Merchant Archive
Thread: Vendor Maintenance Fees coming – your input request
Basing vendor fees on item prices is badly skewed against the professions with low profit margins, and any merchant who isn't also a crafter. I might support this decision, if the vendor maintenance discounts in the Efficiency line were increased, and you fix the Advertising line. Right now, I'm paying several thousand credits a day to re-register all six of my vendors every time you people take the servers down, in addition to maintenance on four houses. I think I've got enough money sinks already.
I believe there should be a percentage per item price somewhere around 3%. Reason being, if the formula Q states is used It would cost me $16,000 credits every day to keep my vendor stocked. I am a weaponsmith and like to keep 2 of each weapon in stock at all times and 3 of some of the more popular weapons. I sell at very low prices, but even that adds up. if I have 2 or 3 of each weapon on my vendor the total value on the vendor is about $500,000. Which calculated out - $500,000 / 1000 * 32(there are 32 segments of 45min in a day) = $16,000
This is way too much especially if I want to place another vendor on some more planets. OUCH!
Now keep in mind that some weapons sell every day so it wouldn't be that much every day. I log on every day to restock my vendor, but what if I needed to take a RL vacation? I would want to have 6+ of each weapon in there to keep it stocked while I am gone.....Now we are talking some serious money drain that no crafter can afford...not to mention if you go through a dry spell and your Items stay in your vendor for a week.
I really feel sorry for Architects who have very high priced items in the vendor. Imagine having a few $50,000 deeds in your vendor for a week. 
Just thought I would put in a few pennies
Quite frankly it isn't even realistic ethier, I think you should treat them like salesmen, give them a low base maintenence like 1-5 credits every 45 minutes and then let the take a commission on everything they sell, something like 5-10% of the cost of the item they sell. Heck you could even start it out at something like 10% commissions and have it lower slowly to 5% as you go up the merchant tree.
This is a dumb idea. It would not really bother the high end merchants (and I was one--wouldn't have affected me at all), but it will be crushing for anyone starting out. It also disproportionately affects some professions (ones that require large stocks like tailors and ones with high end/slow sales items like architects). It's also very hostile to the casual gamer who may rely on spending a saturday restocking vendors with enough to hold them through the week when they can't play as much. On the other side it rewards the 24/7 "no life" crowd who can sit in their house and do sales live.
Also I think it's extremely obnoxious to be increasing taxes on players who are experiencing game breaking bugs.
If the number of items needs to be further reduced, your solution needs to be database redesign, not designing an entire game around the needs of Oracle.
Better yet.. just PAY your vendor to work for you..25 credits an hour?
Or charge to place an item on the vendor just like the Bazaar.
even going with the sales tax idea is better than your proposal Devs
Dont punish people for having variety! Lets kill the game even more!
Also why have ALL those categories on a PC vendor like a Bazaar does?
Everyone just hits the "ALL" at the top anyway.
All I can say is you must be out of your freakin' minds. You don't think we're paying enough already? And you're going to nerf us before you fix something as simple as making sure our barking and planetary listings are persistent between reboots? And what more the cost of doing business on your own vendor is going to be over 30 times that of the bazaar?!?!?!?
Fact: I have lost well over a million credits just to vendors not releasing things to my customers or from the stockroom.
Fact: I currently spend 2100 credits everyday just to turn my vendors on again (barking and adverstising)
Fact: With a billing cycle every 45 minutes, that's 224 billing cycles a week,a 3000 credit item (bazaar max) will cost me 672 credits to list if it doesn't sell. That's over 1/5th the items value and over 33 times the cost of a bazaar listing for the same item.
You folks are amazing. Kill our profession please.
Far as i can tell you need to do one of two things. Charge a flat rate on vendors to reflect reality (hourly employees and all) or charge tax on our sales, not our stock.
Better yet fix our vendors inventory bugs and the persistence of our advanced skills before you dare think of breaking us further.
REALLY PISSED OFF NOW!
You can't just go charging so much maintenance on items stocked in vendors for several reasons:
1) New merchants don't know what will and won't sell, and in addition don't have reputations yet. You're raising the bar for entering the class.
