Merchant Archive
Thread: Merchant Correspondent Input Request (Week 1)
My major issues:
1) Placing vendors while admin of house
2) AdvertisingNeeds some work (ad barking, etc.)
3) Stockroom issues (unretrievable items, etc. though I have never been effected personally)
4) Unlimited timeto sell itemson personal vendor.
5) Vendor command on houses fix
Honorable mention: Premium sales, new abilities in general (rewards for moving up tree not so great), ways to make shops look more like shops: (signs, display cases, etc.)
These are the issues Ichoosewith my 'vote'.
Here is what I sent. Please note, NOT all issues were addressed. I had to pick the top 5. So please don't be mad. We will do this again NEXT WEEK, so we have tome.
Okay here are the top 5 issues as taken from the community
Vendor Inventory issues.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This issue is by far the most pressing issue our class faces. Almost every merchant on the board has countless items stuck in the STOCKROOM of their vendor. There is also a serious issue with items that are in the vendor will not be retrievable by the buyer. This has created a total mistrust of the vendor, by the Merchant, and the buyers.
No Merchant is going to place a 100k house in a vendor if there is a good chance that it will be lost to this defect.
There is also an issue with resources in a vendor. See the following threads please...http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=merchant&message.id=1538
Skills
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The AD tree in the merchant line needs to be addressed.
ADI – Barks work 50% of the time, and eventually stop working all together.
ADII – Custom Barks does not function at all.
ADIII – This is an on again, and off again feature
Novice Merchant – Fix Premium Sales in the Bazaar
Why is this important? SWG has not given us any real way to distinguish a house from a shop, so the AD tree is the only way we have to reach out to potential clients.
To grow in other professions, you have to make stuff, but that is not the case as a MERCHANT, and because a vendor (an ugly one, but still) is given at business III, anyone can become a MERCHANT without having to do anything besides placing the vendor.
This really really dilutes the need for merchants that have chosen that as a profession. Make Novice Merchant something that you have to work at, like Gen Craft points or something, to add value to those that are merchants.
Also, give us a bone for making MASTER MERCHANT. I would like to see a vendor that we can place in our datapad, like a pet, that will follow us, in town. So we can “setup” shop in the town (While we are there).
Vendor List
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The vendor list needs to be fixed. It is assumed that it is supposed to work like this. I add a VENDOR to the list. This will allow that person to place a vendor in MY HOUSE. This is not working; Us UBER MERCHANTS can not set up a shop that has many different people’s vendors. Upkeep of a house and all that comes with it can be a little expensive, and this helps defer the cost.
Changes to the vendors/shop.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Make the vendor easier for us to use. The community wants to be see
Way to change prices without withdrawing the sale.
Vendors should not be killable, many people are grief’ing merchants.
Some tool that allows us to track sales, the email thing is more of SPAM, not a good tool.
Ways to make a shop a shop.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There needs to be a setting in the house menu to designate a house a shop. Here are some recommendations…
A flag on top of the house. (give us 10 or so options that are related to the list in the AD Barks, so people can see by the flag what is sold inside. And One GENERAL flag)
Allow Shops to place items in their porches.
Real Signage
A NPC on our porch, barking
All of this can be tied to a skill tree
Personal Item
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I want to see “shop” furniture.
Posters/signs
Shelves with items
Counter
Enhanced ability to place items in a shop, like a gun on the wall, or to place THINGS on a table or shelf.
Top effort Marqui
Even if only item #1 gets fixed in the near future it will be a big boost to merchants.
Thanks for your effort - keep up the good work ( pestering the devs I mean 
)
Lionicus wrote:
2. Remove the skill of being able to place a vendor at Business III
This should be only available to Merchants. As it is, any artisan has the ability to place a vendor - why do you even need a merchant class then????
Though I would like vendors to be only for Merchants. The question should be thought of, how does one get the experience for Novice Merchant if you cannot place a vender till Novice Merchant? What requirement should replace it?
You could make the XP required for Novice come from Bazaar sales ??? - 50 MXP per bazaar sale once you've reached Business 4 ???
I'm all for Vendors being Novice Merchant only BTW
Many thanks Marqie, you seem to be doing a great job for us (better than some of the correspondents for the other proffesions that I have seen)
Please keep up the feedback to us, as well as the feedback to the devs. It is nice to read about the progress that is being made.
I hope we get a report back soon confirming that the issues will be worked on, and an expected timeframe.
Now, I'm going to try and customize my ad barking one more time, you never know, it might work !
