Merchant Archive

---

JediKnightMark wrote:

---

SomeUser wrote:

Let all players have access to a limited vendor... could be twice a much in maintenance and have only have the capacity to hold items..

---

Limited vendor = the bazzar. If you want more than that, you'll have to use skillpoints.

Yes, I wish there was a ssystem implimented that alllowed us Merchants to effectively be ONLY merchants of other people's products, but sadly there is not atm.

---

As a MBE my wares far exceed what can be sold on the bazzar

Furthermore, for a MBE:

1. Even though we are crafters we are not under the Artisan tree (means we need to invest 15sp just to get Novice Artisan so we can begin the climb to merchant)


2. MBE not only have to gather "mine'able' resources" we have to gather "non-mine'able' " resources. Hence we need to pick up decent combat skills


3. Just not enough skill pts left over

Maybe if they added a merchant branch from the BE tree....

Yolner,

My vendor doesnt make me any money per say... All it does is add a convenience of not having to drop my wares off on other's vendors (most of whom are using the merchant exploit/bug) or trade with them face to face. In short, it saves me time so I can play the game

As one person has accurately said, what skills does it really take to hire some "kid" to sell your junk???

The same argument could be made for using Stims!! Why do I need to waste 15sp so that I can simply "stim" myself???

It seems on onehand SOE wants to discourage dabblers yet on the other hand they make it almost a necessity

Going a little off subject, I think that all people should have access to the basics... All people should be able to "survey", use a "stim", or place a "vendor"... Give the main classes and their elites a more efficient and broader range of options as they go up...

This way there would be no need for people to dabble to "survive". Merchants can be Merchants and Medics can be Medics and Artisans can be Artisans....

I'm convinced this shoddy profession tree concept is just a marketing scheme by SOE to force people to buy 2nd accounts

The point of the skill tree and its diverse skills for each profession is interdependancy.. that is a good thing in an MMO not a bad thing. I know its scary and annoying to have to depend on others but that is one of the challenges of the game.

DocSavag,

I agree with you 100%. I actually like the interdependency!!

But as I stated before, how is it that I can "inter-depend" on a merchant when there is no option for a merchant to "rent" his vendor out to me (with admin rights)??

I know I can have someone place a vendor in my shop and put the stuff up for me but that is putting a lot of trust in someone. I can have over 2 million worth of goods on my vendor... Not only do I have to trust this money will be given to me (minus the rent) I have to have that person constantly stock my vendor, buy offers to my vendor, keep track of all purchases which can be over 50 a day, etc etc etc

It just isnt workable. I've tried

I would be all for fixing this bug/exploit and limiting vendors to merchants only **if** merchants could, as I've said before, rent their vendors out giving full admin rights on them. I would be more then happy to pay a merchant for this service.. I would be more then happy to pay a merchant to advertise my shop on the planetary map!! I Would love to give some of this money I make away if I could get a useful and reasonable service

As far as doctors, I'm all for having the big heals, the cure disease/poison, rez packs, etc etc etc being something you have to earn through skill points... But not having medic (the use of a basic stim b)makes grouping with a medic type almost a necessity if you dont have it... Not a big deal if groups were easy to come by... but they arent

Artisans.. make it if you're not an artisan you cannot use anything more then the personals... hell, give the personals a decay to make em even less desirable

I guess what I'm getting at, IMHO, you can haveinterdependency so that player need one another and their is a healthy player economy without forcing players to dabble, buy 2nd accounts, and pay outrageous prices that further cause even more inflation...

I know SOE is going to do whatever they want and arent going to take any of these things into consideration... I guess I'm just ranting

/rant off

(Did not read the entire thread)

And you wonder why SOE wants to limit the vendors to a maximum of 150 items? If every player would do so (place vendors and surrender the skill) the databases would burst I think.

I would suggest to lock the skill (if you are Merchant 0-0-0-4 with 6 vendors you cannot surrender one merchant skill until you remove one vendor).

Greetings,

Krzl

(2 Servers, 3 Accounts, 5 Merchants )

---

DocSavag wrote:

SomeUser

It is workable becuase I've done it, from the merchant side. I'm sure others here are doing it as well. It isn't easy and hopefully soon we can get it to work better.As for trusting someone with your merchandise..well make them pay up front then. THey don't have 2 million up front? Spread it out over several merchants or sell to them in smaller quantities until you develop that trust. If you aren't willing to do that then you can always spend the skill points and do it yourself.

