Merchant Archive
Thread: Merchant's biggest issue: It Sucks.
tarnak, the issue is that merchant itself receives only 2 skills which do help a merchant in the bussiness. the additional vendors and planetary ad. the rest is just fluff that does nothing.
Fluf? The two lines I appreciate the most are efficiency and hireing. The ability to make my vendors look fit in to the look of a shop by giving the matching uniforms is a huge benefit in my opinion. The reduced cost on buildings given by efficiency, even though it is not much makes me fell more merchant like, by giving me a competitive edge.
While I have planetary advertisement activated I get more sells from people that ask me for a WP, then for random walk in business. As for management, when the vendor cap get here it will be of value, but until then it is "just" a way to organise the stuff you sell.
the xp grind is plain dumb. the only thing you can do is give away things and macro-bark in starports and beg your friends and guildmates to go visit your shops.
That is the achiever talking. Personally I loved that I got merchant xp with out having to grind. You on the other hand sounds like you are driven by obtaining goals, so you properly like grinding (or rather the ability to se you improvement). The "do this get that much xp" type game play will appeal to you because it make you feel like you achieve something.
The merchant do not have that, witch is why I said it is not for achievers. Thoughts that like the game play of the merchant will like the way xp is gained in the profession.
I have three houses in different planets, each stocked with 1 credit for 2X 31% powerups or 1k creds for a crate of the same powerups. So far only my guildies go there regularly...part because they are helping me, part because its basically a very good powerup giveaway that helps them. But to be able to reach a big majority of clientele, the only thing that works is location of shop. For those getting into bussiness so late after the housing patch, its practically impossible to find a lot to build in near an npc city, for they are walled by houses, most times these houses can be 700m deep.
1000m is not anything now a days with vehicles. And close proximity to a NPC city is not all that mater, A location close to a permanent faction base on the way out to a "point of interest" or "quest place", will be just as good.
However, you are focusing on getting the xp, the achiever thing again. If you just tried playing a merchant, the whole finding a nice and getting suppliers, building up the customer base, and then keeping the vendors stocked, you would not be so frustrated.
As an achiever you need to feel you are working throe words a goal, which you have an effort on you progress. Building a successful business can give you that feeling, and all the while, you will get the merchant xp.
Yes the profession could use more business tools, more content and more control of our vendors, but it is not as bad as you make it sound.
Csin wrote: <snip>
Focus in on the merchant skill trees, the proposed nerfs, and the whole merchant picture and it all starts to make sense. The devs want us to be excited over saving a few hundred credits here and there as a 'competative advantage'. The addition of a few items to our nerfed vendors is supposed to make us shiver with delight that we can make 3 or 4 more sales a day than a non-merchant. Add into this profession the aptly-called 'barbie' skills and what you have is a ROLEplaying skilltree...possibly the only skill-set in the game where you are supposed to IMAGINE you are successful.
I run a real business
<snip>
I sadly agree. I was very excited about the Merchant profession until I realized how little benefit it gives. I am still rather excited about the merchant role, and learn from it every day. I keep some merchant skills, and will probably Master for a moment just for the badge, but they do little but remind me of my role.
I think you have something when you say "you are supposed to IMAGINE you are successful" the skill boxes do that without requiring actual success. If the experience were based on profit, the profession would be quite different. As it is, you can become a successful millionaire merchant without taking much in skills, and the grinders in this post can Master it (albeit slowly) without a single sale.
I tried to convince people that the profession should go in a new direction with droid usage, but got no response. Something needs to be done; you should want the profession if you play the role.
Merchants of the world arise! You have nothing to lose but your barbie dolls!
Interesting that you guys are spending a lot of time bashing the RP content in an online RPG.. I would like to have more tools as a merchant myself, but this is a profession that relies heavily on your own real life skills beyond what is granted to you by the system. What is granted to you by the system does give you an advantage, or would if it worked correctly.
The Hiring line may be fluff and unecessary to many merchants. To many others it is important to them. Marketing CAN have an effect on busines even in the game. People remember places which are unique and interesting and they come back (provided the merchandise is good as well) they also tell their friends about the experiecne. Is that type of marketing good for everyone? No but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be a part of the merchant skill set.
I think we should be open to new ideas for skills, but at the same time I wasn't intersted in the droid idea either. That doesn't seem to add anything to our abilities to sell things it just makes us a hybrid combat class which isn't what a merchant is.
I am very interested in ideas like commissioned sales and directed sales and store fronts and even delivery concepts (though I suspect the technical restraints are still preventing this).
doc, the thing is that roleplay elements do not affect sales. items for sale, prices and ease of access to the shop plus permanent advertising (aka planetary ads, signs, unique merchant buildings) is what brings in the customers.
yes, its nice to enter a store and seeit decorated to what it sells. but that will not make a costumer go back to your shop if its located 3k m from the starport and if there's a non-decorated, empty house with 1 vendor that sells the same things you sell for the same price, just 1km from the starport. its fluff.
