Merchant Archive
Thread: Vendor Maintenance Fees coming – your input request
Is THAT what this is about?!?! My god if so I'm gonna be totally irked. It would explain a lot. Okay so if that IS the case then a harvester-like fee based upon how much you have sold (to determine small, medium, large rates) seems like it would do the trick!!!
Khaldun wrote:
[...]
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
[...]
Not sure how many people check the SWG Discussion forum, but there's a lively discussion that includes several non-merchants on the subject. For the most part, they think this idea is rediculous, and fully support a sales tax idea.
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=416429
"Sweet something of someplace..." - Hermes Conrad
15 pages of response to a dev post made only slightly more than 16 hours ago. I hope you'll all understand if I say I'm not going to read through all of it. 
My major request, since this is obviously going to happen whether we want it to or not:
If you're going to fix the vendor fees, fix the vendor bugs at the same time.
I get multiple tells per day from people who bought weapons at my vendor, only to have them disappear because they got on a shuttle too quickly. This is a MAJOR source of aggravation for me as a master weaponsmith, having to tell these people "Known vendor bug, will reappear within 24 hours"... I'm already having to contend with keeping my vendors stocked, and keeping on top of the resource situation (which is absolutely insane on Radiant right now), and keeping both my factories running...
These are bugs that have plagued vendors since beta, and if you're going to "swing the proverbial nerf bat," at least make sure the **edit** things WORK first.
I think the current terminal vendor fees are too high (I don't have the skill points for anything else). I would think a flat maintenance rate somewhere around 600 - 1000 cr/day with an additional 5% tax when the item is sold.
I spend about 75% of my income in harvester, house, factory maintenance, about 10% in travel expenses, about 5% in tips and the remaining 10% in equipment purchases. Originally I was hoping I could spend about 50% in equipment purchases, but that has not been the case with the economy on Gorath.
My money is on the following scenario:
- The proposed system makes it into the game as is.
- It does so unannounced, as an "unplanned" or "forgotten" item, much to everyones shock and awe.
- The Devs apologize repeatedly, say they'll "look into why it wasn't included in the patch notes" and "we'll monitor the game data to see if the new system works."
- Several weeks later, after many shops have gone out of business, they'll change the system to something similar to what has been proposed, but not too similar mind you, we can't have people thinking they read this thread.
- The interim weeks will have skewed the economy greatly, requiring a taxation on all player trades, tipping, and a doubling of all house maintainance.
Honestly i do agree of a certain money sink whitout any doubts as you did mention several times. But in my humble opinion there's barely no reason now to :
1. Get the merchant skill
2. Get vendors or try to sell something on the vendors.
Simply to the fact that is completely irrational. Total cost divided by 1000 every 45 min? To me this is plain ridiculous, sorry to sound a bit harsh here but there's several ways here to create money sinks other that killing the business people have built for weeks and months now.
For very new merchants and new players this will be a way to make them run away from SWG, there's too many nerfs imo and killing the economy by overtaxing like this system is about to be is frankly outbalanced by the formula you gave us (total/1000/45min)
Intead put a max item limit lets say 100 per vendors, then add a daily fee for the vendor or the player can chose to pay a daily,weekly or monthly fee.This way he/she can plan apublicitypromo and then chose to let's say pay his vendor fees to the nextcoming BIG promo week.
Like i said, i agree totally on a fee here im not saying no , but there should be a way to let the player chose a pattern , not impose directly taxing whitout any choices.
Give them the choice to make different kind of payments for their vendors, as i mentioned , weekly pay, monthly pay or daily pay. The bigger the package you get the better you safe at the end ($$).
This will give the choice for the new players to pay their daily fees when they have something to sell whitout killing em tightly on day 1. As for hardcore players they will drain on the monthly payments since their cashdown is higher but will pay more with the monthly fee.
Either way this will create 'The money sink' you guys are looking for. But overcharging is like killing the economy or it would be exactly the same as nerfing a character class badly whitout any comebacks.
Balacing is the key not nerfing in my opinion too much is like not enough. Find the middle road.
Please Let the PEOPLE chose, let them chose their destiny , it's their world and you are the creators.
Thanks for looking ,
Sincerely
Katiara Goldmoon.
Well, I have always, and I mean *always* been a backer of the dev team and their efforts, knowing they were trying to make the game a better game.
This shakes my confidence dramatically. I am horrified to see this, and I am not a trader or merchant or crafter. The way to drain cred off the system is to make *everyone* share the burden of loose cred. We need to all be a part of it. This was started with the mission pay getting lowered. A good start.
The problem was, this did not drop prices as it should have, because there is already a lot of maintnence costs for crafters. So, now we need to find *constructive* ways to get rid of cred without putting half the people in the game out of business, and indeed, out of the game.
It seems to me the only way that we *all* share the burden is through quicker item degredation, increased maintnace of said items, and the increased "taxes" we could all use.
