Merchant Archive
Thread: Vendor Maintenance Fees coming – your input request
People will stop using vendors if your proposed fee goes in.
I suggest:
1)a flat sales tax on each item, imposed at the time of actual sale, NOT upon listing the item.
2) The merchant class canreduce the tax rate they payskills in their profession. The fee could be as large as 15% on someone who had only basic vendor skills. A master vendor could reduce this to as low as 5%.
3) The tax revenue goes to the local township authority. When player cities go in, the vendor fees can help pay for the town infrastructure required, such as plazas and transportation facilities.
Not all players have enough traffic in their shops to warrant a fee based on time. For example, I would love to place a remotely located shop on a remote planet to cater to the occasional traveler that passes by. But with time based fees, I am punished for not selling inventory, soI can't provide that service. The end result is everyone placing their shops as close as possible to existing cities, blighting the landscape in a haloof suburbia congestion.
Please create game systems that encourage their use rather than making it harder for players to survive and actually push them into finding ways aroundthem.
It simply amazes me how bad this idea is 
I almost don't know where to start. I'm sure this has all been said before, but . . . .
1.The proposed systemheavily penalizes those that have higherpriced items
2. The proposed system heavily penalizes those thatlike to keep their vendor stocked
3. The proposed systemheavily penalizes those that do not sell much and therefore have items on the vendor longer
4. The proposed system actually rewards those that will micromanage their vendor every day by keeping only one or two copies of a product up for sale and then constantly refilling those that sell.
5. The proposed system actually rewards those merchants that are already successful and have high turnover
None of the above sound good to me.Butas proposedthereisanother MAJOR imbalance/problem . .
Bazaar - Put up an item for 3000 credits, pay 20 credits. No matter how long it takes you are not charged more or less.
Personal Vendor - Put up an item for 3000 credits. If it does not sell in oneclick (45 minutes) you pay 3000/1000= 3 credits. If it does not sell in seven hours you are now at 21 credits. If that item does not sell for the entire week, you would have paid out 630 credits.
So unless you sell every item in less than seven hours, you will pay more for using a personal vendor, and in some circumstances (630 vs 20 example) you would pay over THIRTY TIMES as much. This is for a vendor that has LESS value because it is not linked to the galactic bazaar.
So the end result of the proposed solution will be . . .
1. Everyone will use the bazaar for 3000 or less items because you would be crazy to put them up on a personal vendor
2. As a result of #1, some personal vendors, like for food, weapon powerups, furniture, etc. will simply die off and never be used again
3. Vendor stock will be dramatically reduced since only a fool would keep a week's worth of selection up on their vendor. The end result will be it will be harder for some people to find what they want because vendors will run out of stock more and lay empty.
4. A money sink will be created, but most people will avoid it at all costs minimizing its impact on the overall economy of the game
With the above in mind, what I would propose is a cost structure of . . .
Post Fees - No fee for posting on personal vendor
Maintenance Fee - Every NPC has flat maintenance fee, something like 500 credits a day.
Sales Fee - When an item is sold, a sales charge is applied. Something like 1 or 2% of the sales.
Also look into other money sinks. I would think, for instance, we could easily see a doubling or trippling of prices for bazaar listings and harvestor maintenance fees.As a matter offact the only fees I see currently at appropriate levels are travel fees.
Now PLEASErethink this before you end up completely screwing up a major part of the player run economy.
All the people talking about having a month or whatever to sell are forgetting about those who resell items. I myself would only have maybe a week to move an item before I have lost money on it. I buy weapons and armor, slice it, and then sell it for a modest markup. So with that in mind, take the example of one of the higher end items I regularly stock ~ composite armor.
Suit bought for 100k
Slice goes well and my selling price ends up being 150k making my profit on this 50k
Now.. In just *1* day of having that item sit there even one day I lose 4800 of that profit. Within 7 days I lose 33,600 of this profit (and actually due to costs am extremely close to a loss at this point).
Now, I chose to go this route for a shop because I did not want to sit around cities all day slicing things. I wanted to be able to stock up and do other things, with the occasional slicing on the side. This high of a penalty (and yes, it IS a penalty) for running a shop would most likely make me dump my vendors and unlearn everything in merchant (not like 3/4 of it works anyways). At that point I don't even know if I would continue playing for that matter. This proposed amount is way too high and would completely kill the way I had always planned to play (and am currently playing).
I think that there should be a small constant vendor fee, sort of like the vendor's salary. Then have a 'vendor commision' collected for the value of items sold.
The original proposal would work for some artisans. I'm looking at this from the point of view of a Tailor. Unlike a lot of other items for sale out there, color is important to clothing customers. An architect could have 5 different harvesters on their vendor and a customer could find the harvester they wanted. A tailor needs to have 5 different articles of clothing in 5 colors each for a customer to find what they want.
sorry to bold/large but
8% SALES TAX ON EVERY SALE
FLAT ENTRY FEE FOR ALL ITEMS
(Bazaar and Vendor)
Dont kill the merchant!
Khaldun wrote:
I've thought about this since I first read it and responded to it.
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.
WOW!!! and you are even nearly a fanboi.....but you usually make good points...
What i wonder is, doesnt anyway at SOE have a spine...surely someone at the meeting where this was proposed said Hey this is a terrible idea...
doesnt anyone there have the courage to tell Koster he is wrong....
(I was getting the feeling that Q actually disagrees with much that has gone down the past couple of months)
It is my firm belief that Koster needs to go....this game will only reach its full potential without him.