"I wasn't intersted in the droid idea either. That doesn't seem to add anything to our abilities to sell things it just makes us a hybrid combat class which isn't what a merchant is"
uh? all i said was that the droids act to deliver items, they dont fight or anything. If you've played Final Fantasy Online you may have noticed players can go to an NPC and 'hand over' an item which would then get delivered to the targetted player's house. Its insanely useful and popular. It is a form of bussiness, merchants are in the bussiness of bussiness.
real life skills as you put them cant be applied when you are offline. they cant be spread to a large number of people because you are after all, only one person. You dont have a staff people that will obey your orders to go out and advertise for you that will be avaliable all the time. whats left is spam-barking or spam-mailing (which has become increasingly disturbing how much junk mail i get in my in-game email. horrido).
You know, IF master merchants could put up a 3 story high, starport-sized building 'mall' that's 'broken up' into several 'shop spaces', each with its own 'control terminal', the master merchant could put up the mall, rent theshop space to other merchants (they get admin rights to that shop space only) and the mall is put on a 'premium planetary ad' kind of status, THEN we could really see a significant change in how bussinesses are ran.
tacwraith wrote:
doc, the thing is that roleplay elements do not affect sales. items for sale, prices and ease of access to the shop plus permanent advertising (aka planetary ads, signs, unique merchant buildings) is what brings in the customers.
yes, its nice to enter a store and seeit decorated to what it sells. but that will not make a costumer go back to your shop if its located 3k m from the starport and if there's a non-decorated, empty house with 1 vendor that sells the same things you sell for the same price, just 1km from the starport. its fluff.
First I simply disagree with you that you can't find a spot within 1k of a static city. With all the movement that has gone on since player cities I see spaces open up all the time and if you can't find an open place to build there is always buying someone else's space who isn't concerned about the location as much or renting space in other shop. There are options. I agree that if you aren't convienient to get to you wont' get as much walk in business but if you are KNOWN on the server as a person who provides a unique or high quality product you will get business. But I am all for new advertising methods, provided they dont' cause more lag and they aren't annoying to everyone.
"I wasn't intersted in the droid idea either. That doesn't seem to add anything to our abilities to sell things it just makes us a hybrid combat class which isn't what a merchant is"
uh? all i said was that the droids act to deliver items, they dont fight or anything. If you've played Final Fantasy Online you may have noticed players can go to an NPC and 'hand over' an item which would then get delivered to the targetted player's house. Its insanely useful and popular. It is a form of bussiness, merchants are in the bussiness of bussiness.
The droid idea was someone else who was supporting Merchants becoming a "droid handler" profession which would have given us a combat component. I support delivery content too. I have forwarded several of those ideas on to the devs. I suspect the problem with delivery is that it is technically challenging with the current way SWG works with relation to users and their stuff.
real life skills as you put them cant be applied when you are offline. they cant be spread to a large number of people because you are after all, only one person. You dont have a staff people that will obey your orders to go out and advertise for you that will be avaliable all the time. whats left is spam-barking or spam-mailing (which has become increasingly disturbing how much junk mail i get in my in-game email. horrido).
You know, IF master merchants could put up a 3 story high, starport-sized building 'mall' that's 'broken up' into several 'shop spaces', each with its own 'control terminal', the master merchant could put up the mall, rent theshop space to other merchants (they get admin rights to that shop space only) and the mall is put on a 'premium planetary ad' kind of status, THEN we could really see a significant change in how bussinesses are ran.
Iagree with you on this. That is appended to the bottom of our Top 5 list as a requested change. Allowing a Player City Mall structure would be very beneficial to the merchant class and while I don't know what is inovlved in a multizone admin scheme I like the idea.
But you aren't going to be able to blow away the 250 item limit in a structure with this idea because the first thing that will happen is the people will start taking merchant to get their 1k storage space.
I am all for new content. I am not for bashing content we have simply because some people don't use it. A LOT of people care about the appearance of their vendors. Does that mean you should? No but it doesn't mean that it isn't important to the merchant community as a whole. One of the top questions asked by merchants in another thread is why they can't get better control of the visual appearance of their vendors. They DO feel it is important.
Yeah, Hiring isn't a "RP" skill tree. I personally have no use for it myself, but image is important to a LOT of merchants out there. Personally, I'm a drug dealer. I expect my employees to be weird looking. In fact, I HOPE for it. The uglier the better. But if I were running a nice boutique, selling clothes, and don't laugh there's lots who do and make a killing at it, then i'd want my people to look NICE. A professional look is NOT something to be sneezed at. A lot of real life companies sweat by it. How many have dress codes? Uniform shops? It matters.
However, I agree that there are lots and lots of ways to make this tree, and our profession more effective. Like ID's being able to "craft" our employees' images, instead of hiring and hiring and hiring and hiring. We DO need better tools to sort and calculate our sales (for instance the resource pool is a good one-all the same resources grouped together in one blob on a vendor and you buy as many units as you want, instead of merchants having to break them down into blocks).
We DON'T need a combat aspect. We DON'T need a craftable item. We DO need tools of our trade to make us more useful. I agree with Csin, I SHOULD be able to have people killed. I'm rich dammit! But we aren't useless. We aren't a quarter profession (I mean come ON, with advertising we're at LEAST a half of one!). But we are lacking.
So let's work together and figure out what we need, instead of how useless we are (which ain't so because 3 out of 5 newbies in my guild asked me if they could sell things on my vendors).