes on the way up the profession should contribute to this effect.
I'm iffy on this one depending on what you have in mind. Merchant should provide the tools for selling our goods, but how much money is actually made should still be dependent on how those tools are used. There are many factors that come into play in making a successful business which is why many real life entrepeneurs with every resource at hand can fail while an upstart working out of their basement can succeed.
Agreed. However, all other things being equal, a merchant with more skill should have a considerable edge in the marketplace, just as a Teras Kasi Master fighting a Teras Kasi Novice will have a considerable edge in the dueling arena.
Scaling vendor capacity to merchant skill involves creating seven "levels" of vendors that are basically functionally and cosmetically equivalent, but have differing sale/storage limits and maintenance costs.
Cosmetically equivalent? That doesn't sound good.
Sorry, I should haveclarified better: I want to avoid having higher level vendors have predefined appearances that are tied to the vendor levels - all vendors at all levels should be equally cosmetically customizable.A master merchant shouldn't be forced to place a vendor of a given appearance in order to get the level 7 benefits. I mention this specifically because there seems to bea natural tendencyto reduce the number of independent variables in any given game object (which is why every high-end combat character is dressed in identical suits of composite armor).
As a Merchant I would never support the removal of current skill boxes and/or abilities, especially one so enjoyed by many Merchants. Hiring is a commonly selected line for a reason, people enjoy having aesthetic vendor benefits. And there is a real mercantile advantage to having aesthetically pleasing vendors, whether we're talking employee dress code orshop theme. If anything Hiring should be plumped out
To me, Hiring sticks out like a sore thumb among the other merchant skill trees, because its skills pertain to interior decorating, rather than retail. Every other aspect of decorating a shop can be accomplished by any merchant or non-merchant - tying this one particular aspect of decoration into a skill tree doesn't fit. If decorating a shop is something that should be restricted to high-level merchants, then more aspects of decoration should be tied to that tree (e.g. the ability to place items in a house), but I doubt anyone's going to go for that.
This would be a problem for architects and others with high value goods. Just because someone is a low level merchant doesn't mean they are a low level artisan. Perhaps better would be to put a limit on how much any given item could be listed for, though then you run into problems of people selling packs of goods. Should any new abilities ever be added they can be tucked into an existing line. There is no need to knock any existing lines out
The limits shouldn't prevent architects from selling goods - it should, however, prevent them from selling high volumes of high-priced goods without the assistance of a skilled merchant. Ditto for any other crafting profession that can potentially make a lot of money (which ideally would be all of them)- they should require a merchant of similar skill to help them realize that economicpotential, just as a combat character requires a weapon from a master smithto realize his/her full potential in combat.
Advertising:
Note that vendor barking has been removed from this list, since it does not directly pertain to advertising. It is suggested that these abilities be moved to Novice Merchant.
Again vendor barking is an extremely valued and useful skill. There is no call for it to moved to Novice Merchant. And it is most definitely a form of advertising for most Merchants. The only move I could maybe see is to the Hiring line but there would be no point really. Why do you want so much moved to Novice Merchant? The goal should be to make Merchant skill boxes things people WANT to get.
Do you think that the 4 proposed abilities are things people wouldn't want to get? I'd think that any one of those would be worth climbing the entire tree for.
I started aseparate thread on the Advertising tree a while ago and reasoned thusly: the function of Advertising is to bring new customers into your shop by making them aware of its existence. Ad barking has no range beyond spatial, and does not generally give new customers any way to locate the shop if they haven't already been there. Therefore, it doesn't actually provide advertising benefits. Its main purpose is to highlight the vendor once the customer has already entered the store (and spam up their spatial channel if there's more than one vendor).
Efficiency:
All benefits are cumulative, so a Master Merchant will be able to operate vendors for 50% of their normal price, and structures for 75% of their normal price.
Sounds high to me. There are already too many credits in the game and I can't see the devs going for this high of a discount. I do definitely agree the current skillbox benefits are not very useful at present. This is the line I've completely done away with to accomodate Master Tailor/Master Image Designer.
The structure maintenance reduction I propose is only 5% higher at Master than it is right now (currently it's a 20% reduction at Eff IV with no additional benefit at Master). And even with the 50% vendor maintenance reduction, vendors should be costing a lot more to maintain (detailed under the vendor revamp section - vendor maintainence cost is proportional to the selling power of the vendor).
Ad barking again is a skill that people see as valuable and as such should have a place in a tree, not at Novice Merchant.
p4Samwise wrote:
The "total sales listed at any one time" thing was my original idea, but I modified it because it's then easy to get around that by logging in more often to restock - hence, the benefit of higher levels ends up being that you don't have to log in as often, rather than that you have a capability to sell more.
The time scale for the limit basically dictates how often the merchant has to log in, at a minimum,to be economically competitive with other merchants who log in more frequently. One week seemed like a good scale because it covers the daily player as well as the weekend player. (A daily scale would be great for people who play an hour or two each day, but would screw the people who play in large chunks over the weekend... this is the same issue that Blizzard ran into with their original implementation of rest state in WoW.)
There is no reason why a low level merchant who logs in twice a day to manage their store shouldn't be able to out sell a master merchant who only logs in once a week, they are working harder and therefore deserve a greater reward.
A master who logs in twice a day can still sell more than a novice who logs in twice a day if they have the customer base to buy that much of their stock, but the master who only logs in twice a weekwon't be able to make as much.
The system should encourage people to be online using their skills and not make it possible to succeed as well only playing once a week asyou canplaying daily.
Darkov wrote:
Why is renting a vendor such a problem? Provided we're required to log in to pay maintenance on the vendors, the properties, the whatever? I don't want a second job, I want skills to let me make money in the game. Having to log on daily is fine, I have no problem with that requirement, having to move hundreds of items on dozens of vendors?
I don't know whether you've looked at it like this, but it's already been said there is atleast one vendor for every player out there. Most Master crafters I know run three or more vendors, now you move their business to the Merchant, thats three vendors per crafter I work with, in my town that would be 21 crafters, so that is 63 vendors I would need to have? Lets assume the vendor cap is just 30 vendors, and I can place a Merchant specific building called a mall, which can have up to 30 vendors. Then we take the current system of me moving all the stock from each crafter onto each vendor and setting prices, restocking etc... I would never log off the game, cause I'd spend hours every day just restocking.
What we have to consider with the coming changes to losing vendors when you drop Merchant skills is that any revamp to Merchant must include the fact that we will need to run more vendors shifting more stock on a daily basis. Everything we do now, will be magnified horribly, so we must have a new system that removes a great deal of the tedious work load. Renting vendors is one obvious way, leave the work in the hands of the crafter when it comes to dealing with stock, just let us deal with the paperwork and the money and then the special deals we set up on the side.
The consignment system as outlined above removes all of the paperwork and money and the management. We are left with nothing to do on a day to day basis and that isnt' much of a service. Rented vendors makes us a vendor crafting profession in my opinion and isn't a good thing. I'm not opposed to consignment sales and I'm not opposed to tools to make those consignment arrangments work very smoothly with as few button clicks as possible. I worry though that making them TOO easy is bad for our profession. We are supposed to be handling some of those details. If we handle none of them what are we bringing to the table except the vendor itself which is a poor excuse for a full fledged profession.
Ijust want a blanace between "ease of use" and "redundant" in terms of our role in the day to day operations of our businesses. To me this means that I approve all stock. (I want to be able to do it by accepting all of them at the same time. Don't get me wrong, but I want a say in the deal)
All of this is my own personal opinion back by my experiences in game.