Merchant Archive
Thread: Vendor Maintenance Fees coming – your input request
All I can say is
What are you smokin'?
All the things that remain broken, that cripple the ability of anybody trying to do business in this shambles of a Player Economy, and you want to saddle us with crippling vendor fees?
Fix the broken vendors ... fix the broken factories ... give sellers and buyers even the tiniest bit of reason to hope that their transactions are reliable and that unexpected bugs won't add 100% or 200% to the cost of performing a transaction ... then we can talk about significant vendor price rises.
The degree to which you are out of touch with the current player experience ... and you must be to suggest this laughable change while so many other things remain broken ... is very discouraging.
NO SALES TAX
For the sake of the casual player, keep the time-based fee tied to the item cost as proposed.
A sales tax will only be passed on to the consumer. A time-based fee tied to the item cost will force the vendors to price items reasonably and not inflate prices. The vendor encourages this economic train wreck.
But then again, a 40k pistol made with 250 resource units (160cr per resource) doesn't last that long on a vendor anyways...
here is the problem as I see it.
As a merchant, you end up getting more for less.
The higher you get, the more things you get (NPCs, barks, advertising, etc).
The higher you get, the cheaper it is for you to maintain this stuff.
Now this is great for the merchant line, I mean it actually adds value to the class, and maybe that is what your intention is. Unfortunately as has already been pointed out, it hurts the dabbler or the small time merchant. They are basically required to sell lower cost items. Even worse is that if they have a really nice high priced item, that item will continually sap them even though it may be no fault of their own that it doesn;t sell.
This will also completely and totally kill the concept of architects having shops. No way I am throwing anything but harvesters up now.. One small house at 8K is going to basically cost me 256 credits per day to list.
As has been said, a commission or tax is the most logical way to go. What you are talking about imposing certainly won't stop the 'sploiters using this for storage (list everything for 1 credit and 1000 items will only cost you 32 credits per day). All it will do is hurt the small time joe.
A commission or tax would create that money sink. It will be an automatic withdrawl of cash into the system. Yes the shop owners will just adjust their prices in some cases to adjust, but they would do so anyway to counter this. Also, you could STILL have maintenance (wages) for the NPCs. That could be the money sink. Don't have it based on price of items on the vendor, but just a flat wage for the type of NPC vendor you have. And as in real life, give higher up vendors better features of some sort (sort features for merchant/customer, search features, etc) but make those features have a higher wage..
just some suggestions.. as you are putting it in now, it will be unrealistic for any crafter to have a store besides a merchant.. if that is your intent I will accept it, but if not, then this is to just let you know..
Here's an idea...
Open some of these unused buildings in the cities to place vendors at. This would allow more people to see and use the vendors as well as give a use to at least some of the solid block buildings...
Also, you could then charge a Sales Tax of 10-20% on top of a minimal vendor maintenance...
I'd love to be able to go to a 'vendor mall' in the city as opposed to running around the planet(s) for an hour or two just to find the vendor empty....
My $.02
Kevin,
I think there are 2 issues here you need to seriously consider before implementing this fix (yes, I agree, the NPC vendor maintenance is a bug that needs addressing).
1) There is currently a bug where items left in the Stockroom poof randomly. After the first big patch last week I lost about 100 weapons that I had on my vendors. Since then I've lost another 20 that went 7 days without selling and disappeared before I could get them reloaded. The reason I keep weapons in the stockroom is two-fold. First, it seems that alot of people have trouble figuring out the "Next Items" button concept. To counter that I spread my weapons across 3 vendors and kept it down to 10 or less of each type. Until I did thatI had people passing on my shop because they didn't see them on the first page. Second, as a weaponsmith/merchant I have demand for alot of different weapons. To keep from having to make new ones every day, I make my weapons in factory runs of 25-50. In the past, I'd load 25 on the vendor, but 15 back to stock and reload them as they sold. With this bug in place, I can't do that for fear of losing items (had a ticket in the CSR system to get reimbursed for over a week, no response).
