Merchant Archive

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Ok, let s analises the objectives, the means and the consequences here.

Objectives : Adding money sinks to the game

Means : Making vendors pay a maintainance fee based on their stock value.

Consequences :

- Fewer choice to no choice in vendors : in order to limit their operation costs, crafters and vendors will reduce stocks on their vendors, which means that the first customers will be served, the customers coming next wont, and as a matter of fact wont spend their cash. Which means actually fewer money spent. As choice will be reduced on vendors, customers wont be able to make "pleasure'' purchases, as the display will be very limited...once again, fewer money spent.

- Fewer shops in distant locations : because of maintainance cost, merchants wont be able to afford to stock in advance their shops in distant locations. This means that proximity services for fighters wont exist anymore where they used to be needed (camps, dongeons, distant planets). Once again fewer money spent.

- Rush for sale : in order to avoid too much cost, retailers will have to face some stress selling their wares quickly or taking a loss. This will induce deflation, especially for the most costly wares that cost most to store on a vendor. As a matter of fact the best wares will be easily accessible for beginners, making the game loose interest very fast, as there wont be anything to be desired left after one week play. Once again fewer money spent.

As demonstrated, while willing to add costs to the selling process, the means used will have the counter effect, reducing the money spent and making game durability shorter between upgrade patches. This is not the right means to achieve your goal.

On a side effect, you will occasionaly make a profession desapear : the pure vendors. While 3.2% cost a day doesnt really affect crafters margins, it actually represents 15 to 20% of a pure merchant margin. This will give an extra advantage to crafters with whom pure merchants are already competing with few to no advantage in their skill tree.

Now this fix might be an oportunity to start fixing the merchant profession. High maintainance cost could be the boost pure merchants need to develop their profession, IF the merchant skill tree is fixed meanwhile. Which means changing the market efficiency line to something allowing real savings on vendors : 20% saving for apprentice, 30% at Ef1, 40% at Eff3; 50 at Eff3, 60% at Eff4 and 80% for mastership. Then crafers would start to actually need merchants or invest in the merchant tree. We dont need the boxes for the bazaar fees, we can afford to pay 20cr for a maximum of 24 items, especially when most of the time we just cant use the bazaar, as our items in our vendors stockrooms count against the bazaar maximum items.

As a conclusion, this "fix" would have real unbalancing effects on the economy, unless the merchant skill tree is revised before to something worth investing experience points in. Otherwise it will create a market slump, with limited offers on vendors, shops only around big cities and a all you can buy at one credit economy where the best items wont be sold thru vendors, but on forums.

Thank you for your attention.

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s7ryk3r wrote:

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.!!!!!!

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he isn't talking about the number of items on the vendor he is talking about the cost of each item on the vendor. so if you have a medium house for 60k that is what he is going off of not the amount

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What scares me is the 45 minute thing.

Right now I have a few harvesters and I feel like I am a slave to them. If I don't log on every other day they go away. I lost two harvesters because servers were down whenever I tried to log in for two days and could not pay their maintenance fee.

How about vendors work on commission. Whenever you put something into a vendor, it requires the value of the item/500.

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So, is this like "Death of a Salesman"?

This is an awful idea for a money sink. There should be fee's I'm not disagreeing at all, but good lord you're going to kill us all. Flat fee or a % of the sales should be the money sink, not punishing us who go to great length to provide quality products and a good selection. I didnt go up the merchant tree to place 1 item on my vender as an examplethen do personal sales for the actual item. I cant be on 24/7 to sell things to customers.

Alot of players pet peeves with merchants and venders is that they travel across the galaxy to get to your shop and find it empty. People come to my shop because I go to great lengths every single day to make sure their trip is always worth the money they spend on traveling fees and the time running out to my shop.

If I have to limit my listings or have to meet them face to face for a sale, I'm dead in the water.

Please, think about this Dev's, you are about to destroy a great many players living, gaming experience and fun

st

Well, you asked for feedback, and here's mine. That maintenance rate is absurd. As a Weaponcrafter I routinely have anywhere from 250,000 to 500,000 credits worth of weapons on my vendor. If you are looking for a drain, having a vendor chewing up 8K-16K of credits per day in maintainence won't work at all, at least for me. I'll just shut my vendor down and sell guns the old fashioned way.

