Merchant Archive

I ran into that problem a couple days ago with the 7 day limitand boy did it suck. It would not be bad if you could just click on all of the same thing and set a price but the way it is now it's such a pain to reprice it.

- Nice ideas, really nice ideas, everyone. The class, even if it worked, is still relatively worthless, and needs serious revamping. Those ideas are really excellent.

- However... I'm willing to wait on such additional content. The thing I'd really like to see is... MY MERCHANDISE! You know, that stuff we're supposed to be making our living with?

- Droid engineers may be broken, but their class doesn't have a bug where you take your hard-earned merchandise, dig a hole, dump it all in, and then cover it up again and walk away. Worthless class, that's one thing. A class that actually works *AGAINST* you half the time? Why am I bothering?

- I have a bit of advice for anyone thinking of becoming a merchant but hasn't yet made the XP: STOP. Stop and play something else, put your skills into anything but merchant, at least until SOE unbreaks the class completely.

I think vendors should be for merchants only. Have you ever seen a grocery store that grows their own food?

There's a ton of bugs in merchant granted. But it's still a useable profession and worth the time to get. Just Ad3 is worth the time. Plantary map tho bugged still brings in tons of business. Extra vendors work great for helping people find what they want faster. Hiring is good for new looks. You'd be surprised how many people will visit your shop for nothing more then to see your cool vendors. I have 1 vendor who's at the front my my place who sells nothing and I change it daily. That along brings people in daily to see the new vendor! People seem to only look at the negatives and not the positives. Just my 2 cents since I'm Vendor3, Hire3, Ad3, and should be Hire4 tonight in merchant.

I am going to stay pure merchant, so I'm not going to whine about quitting, but you'd think after the lessons learned from EQ that SoE would take the Merchant class more seriously.

Player economy is a BIG playfactor in a long-term sustainable online game. How many serious economists have studied the EQ economy as a serious model? How many times did SoE step in to nerf things and tinker with buying and selling to get the economy working in EQ? How would you feel if the Mega-Super Duper Scout Hand Cannon that you just bought for 300k was now worth nothing? Or if your hard-earned mission credits were now inflated to uselessness?

The difference in SWG is this grand experiment with an almostcompletely player-run economy. Good dropped items are rare, and typically not as good as player-made, so bringing good items to market is imperative for class balancing and economic balancing. If player vendors are going to continue to be bugged, if Merch. abilities are going to be useless, and the bazaar continues to be a bland Ebay without paypal or shipping..then this neweconomy is going to be stillborn, and SoE will have play catch-up later after disgruntled players start to drop off.

Vendors need to be fixed, flexible and their advertising functions need to be in order. Merchants need to have abilities that make it more profitable for artisans to work with us, and for warriors-types to buy from us.I want to re-iterate that travel and shipping costs are something that REAL merchants would have handled a long time ago..where's my corellian freighter? At least I would have worked out a bulk travel arrangement with the shuttle service. Can you imagine a real savvy merchant paying RETAIL to fly from Rori to Corellia? (that's 1500 credits easily). Why can an Entertainer list 25 muffins on the bazaar, but a Professional Merchant can list the same 25 items?

Please treat us with care SoE, we are the fulcrum on which the economy balances. Unless we want every planet to be wall to wall houses seperated by smoking extractors, please make the Merchant class a viable alternative.

Thanks,

Csin Csity

-400,-5500 Coronet, Corellia --Bloodfin Server

Here here.. You don't have to be a merchant to be a merchant. In fact if you ARE a merchant it works against you. You have a better shot at becoming a merchant if you never take a merchant skill, get Business 3, and become adroid engineer/weaponsmith/armorsmith. At the time they are all better merchants than merchants will ever get to be. It is so **edit** frustrating that I am seriously contemplating dropping all mymerchant skills entirely. After 2 weeks of slowly getting XP I can now;

LIST THINGS IN THE BAZAAR FOR 4 CREDITS LESS!! WOOT

ADD ANOTHER USELESS VENDOR!! WOOT WOOT!

MAKE THAT VENDOR ANY RACE AND SEX I WANT! WOOT! WOOT! WOOT!

USE BARKING SKILLS THAT DO NOT WORK!! WOOTx4!!

If I knew Merchant was going to work exactly like playing dress-up I never would have wasted my time. Can't wait till I am a master merchant and I get my easy bake oven so I can bake cake buffs 1at a time in 3 days and then lose them in my vendor where it will cost me more to list the item then I'll get when I sell it!

On the subject of having vendors only show one or two types of the same item, and automatically restock... keep in mind there is a possible problem with this - the vendor would need to be able to differentiate between item "traits" - i.e. the color of a particular piece of clothing (a tailor would want to be able to give his customers a variety of styles to choose from), or the stats of a weapon,modules of a droid, etc... although that COULD be fixed on the artisan's part by renaming an item to, say, "Pilot's Jacket [Brown]" or "R5 Droid [Medical Module]"... would hurt pure merchant resellers without that option.

I have to agree with a number of people and say that the 7 day time limit on sales in my vendor can be very frustrating. I have a shop that had a large number of weapon powerups for sale, and the other day my in-game e-mail started being spammed with 'AUCTION UNSUCCESSFUL', making me think there was some kind of bug, because I hadn't listed anything on the Bazaar recently. If the life of a merchant is supposed to be constantly taking merchandiseout of the storeroom every week and putting it back up for sale, then count me out.

There's also the skill tree. The skill trees just aren't appealling. I don't have any suggestions as for what to add, but I definitely think that "reduced bazaar fees" should be the first to go. Listing something on the bazaar is cheap enough as it is. I don't really regret having to spend the extra couple credits, because that's all it really amounts to. And besides, I know that I won't ever be placing anything for sale on the bazaar as long as I have my shop.

I really want to enjoy the merchant class. I really hope it can be fixed.

I am very back and forth on this issue. I dont think I'll ever take enough skills to be Master Merchant until these things are fixed. Adv. 3 and Hiring 3 maybe. But I don't need more than 2 vendors in my one home, and Eventually I think that will drop to only one. I mean I would use them if I could place stores on other planets, but with the lot limit I barely have enough for a store and my harvestors.

I guess I can only hope for the best and SOE doesn't leave us out to dry.