Merchant Archive
Thread: Vendor Maintenance Fees coming – your input request
Q + Devs:
A hurrah for telling us first and polling for opinions! 
I think it should be a commission/sales tax.
As for money sinks, this has probably already been mentioned, but I don't see how you can analyze this properly when you are missing a major sink in that corpse retrieval is not active, so insurance is not necessary and people are not losing stuff when they die.
As much as I don't want the hassle of insurance and corpse retrieval, until that is working I don't think you can determine whether additional money sinks are required. If you put additional money sinks in before activating corpses, what happens then?
Other money sinks to consider -
- clothing decay
- building decay (I think there is none?)
- penalties for not eating food/drink
Oh, and *please* warn us big time before instituting corpse-retrieval!!
Cheradenine Zakalwe / Kettemoor
The real joke to Q's post is the excuse of a money sink. We have seen time and time again about their database issues. Everything they have done recently can be traced back to them trying to limit the number of items in the database. I beleive the factory bug is not truly a bug, but another way of limiting the item in the database.
As a tailor, there is absolutely no way I can use a vendor if the maintenance cost is going to be calculated on that formula. It is too high. I like some of the ideas that have been posted, ie. commision, sales tax. My question is, who pays the sales tax? The buyer or seller or both?
Also reading this, I keep wondering what the decision making process is for the developers. Sure we have bugs that are severly hurting professions, but lets not work on those. Fix your real bugs first, and then continue on the game.
If the issue really is a money sink then please go with a sales tax so as not to punish those crafters and merchants that put up a nice variety of stock.
If the issue is really too many people owning vendors then please make sure that you allow for the trading of schematics between people without having to use a vendor or the bazaar....before you ban non-merchants from owning vendors.
So is the problem with keeping people from using the vendors to hold items? OR is the problem taking some of the credits out of the ecomomy? OR is it both?
Well, if the 75 items per lot issue never came up, then people wouldn't have a need to use vendors to hold their precious stuff. *wink*
As for the vendors actually working? Well, personally, I'd like to see vendors fixed, and when I say this, I mean...
- Being able to set the vendor ad barking on and not have to reset it
- Being able to set the planetary map and not have to reset it every morning to try and be the first on the list.
Yes, like 50,000 of you out there, I too am an architect. If I'm not making money on sales, then why should I get charged to place the item on the vendor to try and make money? Catch 22? Vendors are droids, not people we hired.
I can go for the sales tax idea, but definately NOT 10% of the sales price. 5% MAX, but again, NOT 10%. I don't live in California and am NOT used to high sales taxes to feed hungry politicians. I don't overcharge my items like most do, I'm not out to get rich in this game, I just want to have fun and stay afloat.
I still think the easiest way out would be a flat tax on vendors. I agree, 45 min incriments are too much formy forensicfried brain to figure out, charge by the hour. 10 credits an hour per vendor seems fair enough to me. I have 2 vendors so that comes out to 480 credits a day or 3360 per 7 day week. How about those that have more than2 vendors? Well, I can see them firing some vendors for sure, which in turn renders the Merchant tree useless. (There goes another money sink, unless people get trained from other players)
Now that I'm finished debating with myself, I'll allow you to try and figure out how the hamsters in my brain work....
To whomever suggested only Master Merchants get to list 100 items on the vendors----erm that's not going to work either. I don't know a single Master Tailor, Master Armorcrafter, or Master Architect who has points left over to master merchant....we are all novice, with several boxes trained in merchant profession.
And my vendors have over 100 items on them at all times. Excessive? I'll be frank----I sell 20-50 items a night when I'm not logged on. I NEED to have a well stocked store 
I'm sure everyone has beat these points into the ground but I'll add my voice to the noise.
1) This is a money sink for crafters? Okay fair enough, however it should not be a bankrupting sink. No other money sink in the game is designed to put some people out of business, or create a situation where its next to impossible to make money. If I spend 2400 credits to go to yavin 4 I can earn enough money to pay for the trip with a few missions, and then everything else is pure profit. With this scenario I have to sell enough goods (something beyond my control) not to loose money paying my vendors.
2) This is designed to prevent people from storing unlimited items in vendors? No it is not, since I can simply keep stuff in my Stockroom if I want to store items.