I currently use bulky terminal vendors, just cause I don't have the points to spend on Merchant skills. To me the maintenance rates on those are ok - I drop in a couple thousand credits every day or so. If you want to pull some more money out of the economy, find some money sinks. Give us some frilly luxury stuff to buy that costs a lot of money, but don't make me pay to keep a vendor up. I am of course only one vote, but I won't do it.

stI dont think it should be based on the total amount/price of stuff on the vendor. One complaint I hear from tons of people is that a lot of vendors never have anything in stock. If it is setup where the rate is based on total cost of all items, this will even get worse. People will end up using vendors just to get thier shop on the global map, and will make people email for custom orders. As it is, buisness has been horrible for everyone Ive talked to here in the last few weeks. My architect and armorsmith friends said buisness has been horrible the last 2 weeks. Im barely lucky to get 1-2 sales a day, and they usually just come from PA members. Before you start charging again, you need to fix ad barking and the register feature. The barking stops working after a few hours, AND the register feature breaks and has to be redone every morning.

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NPC vendors DO charge a maintenance fee, and if I may say I think you're approaching this bass-ackwards: the other vendor rates should be lowered to match those of the NPCs.

Let's face it;player vendors are currently crippled. When they work at all (which is to say, not bloody likely), they're impossible to locate except through planetary advertising (again, a system that is unreliable at best). This is NOT the opportune time to increase fees, or even charge fees at all.

Let's have a low flat rate on vendors, like that currently charged by NPCs. Then, if you're still determined to suck yet more money out of us, charge a transaction fee of 15% or so of every sale (implement the same on the bazaar, if you please, to even things out). This removes the money at the point where most of it is being exchanged, the wealthiest merchants and their customers, while allowing struggling shop owners in out-of-the-way locations to still build their stock.

Otherwise

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**edit** clunky interface.... as I was saying, otherwise you're going to drive the small businessman out of business and leave only the megamule PAs to celebrate.

And maybe you could figure out a way to reinvest those "tax" revenues into FIXING the blasted vendors, eh?

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I made a large house on corellia and have troubles selling it. So I raised my business in order to get a merchant.

I put it in my house, really proud of it. I paid it 1000 or 2000 credits, and read : "48 days". Wow, that's a lot !

And then I was starting dreaming : I could put my architecture stuff and my armors for sell. wow... they'll be able to come, and see the houses...

The large one came into the vendor for 160.000k. i put some mabari too. At least a good point for someone to come to my house and check my wares : more than 30 items, all interesting (well, that's my pov )

I checked the status...2 hours left.

I removed all the items, the vendor can die, I don't care. Now I'm sell in front of the starport

Your system would be ok for low cost items. But what are you doing with highly valuable one ?

If I have been charged even 10% for the products SOLD, then I would have made my vendor run, and advertise, and be interested in having a high quality shop...

As the buildings don't decay, less and less people will need houses or factories (except thanks to your re-deed bug with deeds never re-appearing in bag ) so a house will never appear in a vendor... There are so many furnitures you can't put them all into your vendor ! If you sell ranged weapons, you can survive with 12 to 16 kind of items. As an architect, people will want to buy a table, 4 chairs. 4 chairs of the same kind. There are 5 or 6 different types... Imagine the costs, I don't want to...

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I aggree that money sinks need to be added... But Sinks over time at the merchant level isn't quite right. Merchants don't do missions, they do transactions. It would make more sence if the fee was posted against the transaction not time since merchants don't make money per unit time, but per unit sold. For example, with the cost over time system, a tailor (like myself) is discouraged to have a wide selection of different colors/styles because each one cost creds, whereas, you could get the same sink by charging against the transaction. As it is, the merchant has some of their funds tied up in the goods on the vendor (the 60 of material used to make a ribbed shirt, for example, cannot be reclaimed or even resold on the bazzar as long as it is on the vendor.)

