Merchant Archive
Thread: Whats the real enemy for Merchants? Business III or the Bazaar.
The real enemy is that players have no way to SEARCH thru the various vendors at 1 convienent location....
they just have to walk in then check the vendor.....
the only time i even bother with looking at other peoples vendors is if i have spoken to them and they have left something for me or they have told me they have X or more of X in their vendor.
I do about 99% of my shopping off the street and off the bazaar...
even if you are lucky and get a good location, chances are in a couple of weeks you will be surrounded by other houses and harvetsors and that prime real estate is worthless...
as a crafter i do 99% of my business and money making thru the bazaar....i would rather get a couple of 1000 less and make money than charge a higher price and make none...Friday i put the same 10 items in my vendor and on the bazaar...the bazaar sold out within an hour and the ones in my vendor are still there...
WHat i find most annoying now is people who street shout about their vendors....if youre here and i am here i just want to buy from you now...not walk 1200km out of my way
I guess you could call me an "artisan-merchant". I am anArchitect,but I trained Novice Merchant so I could be my groups front-man. We set up a store south of Dearic on Talus and I (will soon) have an NPC merchant for each of the artisans in my group.
We did this for efficiency. Having an architect, tailor, weaponsmith and armorsmith all selling in one location is convienient. Plus, people shopping for weapons or armor often buy something from one of the others (often clothes from the tailor).
We have an area in the back with personal crafting stations for special or rush orders, a showroom and the front area with the vendors. Sometimes it's hard to keep things in stock, but we try our best. We're mostly casual gamers and often don't have time to grind out dozens of copies of things. We try for a wide selection of all the items we can make. (The factory nerf/fix put a huge dent in our production, so nearly everything is handcrafted.)
I don't think being able to have one clunky arse soda machine vendor is going to kill the Merchant profession. The Merchant profession is more of a nitch profession then the artisan-merchants. Unless you have a network of people willing to letyou do commision sales, it would be difficult to keep items in stock. That's where I have it lucky. When one of my group wants something put up for sale, they offer it to thevendorfor 1cr and send an email telling me what they want it sold for. I then pull it out and place the item for sale. Whena sale is made, I/tip bank them the money, minus a small fee to cover the transfer andmaintenance for the house and vendors(10-15% total).
Once we become more established, we'll start seeking outside offersfor items we can't supply,butuntil then, we're working together to helpall of us out.
Marduke Akkad
I dont agree with the extreme of this argument (seen in other posts here) about removing vendors from Business III & IV.
Why?
Business was the last artisan line I took, why?, because it offered me the least for my xp at that point in time. I need/wanted master artisan so it wasnt an option but it was something I could put off until I had the widest range of products to make.sell and could see what kind of markets I was dealing with.
Having said that the 25 item limit on the bazaar is crippling to a crafter. The 3k cap I can live with (there isnt anything I can make as a master artisan that I think would go for 3k now anyway) but I need to be able to list more choice so I'm not considered a 'crappy merchant' by customers who visit (as one guy perfectly illustrated in an earlier post) the other problem is that merchants dont seem to want to be merchants
I'll explain that last bit
As an artisan (who has _always_ had an artisan flag under his name) I have _never_ been approached by a merchant who enquired about selling my products (actually I dont think I've ever seen a merchant on Eclipse). I would _love_ to be able to offload my 33 bone armour chest pieces (which I refuse to destroy due to the time/resource investment) at a resonable price (and I'm talking 750 cr each), and I would love to freed from the hassle of having to sell direct and just be able to sell everything to one person.
The problem is the current economic situation doesnt make it viable as the raw material is generally now worth more than the finished article
Cut-throat competition between artisans to shift their stock at any cost to get the UXP (and you guys who are now merchants are just as much to blame here) has resulted in the 'market price' often being well below any break even point. The lack of sustainable markets in the artisan space (i.e. repeat business) results in little money to be made here anyway so the only people making any money are the early achievers/exploiters who go to the elite crafting professions first and were able to corner the market and gain reputation
However even these markets will be eroded over time, as more and more players reach the elite crafting professions the cycle of cost cutting will begin anew and it wont take long before their product are also selling for peanuts - how the merchant is supposed to work within such a framework on a large scale is beyond me
However, it seems clear to me that merchants should be targetting the elite crafting professions, and not the artisan since they are the only ones that have a market - the problem will be either getting the elite crafter to accept lower profits on their product to allow a merchant markup for sale at the same price (bear inmind alot of these elite crafters are having trouble keeping up with demand) or getting the customer to accept a higher price if the elite crafter wont sell for less. Also getting the customers to come to you and not the elite crafter will be difficult now that the supply channel is established (its like the factory outlet store before the retail reseller)
The fact is a vendor is equal to a pet. You don't see a pet in the scout line. You can't play a creature handler without a pet. Same with merchant. You can't play a merchant without vendors. Why is there a vendor in the artisan line? A vendor makes the merchant class asa pet makes the creature handler class. What is unfair is now every tom, **edit**, and harry can get a vendor but not a pet. This *needs* to be address and fixed like pets.
