Merchant Archive

st

I would rather see a small vendor fee and then a tax on each sale. This would allow me to have a large selection of items avaible for sale without it costing a fortune to maintain. The way to get sales in the first place is to maintain well stocked shops and the fee you are suggesting is going to hinder that.

Also allow merchants to have reduced taxes based on their merchant skills.

st

This feee is way to high. I normally have around 1million credits worth of structure inventory on my vendor as a master architect. a guild hall or 2 a few large houses 3 or 4 med houses some med and large harvs and bam, now I have to pay 1000 credits every 45 minutes for maint. OUCH! If this change goes in to effect I will have to close down all my vendors. Structures aside , in order to sell furniture on a vendor I need a few hundred items at around 1k each to show a good collection.

And besides with the additional cost of redeeding factories (I know it says waived but I think this missed test like many other things because it doesn't work), vendors eatign resources, vendors eatiing items, vendors holding items and won't give them out to the person that bought them and the numerous other vendor bugs lead me to believe we have bigger issues to worry about other than how we can make life harder on the crafters.

Bexling Hirego, Master Artisan and Master Architect - Radiant

From the looks of it soon to be Novice Scout and Novice Marksman )

st

Sir,

Your remark at the end is indicative to me of the few problems I see with being a merchant in this game. I fear this post will get lost in the shuffle, but hopefully you see this.

So far this has been THE best economy I have ever seen in an mmorpg. I could never have imagined a player-run economy working as good as this one does. But, the proposed costs for vendors is going to put a serious crimp in that, if not kill alot of vendors.

My biggest complaints about this game are the bugs, esp. the vendor bug (which still has not been fixed). This bug alone has caused me to quit weaponsmith alone, as it brings out the insults and complaints from the less mature players who have to logout for 30+ mins for an item to re-appear when something they bought disappears from their inventory. They blame the merchant rather than realize its the game bugs that are causing this. I have sent in many, many bug reports on this and finally decided that it isnt worth it anymore.

Now, you are talking about a vendor costing more than you may make in a day. Its hard enough trying to balance your products to the market, hoping not to charge too much or too little. Making vendor maint cost more will mean raising your prices. Great, this will raise the market value of items...once the market fluctuates towards this new cost. Until then you are either in the red, or fed up and stop selling like I have.

No sir, 0 maintenance is not a "no-vote" to me, as you suggested. I agree that there should be some maintenance, but it should be low enough that it doesnt hurt the little guys. Please dont ruin this economy, which is the best I have ever seen in an mmorpg...

st

Why are there so many money sinks for merchants and artisans and nearly none for fighting class people.

This actually is not a good way of looking at it. By money sinks he means money leaving the economy and not going to other players. Fighting class people spend money, but they give that money to other players for the most part (artisans). If merchant fees are raised, the price of goods will go up, and the fighters will have to spend more money. The trick is to raise merchant fees in such a way that it is fair, favors people who have invested in merchant skills more, and taxes all types of merchants equally (i.e. you are not financially penalized for selling lots of small cheap items over large expensive items, or vice versa).

st

As a tailor..There is NO way I'll be able to keep my vendor if the formula value/1000 goes in. I don't sell near enough off my vendor to be worth the amount I would have to pay every day. That would completely eat up any profit I had on anything I listed there if I kept any kind of variety on the vendor.

I think a much lower maintenance rate would be fine - maybe a flat rate per day similar to how harvesters work so you don't penalize people just for selling expensive items. Or a % of sales as a "commission" to the vendor (or tax), but still not a really high tax (maybe 5-7%).

Or if the value/1000 goes in...make the Merchant Efficiency (or whatever its called) line of the merchant skill tree actually do something useful. Right now theres not even a point to getting it. The price reductions it gives aren't worth spending the skill points to get them in most cases. Maybe make each level just reduce vendor fees instead of reducing baz fees (saving that 4 credits on bazaar listing from merch eff 1 would take me years to even get back the 5000 or 6000 it costs to learn the skill from an NPC trainer).

Maybe a higher charge would be a lot more acceptable if the items on player vendors weren't so hard to find. I have planetary advertising..and it seems like no one knows how to use it. I've never had a customer say they found me from the map - all word of mouth from other people.I would be willing to pay more for maintenance if there was a way to maybe list vendor items on the global bazaar or something like that because I'm sure I would have tons more sales than I have now.

But as it is now - theres no way I can keep my vendor up and running with a high charge like that.

stThe net effect is less items being sold on vendors, which means less items being crafted to be sold, which means LESS ITEMS on the lackluster Database. Remember the lesson of the newbie melons. Everything is about database space.... Its got nothing to do with money, because any intelligent person would guess that merchants would just stop stocking up the vendors and not spend the money on maint. fees....

st

This will have the opposite effect as intended.