We need some way, maybe via the house menu, to make a house a shop, and by doing to SOMETHIHG, a flag, a banner (even the one related to the planet), a lighted sign, anything, that will set a shop apart from a normal house.
You are beating you head against a wall for that one. It took a years worth of screaming just the get the stupid little mouseover signs we have now.
"Ways to make a shop a shop.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There needs to be a setting in the house menu to designate a house a shop. Here are some recommendations…"
Never going to happen till they fix number of items in a house. I can't afford furniture or I can't sell as much stuff. 
- WELL DONE MARQ! It's a very good start. I'm confident that at least the devs will read this and understand it, and that's half the battle.
I'm just starting up the merchant tree, but I don't see several of my issues on here.
Not yet mentioned: The absolute biggest thing that is driving me nuts is that when somebody uses one vendor, it defaults to "All sales in region." What's the point of having multiple vendors if each of them lists all the items? To my mind, the whole point of having multiple vendors is to (a) keep the list of items per vendor list below 100, eliminating paging and (b) be able to further differentiate product - very important to tailor/merchants and to most weaponsmith/merchants, as nearly all of our products fall under one item listing category. And it would be simple to change: default the list to "This Vendor."
Not yet mentioned: It also drives me regularly nuts that the Bazaar has an easier user interface for listing multiple items, in that when you click on an item in the inventory windoid, it automatically moves the cursor up to the price entry line. That way if you're listing multiple items at the same price, all you have to do is click, hit enter,repeat. But this doesn't work on player vendors.
Not yet mentioned: Once you hit Novice Merchant, if you place a vendor terminal or vendor NPC in the house, your house's name should show up on the ctrl-M overlay map, period. If that's considered too easy, add it to the planetary map box. Or better yet, replace the planetary map option with the option to appear on the overlay map, because more people use it, especially when running around outside of towns.
Not yet mentioned: Either vendor maintenance rates need to be drastically reduced or Efficiency needs to do more, period, because vendor terminal maintenance costs (1% of inventory per hour) are insanely painful - if you have an item listed for more than 4 days, the maintenance cost just completely ate the sales price.
Agree/disagree with earlier points: I agree with the complaints about the stockroom being both bugged anduseless, and about having to relist items every week, and about the insane difficulty of moving a vendor (or its stock) from one building to another. I disagree with the idea of making vendor terminals merchant-only, but do think that merchant vendors should be a heck of a lot more useful and/or cool. And thank god I never got around to selling resources out of my shop, so I hadn't run into the split resourcesbug, which would have fried my brain.
Bug report, not mentioned: I had a customer email me this morning claiming that a Sleeveless Dress she bought from my vendor terminal couldn't be worn. It showed up in her inventory, but when she tried to equip it, she got the error message: "You do not have permission to open this container."
Cheap and easy suggestion: They are never going to let us skin our own buildings, don't even ask. Nor are they evenlikely to let us even skin our own signs, don't even ask. But if tailors can pick from a variety of colors for clothing, why can't merchants use house control commands to pick from a variety of colors for interior wall color, interior floor color, and exterior wall color? If shops looked more distinctive from houses, they'd be more obviously worth investigating.
Architect issue that cripples merchants: The fact that all of the Furniture II lamps are broken, and that the built-in house lighting doesn't work on most vertical surfaces (like characters and NPCs) at all, really really makes showrooms and NPC vendor appearance both ugly and disfunctional. Fix the lighting, please!
Another architect issue that hurts merchants: Allowing furniture such as tiki torches and signs to be placed just slightly outside the house would also make it easier to give shops a distinctive appearance. How do you know that that's a weapon shop? There's a gun mounted next to the door. How do you know that that's a tailor shop? It's got a couple of pieces of clothing outside the door. Etc. (Oh, and whether inside or outside, dropped weapons need to hover at a more convenient height, like backpacks do.)
Clarification to earlier point: As for the items for sale add to the house items list bug, that doesn't seem to apply to all vendor models. The default bulky terminal definitely doesn't have this bug.
Clarification to earlier point: In fact, vendor behavior needs to be 100% consistent regardless of vendor appearance, with the possible reasonable exception of making barking an NPC onlyskill. Vendor XP should be the same for all of them. Maintenance cost should be the same for each of them. Moving the vendor once intialized should be the same for each of them.
Brad, I will be sending a message to them every week. The directive is to choose the top 5 or so issues. We all know that this class needs some love.
I will put your issues on the list, very good points.