Merchant Archive
Thread: Merchants, Why do you stand for this outrage?
DocSavag wrote:
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I understand why you want to remove the merchant profession for your own benefit, but I just can't agree with it, and many others don't agree with it either.
it isnt for MY own benefit....it is for the good and fun ofthe game...
i still have all the points for all my vendors...kust sitting there taking up space for something that could be more fun..
I think the people who want the vendors nerfed are the ones thinking oftheir OWN benefit...they are greedy and just want to count their imaginary gold...
Naufragus wrote:it isnt for MY own benefit....it is for the good and fun ofthe game...
i still have all the points for all my vendors...kust sitting there taking up space for something that could be more fun..
I think the people who want the vendors nerfed are the ones thinking oftheir OWN benefit...they are greedy and just want to count their imaginary gold...
Umm... i still had the points for novice medic "taking up space for something that could be more fun", but i chose to hold on to it so i could have the benefit of being able to heal myself... You can make that same BS argument about anything in the game: Surveying, tossing a camp, harvesting hide, terrain negotiation, etc.
Problem with the argument is just that tho, its BS
Wrong. You use your merchant skills everytime you put something on sale, retrieve it or whatever. Or it's what it's supposed to be, once they have fixed that BS.
Naufragus wrote:
ace what i meant was that you get USE that healing skill when you need it....
merchant skills just sit there...you get the points...get the vendor or the planet listing and thats...you never do anything else with it after the placement...i havent "used" any of my merchant skills in like 6 months.
Ewach wrote:
Rather than making retaining vendors your number one issue, merchants should be clamoring for more skills/tools to enable them to actually BE a merchant.
Right now, trying to market items for someone else is very labor intensive and difficult to track. Essentially, under the current system, there's two basic mechanisms: buy wholesale or sell on consignment; both of which have their problems.
Buy Wholesale approach- Crafter offers items to your vendor at discounted value (perhaps 80% of expected market price. Disadvantage: Requires merchant to front the capital for the product and have a wide knowledge of prices across a broad spectrum of products.
Consignment approach - Crafter offers item to your vendor for "free" (ok - 1 credit, as close as you can get) and you sell for agreed market price. Afterwards, pay the crafter the proceeds less a commission. Disadvantage: Serious paperwork involved with trying to keep track of sales, owners and commissions owed.
Why do I say this should be your number one issue, and not the fact that a non-merchant can keep and operate vendors?
Because until the underlying system is fixed, dedicated crafters will simply get an alt account to mule merchant skills and they will still not use player merchants.
The "cost of entry" for crafters to use other merchants is too high right now. Not in credits, but in time, effort and difficultyto do it. Make the process easier and you may find more crafters concentrating more on making their products and less time trying to market them.
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Background: In the spirit of disclosure, to provide context for my comments above, I'll explain my personal merchant experience.
Last summer opened a powerup shop as a Master Artisan. Eventually progressed to a few Merchant skills to obtain more features and vendors. However, I peeled back skills tonovicea short time before some of the improvements came in - such as house signs, merchant tents, etc.
Wasn't too interested in the holocron frenzy, but when Christmas holocrons came around and I receive a couple for free, decided to see what it had to say. Little blue cube whispers "Master Merchant" - so off I go. Conveniently I was still Novice with quite a bit of accumulated Merchant XP, so it came quickly.
My primary profession is Master Architect and I"m also a Mayor so I have points thrown into that skill point sink of Politician. Next I decided to Master Marksman so Merchant skills had to go.
Where am I now? Master Architect/Master Marksman/Master Artisan/Politician. Still have five NPC vendors and one droid vendor (protocol droid).
My only regret? Not reprogramming all the audibles on my vendors before I dropped skills. I still have one I use that says "I'm not stocked yet".
Why did I keep the vendors? Because the current system allows it.
Therein lies the problem with the system, instead of taking care of exploiters they do things that mess up real merchant players.
This isn't that hard guys. Associate the search and make a non-skilled list of players to vendors. Send them one email with two weeks warning. Delete the vendors.
