Merchant Archive
Thread: Vendor Maintenance Fees coming – your input request
efficiency 3 should reduce more vendor fees...no one cares about paying like 16 credits to sell somthing instead of 20...:/
people with advertising 3 should gain exp faster but have a higher payment cost
silmaril
An absolutely ridiculous idea...but...since its going to happen regardless of community input...please, please consider a tax at time of sale rather than a maintenence fee. If vendors become too expensive, you may as well dump everything into the bazaar at 20 creds for each item and be done with it. You could end up with a crippled bazaar system.
I know this is going to seem a bit bizarre for a pricing schedule. but this is how i see it.
on Avg, resources cost 2-5credits per unit, anything on top of that is profit.
So, the cost of selling an item should be derived based off the unit count of an item instead of the sale price.
So for an weapon smith, selling a Scout blaster for 10k would fall under the following rules.
111 units of material, that’s an effective value of 500 credits.
His fee should be the token : 500 credits to sell something, and a increase fee of X percent on the remaining 9500 credits ( roughly 5%) basically 1k is what it should cost him for 1 week posting.
For High Ticket items that use Large resources. used in Architect vehicles when they come into play.
So for an Architect, selling a medium Generic for 70k would fall under the following rules.
23600 units of material, that’s an effective value of 118000 credits.
His fee should be the token : 500 credits to sell something, and because the guy selling his stuff at less of a markup then a weapon smith, he isnt taxed on his profits.
This might not seem fair to some, but I warn everyone, if the fees are based on price. we can all expect a huge cost jump in some things.
To me the cost per unit fee structure with penalties for excessive markups, is the only fair fee system.
OK as you have read NO ONE likes this idea... I know I don't cause it will KILL our profession. We don't make that much money... Heck I had to spend 3 hours the other day doing survey missions to make 25k just so I could pay for all my harvesters and other maintance fees... I paid all that yesterday and I am down to 5k... OK how am I supposed to make a living if your just going to increase my maintance fee from the 24/crs a day to 2400 credits a day cause I have a total value of items of 240,000 and it doesn't sell fast. Yes I can easily have that much... Just put a few houses and some harvesters and stuff up for sell and you are looking at a HUGE maintance fee on your vendor. Not to mention I have to spend money to get items to sell cause I don't make them... So I am looking at going bankrupt and saying forget this Merchant profession cause I just simple can not afford it. If you really want a money sink hole why not charge 100 credits/ hour for things sold on the Bazaar?
I believe with the idea you all wish to put in you are wanting to kill this profession. Yes you say if I don't like do a differant one. I am doing another one I am a chef and I make NO money from this profession either. You all have descreased the amount of money in the system already (especially the money avaiable to those of us who are not hunter/killers) and so now we are suffering cause people are charging outragous prices for things and we can not afford them and these maintance fees you are wanting to increase. If you really wish to make a hit on the money in the system do what everyone has suggested:
1.) FIX the vendors. The reset of Advertising is killing me personally cause I get on at 8pm EST and leave around midnight.. You all reset the servers every freaking morning which is preventing people finding my store until I log back in to reinitialize my ads. Fix this first.
2.) FIX the retrieval system. I am in the process of moving/renaming vendor's to support future growth and I had to spend 2 hours last night withdrawing sells and then attempting to retrieve the item from the vendor. This is a major concern cause it is wasting my time. Time I could be doing things as a merchant like making deals with people who make stuff.
3.) Set a TAX rate for the planet. There has to be a central government for the planet. Especially if you are advertising on the planet map. Tax us. Well not us but put a SALES TAX that is charged at time of sales to the buyer cause well that is the best way to get money for the planet.
4.) Impliment Player Cities so we can add aditional taxes and the customer can get used to the prices.
That is all I can think of now. If you all do impliment this total price/1000 * 45mins thing I am going to start charging (in person not via a vendor) 1000 credits per a charge for food items cause I will need some source income. Cause I only sell about 1 or 2 items a day... Right now I make maybe 200 or 300 credits a day and I have to spend over 3000 a day to upkeep... So please THINK about this before implimenting it and if you all don't have other things fixed before implimenting this insane idea... Then you all are not listening to your client base and are probably going to loose this profession cause no one will want to be a merchant cause they get screwed in the end. You can do everything a merchant can do at Business III and not have to waste the skill points. So PLEASE think.....
WOW, this "money sink" really hurts me as a Expert Weaponsmith. I'mblowing through resources practicegrinding and between having to pay for my harvesters, my house, and my factory (which by the way is still bugged)... I'm LOSING money... not making money each day.
