Merchant Archive

Last two posts are dead-on... Merchants are not the ONLY profwhere you get to keep things when you drop the prof - Docs/CMs with their hospitals, and Entertainers/Chefs with the Cantina and Theater are two more examples. A Merchant skill isn't for having a vendor - it's for placing a vendor. And to be honest, I doubt the devs CAN make it so the vendors disappear when you drop skills (let alone if you have a vendor of a higher ability than your skill). All dropping skills does is give back points and remove schematics from your datapad...

Solution that might work though - make the vendors check that you have a skill for you to be able to do most functions on them. For example, if you dropped merchant and just have business 3, you can still use your boxy vendor, but if you had a NPC vendor, you could only remove stock and maintenance. You can't add new stock (or put anything that didn't sell back up for sale) nor add new maintenance. So the vendor wouldn't disappear, but basically, other than the stock you had on it when you dropped the skills, you can't put up any more sales. In less than a month in most cases, makes your vendor useless...