Fivo Asia
JTGAlpha wrote:
That's not true. I was a master. I wasn't a hologrinder. I dropped master because I wanted the skill points. I intend to keep the rest of the profession (including the management line). If the profession is so useless to you than don't be a merchant. But it's useful to me, and it's about to be rather invaluable to my city. In short: I disagree. We need more tools to make us more useful and more attractive to crafters (tools that can track sales and the like much easier, and facilitate dealing with us), but we don't need to get rid of the profession, or anything in it. We need some stuff added, and we need to secure our ONE BIG attraction, ie vendors, to be ours and ours alone. It's about profession identity and usefulness as well as money.
ok .....
how exactly will we get goods to sell....
will people be bugging us day and night to list their goods....
how will we sell all these goods if we can only list 200 items?
i like going to other people places and BUYING THINGS OFF THEIR VENDORS and then reselling it...
if these people no longer have vendors then it is going to force us to run around picking things up...
or do you thing everyone isjust going to come to your vendor and sell it to you....
say they do do that... where are you going to store all the crap?
you are naive if you think the devs are going to add anything...they dont add things...they just take the same things and gate it or move it higher in the skill trees
you guys are too focused on the vending machines...
I hope you all get what you want and every one drops their prices and lists on the bazaar or gets biz 3 and never deals any of you.
ace what i meant was that you get USE that healing skill when you need it....
merchant skills just sit there...you get the points...get the vendor or the planet listing and thats...you never do anything else with it after the placement...i havent "used" any of my merchant skills in like 6 months.
i am sure your healing skill comes in very handy everyday and has saved your butt....
Merchants have no ACTIVE skills....we have nothing that we actually do..they are use it and forget it....
that is mainly why people DROP the skills....if i didnt have these skills just sitting there taking up space i too might be able to get something cool like healing that i would use all the time..
I just dont see having a vendor sitting in one spot month after month a "skill"
instead of making the profession skill based they could change it and just make it an add on...
Say after you have done personal trades of 500K you get a vendor.
When that vendor has sold a million you get a planet listing
2 million in sales gets you another vendor and so on...
That is no better or more exploitable than the XP system they have now.
But to answer your orginal post the reason that we stand for this outrage is because there really isnt any outrage. Though there will be alot once they put in vendor limits and tie it to merchant skills
sales? that's highly exploitable.
Just have your pa buy the same items over and over and refund them their money every day. Mastery in a week, and you're STILL not doing anything.
Naufragus wrote:that is a vendor...it isnt a skillso standing in one spot everyonce ina while clicking that awful interface is my skill.?...please
ok, what about CH? Should it be that once you tame a pet, you can unlearn CH skillpoints and still be able to control the master level creature?
after all, its not a skill, its a creature...
See where your logic leads?
and i dont need a vendor to sell things...i do do the EXACT same thing on the bazaat that i can do on the vendor...but usning the bazaar interface takes no special skill points
Wrong... you cannot sell a LS crystal on a bazaar and get a reasnable price, while you can on a vendor. Think of the bazaar as the "level 10 pets".
If it is a skill then why do i pay maintence....it doesnt cost me many credits a day to use any of my other skills....I can shoot things and harvest hide for free...so if using my vendor is a skill thenit should also not be a money sink....
By that same logic:
Smugglers should not have to spend money on resources to make precision knifes. After all, it is a skill they earned, so that means they should get a free ride, and not have to pay for their tools.
Any eliete artisans also should not have to pay for resources, they should all get them for free, because as you said, they used skill points, so they should get a free ride.
Message Edited by Ace4Brit on 03-10-2004 12:22 PM
Naufragus wrote:
i am just amazed we arent also charged for using the the shop sign option....
if any one current has a vendor they should get to keep it as long as the pay the maintance...there should be no vendor wipe.
If we were maybe people wouldn't be using them when there is no vendor inside and it would actually mean something.
We "stand for" this outrage only because there is no real choice. The real fix has been declared "too hard to do" months ago.
The best we have in sight is a nerf that affects those withfewer Merchant boxes more, an item count limit on vendors that goes up with skill. I say "in sight" because it has been talked about by devs, though I have not yet heard a release date.
BTW, if the vendor item count can go up as you master, why can't it go down to zero as you drop Bus 3? That would at least stop the most offensive cases, where the character has no Merchant or even Artisan skills, but still runs a large shopping mall.