Merchant Archive

st

While I understand your need to fix vendor fees, the implementation is an horrible idea.

1) You are punishing the artisans who take the time and effort to provide a SERVICE to the community, in having large vendors displays of a variety of diverse items.

The changes is an incitation for players to only stock their vendors with top selling "flavor of the month" items, thus reducing the availabilty of needed, but by a lower number of people, items ("interedependance" items like master artisan's or synth cloth crates, wookie clothing, specialized classes weapons ....)

2) This kills the professions that, by DESIGN, have to offer a varied choice of items to their customers. best examples are chefs, and especially tailors. A self respecting tailor will offer mutliples of each items (among the 200-300ish they can make) on their vendors, with different colors and different associations, so that the customer has a real choice. Black dusters, anyone ?

st

Eeek sorry for the reposting, I thought I lost my message to the forum monster heh :/

ed

That's waaaaaaaaay to much. If an architect stocked his vendor with 2 heavy harvesters or anything that costs a lot, it would cost the vendor 7,000+ a day. A vendor should never cost more than what a Heavy Harvester or a PA hall cost in a day.

The best way to make this fair is take a percentage off. Make it small like 5%. Something sold at 100k would be 5,000 tax, something 200k, 10,000 tax. Something costs 2000, 100 tax. That makes sense.

Even if it was higher tax, I wouldnt care, as long as its not per day no matter if u sell or dont sell. That will ruin noob merchants, because they wont have the customers coming in to help pay for the maintence fee. If you still want to have a maintence fee have it based so it never goes over what a heavy harvester costs per day and do the tax.

Whatever you do don't do current formula. Anyone selling big items like architects that like to stock their vendors wont be able to keep it up. No one could afford to stock 1 of every house type (their planet and generics), 1 of every harvesters (Mineral, Chem,Power,Water, Flora, Gas). That would be like 30,000 a day, and stock 1 of every item isn't rare at all. I stock 5 of every furniture item.

st

first off FIX THE **edit** VENDORS BEFORE YOU DO A **edit** THING TO THEM!!!!

I have one resource for viewing only and charge 9999999999 to keep people from buying it. I put the amount available and price in the sellers description and the buyers contact me and I sell off my alt who is at the shop.

here is the problem with NPC vendors and resources...
say you have a stack of 10,000 units and break it up to 10 stacks of 1k. you put all 10 stacks on your NPC vendor. A person comes along and buys a stack of your material. They will get all 10 stacks of the material making the other 9 invalid stacks. Person B comes along and buys a stack. they can't retrieve the item as it is not a valid resource stack. You also can not pull the valid stacks back off into your inventory as they are invalid. This has been a bug since late june and I don't even know if the DEV's have commented on it.

Now onto your formala...that is WAY too high! I will put all the resources on my alt and move him to the spot in bestine where a shout hits the bank, cantina, and starport and spam sell if that is the formula you go with!! I am not going to spend over 14k a day to keep a few hundred thousand resources on my vendor!

Charge like the bazaar does!!! I thought the vendors were supposed to be a step up from the bazaar...It sure as hell doesn't look like it!

One pissed off resource seller at this point and time!!!

ed

Too much.

If I put 10-15 master tailor items on a vendor, I have to pay almost 5k of maintenance each day. That's stupid.

ue

A fee based on value of items up for sale is absurd. I think we all agree on that. It would be the end of the merchant class, and the end of nearly every vendor on the planet.

But I actually don't think a sales tax will work well. For small ticket items, it won't be too big a deal. But imagine this scenario on a 150k large house: Person sees house on vendor, knows a 5 percent fee (lets say) gets taxed from the sellerif he buys it. That's 7.5k, meaning the seller would receive 142.5k after the sale. You'll see a lot of people asking the seller to sell one directly for 145k, knowing that they each save and skip the tax fees. In the real world today, stores can't go around the sales tax. It won't work in SWG unless you tax all tips, bank transfers, and handing of cash too.

A flat daily fee may be the only thing that makes sense. Tie it to the number of items, and the person selling lots of small cheap stuff loses. It's has to be just a flat fee, based on the merchant type used and skills in the merchant tree.

There are so many ways to add money sinks to the game without drastically changing the economics of the world. Really add a maintenance fee for vendors (mine are 1 per day right now), really charge to be globally placed on the map, FIX corpses so you can implement insurance and cloning! (<- Huge impact here), remove the aburdly easy surveying missions which pay WAY too much.

Where is all the money entering the world? Mostly from high end combat missions (once you fix the survey missions). It may transfer later, some to crafters, but the majority enters here. So remove it from the source, give the combat types more places to spend money. Implement the need to clone/insure. Give them something to be spending their money on on the off worlds, maybe purchasing special buffs or hiring npc dancers at empty cantinas to heal BF, etc.Lower some of the payouts. You have to do a lot of things, combined, to make this work.

st

Well I have a few replies to this...

First worrying about charging extra fees to the merchant before you even fix the NPC vendor issues is backwards...

Second if you are TRULY doing this to drain some money out of the game, why in the world would you look to the minority? There are far fewer vendors than players running missions... now I know this wont be a popular statement, but I have friends making over 300k a day just by running 16k missions on Lok for a3-4 hours each day.

So how does increasing merchant costs to silly levels remove the huge amounts of cash flowing into the system? If the maintenance is at silly levels I will simply setup times to come to my shop and I will trade the items for a 2-3 hours period every day and not pay anything and get all my skill points back for almost being a master merchant which is basically a waste of points at this point in the game.

