Merchant Archive

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VarnaxDespin wrote:

I am philosohpically against any more limits on our vendors and will post this again in case no one has yet seen it and cares to respond.

What type and how many items we place on vendors is already limited......not by a arbitray # thrown up into the air by us and/or the dev's, rather by the 30 day limit placed on all vendor items.

Let me explain.... currently I and everyone else can put as many items onto a vendor as we like... what stops many of us from going over a certain number is the 30 day limit. For instance I have aprox 700 100k unit stacks up on my resoruce vendor... using my backstock I could double or maybe even triple that number. Yet I dont.. why? because some items sell slower then others and I dont need to have 5mil units of X resource up at any one time, especially if I know that by doubling my items.. I am going to have to spend an extra 2 hours re-stocking those items in 30 days... the amount I put on my vendor is proportional to the amount I think I will sell and how much time I am willing to spend re-stocking ever month it those items dont sell.

Why else do we not see vendors with 20k items... or 50k items.. or even a 100k items? because no merchant in their right mind canwants to spend20+ hours adding and then re-stocking all those items.

I am going to keep posting this becasue there is no reasonable item limit....100 items per vendor...200 items... 500 items the number is irrelevent.... You cannot go from an infinite number to a finite one and maintain any rational perspective.

Heres a real life example from another post of mine to point out how absurd a vendor limit is:

2 assumtions:

Humans need to breath air inorder to survive

Merchants need vendors is SWG to survive as a proffesion

Lets say you live in a large industrial city (SWG) and the goverment (Sony) comes to the citizens and says, "Hey guys, we have a carbon dioxide problem (database) and inorder to to solve it we are going to have to limit the amount of times each person breaths per day. Now in order to make this fair, we cant base the number of breaths on the size of the person (the amount a crafter produces/sells) because larger people and athletesbreath more then small people and that isnt fair. So next month (publish) each family is going to be alloted a number of breaths per day....If you a single Adult you'll get 50 breaths, a couple each get 70 breaths, couple w/ 1 kid each get 80 breaths, couple w/ 2 kids each get 90, couple w/ 3 kidseach get100 and a couple w/ 4 kids each get 110 breaths per day, Have a nice day."

Well of course the community (forum) gets all up in an uproar and yells, screams and kicks thier feet because they cannot survive only breathing so few times a day. People start throwing out ideas on how many breaths "they" could actually live with, how they could get around the breathing limit and how they could change the way they breath. The problem with this is they have by doing this already accepted the insane idea that they should have to limit thier breathing to solve the cities air problem rather then the city working on solving the amount of carbon dioxide being emited by the city's Industries.

So after a week the city government comes back and says, "We hear your plee's/concerns, and thanks for the feed back and ideas, we understand your points of view and feel your pain, so we have decided to double the amount of breaths we previously proposed. We have given, now you must."

Well I am sorry I cannot live on 50 breaths (items), 100 breaths, or 1000 breaths a day....This leaves me very few options, try to live with the absurd demand to limit my breaths and die, or leave the city (swg)I have loved up until now, for another town (MOG) that will allow me to breath.

Vendors are a merchants main tool, much like a rilfe is a riflemans main tool,Limiting items per vendoris akin to telling a rifleman they can only shoot a rilfe so many time per day....It is absurd.

As some have disliked my rilfe/vendor analogy I will add a rebutle here to keep it visable.

Argument against: a combat proffession is limit by the spd cap and the condition of a weapon so they are limited and so should vendors be..

Rebutal: The loss condition of a weapon for shooting it does not limit the skill/or abilty to shoot.. the weapon itself is the limitation. Theoretically you could have 100 weapons on your person and stay online from server re-boot to server re-boot and shoot those weapons for as long as you desire. While there is a "actual" finite number of shots that could be made in a day...that number is going to depend on the amount of enemies you can find to shoot and the spd cap at which you shoot... but you have at least have the option of doing that.. the items maybe be limtied and the speed at which you shoot them, but the "skill/tool" (ability to fire it) is not limited to a specificaly unrealistic number.

Merchants have the option of theoretically stocking and infinte number of items..how many vendors have to stumbled arcoss that currently stock an unlimited number of items? My guess is none

While theoretically the number of items on a vendor has no current limit, we.. merchants are limited already by something called the 30day drop off....if I spend 8 hours of RL time puting 20k identical items up on my vendor...then most likely 30 days from now I am going to have 15k+ "item auction unsuccessful" emails to delete and I am going to have to spend another 6 hours of my time restocking those items...

We merchants control ourselves and place as many items as we think is necessary to maintain a selection and keep up with our sales...but we do not overstock by massive amounts because we dont want to waste hours of our time restocking those items. In other words....we are limited...by ourselves, just as combat class is most likely not going to spend 24 hours a day 7 days a week, week after weekonly shooting thier gun...

Message Edited by VarnaxDespin on 08-10-2004 09:37 AM

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qfe

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Rubicon49BC wrote:
I still don't understand why this can't be done incrementally. Start with bugfixes, then nerfs if needed.

1. Start by removing the vendors of all people who dropped the required skill to maintain them.
2. See what happens
3. Evaluate
4. Then talk about reducing amount of items on vendors

And if you are worried about people keeping 0-0-3-0 artisan to have unlimited storage, begin by capping the number of items they can have on a vendor. And not by capping Master Merchants off the bat.

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I wholeheartedly vote for this suggestion. Remove the freeloaders in the tree and then assess the situation. Don't hit us with both vendor removal and item limits at once.

Once the "free" vendors are removed, then crafters will need to sell on consignment. And that's great. But they won't be able to do this since the legit merchants won't have any room on their vendors to sell their goods. This is going to be awful for the economy. Merchants need the tools to be able to sell the goods of the crafters. I thought this was the essence of the merchant profession. There is no way they can achieve this with such strict item limits and no interface to allow consignment sales.