Frankly trusting 2 million in merchandise to a historically flakey vendor system is probably more of a risk.

---

You're 100% right there hehe

In the past, I have had friends, that I did trust, help me out with a vendor. After a week or so it became too much of a burden and I felt uncomfortableinconveniencing my friends with my busy sales...

No doubt it is possible, just havent found it workable in my situation.

I do have a question, is renting out vendors (with admin rights) something that is on the Devs radar?? Is this an issue that has been talked about here on the merchant forums and, if so, how do your fellow merchants feel about a system that would allow them to rent out vendors with admin rights??

I do sympathize with merchants feelings when it comes to non-merchants "exploiting" their profession. I would just like to see something eventually worked out so that crafters such as myself, who really cant afford to spare the extra skills points, can have acess to a vendor (with admin type rights)via a certified merchantthat not only allows the sales of higher end items but also the abiltiy to purchase items through the offer vendor feature.

It is indeed hard work doing that on a large scale. The answer is better tools to make it easier. I think I would have a better time of it now with the mailsave command allowing me to process my sales offline and do some reporting. Alas that relationship ended some time ago and I've never replaced it. (I haven't spent the money I made then yet )

As for Admins. The problem with allowing a non merchant to take control of your vendor is that it differs little from just giving them vendors in the first place. Why do you need the merchant at all? To put it there? That seems unnecessary. However, if you change it slightly. If you fix the issues we have with the offers screen (ridiculously low limit, no interface for suggested retail price, no tracking of who made the sale for automatic payment and recordkeeping..etc) then I think you can make it much easier for Merchants to do business with suppliers and make it less of a task.

The devs have proposals from us on consignment sales enhancements which would address those issues. I'm not sure there will ever be "vendor admins" who are not also merchants. This renders the merchant unecessary in the sale and that really is a bad thing for the merchant.

---

SomeUser wrote:

As a MBE my wares far exceed what can be sold on the bazzar

Furthermore, for a MBE:

1. Even though we are crafters we are not under the Artisan tree (means we need to invest 15sp just to get Novice Artisan so we can begin the climb to merchant)


2. MBE not only have to gather "mine'able' resources" we have to gather "non-mine'able' " resources. Hence we need to pick up decent combat skills


3. Just not enough skill pts left over

Maybe if they added a merchant branch from the BE tree....

---

If your wares exceed what can be sold on the bazaar, then you should hire a merchant to place a vendor for you, or wait until SOE impliments a system for merchants to function as merchants only (AFTER it fixes this bug)

1. Yes, I agree. Bio-Engineers need to have some realistic access to the Business tree of artisan. It was foolish to have a crafting profession such as theirs not be tied into the Artisan skilltree somehow. Good call.

2. Yes, I also see how this is true. While other professions need to get combat skillsto stay alive, a BE's goods REQUIRE him/her to be able to take on tough MOBs. However, grouping is also the solution to this. I'm a DE so I know all about profession inter-dependencies. We by far have the most components required for our schematics that we cannot produce ourselves. But, we get by.

Merchant branch to the BE tree would be exploited faster than this Merchant bug was. It would make the current Artisan-business-Merchant path obsolete unless it was implimented flawlessly.

All very interesting information and insight

Thank you DocSavag, JediKnightMark, Yolner for you time and patience.

Well credits are the main gating factor for most new merchants that prevent them from becoming an intergalactic spec trader. When I first started out I tried doing that as well but the problem was finding someone who wanted to sell to me at any kind of reduced rate so that I could make any profit. In fact one of the first weaponsmiths on Starsider refused to even return my emails asking about an arragngement to sell some of his items. I bought them from his vendor and transported them myself and charged more than he was getting and they all sold. He could have doubled his sales probably with additional locations but he wasn't interested.

I think that is the issue for many merchants trying to get started. If you don't have a crafting profession or surveying experience you don't have any real way to generate revenue to purchase other goods. If you have surveying experience or are a crafter you tend to rely on your own merchandise to make money and forget about buying other goods.

To do speculative trading you need a sizeable amount of money up front which is difficult to come by as a merchant unless you are a crafter or you have a combat proession to run missions with. You take all the risks with the purchases but the crafter still wants to make 90% or better of the profits which simply isn't realistic but it is far to easy for them to run their own shops so they have no motivation to sell to a merchant.