3) This is designed to make being a merchant so difficult that many merchants cease to opperate because the Devsfeel there are to many vendors?Well, I think this is a bad way to govern the economy. What we have is a situation in which those people who have, for whatever reason, made a pile of money will be able to continue to opperate failing businesses while other people throw in the towel.
also this system makes 0 sense. You assume that an NPC vendor is an employee. I work in retail and on commission...I only wish I got paid based on my current inventory! I get paid to MOVE inventory, not store it. From an immersion angle this system makes no sense. The obvious move is to charge either a listing fee like the bazaar or charge an additional fee for every item sold.
A listing fee prevents people from using the vendor for storage, it acts as a money sink as we have to pay the fee whenever we list the item. This programing is already in place and active in the bazaar so its easy to impliment. Put in a set maintanance rate for the vendor, modified by say ad barking and advertising and then charge us to list items.
It's easy, it does not punish us for listing several items.
I'm one of the tailors who could be driven out of business by this change. I did some quick math.
I list about 400 items average on my vendor and I figure the average price of my items is probably 800 credits. That means I have 320,000 credits in inventory in my vendor so my total maintainace per day would be 10240 credits per day. Now I have Efficiency 4 so maybe I pay half or 3/4 of that per day. I have to sell 8 items per day just to break even. That doesn't take into account that as a merchant, I also buy other crafters good and sell them, including some big-ticket items.
So, I could probably survive as a tailor/merchant but If I have to buy finished goods at wholesale and sell them on a small margin it simply won't work! Last night I found some nice Chitin armor on the bazaar that was a steal at 1500 credits per peice. I sell this regularly for 4k per peice. If I listed this on my vendor and it didnt sell for a week, I lose a ton of money!
The biggest kick in the butt with this is that the rest of our profession is broken.
As merchants we don't really have a lot of benefits. Cool vendors? Not really we cant dress them yet and cant customize them.
Ad Barking? Doesn't work
Advertising? Gotta reset our vendors every morning
We have no other real skills besides this. Before giving us a big nerf could you Developers at least lessen the blow my fixing our profession or giving us something that works? Could you at least take vendors away from people with Business 3?
The Devs first instinct is to bring this to the forefront, instead of fixing our class and then bending us over a barrel. At least we would feel taken care of on some level before you bring on the pain.
I don't really know at this point what I will do if this stays as proposed. I have enough cash where I could probably be one of the guys that sticks it out until everyone else quits, but I don't know that I want to be out doing missions to pay to stay in business. The thought of quiting has crossed my mind, as I'm sure many of you have thought.
All I'm asking for is a little logic here, and at least the feeling that other issues are being addressed.
Good luck to you all
You have already stated in several threads that vendors were not intended to storage of items, and I can accept that. With this fee structure, however, you are penalizing legitimate merchants that try to maintain stock, in an apparent attempt to stop people from using vendors to store things. This is not going to achieve that, because they are going to leav all the items at a value of 1cr and make the structure private. The answer for architects (and other merchants of high priced items) will be to only have a limited stock, which will stifle the economy, drop prices to avoid usurious fees, or lower prices and set a high access fee to enter the shop.
I would suggest a three part solution to the problem you are trying to address. Rather than penalizing the honest merchant trying to make a living, bill him for making use of a vendor. Leave the flat rate vendor fee; apply a sales tax when a vendor sells an item; and, charge the vendor half of that sales tax if he chooses to remove an item from a vendor rather than keeping it there for sale. That way, those that are using vendors for storage will be charged each time they remove an item from "storage". Part two, let architects build storage that really works. Let a chest take up 5 space in a house but hold 25 units for example. This will have players using storage containers for...STORAGE! And part 3, you could then base the maintenance rate of a building on the number of items TOTAL in a building. If I have a small house full of chests, full of stuff, I pay a LOT more maintenance than the guy with the small house with a couch and a crafting station. I would also be less inclined to accumulate a whole lot of junk in my house, just because I can.
Money sinks are a necessary evil in the game, but please apply them in the right places, for the right reasons. Look at charging bank fees based on the amount of things kept in stoarge at the bank; apply modest access fees to medical centers and cantinas; charge a small fee for accessing a mission terminal (heck you could make a fortune by charging 1cr every time a player hit the refresh button!!), charge a fee for using a 'public' crafting station, fix cloning and insurance will be a money sink. There have got to be better places to grab cash from the taxpayer than nailing the vendor.
I am in the Sales tax + a flat fee scenario. Perhaps detemine the amount of the flat fee--and the sales tax for that matter--by the type of vendor (is there such a thing as vendor type? I am noob when it comes to the merchant stuff in SWG), or by it's inventory. That way the money sink would be scaled sothat it would impact each kind of crafter in a similar fashion.