With merchant fees so high, most part time merchants (those who are primarily crafters that only have merchants to sell their own wares) are going to abandon vendors for the majority of their sales. This means that they'll be carrying around resources and building to order, resulting in fewer overall sales. Fewer sales means less money to pay for harvesters. So what are they going to do? They're going to pick up some combat skills and RUN MISSIONS, the source of money in the economy.

Like all burdonsome tax systems this will create an alternative economy, where selling face to face is the SWG version of a black market to skirt the tax.

So you wind up with...

1. Less vendor usage overall so you don't get the money sink you're projecting.


2. More missions being run introducing more money into the economy.

Doesn't sound too well thought out.

--Joeb |Ri|

Master Merchant,Owner of Ri-KEA

Theed, Naboo (Ahazi)

st

I don't have enough free time to read the entire thread so here are my opinions without reading a thing in this thread:

1. Merchant "skills" are almost non-existant as it is. We get to hire a few vendors, give them something wear, etc. The two biggest perks IMHO are Planetary Ads and Lower Structure Maintainence. The Planetary Ads are broken for the casual player. I can only run my ads from 8pm at night until the server reboots.

2. The only other "perk" is low cost vendors at higher levels now you are going to take that away without giving us anything else? Bad idea. I would accept a trade-off. "We are going to increase vendor maintenance but we are also going to give you <insert new feature here>".

3. Fix the bugs then worry about money sinks. There are plenty of things that don't work in Merchant, fix them first then hurt us with maintenance.

Thanks for listening.

stChiming in here....definetely make this a flat rate percentage based on item cost. Maybe 5% to 10% of sale goes to the NPC Vendor for wages, to the Droid vendor for maintenance fees, etc.

st

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JediPhr33k wrote:
The net effect is less items being sold on vendors, which means less items being crafted to be sold, which means LESS ITEMS on the lackluster Database. Remember the lesson of the newbie melons. Everything is about database space.... Its got nothing to do with money, because any intelligent person would guess that merchants would just stop stocking up the vendors and not spend the money on maint. fees....

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He only speaks the truth. He only speaks the truth.

Moulin Rouge

st

So, I'm seeing some consensus emerging:

1. 
   
   Everybody seems to accept that NPC vendor fees should be consistant with other types of vendors, but almost nobody likes the current fee structure on othertypes of vendors.
   .


2. 
   
   The favored alternative to the current rate structure is a much smaller flat maintenance fee plus some form of sales tax on each purchase.
   .


3. 
   
   We're praying for some form of injunction against "correct" fees until the other quirks with vendors are addressed. (In point of fact, until stable and usable vendors are achieved, itmight be politic to convert all other forms of vendor to the NPC maintenance structure... but that's my personal observation).

Would that be an accurate summation of the majority view?

st

Please explain why you want a time based fee....?

If you want a money sink would not a larger transaction based fee be best?

Could you just want to reduce the load on the database?

I think so....

If you place a time based (Cost of listed items/1000)*32= Maint for Vendor charge...after the many many post on this subject the PTB....

Well they will have a hard time making any good change in the future...just read this thread and you can see the distrust in the boards...

I have been a fanboy for a while but my trust is fading...

If you take 100 people and tell them you need to shut off there power so you can perform test...they will not have a problem with it

If you take 100 people and SHUT the power off and dont tell them why or give them a LINE they will all be mad...

My point tell us the reason you need to make all these changes...Money sink does not fly with me or the others that have posted over the last 20 pages....Why we dont trust you...or the PTB

The PTB must see the light and come back from the dark side...if a 12 year old can poke holes in your MONEY SINK cover...maybe you need a new cover story....I have seen many many great ideas come from this thread alone....

I also have to say the T21 nerf then UN-Nerf just proves my point...

If money is the reason for the change...what would be the easy way to fix it temp....a across the board tax on cash in the bank....just delete 50percent of it....and then think of a proper fix

This will just kill the in game mechanics you made...and make us players do more workarounds...can you say /shout See me at starport I got homes/guns/resorces PST....

Of course 50 people will be doing this in every town....take about spam

I got to go this is getting to be a sore point for me....time based charges dont work....on fixed value items...think of it this way...the new car does not get taxed every hour it sits on the lot...sales tax here is 4 cents on the $....not 4 cents every hour an item sits in a store...talk about inflation

stHow about hiting the "faction perks"? You want money sinks but you are giving away stuff that could be player crafted. Insted of flat out giving the stuff away, they use faction points to be allowed to buy the stuff. The way it is now, they do a mission, get BOTH money AND faction points. But they only have to spend the faction points to get for free what would cost a lot of money. And what can't be crafted yet is SOLD where ever they get them until the items show up on venders, private or otherwise.