Merchant Archive
Thread: Vendor Maintenance Fees coming – your input request
The proposed formula is bad for several reasons:
1. I am not online 24/7. When someone orders something from me via email (because I was not around when they were to /tell me) and I fill that order, I can currently either A) sit around and try to bump into that player when their play time coincides with mine in order to make the sale; or B) place the items on my vendor and tell them to pick them up at their leisure. In the case of A, it sometimes takes a week (if ever) before I run into some people. In the case of B, it can also take a week at times, when that person ends up very busy and doesn't have a chance to run out to my shop to pick up the items that are ready for them. At this maintenance rate, I'd end up making 0 profit (in some cases I'd even lose money) for trying to be flexible about picking items up.
2. In order to sell anything as a tailor, for instance, you absolutely HAVE to have many items on your vendor, because each article of clothing comes in over 200 colors. I usually keep at least 100 items on each of my 2 vendors right now, and I am barely selling more than 5 items per day. In order to keep that variety and keep up with the maintenance on those items, I'd have to sell a heck of a lot more than that. The same is true for armor and weaponsmiths, as I'm sure many list several different sets of armor to cater to those who want lower HAM costs,higher damage, etc etc.
3. This is punishment for higher level players. Granted most of them already have quitea bit of cash in their pockets, but they've earned it for the most part. Now, just because I'm selling Master level items and I can finally charge a decent amount per item, I'm forced to pay whopping amounts of maintenance in order to keep those items on my vendor.
4.Because of the already low house volume limits, I cannot display more than a small fraction of the items I wish to sell. All the items not on display in my house (and there's a ton of them, since I only have room for about 2 dozen items in my house for display purposes with having to store resources somewhere...) are "on display" on my vendor. So effectively means that I can only place items on my vendor that "I" think will sell in a day or so, and thus drastically reduces the amount of variety available to my customers. Heck, I'd bet 75% of the people buying from tailors don't even know what half the stuff we make looks like, because they've never seen it outside a vendor listing, if they've even bothered to look at half of it, and so they already only order from a small subset of the items we can craft. This will only shrink that subset even farther.
Solutions:
Yes, the maintenance costs need to be increased, however the current proposed formula charges FAR too much. I'd be better off just running into town and listing everything on the bazaar. Even with the 3k limit, I'd probably make more profit than bothering with a private vendor with that formula. Working something out so that we're being charged 2k/day per 100k listed (mind you that's listed, not sold) would be sufficient. Have the efficiency skill that lowers vendor costs decrease the cost by 25-50% instead of the current 20%, or take the idea posted earlier and have all 4 tiers of efficiency & Masterlower vendor costs cumulatively by 10% each box (so tier 1 efficiency would be 10% decrease, tier 4 efficiency would be 40% decrease, master 50%). Since housing maintenance figures into the costs for maintaining vendors, I'd suggest doing a similar this with building maintenance, perhaps in increments of 5% instead of 10%, so that at tier 4 you still have the 20% decrease in cost, but the burden is eased on the folks lower down in the tree. This could also continue into master, meaning you get a 25% decrease in structure maintenance at Master level.
The best solution? Commissions. Charge a set % of the sale price as vendor maintenance. Sell nothing, pay your shoddy vendor nothing. Sell a lot of expensive things, pay (and reward) your vendor appropriately. Start at say 10-15% commission fee, and have that drop to 5-10% when you get the vendor maintenance effiiciency skill. Does not penalize the player for providing his customers with a selection from which to choose and does not penalize people who are trying to use their vendor as a middle man in trades (when the playing times of the crafter and client don't mesh).
Granted this still lets people use their vendors for storage (which they should be allowed to do since there isn't near enough room in ANY building to hold all the resources crafters collect) which I'm sure is what you're REALLY trying to fix with this nerf, but you should really be working on fixing your database/upgrading your hardware to support that database rather than trying to decrease the amount of data-space each player takes up. The game was made so that crafters have to store a lot of stuff, you can't suddenly decrease the amount of storage space we've got and still expect the game to work the way you planned.
-Hena
I completely disagree with the variable amount based on how much the vendor is selling. One normally does not pay an employee a variable rate based on the value that they are selling. Now if you are considering this as sort of "comission", I would suggest making vendors EARN that comission. If all they are doing is staying in one spot and allowing people to scan an inventory and then collect money, (ie. clerk at K-mart) then no comissions. If they are actively selling your wheres... making calls, generating leads, and closing deals, then they certainly deserve a comission.
Making a variable rate also discourages the selling of larger items and keeping a comprehensive inventory. While that is good news for your Database problems, this is not good for game play. Make it a reasonable figure and I am all for it. Make it a variable figure based on the number and value of the items, and I am whole heartedly against it.