2) Item decay isn't implemented for all items. Specifically tailored items. People aren't buying as many clothes as they did anymore. I've got over 200 items on my tailor vendor that are just sitting there waiting for someone to buy, but until clothing decay is in no one has any reason to buy more clothes unless they just want a different look. Also, overall demand is dropping, but sure enough if you don't keep just about everything stocked you lose business when people can't find what they want.
Due to these 2 factors, if you implement maintenance I'm in a bind. Because of the stockroom bug I can't bump out excess items to stockroom to keep maintenance manageable (because I'm likely to loose them). Also, because of limited house storage, I can't offload all these items and store them in my house. The only option you leave me is either a) leave everything on my vendors, hope they sell sometime in the future and take a big hit in maintenance fees or b) leave 2-5 of each item and destroy all the extra items (which means I now have to go into a mode where I'm always creating weapons in small quantities so I don't kill myself on costs, but I'll be doing this constantly to fill demand.
I hope this has made sense. Please consider these issues before implementing this fix.
I am against any % fee----defeats the whole purpose of having a vendor in my opinion, unless you are going to make Bazaar available for selling high ticket items.
Flat fee, based on skill level (NPC more a day than a Droid, etc). OR per item fee...but a percent will kill anyone who is a architect or armorcrafter. A chef and a tailor both work equally hard to master their profession....why punish the tailor cos her top item is 10k while the chef's is 400 credits?
The real problem is that you're pumping too much cash INTO the economy. People are getting a lot of cash really fast through missions, and much too easily. A previous poster said that he knew players that were making 300k through missions in a few hours... there's your problem right there. You don't fix it by penalizing people that have nothing to do with the amount of money coming in. Besides, with that amount of money coming into the game, there's no way people can spend it fast enough, so you'll still have too much cash in the game.
Making vendors fees higher won't get the cash out of the system; people will just sell their items on the street instead, and the money that was coming out of the game won't be anymore...you'll have more in there.
One way of fixing this is to reward players, give them items that degrade or that only they can use, not as much cash.
I've been thinking for the last few days....well, after I get that big house, and a few items for it....what then? What can I spend my money on?
If you're trying to get money back out of the economy, give us something to spend the money on that enhances the game and doesn't feel like a tax or maint fee. Let me buy special items from the guild halls in town that I can ONLY buy there. Some sort of status item(s). Get the vehicles working, and let us buy those. Increase the cost to travel between planets.
If you really want to suck money out of the system fast (after you decrease the mission costs), SELL PLOT SPACE. Right now there's a 10 lot limit....nearly everyone I know wants more land, and would pay to get it.... Add another planet or two and let people buy plots there. Make it expensive, and voila! Cash getting sucked out of the economy really fast.
I know that this is will increase the demands on the database, but I'm telling you that you can either deal with this database issue head on by buying an increased capacity license from whomever your database vendor is (Oracle, Informix... whomever it is) now, or you can do it later. Doing it now will prevent you from trying to figure out ways around it buy nerfing things that shouldn't be nerfed in the first place.
At the proposed rates, I will simply stop using a vendor.. and run survey missions in the time I normally spend stocking it...
I'm a Master Tailor.. so I have alot of items.. in alot of colors. This is great, as it give players many clothing choices... but to give those players choices... I have to make items and put them up for sale.
Lets say I take 20 items and make them in 10 different colors.. and sell them for only 1000 credits... (far less then it costs to manufacture higher level Tailor items)... so I'm paying 200 credits every 45 minutes..or 6400cr a day... so I have to sell at least 7 items a day to make a mere 600 credits. Or I can simply run two survey missions for ~2500cr in under 10 minutes. Sure I could raise the prices, but the ratio remains basically the same. Imake more money at the 7th time, but atgreater risk. Granted if I sell more then 7 items a day.. I'm making 100% profit (from the vendor standpoint) on the remaining items, but in all reality most of my color selections won't sell on a given day.