I know that you need to create some more money sinks, but the one that you propose is way too prohibitive, IMO.
Berdangar
mtnsurfer wrote:
The real joke to Q's post is the excuse of a money sink. We have seen time and time again about their database issues. Everything they have done recently can be traced back to them trying to limit the number of items in the database
Everyone read this again.
The jigs up, we're onto you, Koster. Stop with the bull$hit.
However, this proposed money sink is ill-thought out. It will drastically impact how much of my higher range tailoring inventory I can keep on my vendor, the mind boggles at how much weaponsmiths and architects would be hit.
The point is, that this punishes crafters (especially casual crafters who load up their vendor for the week, or crafters who have not yet built up a name for themselves and won't have regular traffic coming to their store). This is especially cruel when we are still reeling from the house item limit nerf and hemorrhaging money from having to redeed broken factories (that SOE claims were fixed).
Chaowyr Aethoc
ChaoTEK Studios - Talus (Radiant)
I think that cr amount on vendor / 1000 per 45 minutes is crazy. Let's review my business. I am a master architect. I typically have 2-3mil worth of deeds on my installation vendor at any time. Given your approach that would cost me; ... Let's see. Inventory Cr / 1000 per 45 minutes. There are 32 - 45 minute intervals in a 24 hour period. So to maintain my vendor for the day; 3,000,000 / 1000 = 3000 * 32 = 64,000.
So what your proposing is that my vendor costs me 64k a day to maintain? That makes no sense to me at all. At most it will change the way I play. I will just yank all the stuff off my vendor and store it in packs. I will only sell the expensive items face to face.
How about a sliding % based on sell price? 20k or less 5%, 20k-50k 4%, 50k and above 3%.
I try to maintain a large and deep stock on both my installation and furntiture vendors. If you need a money sink, make it associated with the sale of a product in the form of a VAT or something like what I suggested above. Not a listing charge, ut a sales tax.
Others have said it, but it needs to be emphasized, FIX MERCHANT BEFORE IMPLEMENTING ANY OF THESE CHANGES. If this change, or a similar merchant nerf is implemented before the other bugs in the Merchant class are fixed, I will quit. I really want to be a master merchant, I really wnat it to be worthwhile. But right now almost half of our boxes are worthless, or bugged. Hiring does nothing. Advertising is shutting off constantly. Efficiency is a pittance, even at master. And Master Merchant is a joke. No, raising vendor fees does not help MM, or efficiency, it hurts them, just a bit less than it hurts "casual" Merchants. But it hurts them on a much larger scale, since they really *want* to be merchants.
My suggestions:
Dear god, fix advertising shutting off all the time.
Make sure to give a good grace period when you implement this, so that Merchants don't lose whole vendors when this goes live.
Limit the number of items on a vendor to (Hiring Skill) * 10.
Sales tax of 5%, *charged to the customer*, just like a bank transfer. Reduced 1% with appropriate Efficiency boxes.
Vendor maintenance should be 1cr/hour/10 items. That's approximately the bazaar cost (170 credits for 10 items for 7 days vs 200cr on the bazaar.)
Vendor sales should not expire.
Planetary Advertising should add a flat 10cr/hour to vendor Maintenance. Halved for AD IV.
And, while I'm here, something I'd like to see:
Allow Merchants to ship good to distant shops. Pay the cost of a ticket to the other shop, and you can sell/retrieve items as though you were at that vendor for 1 session.
While I do agree with the intent to increase vendor fees, the implementation is awful :
1) You are puniqhing people who take the time, effort and to the SERVICE to the player community to have their vendors well stocked and offering a lot of choice to the customer.
Your formula is an incitation for players to only put a few "big sellers" items at a time and restock them as needed.
Well experimented lower level items, items for specialized classes (like grenades and such) will disappear from vendor inventories, who will just sell flavor of the months items, denying customers the right to choose
2) You are punishing the professions that have to place a variety of items on their vendors to give to customers a reasonable display of their abilities, and a reasonable choice. Best examples will be chefs, and especially tailors. Clients appreciate to have the choice between a red, yellow, black, withe or blue cold weather jacket. With the announced changes ... well aren't there already enough black dusters out there 
3) You are killing artisans who are setting up their shops, and working towards getting a clientele, vs. already established merchants, who might already
The only fair solution is to put a % to each sale.