Merchant Archive
Thread: Vendor Maintenance Fees coming – your input request
I personally support this, I believe they should fix any issues with Merchants first however, But this will be a good step into insuring that noone over prices items! Which on MANY servers is a major problem!
"Ten thousand?! We could buy our OWN Star ship for ten thousand!"-Luke Skywalker...
Sorry Luke....10k Barely buys you a scout blaster...
As a purchaser of items I enjoy this idea, Because money goes into players hands combat professions etc. Then into the crafters hands, Where the majority of it remains.
And yet all the while Crafters are allowed to charge extraordinarily OUTRAGEOUS prices for their items, Making us the people who mission etc. for our money Pay Even More, So with this implemented Crafters will still make money, But they will be forced to sell at Fair prices, Imagine if Luke would have been there to buy an FWG5 from Han Solo....And heard 20,000c...He would have passed out.
I believe maybe like 500 pr hour etc. as with the calculations you recommended, Thanks Q This is awesome man!
*Rich people always hate paying money*
Yea I agree Eateng, Sorry am tired, That WOULD make more sense to do it like that and just charge X% of the price of the item sold as tax that sinks that % of the credits, I was mostly just stating my appreciation for this idea, Is in my mind the most needed thing there is.
On Wanderhome you can pay in excess of 40k for a good gun at times, Im sorry, That is pathetic, And 12k for a Dl44? Noooooo! Whereas Lowca has fairly better prices however still man, I Can Buy A Small House for what some people charge for lower end weapons, And a MEDIUM HOUSE for what some people charge for weapons such as the FWG5, And I could buy a LARGE house with money for maintainence for what I would be charged for a suit of armor.
Prices need to be fixed, The economy needs to be balanced, BUT FIRST Merchants need to be fixed, This way you dont open some NEW problem, But I definately support BOTH Q's suggestion and the idea of just a sales tax for the seller, Makes sense thanks!
Hi,
well, Devs also try to keep the number of Items in the game as low a spossible. This means, Items who are not worth selling will not be sold and destroyed instead, or not produced. But this creates a problem with the Portfolio of the crafters and only those things almost everybody wants are made and sold. But where do you look for items at? At the tailors storewith 100 different items in the Vendor, or the one with 10 Items, if prize is the same?
Exactly.
Therefore a balanceneeds to be created which allows to have rarely sold Items in the vendor to have a customer-friendly portfolio available, thats why I look at the total cost for the time things are in the vendor, and not just only at those things who are sold within a few hours.
In other words, I would stop having Heavy Harvesters and Stuff like that in the Vendor, they are too expensive to hold. But I like to be able to have one of those in the Vendor all time.....
This Problem is smaller for People with lower-prized Items, but the Weaponsmiths I know have usually 400 Items in the Vendor. Imagine 400 Weapons at a worth of at least 1.5Mio Credits.......1500 Credits per 40 Minutes......54k a Day.....
Thats Insane.
Read ya.
If however, this fee is a poorly masked way to prevent people using vendors as storage, then using this line is an insult to the intelligence of your player base, and indicates you are not truly interested in our feedback but simply want to cover yourself as you failed to do with the changes to house item limits.
I actually agree that vendors should not be used as storage, and believe that this is what you are trying to achieve, so will approach the argument from that direction.
It is difficult to prevent vendors being used as storage without nerfing someone along the way. But have you really thought about whether it is fair to punish most the people who have put the most into their businesses? Have you thought about the long term consequences of punishing people for stocking a full range of items in their vendors? This is a player-based economy. You should know this. Why are you punishing the people who make your game world work?
The best ideas I saw from scanning this long thread are:
1. Charge a 25% fee for withdrawing an item from sale, and remove the 7 day limit for items on player run vendors
This way, if someone puts an item there for storage only, they have to either put it on cheap enough for people to buy and take that risk, or pay a fortune to be able to access the extra storage. It won't bother people who have loads of credits, but neither will your maintenance system. Best of all, it won't hurt genuine merchants.
You could make this a 75% fee and it still wouldn't bother me and my 600k odd worth of real stock, but would really make it hard for anyone trying to use a vendor for exatr storage.
In your system on the other hand, my 600k would cost me just under 20k a day to maintain (well 19.2k but say 20k for an average figure - stock value fluctuates). Someone storing around 30 items at a 20k each would be paying 20k a day for the pleasure. If they have fighting skills, that's a few missions. For me, someone relying on my craft and merchant skills to make a living, its a giant pain.