If this change goes into effect, this is what I expect to see happen:
Either:
- Vendors will contain 1 representative item each of what the player has for sale, with note(s) indicating that this is the case...
and/or:
- Vendors will have a single item for sale, with a description of the goods and services avaliable for purchase. Items will be kept in the vendor 'store room' and pulled out by the merchant upon request.
All you will be achieving with this change is a slightly greater money sink from the small minority of merchants who may be able to swallow the massive increase in overhead - and greatly inconveniencingeveryone else, buyers and sellers alike.
So, 21 pages of people saying that they don't like the idea. Hell I consider myself a total "fanboi" and I think this is the worst possible thing they could do yet.
Anyway, 21 pages, and no word from a developer. I, for one, would be interested in hearing what they have to say about this widespread grievance?
So far the concensus, as far as I can tell, seems to be "Yes there needs to be a credit sink, and I don't mind fees to do it, but if you do this I will be ruined as a merchant..."
At the VERY least, please put this on test a month or so before you go live with it. Not that it will get a total shakedown there, as I cannot imagine too many merchants are as far along their careers there as they are on the live servers, but at the very least *we* can see how bad it will be if it goes live.
Holo, I am pretty sure that you have made the mistake of assuming that we are unaware of the true reason all these changes go into effect.
To reduce the load on the database. You are penalizing us for your database issues, and that is not fair, not just, and not acceptable.
The Merchant line as it stands now is next to useless, nothing works more than the day you set/reset the vendors back to barking ads and the planetary map.. EVERY DAY.
If I could become your boss, I would order you to fix the all the myriad bugs associated witht the vendors before you EVER THINK of TOUCHING maintenance fees.
I'm not going to do your job for you, but I am sure that if you did a search on "vendor" and "bug" you could find enough code to rewrite to keep your team busy for the next month, before changing maintenance to what you view it should be.If, from everyencounter with the CSR team, yougot nothing but glowing reports of "I lost 35,000 cr in the vendor, and the CSR cleared it right up!"then maybe you would have a case to charge a fee for use of the vendor. As it is, there is plenty of expense associated with the merchant occupation in the form of refundsdue to bugs, that SHOULD NOT BE THERE.
I know you are intelligent. I know I am intelligent, but there exists a disconnect in your reasoning for making the maintance fee be inventory based. No real world system uses that, and if any government (which in this game, you basically are) was to implement that, people would quickly either revolt or move to another country.
Let me reiterate: Inventory Tax Is Not Acceptable. DO NOT USE.
Now, then, let's see about the alternate choices.
First, any "tax" should have an in game reason. If you don't have an in game reason for it, then it should not be in the game. The "hidden" excuse of "My supervisor/techie/whatever tells me I have to reduce load on the database servers" IS NOT A VALID EXCUSE WHEN ADDRESSING IN GAME ISSUES.
1) Sales/income tax? maybe.. IF you could use a slicer to "get past" the system to avoid it, ie in game tax means in game ways to move around it
2) Flat Fee. I like this one the best. It makes sense in a immersive way. I would pay a person in real life to sit there for an hourly wage, but if I sell Land Deeds, they don't get paid 100 times more than if I'm selling .10 pencils. In your twisted world, the richestpeople on the planet would be the cashiers at a Luxury Car Dealership. Strange, how this is not the case. The owners of the car dealership are much richer than the minimum wage employees running the sales for . . . wait for it. . . commissions! Wow, that leads back into sales based taxes.
All in all, if you implement some insane fee, most people will just hawk their wares, stop crafting, or sell on the bazaar. Your economy that you are trying to get to be the best MMORPG one out therewill slowly grind to a halt.
My 0.02cr
(looks up from desk as employee knocks on the cube wall)
Merchant: Good morning Vendor Soe. What can I do for you?
Vendor:Soe: Yes boss, I was wondering. The boys and I have been talking together, and we think....
Merchant: ....what?.....
Verdor:Soe: ...well, we think we deserve big raises.
(Merchant sits back thinking for a moment.)
Merchant: So...you want more money?
Verdor:Soe: Yep. And we are prepared to go on strike to get it.
Merchant: Verdor Soe, just what do you do for me here?
Vendor:Soe: We display and sell your stuff.
Merchant: Aye, that you do, but you don't do it very well. What about yesterday? You stopped talking to customers after an hour and just went off into your own little world. And the day before I asked you to list us on the planetary map and your forgot...AGAIN.
Vendor:Soe: I am certain with more money we would be better motivated to do the job right.
Merchant: Ugh huh. I see. I spent months wondering which one of you was going to show up for work that day, and when you finally got down to just sending a few you chose to ignore the sales pitches I tought you. And what about the uniforms I gave you all? Why do you not wear them?
Vendor:Soe: We didn't want to be corporate puppets.