"How much will give us an appropriate drain without crippling any players?"
Isn't the whole idea of this to cripple players? The reason there's too much money in the game is your broken survey missions. Destroy missions don't yeild nearly the credits they used to, and explorer missions are either broken or require you to find a large quantity of creatures that don't seem to actually exist. Fix the survey missions if you want to slow the flow of credits into the economy.
This is very frustrating. When the server resets, the planetary map does not save. Therefore, unless I get up before work each morning and log on to list my vendors on the planetary map (which I'm not going to do), I'm ata disadvantage to the other area merchants. I am a Master Merchant, and can not enjoy the same privileges as any merchant with Adv 3 and the ability to relist on the map each morning.
As for the fees, I don't mind having them, but they don't need to be so high. The fees need to decrease at Novice Merchant to prevent people from picking up the Business line only to store items on their vendors. They also need to decrease more as you move up the Efficiency tree, and even more still at master. My understanding is that the main reason the DEVS want fees is to prevent people from jacking up prices on items so high that people will not buy them, in order to use their vendor space asadditional inventory. My strong opinion is that anybody serious enough to spend the time and skill points to master the merchant line is usingtheir vendor spaceto sell wares, and not for inventory.
Now there is a direct trade-off between the Merchant skill and simply standing at the starport and shouting to sell your wares. The Merchant line gives you no additional benefit. You can either spend skill points to get multiple vendors in your store, of which you must pay a healthy fee for if you maintain any decent amount of inventory, or you can use those skillpoints elsewhere and whenever you want to sell your goods, stand at the Theed or Coronet starport and shout. Please give us Merchants a reason to keep this skill. Make us believe our time and energy has not been wasted.
There will be a huge decline in Vendors, and as a result less items will be sold.
You will see an exodus of vendors, and in influx non-merchant types.
Merchants will simply charge outrageous amounts for goods listed on their vendors. And with the already nerfed mission payouts, tony amount of credits from loots, and broken missions, there will be a mass decline in items sold.
If you want to set prices, set prices. don't nerf a class that is already 90% useless. When this goes live, I will be tearing down my vendors. I have enough caosts with the "factory fix", and the house maintenacnce, plus that of my harvesters.
I would rather sell ym wares by hand to my customers than be part of a grand scheme to dwindle the economy down to nothing.
Stop ruining crafters and merchants. Please, fix some classes that need fixing beore you rampantly nerf working or semi-working classes.
It is a player run eceonomy...let it remain that way.
As it is, there is nothing I need to spend my money on other than my maint fees... why am I along with other merchants going to be punished, and our lives made harder?
Marksman spend more maoney than I do... I use no armor, and have a d18 pistol. Why am I going to be punished, along with others, simply because people want to buy my items?
Making this maintenance fee will ensure that the first things that come off my vendors are the PA Hall, Large House and resources. The margin on items is not large enough to absorb a potentially endless drain while waiting for a sale, and people WILL go back to a special order and/or hawking method. Come to think of it, I cannot afford to list anything at all, Medpacks, Tatooine Sunburns, Armor... how can I list when I cannot possibly predict what the total cost of selling is?
When they come into the Body & Soul, instead of perusing well-stocked merchants, they will have to ask me about availability of Armor, structures, resources and dresses. I cannot afford to pay an endless stream of maintenance while waiting for a high ticket item to sell, never knowing what the final fee will be.
People selling directly will gain a substantial and immediate advantage over merchants, and instead of waypointing stores, buyers will gmail crafters and manufacturers directly and special order items. I know that I would do the same.
The game economy is artificial and relies on physics absent from real life. In real life, I have owned a retail establishment; Icould stock mystore with 10 items or 10,000 and maintain a steady rate of overhead. The cost was never based on the value of the items, but rather the time and space used. Wages, power, lease, bank fees remain the SAME every month, and my wholesale purchases and sales taxes are a predictable amount. I could budget my costs accurately. If I am required to pay a recurring fee every 45 minutes until an item sells, I can no longer budget.
I do agree that there needs to be a fee.
I fully support the concept of a "sales tax" or rather"commission" be paid our vendors upon the sale of an item, after all, slavery is an outdated notion, used only by the uncivilized in the Galaxy *grins*. A regular, predictable percentage of the overall value, that I can plan for and include in the price. I could get behind that and fully support it.
I would also like to see broken aspects of the Merchant profession repaired before we go further into fees; global listings, dressing merchants, and the infuriating split resources bug really need to be addressed.
Respectfully,
Bhin'der
Manager, TCON Body & Soul
Serving Wanderhome from Consortia, Corellia (5 minutes east of Tyrena, -3325, -2625)
Unless somebody sells something right away your going to keep sucking the profit from them? Give me a break, this is the dumbest most unfair system Ive ever seen.
Make it a flat tax on ITEMS SOLD, sheesh how about you spend 10 minutes thinking about real world economics ffs. Your proposal totaly punishes the new business who doesnt have a large established customer base to suck up their goods right away.
Dumb idea, very dumb.
Vendors should be an hourly rate. I am paying for the use of the vendor not paying comission.If you do a rate per value, then it kills that architects since their products cost the most. But they have the lowest mark up. Heck on mostservers a small house is sold for a little over 1 creditper, while a weapon is sold for 20-100 credits per.
Also vendor is not a very good spot to make a money drain. A better spot is increase harvester cost, this will effect everyone.
Increasing vendor cost only effects the casual gamers that don't have time to be in game 20/hrs a day to sell his/her stuff through trade!!!!!