Under the 25% item withdrawal penalty system, the person using the vendor for storage would have to pay 5k to access any item on the vendor. Considering that someone using a vendor for storage would be pricing items alot higher than their value to discourage others from buying them, it would probably be cheaper to buy a new item than store it when you know what the recovery fee will be.
The true merchant would have no penalty fee, and only the fees below to worry about.
2. Charge a 5% tax on sales
This would achieve the original objective of effecting "the economy in the transaction phase" and add a money sink that the economy can bear. Merchants can pass the cost to their customers if they choose, or take it on themselves if they want to keep their prices lower.
This fee should be added on when you price an item. So if you put something up for 200, the price on the vendor would be 210.
3. Charge a standard daily maintenance fee
This fee should be minimal and affordable, something like the fee for a small house. Charges for special merchant perks like barking and global map advertising could be added in here.
Please consider something like this as a solution to merchants, and do not settle for something so poorly thought out that it will cripple the player-based economy this game relies upon.
Hmm. I should be hitting Master Armorsmith within the next day or two. I had planned to have my general stock at 2 suits of chitin armor, 3 suits of Ubese, 2 suits of Padded, 2 suits of Advanced Chitin, and 2 suits of Composite. With pricing that is actually below average for my server, that's about 650k in armor. If I calculated right, I'm paying out 18,500 a day to my vendor to stock that much. Now, if I sell anywhere near that then 18.5k is no big deal. I probably won't be doing that kind of business though. I'd guess that 18.5k per day would be a good 10-20% of the money I'd make on a typical day, maybe more than that.
Then there's the 13k a day I pay in harvester and house maintenance, so 31.5k per day total. Now I'm looking at 20-30% or more of my expected daily earnings. I must sell at least one full suit of Ubese armor every day to meet these expenses. Even one suit of chitin would mean I lost money that day.
Then there's the money I pay out on a daily basis for resources, as there are many I need and I cannot possibly gather them myself.This is good, for the most part, as it spreads the wealth in a manner of speaking. However, throw in resource cost of at least 20% of my armor's sale price, and now I'm paying out 40-50% of what I hope to earn. Of course, 20% is on the low side for some of the armor I make, especially that which requires difficult to obtain resources.Chances are at this point I'm paying out over 50% of what I make.
Now, this would be all well and good I suppose, except for a few things. First, even with the desired inventory I listed above, my selection is limited. Why? Colored armor. I just cannot afford to offer a variety of colors with these kind of fees. So, I guess I better limit colors to special requests and personal delivery. Kind of defeats the purpose of my vendor, and my merchant skill that I use to advertise said vendor. Somehow I don't think that punishing those who wish to offer a variety is a good thing. Gotta be tough for a tailor as well. Second, I cannot afford to overstock at any time. Often the weekends are very busy, double the business of normal days. This past weekend was horrible for me, with almost no business. Had I overstocked to attempt to meet weekend demand with these kinds of fees, I would have been down to just about nothing in the bank. Third, this is great for preventing newer crafters from becoming overly wealthy, but does nothing about those who powered ahead early with factory exp at 100% and have made tens of millions since then. Fourth, while it does remove some money, it does nothing to remove money from the more advanced fighters in the game, who often don't need to spend much on items. A master CH needs a good weapon. That's it. If they sit there farming 100k credits an hour, it's not leaving the system at all other than negligible travel costs. A novice smuggler can make money at that rate right now too, and also only need a good weapon. Neither requires armor, or much else in the way of crafted goods.
As has been mentioned, a percentage of the sale being given to the vendor would probably be a better idea than hourly maintenance based on items available. This is, I think, how things worked with vendors in UO, and it was a good thing. Doing things that way would not penalize crafters for offering a wide variety of goods, which is what they should be doing. Oh wait. Call me cynical, but I just realized that from the database's point of view, a wide variety of goods is not a good thing. Cookie cutter vendors with a small, token selection of wares is probably desirable right now. My mistake, of course less items on vendors is what you want. Wonderful.
Ok im going to try and be constructive. this post is so deep im sure it wont be read anyway.
This will just me another butt bomping for Archtiects who have to sell the most expencive items in the game at the lowest profit margin! Go by Item count not value please.