Granted this problem may be more limited to Tailors, as far as the variety of items, but certainly the cost to manufacture some other items in the game is far higher, so they just move the numbers around... same problem really.Crafting take a lot of time, and money, in the cost of harvesting materials and leveling up and running the factories and making the final item, and stocking the vendor and then restocking the vendor when it delists everything... so now you add another sink to this group of folks who already deal with many sinks.. not to mention this sink is more of a gamble. I don't know who is going to buy something... it could just sit there for a week... It already cost me it's retail value in vendor fees.. so I'm just out the cash.. even if I sell it now.. I'm losing money. It seems alot more cost efficent to turn my vendor into storage (the problem your trying to avoid)... run survey missions and wait for people to /tell me with clothing requests. Then I can just go retreive the item from my vendor.. deliver it.. and save all the maint fees. Sure my sales will go down, but it doesn't matter, because I wouldn't be making money on those additional sales anyways.
(I'd also stop stocking anything other then white and black.. since 80% of requests are for those colors. I'd make the others on request..)
I also don't see how this is a "transactional" money sink. Your charging me moneywhena transaction may/ or may not exist. If you want a transactional money sink, implement a sales tax. If you wanted to be creative (I hear that's a goal somewhere), you would could even have these taxes go towards Imperial or Rebel causes.. and have a slight effect on the GCW. I'm sure crafters would love a way to have a impact on the GCW. I'm sure most crafters would dislike a "sales tax", but at least it isn't punitive. The proposed change merely makes crafting/merchant unfeasible for the non-hardcore players. It's difficult for the casual folks to be effective now.. the proposed changed simply eliminates their avenue of sales... while only changing how those of us with more time go about selling.
My 2cents
Q, let's be clear here.
If this goes through, the availability of weapons on vendors will decrease to almost nothing. Street hawking will be in full force.
As a weaponsmith, I attempt to keep 60 to 80 weapons available at all times including those that do not sell in 3 days. There is no way I'm going to stock my vendor to ensure availability of items at those rates.
Go to a cost per sale or cap the daily cost. Anything more and you will destroy player merchants.
Merett
Master Weaponsmith
Looks like I found the skill class I shouldbe dumping(I'm just shy of Master Merchant). Devs....how about properly fixing the vendors before further killing the Merchant class with insane ideas? Sounds like you all want to erase any profit a well-stocked merchant would enjoy by having some off-the-wall formula...it would absolutely kill those who market in higher level merchandise or those who strive to be the "all-in-one" shop. A percentage tax/commission would be much better. Again though, how about properly fixing the darn things before proceeding with ideas such as this?
Im on intrepid and I spend a LARGE and I mean large portion of my day earning the credits it costs me to travel to the ends of the galaxy to get the materials it takes to be an effective doctor. I sell stims in the hope that some day ill turn a profit but I cant even get someone to give me 1k for a super hot 400 heal stim b . With the proposed vendor changes you are not looking at the big picture ... only one crafting class is making wild profits and thats the weaponsmiths - everyone else is sucking hind **edit** as they say on the farm - if the game needs money sink this is the absolute WORST way I can think of to add one... because all its going to do is make the convenient vendors not available - only those who sneeze away 100k like yesterdays newspaper will use vendors and then charge more for the items on them - the rest of us will go back to the way things were before we got houses and vendors and trade in the streets - in a world as advanced as starwars you just seem to be adding more micromanagement and no real management - IE why cant I see my vendors from whereever I am on my datapad ? I cant get an inventory of my houses' contents while running on another planet ? Why not ? but you can take the time to add taxes to vendors ? This is another in aline of really moronic moves - I dont understand it but what this means is the game is gonna suck - I like being able to run into anyones house and browse the nifty little junk they dont want but will sell me - wether or not they are there ... the end result is that game will be FAR less enjoyable than it was ... for those of you that are so cool and have so much money and are already SO bored with the game that the only gratification and acknowledgement you can get anymore out of the game is to come here and beg to be nerfed and have these utterly inane features added to the game ... go play something else - are VENDOR FEES gonna restore the balance to this completely broken economy ? No - hell no - they are just going to make the game far less enjoyable and much less convenient but you uber already PLAYING WAY TOO MUCH PEOPLE will be made UBERER ! rediculous has anyone at sony thought this through ?
Wow seems they are determined to cater to the 10% of the people that can actually play 24/7 and the rest of us be dammed