2) Casual players might ONLY be able to stock their vendors on weekends, hoping to produce enough stock to make it through a week. This punishes players like this very badly.
3) Current pricing schemes are such that some of the biggest-ticket items (houses and the like) are also selling at the very lowest credit/unit multipliers. This is a disincentive to the architects.
4) One of the benefits I THOUGHT I was getting from opening a shop was the ability to carry more than 25 items on my vendor at a time. All of a sudden I have an incentive to strictly limit my on-hand stock, and do business more by direct interaction than through my vendor. Why wouldn't you want to make vendors BETTER rather than worse means of transferring goods.
5) Vendors are inconvenient already, given the large number of player-owned shops, the wide variety of available merchandise, the sprawl and the limited stock any one player has. If the intent is to limit player vendors drastically, thus opening the way for purer merchants, then TAKE THE SKILL AWAY from artisans. It ALREADY doesn't really pay to open a shop before training Novice Merchant, this will just make for fewer grand openings.
6) Before you do ANYTHING to vendor charges, the economy has to have all of it's bits fixed first: Fix Factories (and I don't mean let me redeed for free, I mean FIX the darn things, sometimes we cannot replace them in our preferred spot). Fix the bugs where customers cannot retrieve items. Fix the ability to advertise. Give us billboards. Give us a means to post notices in our shops about available items and pricing for things we can't afford to stock. Make us into REAL shopkeepers, and then think about charging us for the privelege.
maintenance fees such as this will require a merchant to do more to make their money. if they don't 'perform' they will end up broke.
so, how do you perform? have a wider selection of items? increase the price to bring in more cash? there is nothing you can do that will not incur even more penalties. a tax per item once per sale for the majority of the tax is much better. correctly balanced it will cause the same money drains, but encourage performance rather than disourage.
the currently proposed, time-based maintenance fee will cause a sort of slippery slope effect. once you start to slip a little, everything you do to try to recover causes you to slip even more. this is poor design.
in summary, something like a 5-15% fee once at each sale, in addition to a low maintenance fee such as "total listed price of all items" / 10000 every hour.
this way, a vendor still makes money and attracts customers based on selection and quality. since the advertizing skills do little to attract business, and the biggest business draws are on selection and quality, a fee such as was proposed in the original post would discourage a merchant from having said quantity of items. they could not pay for the vendor with such decreased quantity unless they increased their prices. but OOPS (this is where the mistake lies) increasing prices also penalizes you.
The worst thing about this fee per 45 mins is that you cannot run a complete shop of something. We will just see shops with the top selling items.
I personally wanna have a nice weapon shop where i sell all weapons, even the survival knives and the staffs. But i can forget this with this fee.
My suggestion is to make a real small fee when putting an item into the vendor like PRIZE/1000 and then to charge a tax of 1% when the item is sold. Also take a fee like 500 credits a day for the vendor itself.
With that tax we can run shops withnon top selling items and there is still a money sink as intended.
Igorr Blackfire
Blackfire Corp
I personally feel that this is a horrible idea to base the vendor maintenance on inventory.
Why? Because I've already been bitten by this. I sell resources. I was happy with my terminal vendor until one day I went and got 40,000 hides from a friend of mine to liquidate for him. So I placed those on my bulky terminal vendor (the only kind of vendor that CAN sell resources 100% reliably) and started winding down for the day.
About an hour later, I check my vendor just before I log out (at midnight) to see if I've got enough maintenance for the next 5 days. What do I find though? 15,000 credits a day! I don't even make that kind of money in a 3-4 days. I spent the next 5 hours (fortunately it was a weekend and I didn't have to go to work the next day) unloading my vendor and replacing it. Then I found out that NPC vendors can't sell resources reliably. Oh well.
Q, this is a bad idea. I won't bore you another re-hash of the facts, everyone's already done it for me. Architects, resource gatherers, tailors, armorsmiths will be the ones hurt by this. And it will hurt.
So, as a variety vendor of resoruces, weapons, slicing stuff, etc,here aremy recommendations for consideration:
- Sales Tax 5%-10% sales tax should be more than enough of a credit drain on us. We can't really raise the prices because people will just stop buying. People with large inventories can continue to offer the selection that people want.