2-5 credits per item per day
Thank you
you know I figured it out. I know what a few people have in the way of inventory on a vendor. And I know what I have. For my stuff and all I sell is pet stims and vitlity packs. the vendor is going to make over 100k a year. Boy I would love to have that job. for someone like a weapon smith. we are looking at 2.4 million dollars a year the vendor is making. THAT IS NUTS. That is more then most CEO's make ina year. Make it more realistic. I have no problem with the vendor getting a % of the sales at the end. Just don't charge us for having stuff up there. I don't make that much money on pet stims. I bearly make enough to keep up with the demand and my harvesters. I normaly break even right now with the vendors the way they are. I will lose money with what they are suggesting.
Autum
Vendors aren’t the place to put money sinks. Not all merchant/vendors are making cash hand over fist (with the exception of vendors who are also a master profession like weapon maker.) If you turn vendors into anymore of a money sink then it is now the people who have lots of money will just stop using vendors.. think about it. We are capitalist minded, if a vendor becomes too much of an expensive we will just turn to other ways to sell our goods so that we can maximize profits and as a result we will end up avoiding your money sink altogether. I’m sure it would be cheaper for me to hire player characters on commission to sit on the street and do /shout sales than paying the insane time based vendor fees you want to implement. At least if I’m doing player commission sales I know that I’m not losing money every hour something doesn’t sell.
If you want a money sink here’s a novel idea, use PLAYER CITIES. It should be easy to have some sort of "city tax" that would be necessary to keep a player city as a city. You could just make those funds drain right out of the game.
The merchant class is pretty much useless as it is.. I doubt many people will bother playing it once you make the change to the NPC vendor. Sorry, you guys need to rethink your money sinks.. it should be something fun and not something that cripples an already damaged class.
The merchant money reduction should have taken the form of a percentage of the total sale and not a time based thing anyway. You could have just called it a 10 percent imperial tax. It would have equally taken money from across the board instead of just punishing those who aren’t fast sellers.
Holo I completely agree that merchant fees need to go up, I have 5 vendors.
Let's take a look at what I have for sale on 2 of my vendors. I restock them daily. These are my housing and furniture vendors.
Housing one has 85k merchandise on it. Using your formula that's 85000/1000 = 85 credits every 45 minutes. For ease of calculations let's say you raise that to every hour. That's 85 times 24 = 2040 credits a day. I sell a house maybe once every 3 days (75k of that is medium house, 10k is small). So if it takes me 3 days to sell the small house (which is not unreasonable) that's 60% of my profit in vendor fees, calculate into that harvester fees and I'd be lucky to break even.
Now let's look at my furniture vendor. I'll say I have about 50k merchandise on it. That's 50000/1000 = 50 credits every hour (for the sake of calculations). That's 1200 credits a day. I make maybe 5k in sales on that vendor a day. That's over 20% of my money in vendor fees, caluclate into that harvester fees and I'd be lucky to make 50% pure profit.
Sales tax of 10% or so and/or a 5-10 (max) credit an hour fee on vendors is a much much better approach.
This will really really hurt the architects because our things sell for a lot, but not very fast. It won't hurt weaponsmiths much at all because even though their things sell for quite a bit too, they sell out about 12-24 hours after they put their merchandise on their vendor.
Another good money sink would be increasing the rate of decay on weapons. I've had the exact same weapon since I bought it maybe 10 days after release and its still only about 300 points decayed out of 1000. Granted, I don't fight a lot, but I still use it quite a bit.
I read this post below -- what? 800 items on one vendor? And you didn't think that might be alittle excessive, or that you could get away with not paying any maintenance for all that?
Come on -- be serious.
I am for some maintenance on vendors -- I say put a flat rate of 10 credits per item placed on the vendor per day. I also think there should be a cap of 100 items per vendor to ensure that people aren't cluttering the system with tons of items.
1) 100 items x 10 credits per day = 1000 credits per day
2) Cap the number of items on a vendor to 100.
I think that would be more than fair.
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edwhy punish peopl from having well stocked vendors? This is plain ludacris! You want to put a damper on the economy, base the merchante fees on a per sales basis. This would definiatley make someone like my self go play a melee.As a tailor i have over 800 items on one vendor in one shop and another 300-400 on anothe shop on another planet. With tailors able to produce over 200 items easily, this would kill us. Read the inputs before the nerf bat swings.!!!!!!