If you want to change that you have to make running a merchant shop tougher. You have to make it require skill points to continue, not just to start, and you need to make the cost of doing business more than it is now especially at lower levels in merchant or business III.

This past weekend I visited a number of shops ok Lok on my server. In one city I visited 5 shops. 2 had no vendor inside though they had a merchant style sign outside and the name of the building said "vendor inside." 3 had bulky terminals which are indicative of a Business III crafter and not a merchant. 2 of those vendors were empty. Now it is certainly possible that those empty vendors were just sold out over the weekend and they are full now. My point is that out of 5 stores I entered that day in this particular town all of them were self run establishments and 4 out of the 5 were devoid of any merchandise. This is a bad thing. A better scenario would have been one store with 2 -3 vendors in it all stocked with something. One or two merchants involved with 5 crafters would have made a decent shoping experience.

---

None2Soon wrote:

MERCHANT: (n)

1. One whose occupation is the wholesale purchase and retail sale of goods for profit

2. One who runs a retail business; a shopkeeper.

---

---

JediKnightMark wrote:

---

None2Soon wrote:

MERCHANT: (n)

1. One whose occupation is the wholesale purchase and retail sale of goods for profit

2. One who runs a retail business; a shopkeeper.

---

marks·man 1.A man skilled in shooting at a target.

The problem is that with the definition of merchant is that it is the devs who decide what our profession is by making certain ones available to us and others not, based on a number of different things, such as skillpoint pool and current experience in professions, not us according to our past irl experiences. Many people cannot be in the marksman profession in SWG because they do not have the 15 skillpoints spend for it. However, this does not mean that they cannot whip out their CDEF and shoot low-level stuff as "A mean skilled in shooting at a target" does simply because they have experience with other games. They might be experienced relative to the things they are attacking or because of out-game experience but they're not an in-game marksman and they are not experienced according to the game's systems.

The same goes for merchants. There are numerous people who can HexCode the color on their home's sign to give it multiple lines or name it whatever '[Insert Name Here] Inc." they feel like. They even know that oftentimes AFK city yelling, while it results in a lot of addignores, also works to get people to go to one's waypoint and look around. They also know that naming their harvesters as they do their sign and, even more than that, adding the coords to the name is a good advertizing tactic. The problem is, is that these options are all available to everyone and the game does not recognize there people as having any merchant skills at all, whether by true definition or by game system. Anyone can do these things. But, when these people who consider themselves to be merchants in the IRL definiton sense of the word,have to actually spend (omg) SKILLPOINTS to obtain... ABILITIES from a profession that's main goal is to allow a player to own and run a business, they get all pissy.

The basic idea here is that there are people who are merchants in their mind because they sell things to makemoney. They spend no skillpoints and have access to all the commonalities that the average player does.

Then, there are people who are in the merchant profession, and enjoy all the benefits of the profession but also spend skillpoints to have these abilities.

Then, there are people who exploit the merchant porfession, enjoy some of the benefits (just vendors, so I've heard), and don't have to spend the corresponding skillpoints.

The last group are exploiting the system, and that is not right. Every other profession in the game requires a tradeoff of skillpoints for abilities. Compromise on this issue is total *selfedit*.Syntax aside, these people are not playing fair.Call it whatever you want, theyare breaking the rules. Some might say that they aren't, they just found a loophole. To this I say that they are justkidding themselves if they believe this. Everybody knows how this game works. Skillpoints godown asskillboxes learned go up. No exceptions. People who usethe Merchant profession without paying for it as per every other profession should face the same consequences as any other playerwho knowingly exploits the game system.

i.e. Ban them.

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

---

What about an architect who masters artisan, makes schematics for the few master artisan components he needs,and then drops master artisan but continues factory producing those components. Should he be banned too?

What about the doctor who obtains rifle 4 and hunting 1 to harvest avian meat for a few days, then drops those skills but still uses the avian meat for buffs. Should he be banned? What if he masters doctor so he can make some killer med schematics, but then drops the crafting line. Banned?

People who obtain merchant skills to create a vendor and then drop the skill, just like those other examples, gainone benefit from doing so that lasts beyond the time that they have the skill. They do not retain the benefits of people who keep the skill, such as the ability to create vendors whenever, wherever, and of the typethey chose. If you are really serious about playing the Merchant class, those abilities, and not the mere ability to have astatic spotto sell stuff while you're not online, would be what you'd thrive on.