The better solution, transaction oriented, goes as such. A vendor sale is 4 days. So the cost to post the item on the vendor (Vendor's salery for RP notation) is (Number of 45 Minute Cycles in 4 days)*(Cost Of Item)/1000. Exact same as it iscurrently (128/1000)*Cost. However, the 1/1000 factor is WAY to big. As suggested, for a standard 4 day sale, a 3K item (Chosen because it could be sold on the bazzar for 20 creds with great advertising and central location over 7 days, not 4) would cost 384 creds. So it actually costs more (about 672 creds) to sell an item at 3K on a vendor. This seems unreasonable. The cure? Either adjust the cost per vendor sale to (128/33600)*Cost (No exaduration, under your formula this is Cost/33600 per 45 minute step and causes it to exactly match an equivelent sale on the bazzar, which is actually a penalty because people actually have to find your shop whereas the bazzar is centrally located) or nerf the bazzar to match the new formula (Thus the cost to post a 3K item on the bazzar jumps from 20 creds to 672 creds).

The big consern here is that you are currently placing money sinks in different places than money sources. Since only armor and weapons degrade in game, fighter types (The money source, money appears at terminals (And thus warrior types)and vanishes at artisans/miners) rarely visit the non-weapon/armor smiths. This means that rather than spending the creds, warriors buy one or two non-weapon/armor things and then only buy weapons/armor from that point forward. But since their expenditure rate is less than their income, they horde money (Nothing to spend it on.) Artisans depend on warrior money to fund their shops, but if a non-degradable item seller's (Like a tailor shop) cost goes over demand, they fail. And if the money drain increases too much, then they will all eventually fail. The question is, is there a way to directly control money at the immediate recipients? Yes. But it depends heavily on item degeneration, forcing them to replace that worn out ol' probot or weary old sock. Creating a "trickle down" method of sinking money... Or a bunch of naked warriors (It has been a suggested side effect of clothing decay.)

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You've gotta be kidding me Q. That rate is WAYYYY too high. As a Master Architect, I'm routinely selling the large harvesters for 150k. I have about 20 of them on my vendor. That's about 3 million right there. Now add all the furniture and solar generators and mineral mining harvesters I have there on top of that. I'd guess I have about 5 million credits worth of goods for sale on my furniture vendor.

I also host goods from weaponcrafters, clothiers, armorcrafters and droid engineers on other vendors I've put up in my house. I thought that was how merchants were supposed to work. If you put this nerf in, there's no way I'll be able to support this side business. I'd have to mark up everybody's goods 100% to sell them and then barely break even due to the ridiculous upkeep you propose.

Mind you, with 5 million credits, you're asking me to spend 5000000/1000 = 5000 credits every 45 minutes!!! hahah.. YEAH RIGHT! I currently have about 1 million credits, but it's taken me a long time.. about 3 hours every day running to harvesters, crafting more furniture, buying resources from folks, etc. If you add an 8k (including all my vendors) every 45 minutes in money sinks, I'll be losing about 240k/day. All the money I've worked for will be gone in FOUR DAYS!!!!! What a joke.

You guys need to seriously reconsider. The fact that you're even proposing such a rate tells me you have no clue about how merchants are operating in this game and are trying to divine an answer from some obscure database analysis. If you put this change in place, I will be removing all vendors. And most likely leaving the game. I enjoy running a business, it's fun for me. But you can't run a business with such ridiculous vendor maintenance fees.

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Fix vendors first, what hell is wrong with you guys!!

They lag worse than rush hour traffic

Retreiving items sometimes nets the purchaser with an item the dissappears when they shuttle, which in order to get the item back that person is forced to log off for 30 minutes. This is crap, and it should be fixed before you go nerfing yet another class.

The merchant class is a joke as it is, why make it more of a waste of skill points?

And somewhat related to vendors is the factory FUBAR which causes so much frustration it's hard to believe that we pay for this game.

I know you could care less if people quit this game, cause there is alway some other moron to take their place, but please getyour collective *edit* together..

You want sinks in the game allow people to purchase faction perks with credits at maybe 20 times the costof faction points..