THEO

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rezalg wrote:

...since I refuse to "grind" my profession...

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Don't you get it yet? If you're not grinding, you're playing this game wrong.

Love to see an answer the the Sigrums Post!

Message Edited by Malicious1 on 08-16-2004 01:23 PM

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Ro_ood wrote:

Back in my UO days, you could go to a vendor and it would have containers in it. Each container was appropriately named describing what was in it, and you could put a price on the entire container with everything that was inside. With this idea, you should be able to make a box or bag of some sort and put all your armor bits in it to help organize, and it should only count as one item. Maybe we could have a special armor carrying case that you can put only one of each armor bit in.

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To clarify, I realize you can use backpacks and stuff, but you can't actually look inside of one. That's silly. Sure, get rid of the backpack problem, but let's have a craftable kit for armor and other group type items that are always sold together, and let us look inside of the containers when they're on a vendor.

This game long since should have had a consignment system for merchants.

It could work like this.

A merchant has a console that allows them to set a list of names of people to place items on a vendor for sale, along with a percentage of the total sale price of that item to be taken by the merchant.

Lets say the consignment percentage is 5% for Player1. Player1 on the list goes to the merchants vendor and lists the item. The item sells. 95% goes to the player, 5% to the merchant. Player2 has a percentage of 15%. The item sells and 85% goes to the player and 15% to the merchant. 100% is the max and 5% is the minimum fee.

For security once an item is on the vendor at a specific consignment percentage it cannot be changed by the merchant. The consignment rate for a particular player can be changed, but only on items that are newly listed. All consignment rates for all items should be clearly displayed to the consignee. The consignee may not see other players rates.

Items would become unlisted at 30 days as before to be relisted by the consignee.

This would have several positive effects.

1) It would promote merchants being merchants. Consignment would be a master level skill.
2) It would allow non-merchants to not dabble in merchant.
3) It would centralize vendors. Right now there are too many vendors with empty inventories. This would allow a smaller number of vendors to satisfy a larger clientele of both sellers and buyers.
4) Would allow merchants to work up to being a successful merchant. It is simply too costly to buy goods from other players to resell them. It is too capital intensive. Consignment is capital light and would allow merchants to bootstrap till they get the kind of capital that would allow them to buy and sell themselves. There would also be less risk in this gameplay since there would be less competition from dabbler merchants. Especially those that have vendors and no merchant skill.

I personally cannot believe that the exploit where you can have vendors without actually having merchant has persisted. That is like being able to use master level rifle skills without any rifle boxes. Shame on the developers for crippling merchant and leaving it crippled.

This nerf to merchant completely ignores the fact that merchant needs a revamp in a big way. Had the suggestions of the merchant community and other players been headed months ago this situation need never have occured.

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Ro_ood wrote:

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Ro_ood wrote:

Back in my UO days, you could go to a vendor and it would have containers in it. Each container was appropriately named describing what was in it, and you could put a price on the entire container with everything that was inside. With this idea, you should be able to make a box or bag of some sort and put all your armor bits in it to help organize, and it should only count as one item. Maybe we could have a special armor carrying case that you can put only one of each armor bit in.

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To clarify, I realize you can use backpacks and stuff, but you can't actually look inside of one. That's silly. Sure, get rid of the backpack problem, but let's have a craftable kit for armor and other group type items that are always sold together, and let us look inside of the containers when they're on a vendor.

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This has to be coupled with the ability to specifically list an item for a player. The inability to look inside containers on vendors is used as a security through obscurity mechanism.

Say I have some krayt tissues to sell on the boards. I get 10 million for the lot and tell the winner of the auction I will put it on a bag on my vendor. I do so.

Now what if someone else comes along. Well they could buy the 10million credit bag, but since they cannot see inside that is a lot of $$ to spend just to have a peak. Were they able to look though they might decide that yes in fact that bag is worth $10 million credits and buy it. The real recipient then would be out their items.

This is the same for a lot of custom builds. Often I have made deals to purchase multiple items from a crafter who then places the bag on their vendor with the total cost and my name.

So basically I have no problem with allowing viewing of bag contents, if and only if they add a real security mechanism by which you can specify on your vendor who a particular item is intended for. In fact I would prefer an actual security system over the security through obscurity that there is now. However obscurity is all there is, and it cannot be lost without a replacement.

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Ro_ood wrote:

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Ifi wrote:

Just my quick input, but as a master armorsmith, if you have such a low limit, customers won't be able to have nearly the selection that they expect because of the numerous types of armor. And with nine sets per piece for some types or armor, you won't be able to put much at all for sale unless you have multiple accounts. I think the limits should be raised significantly so that with master merchant one would be able to hold maybe 2,000 items.

Ifi A'Tah

Master Armorsmith

+12 R.I.S. Certified

Flurry

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Back in my UO days, you could go to a vendor and it would have containers in it. Each container was appropriately named describing what was in it, and you could put a price on the entire container with everything that was inside. With this idea, you should be able to make a box or bag of some sort and put all your armor bits in it to help organize, and it should only count as one item. Maybe we could have a special armor carrying case that you can put only one of each armor bit in.

Plus, it would be nice if I could manufacture powerups in crates of more than 10 each! That would cut down on the number of items in the database for certain.

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The devs expressed some obscure reasoning for the crate sizes at the Fan Fest. Something about not being able to bring products to market as fast if you are limited to crate size....right...

Anyway that argument held no water when it comes to powerups. Powerups should start in crates of 25 or 50. These items are end products, not sub components. 10/crate is an unecessary restriction.

At the very least crate sizes for some items should be examined and re-evaluated. Powerups should be top of the list for a revision upwards to 25 or even 50.