Put your money sink somewhere else please.
Eliss
You could end up with a crippled bazaar system.
"End up"? Man, we've been there a while ...
I got to this post late, and I am sure you will never get to page 9.
I agree that this game needs money sinks, but it looks as if only merchants are hit with such a sink. We are being slapped around. *wink* It looks as if merchants will have the larges money sink in the game, I am not sure that is fair, and we will all have to raise our prices to pay for this.
Also, because of the lack of ways to get people out to out shop (reset of map, ad barks, and so on) we are paying for stuff that is sitting there, because no one knows it is there.
I want to see a fee charged at the time of purchase, say 3%, that away we are not being charged for shelved items, we are only being charged when we make money.
I am not sure how they are calced now, but If the fees remain the way they are on droid and terminals, with no change, I will have to close down, because you have not given us the tools to move people to our shops.
Ioo (marqie)
Q3PO, don't feed us a line about "money sinks". We all know the purpose of this ridiculously high vendor fee is to shrink down the database.
As an architect, the fee you describe will make my shop a money loser.
I close the shop, I quit the game.
Your choice.
And if anything, I've gotten angrier and more frustrated, more than I've ever been by the game.
If the devs cared at all about the quality of fun in the game, or about building a world that people "lived in", then they'd never even have suggested this. The one thing that's growing in vibrancy and fun every day are the communities that players are forming. I love running up to groups of houses and seeing what's on vendors. It gives a good sense of connection to the store, and it gives the people running the vendors a reason to be out there searching, buying, acquiring, crafting. It makes the economy come to life. It's one of the few casual-friendly things left in the game.
All that's going to be thrown roughly overboard so that they can get at the people using vendors as a giant backpack. They'll harumph and say it's for necessity, and of course you understand that there have to be drains on the economy and maintenance fees weren't properly implemented and so on. It's all rubbish. This is a quick, slashing fix to a subtle game-mechanical problem. They don't want to invest the effort to get at the practices that are a problem (vendors with 100 items priced at 999999 credits) so they're going to hit everyone across the board, gutting out much of what is living and growing in the gameworld in the process.
The database will be saved, and the gameworld will be in ruins. Hoorah.
Q, don't do this. Don't fumble the ball even further than you guys already have. LISTEN to what almost EVERYONE is telling you. If you have to save your database, try other things first, things that don't really impinge negatively on the parts of the game that are WORKING.
I know it's not "constructive" to say so, but if you follow this formula--even a reduced version of it--I'm gone. I'm done. The game is over for me at that point. I will really have lost all confidence in the development team at that point, and maybe in MMOGs as a whole.
If you listen to any post in this massive mess of outcry, please read this. This doesn't just concern this problem, but should be a paradigm for how you approach future economic problems in your project.
Here it is:
"Take your idea, and apply it to a real world economy."
What you have in SWG is the closest thing you can get to a RL economy. As an economist I have taken great joy in watching this economy flourish and form (I signed on Valcyn approximately 16 hrs after the server was launched) watching prices fluctuate to reach equilibrium, Watching values inflate as more money entered the economy. As an economist, I would be interested to see how the economy reacts to this rule. As an armorsmith and nearly full time crafter, I can tell you how I would react...
"Surrender Skill->Yes (Repeats until novice artisan is surrendered), Go To travel terminal, buy ticket to dathomir, begin working on pistoleer skills, until you nerf those too."
The need to sink credits from the economy is no where near urgent enough to merit such an intrusive rule. Currently credits are the only variable in the economy (everythings value can be measured in credits, therefore credits have no set value) So if there is too much money, prices increase and there is no serious problem.
If you absolutely need to raise money sinks, then raise the maintenence rates for harvesters, even if they were doubled, they wouldn't put resource collecters out of business (I'm not endorsing this though, I personally think they should fix insurance, as that is the best moneysink going) However, the formula that stands now, garuntees bankruptcy for many crafters of all levels.
One more thing to think about... and really think about this. The decision you are about to make on maintainence fees will determine a lot of peoples choices for skill paths in the game. Estimate the number of people that will switch from crafting to combat through this decision, then estimate the money that they will bring in to the economy by doing missions. If it doesn't balance with the amount going out from the increased vendor fees from the remaining crafters (which i'm sure you will find it won't) then the decision will have the opposite effect then you intended, plus you will have a lot of pissed off people.
Thanks for asking for our feedback, please listen to us this time, don't make this another T21 Issue. Remember that your playerbase has way more collective experience with the game then you do now.