Raise travel fees, make gambling more attractive, add cover charges to cantinas to reflect drink purchases, increase house maintnence cost, increase tax on transactions either by raising the tax or adding the mentioned "sales" tax to all sales. But for the love of all things holy, do *not* impliment this as it stands.
To do so would not only get rid of any merchant but the wealthiest (yay, make a monopoly) but would prevent any "small time" merchant from ever being able to make it successfully.
The way to stimulate the player economy, it seems obvious to me, is *not* to destroy it. I, for one, really want to be able to buy a full suit of composite armor and a new weapon when what I have wears out. This will be hard to find if there is no one to make it.
"Please, Q, you're our only hope..." <don't take of the restraining bolt, you don't want R-2s full message, believe me>
Harin, it'll be just like the House Limit nerf I bet, very similar to what you said. They WANTED it to be 75 itemsx lot, so they put it in, unannounced, at 25 x lot. People bitch and raise holy hell, so they "compromise" and "fix" it to 75 x lot to "help us out, coz they understand". We're all happy because we've gotten 3 x the amount of storage from the day before and can finally access our homes again, when in reality we've been slashed nearly 50% LESS space than two days before.
I'm sure this is just a bigger version of it, like you said. Maybe their target is really Value /1500 x 30 minutes or something. So they change the time frame and set amount a little to confuse us, than spring it on us, get what they want but appear to be listening to us by coming out with an absurdly stupid idea like this, then "fixing it to help the players".
Or they really are clueless and really do want this, where small time crafters are replaced by Wallmartish super merchants.
Make player crafted items actually worth something and the "sink" you are looking for will start to happen. Examples are:
1. Player Crafted Droids for BH.
2. Fix armor so people actually want to use it.
3. Let non medics use Stimpack A
4. let low level CH transfer low level creatures so master CH's dont spend there time selling kittys to suzy.
5. Make armor plates work for droids.
I know you are looking at some of these already but I think the sooner you fix these the sooner you will see the economy balance. What you are proposing is far to high for maint fees especially when you consider master level DE WS and AS.
Birsco
Personally I don't care one way or the other, as it's not my money that it's affecting, but I do have a concern as to how this will affect the community as a whole, in such that I can see this impacting others being able to get items.
Example; Say I want a Scout Blaster. Chances are you can hit a random Weapons Vendor and be able to get one. Why? Because, the vendor can stock 20 of them. Well, now that he's going to have to pay to stock each of them, they're only going to stock 2 or 3. Well, what if I'm the 4th person? I'm going to have to hope that the vendor is online and /tell him that I need a Scout Blaster. Then he's going to have to truck all the way to his vendor, to make another 2-3 available. When he could be spending that time running missions, building more desirable items. That means I could very easily spend a huge chunk of my time running all over the Star System lookign for an item(s) instead of running missions etc.
If there HAS to be a fee imposed, then why not just make it a flat fee based on the selling price of an item, payable by the vendor owner upon THE SALE of that item?
Shameful Q, shameful.
Yall have nerfed missions all to hell. Why not give that nerf time to set in before you go looking for more ways to screw with the economy.
What happened to making a game for the casual player.
How are tailors supposed to survive now if people dont' need to constantly buy clothes because there's no decay? If a person enjoys making clothes, and wants to put them on their bazaar, theres a good chance they could be there for weeks before being sold. Now you're saying that this person, who's already paying maintenance on houses, harvesters, and factories, will have to pay to store items too?
You have a database issue, fix it and stop crippling casual players with nerfs like this as a bandaide measure.
Everyone knows the extra cash doesn't flow through merchants, but power levelers who run missions non stop. Fix that, don't hurt others because of some screwy metric holo's looking at.
I thought about this overnight and I've come to this conclusion.
The equation that the Devs give would be crippling to the upcoming artisan. It would be doable for the masters out there who have already benefitted by the 100% factory experience and other things that have been changed. I think that it would hurt tailors, who need to have huge amounts of inventory on their vendor just to make a few sales. It would hurt architects because they have huge ticket items on their vendor with only a few sales. For the pure-merchants I think it would hurt the upcoming ones because in order to get business you have to have a variety of items on the vendor...but without the name recognition enjoyed by the already popular merchants, the sales will be slow. Add to slow sales and the equation given will result in many people losing a lot of money and businesses will be lost.
I think that a flat fee (or salary) for the vendors coupled with a sales tax would be the best and fairest way to implement a maintence fee for the merchants. The people who are just starting out will be able to afford their business, and the money sink will be in there. It seems the most logicall.
Plus, who would base anything off of 45 minutes? Is that a random number? If the devs decide to ignore the calls for a sales tax then at least make the ratio based on an hour. It'll be easier to calculate how much money we're losing.
-Kanadani of Kanadani Klothiers, Theed, Naboo, Starsider