Zeto
Master Weaponsmith / Master Merchant / Novice Armorsmith
Kaadara, Naboo - 5825,6275 (Lowca)
You all are getting way out of hand with your pronouncements...
First, the database issue is irrelevant. The designers doubtless know the capacity of their database and its functionality, and they're obviously not worried or they would have done something about it. Stop bringing it up as if the game will suddenly have a huge performance increase with such a minor change. Every vendor less means one DB entry less - and how many vendors per server? Maybe 2000, tops? Given that all of the items that would sell on those vendors would exist anyhow, we're talking about eliminating at most 1950 entries out of a database hundreds of millions of entries long. This isNOT an issue.
EVERY skill tree in the game is built to support advantages for only partial completion. It's unfair to let Master anythings have a monopoly. The game is perfectly balanced as is with this regard - if an artisan wants to have a vendor, they must pay out 9 of their 150 skill points to do so. Increasing the cost by another 11 isn't going to make your life any easier, it'll just make the load on the crafters harder. If they want to sell for themself, then a 20 skill point investment won't deter them from doing so - they'll take the hit elsewhere, or stop crafting. At no time does the merchant gain ANYTHING from this change.
A lot of you are under the foolish misconception that you can FORCE a monopoly on people, and make people go through you to sell. Which is ironic, because I often have more inventory than I can sell, simply because a lot of people want to sell for me. Did you ever ASK the crafters on your server if you could be a distributor for them? Did you ever try to reduce their load by supplying a reliable sales point? Almost universally, the answer when I ask people directly is 'No, I shouldn't have to.' I make a lot of money as a Merchant, and if you can't, then you have a problem that no skill changes or ability redistributions are going to change.
"I don't need to take the big ugly biz3 box away from the guy who's selling casual pants and short sleeve jackets. He's just no problem for me."
Exactly. Your our to benifit yourself not merchants as a whole. Your out to get changes that directly affect you. Don't see how you can take a stance on this issue when you openly admit you have no problem with it. So far as you care you'd be fine if businees 3 didn't have vendor or did. So let the people who want them out to win. What do you care if their no problem for you?
do you really need to resort to character assassination to prove your point XCal?
As for "Don't see how you can take a stance on this issue when you openly admit you have no problem with it" That seems pretty clear that he took a stance.
The limit is so that people do not fill it with COUNTLESS piles of crap. It is a nessesary evil. As for you not being asked to make anything, if you are carring the Novice Artist tag, them the merchant can make almost anything you can make (if they trained it) so... But I approch Novice Tailors and so on all the time.
Numtini wrote:
The vast vast majority, perhaps 95%, of merchants are crafter-merchants.
Right now, as a Merchant, a Crafter Merchant, I would say the biggest danger to my playstyle is elitist pure merchants trying to nerf Crafter Merchants.
Right now, as a Merchant, I would say the biggest danger to my playstyle is Crafter Merchants trying to nerf elitist pure merchants.
Chelsim wrote:
hehe - It cracks me up whenever I hear that something doesn't fit the StarWars theme - I personally hate to shop at malls in real life and expect that in game life I'll feel the same way but how can anyone say that malls don't fit swg? It's in the future so anything should go
Heh... I wasn't saying that public markets didn't fit the theme. I was saying that what would logically follow fixing the "house vendor permission list" bug and the "vendor inventory being counted versus structure inventory limit" bug wouldn't. That being housescrammed as full of vendorsas a college phone booth stuffing party.
Maybe "mall" isn't the term I should've used. "Merchant XP Sweatshop" is probably closer to what I'm envisioning. Players will always find the shortest route to the cheese, and in this case the path would be... unsightly. But, hey, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
When player cities are implemented, proper malls and marketplaces should definitely have a place... with funds siphoned from us going toward the upkeep of the city.
What should be addressed is making the Merchant class better, not the Artisan/Business line worse.
Why not just have an item/price limit on the Business Vendor? Start at 20 items and 3000cr, just like the bazaar at Bus3, raise it to 30 items and a 10Kcr limit at Bus4. Novice Merchant, removeall caps.