Merchant Archive

Why can't this be part of the Combat Revamp? If you don't have time to spend energy on correctly updating the Merchant Profession on the whole, please leave vendor item limits out until you can bring in the good with the bad.

Most Notably:
There's no way to deal with repeat customers in a easy way other than lots and lots of email. If you are going to drastically reduce the size of the database by limiting the number of items per vendor then we want additional fields for recording data about our customers through perhaps the data pad or the friends list. Tie it to Master Merchant or something so not everyone can clog up your database with merchant-related info.

-I want a better interface for tracking the "going price" of an item on the server, something better than having to try to use the clunky, slow, and often incomplete info offered by a vendor terminal set to Entire Galaxy now. If you have all the data in database, which you do, we need more tools for making queries to that database as a master merchant. As a master merchant I want to be able to quickly, and easily price out and compare the item I've just created with all the other equivalent items already on the server. This is star wars, not some wild west general store. I should have more info about the market as a whole at my finger tips.

-We need at least the equivalent of a basic spread sheet in game. At most, a stack of resources should have the cost of harvesting attached to it so calculating prices across the galaxy starts to see uniformity, especially given that the actual price of an item could be vastly different from one vendor to another due to supply and demand and lots of other good economics. This sort of tool, to help generate the value of time and materials and help generate a cost for production may not help reduce the number of items in play, but would make life as a merchant more pleasing. When I'm not spending time figuring out how to price a given a item, I'll be stocking my vendor under the new system you are suggesting. Please don't add frustration to the process by not adding something back in while penalizing us for what appear to be failures in database design and/or foresight of the SOE/SWG machine.

I was a Droid Engineer/Master Merchant from pretty early on last year so I've seen all of these needs first hand. I've dropped most of Merchant and all of Droid Eng. till things are really fixed for both professions and the gameplay offered by these very important, and in the Droid Engineer case, very star wars character classes is getting the attention the combat professions will receive in making the play fun and important to not only the day to day, but the GCW.

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DocSavag wrote:
I am researching what happened to the other thread. Please post your suggestions and counter proposals to the item limits here.

Please try to keep the flame to a minimum. I understand you are angry but try to remained focused on the goal which is to prevent the item limits from going into production at a level that will not allow us to do business in an efficient and reasonable manner.

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I hate having to reconstruct messages. But, since I will be affected by this change here are mine.

I am a Master Artisan / Master Architect. I have the vendor that Artisan/Business III allows. I have over 2000 items on my vendor. The majority of these items were made by me.

I do not use my vendor as storage. I maintain the storeroom and cycle everything back into the vendor fairly quickly.

I see some problems with the proposed vendor changes. The biggest problem I see is with the way the item counts are scaled up into the Merchant tree(s). As it stands Merchants are given several benefits at the higher skill levels. One of these benefits is mulitple vendors. Giving them increased item count limits as they go up the trees is truly a waste of coding. Many is the time that I detour to check our vendors only to find them with only a handful of items or empty. More times than I can count the vendors that I found were only in existance for the sole purpose of 'grinding' merchant experience. I have never found a vendor with more than a couple of hundred items on them. Most of those were Tailor or Armorsmiths vendors. If a limit Must be set, then set the limit Per Vendor for Everybody. Most people will never reach that limit. I have read posts on the forums where people (like myself) claim to have vendors with a large inventory for sale. So there Must be people out there using there vendors for actually selling stuff. Unless I am way off the mark here, I get the impression that the Devs took a database snapshot of the vendors and their content counts, averaged out the numbers and came to their decision based on that data. If so then they have done (or will be doing) the players a grave dis-service.

I have spent a great deal of time gathering resources, working my factories and advertising(word of mouth etc) in order to build up a good client base. Using the currently available tools I can not do business in any meaningful way with an item count of 50 per vendor. I would be hard pressed to do business with a limit of 1000. Under 1000 I might as well do only custom orders. I have sales almost every day. I sell everything from candles to PA and City Halls. 50 or even 150 item counts will not suffice.

My offer of counter proposals.

1. Activate crate sales. A good 30%-50% of my stock can be sold through crates. If a buyer can peruse my list, see the contents of a crate and then buy out of the crate then I can leave my inventory In the crates. Also, because I do this Now, allow bulk price breaks to be set up by the seller. Prices for 1, 2, 5, 10 (20/25 for large count crates) and full crates would prevent me from having to split crates to offer price breaks. (Split crates go from one item to 25. Selling 6 kinds of candles... 6 becomes 150)

2. Activate consignment selling. I sell for my friends because they trust me. I offer their goods for sale and make sure they get paid. Also, they have a limit of 25 items that they can offer to me at any one time. With consignment selling that could be done away with on private vendors. Allow Merchants to grant 'consignee' status to sellers and to apply a percentage fee. This fee, unlike taxes, should come from the 'Offered Price', not added To the offered price. That is howmerchants 'take a cut'. The seller would have to agree to this when s/he accepted access to the vendor. Once set it stays set for all items put up for sale. If there is a falling out or the merchant wants a bigger cut, the merchant can put a lock out on new sales. The items currently for sale can be sold (at the origional %) or retrieved. Any new agreement would then affect new items offered for sale. Emails (alerts and status) for those items would go to both parties.

These two changes alone could drastically alter the vendor landscape. Vending machines would again be something people hunt for looking for the items they want. Merchants would have a Reason for owning multiple machines. People could focus on their craft and the game in general. The economy would have a smoother mechanism for buying and selling.

Just my two cents

Spryte [Haven] - Haven - Corellia - Scylla

Master Artisan / Master Architect

Dabbler

Just my two cents, I don't use my vender for storage but I probably should then I could free up the 6 factories I use for storage since a factory can hold 100 items for one lot and a house only 75. so fix the amount I can store in my house please. As a Doctor I don't mind having to have business 3 to run a vender but like any master crafter to keep a full selection of items up for sale I need more room than 50 items. I try very hard to price things low so new players can buy things but it seems to me this change would be driving people away from having a reasonable supply of items on their vender, seems to me if you don't want people using venders as storage then make the bank vault space bigger, allow more items to be stored in homes. I shouldn't have to have a second account just to have enough space in my vender to hold the items I make every week.

Message Edited by aaaaaaarrrgh on 08-17-2004 11:13 AM

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Iconic wrote:

I currently have about 700 items in 2 different vendors. Being an architect, I have to provide a wide selection of items in order to make any money. If the vendor cap is too low, I'll be forced to list one of every item at the highest price imaginable and give my asking price in the description and custom craft orders and stick them in packs to save space.

I'd probably give up crafting and mercantile operations entirely if this plan goes through in it's current state.

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/agree

In my case, my crafter toon is the leader of a 120+ person guild, so I am not likely to just quit. I do however intend to stop crafting for the general public. The very idea of working with custom orders only is mind-boggling, considering the sheer variety people tend to buy. The vendor space will be unavailable for sales, as I will need it so I can have my zillion subcomponents and resourcesnext to my crafting station, to avoid having to run past 5 different factories (spread over a 1 mile radius) to get the elements for making one structure.

As for my BE account: I think I will simply cancel that. What's the use? Even as a noob BE, I already have more resources than my house can hold, and I don't even want to think about all the DNA samples I have in the storage vendor (1 sample = 1 uniqueitem).

Linna