- Un-stocking Fee If you want to keep people from using vendors for storagethen add in a 25% un-stocking fee based off the listed price. In other words, if I want to pull an item off I have to pay 25% of the listing fee that goes straight out the door. I personally almost NEVER de-list items on my vendor. Because I keep what I want then sell the rest. But then take away the whole 7-day limit on items that are listed or at least give us an optionto use it or not.
- Number of Items listed limit based on vendor type If you're really anxious about people using vendors as storage, then add in that terminal vendors have a specific # of item limit, say 25-40. Then droid vendors have a little more. NPC's have a little more, say 100-200. That way if you want the extra storage you have to move up to a Merchant profession. do not do this until NPC's are fixed for the split-resource bug!!!
These are my opinions on what should be done. Do with them as you will.
The whole idea of having a vendor is that you don't have to be present to make sales. It is not a penalty to charge for this ability... However, until a shop is flying with business standing out the door, a maint fee such as this would be KILLER to the person just starting out..
The argument could be made: Ok, then the lower level people use the Bazaar... but the idea of a merchant is to bring people TO your shop.. As a Tailor, working my way to master, I want EVERYONE AND THEIR BROTHER to come out to my shop, even though I'm NOT master.. just so that they know where it is... As I gain levels, I can let these people know and the return business will help my business grow... I'm JUST starting to get solid use out of my vendor with 5 boxes to go for master.. if I'd have had to pay high maintenance fees on the way up, it would have been much harder..
I also agree that 2 20% reductions in bazaar fees is not worth as much to me as a reduced maint fee of a vendor.. if you're really working on 'efficiency', the maint cost should decrease as you increase in levels.
How about this: Each vendor adds additional maint to the house terminal that crated it... this way if people put vendors in other shops, on other planets, they can just pay the maint. fees with their own shops..
Second: Charge a flat percentage per item SOLD.. Like a sales tax. Merchants can now accuratly calculate how much it will 'cost' them to list an item, and what they need to sell it at to make money. You could escalate the fee for more items on the vendor... I.E. the fee is 5% for the first 100,000 credits of stuff, an additional 2.5% for the next 250,000 and another 2.5% for everything over 350,000... By the time people are listing 350,000 credits of items on their vendor, they can afford the 10% fee for each sale..
Q -
Sigh.... 
you aren't making this easy on us are you? I'm a casual player. I have a busy life with work, friends & family. But I love playing this game, so I squeeze in a few hours whenever I can. I'm a struggling tailor/merchant. I'm so casual that I've only got Casual I & Field I in tailor, and Hiring I in business. I have no harvestors. I run crafting missions to make money to buy my resources. This is all as intended, yes?
So why punish me this way? This formula,Total Listed Value of Items on Vendor / 1000 every 45 minutes, if implemented as laid out here, will cause me to shut my 2 vendors down, forever. Let's break it down to simple, simple terms. 10 items of clothing, say a ribbed shirt. 300 fiberplast, 300 metal. Okay, fiberplast & metal both run (on Starsider) an average of 3 credits per. So these shirts cost me 1800 credits to make. simple enough, maybe I markthem up to 2500 credits (come on,they're ONLY ribbed shirts.) So I will make 700 credits in profit.
Until this formula kicks in. Then I'll be paying 2.5 credits every 45 minutes. over the course of 1 day I will pay 80 credits. Wow, my profit is suddenly down by over 10%. if they don't sell the next day, its 160 I'll be paying. Wow - almost 22% of my profit, just to put it on my own vendor? What about day 3? day 4? by day 5 I'll have paid 400 credits to have these 10 shirts on a vendor, reducing my profit to 300 credits. Oh wait, the vendor is in a house, I have to pay maintenance on that too. Say good bye to the last of those credits. I just gave the shirts away for free.
Please, as a casual player, I beg of you to rework these numbers so that the "little guy" doesn't get slammed. Suppose you adjust the mission payouts more? Take 10% off of them, and you'll have less money flowing in the game. This reduces the need for money sinks. As many, many have said, institute a 5% sales tax, and a 15% restocking fee (if someone withdraws items from their vendor.)
Oh, and one last suggestion - before you implement ANY of this - please, please, PLEASE fix the class before you nerf it!