Additionally, if you are looking to penalize the merchants be fair and swing that nerf bat on all vendors including the bazaar. That means based on the devs suggestion of value/1000 per 45 mins if someone listsa 3000 credit item on the bazaar for a 7 day auction they should be paying 672 credits to list that item instead of 20.

If you want to swing the nerf bat, you have to make it fair on ALL vendors so apply whatever you are going to apply to the people who spent skill points tohave vendors, to the masses that have the benefit of no structure cost 20 credit flat fee bazaar vendors as well.

Why should anyone bother wasting the skill points for merchants if we all have to pay more than the people that arent?? Just stop at artisan business 3 and remove the entire Merchant class from the game then

Fury

P.S. Or consider how most auctions really work"A Buyers Premium" in the real world a small fee is paid and the buyer pays a 10% premium in most places.

ed

Well, I may be different than most but lets walk through a sample. I currently stock approximately 650 weapons on my vendor (so prospective customers have a wide selection of all types of weapons) which are between 1k and 5k in price (assume an average price of 4k). I sell maybe 50 items a day and don't make much profit (actually I've been losing money in the last week, but I did buy 2 more large harvesters, so that put a cash flow dent in the books). I suspect my daily profit averages out somewhere between 20k and 50k if I make no trips and move no harvesters.

So, using the above formula, I would be charged (650 x 4000) / 1000every 45 minutes. That comes out to 2600 credits every 45 minutes, or 83,200 credits a day.

Assuming I sell 50 items a day average of 4k each, I'd have to increase my prices by 1,664 credits per sale. This is a 41.6% increase in price to my customer.

My suggestion. TAXES. Instill a sales tax. Have each vendor take some percentage of each sale as sales tax. If I price a weapon for 5k and there is a 10% sales tax, the customer would pay 5500, of which I would get 5000 and 500 would go poof. In addition you can charge me a daily maintenance fee based upon the style of the vendor. the more advanced (terminal - droid - npc) the vendor, they higher the price, but it's a set price.

Sariff - Tarquinas

st

Can you atleast give me enough time to sell the rest of my crap... shutdown my vendors and switch professions?... because if this takes effect.. i'm out. done... later. no more shop, no more selling unless asked. There is no reason to.. i'll sell items when asked about them, I will NOT have a vendor anymore. no real need.

I refuse to waist SO MUCH on the droid / coke machine vendors... it is a pathetic amount of credits i wast to TRY to sell items... FORGET IT.

That is why I took the Merchant Skills... so I could have a NPC vendor at what appeared to be a flat rate of so many credits for the vendor per day... if that goes... so does my vendor.. so does the business.

FLAT RATE as it is now is just FINE

st

My suggestion;

1) Base Fee - 250 creds per day
This would stop people from getting 'free' merchant xp, ex. set up a merchant with no items to gain xp. It would also persuade people to stock their vendors...since they are paying for them.

2) Sales Tax - 10% of item onSale (we can always pass this cost on to our customers)
This would also promote keeping then vendor stocked...why would someone want to keep their vendor stocked with many many expensive items if they know it's going to cost them tons of maintenance? Only charge per item maintenance if the item sells.

3) Restocking/withdrawal fee - 2% of item price
This would prevent people from using the vendor as 'storage'.If you have an item up for 1,000,000 credits so no one will buy it, you would bepaying 20,000 creds to retrieve this item. That is expensive storage!
This is assuming that we have the option to change our descriptions and prices of currently listed items without having to pay this fee. To prevent an exploit from someone lowering the price to withdraw the item, the withdrawal fee would be 2% of the ORIGINAL PRICE.

4) Change merchant skills to lower the Sales Tax, Tier 1 = 8%, Tier 2 = 6%,Tier 3 = 4%, Tier 4 = 2%,Master = 1%, or something like that.

5) Raise base fee of the vendor for improved Store sign, planetary map registration, ad barking, etc. Merchant skills would lower these costs by as much as 75% depending on Tiers.

Thoughts? I think that making the fee's solely on value of items in the vendor on a daily basis would not be the best suggestion.

st

Too much money in the economy...

All money except newbie starting credits came from missions...

What should be nerfed?

Merchants!

Where the hell did that come from?

stWhy are there so many money sinks for merchants and artisans and nearly none for fighting class people. I mean we have to pay maintenance fees for our housing and vendors and harvestors and as an architect I can still sell resources for more than I can the finished product most times. Yet now we are going to get charged TONS of money to have those houses sitting up on a vendor when I can have them sit there for weeks and not sell ?? The economy is fubarred but its not going to be helped any by nerfing the working class merchants in the game. I mean I've made more money running destroy missions in the last 4 days than I've mad being an architect in the last month. Yet now the architect part of me is about to take it up the rear unless I take all my deeds off the vendor and run around towns /shouting at everyone if they want to buy a house. Its going to get very ugly as this is what will be the result. People will take the things off the vendor rather than use them and run around trying to sell them in towns. Thats a terrible solution it really is. I have no doubt that SOE will go ahead and do it anyway because they apparently dislike architects so much that they want to make them instinct lol ... well I'm working my way off of it and if you chance the vedor pricing I'll never use one again and just run around shouting all day.

st

I don't know what the current rate is.....but right now I am running a vendor in a small house on Naboo for an Architect friend. She has roughly 200k worth of merchandise on the thing and it's costing anywhere from 5-7k a day to keep the thing going!

It is unfortunately true that people don't use vendors much. We simply can't keep the vendor as it is. It just isn't worth it's weight. A flat rate would be nice or a commission.

~Erri - Flurry

(I really hope someone is listening)