Merchant: If you have no loyalty to the corporation, why should the corporation have loyalty to you? You managed to bungle every sale of iron in the past month, selling the whole lot to the first person that asks for next to nothing and then cheating everyone else who buys by giving them empty containers. You may not be puppets but are certainy putting a Punch & Judy show on the customers with this foolishness.
Vendor:Soe: That's not our fault! We didn't make the cash registers!
Merchant: Well, the "cash register" vendorsmanage to sell iron and rubber ducks by the K and not get them mixed up, why can't you?
Vendor:Soe I am certain with more pay we would get the job done right.
Merchant: And what's with this merchandise dissappearing act? I get customers calling to complain every day that you sold them something, and by the time they got on the shuttle to go home it had dissappeared. At least some of them claim to have received it the next day by Reboot overnight shipping. How can you justify a pay raise when you treat the customers and this business like this?
Vendor:Soe: I am certain for more money we would do the job right.
Merchant: Have you cleaned out the stockroom like I asked you last night?
Vendor:Soe: No, we didn't.
Merchant: (shrugs) another failure to perform your job duties. Now that stuff has spoiled and we will never get the stench of it out of there. And you want a raise?
Vendor:Soe: I am certain for more money we would do the job right.
Merchant: I see....and you would do things correctly...for more money. How much money are we talking here, given my current stock?
Merchant:Soe: We want to make more than you do Boss. Each.
(Merchant leans over closer to Vendor:Soe)
Merchant: Come on...you couldn't pick up banta podo witha binary load lifter and a team of jawas. What's really going on here? Why are you really asking for a raise?
Vendor:Soe: Well, me and the boys lost our shirts on a gambling venture that didn't pan out like we planned,so the union wants us to hit up the middlemen and crafters. We tried taking money from the brawlers and marksmen but they got REALLY angry, and the dancers and musicians are broke anyways, and if we take money from the doctors they stop healing or want to see our insureance cards before they do. Which reminds me, we will want health care and retirment benefits too.
Merchant: (shakes his head) I'm sorry Vendor :Soe, but I cannot possibly give such a raise to incompetient, brainless workers who don't do the job I pay them for now. I won't give you a raise until you straighten up and show me you are with me on this business venture.
Vendor:Soe: Well then, we'll just go on strike!
Merchant: Suit yourself. I get eh same exp no matter what you hold for me. You earn me better skills whether you are tied up int eh basement or out front hawking my goods. The bizarre works just fine, and I imagine the data-terminal vendors would never mind holding chits and advertizing for me goods, nor will the droids object to holding my goods while I advertize in shouts in the popular town. Soon enough we will have little need for you anyways, everyone will be in Theed or Wayfar or some tent city somewhere where all sales will take place without you anyways. I don't need you that bad Vendor:Soe. You are striking yourself out of a job.
(Vendor:Soe looks miffed)
Merchant: now get your #$% back out into the shop and get back to work, for as long as you are here and what little you do of it.
First of all maintenance should be a TAX at time of sale. It just makes more sense. I'm already paying to run my vendor terminal...why should I pay to keep stuff in it too?
Second, PLEASE do not add any more daily maintenance fees to the game until there is a quick easy way to check them and pay them all in one place! In fact the I think what would be best is if i could plop down say 10,000 credits into a generic maintenance pool that they all draw from. That way you don't have to worry about keeping my bank balance current with harvesters (since they aren't "live" if nobody is viewing them), and I'll get more efficient use of my credits as a nice added bonus.
And third, while I completely agree that the economy is out of whack, I don't agree with adding more money sinks as a way to adjust it. The problem is that is just curing the symptoms, not the problem.
The real PROBLEM is that you have a terrible imbalance between supply and demand. There is a huge supply of many crafted items vs demand for them, and as a result prices are going through the floor. In many cases you can pick up what you want for free. Maintenance fees are paid on items that are (in general) owned and operated by mid to high level characters. Thus if you use them as money sinks all you're really doing is cycling money from "The System" to a certain subset of players and then back again. The money needs to be made to flow through more players. Spread the wealth, so to speak. Let it trickle back into the system from many small points instead of a smaller number of large points.
The next questino is: why is the supply so high? Because people are forced to grind out hundreds or even thousands of useless products to gain experience. Case in point: I'm a Novice DE. My next advancement is going to take 48,000 droid crafting exp. That comes out to about 320 mouse droids. Nobody wants mouse droids...they serve NO purpose in the game! So I basically am going to end up buying something on the order of 100,000 credits worth of resources just to run in pratice mode. That's not a money sink; it's a money black hole!
I don't pretend to know the answer (believe me, I've TRIED to think of one) but sucking out more money is just a band-aid on a gushing wound. I do have a few suggestions though:
1. EVERYTHING that is craftable should have a purpose. Make it so that there is a reaosn to stop and experiment to produce a better product, instead of grinding out 300 of them to get your next skill level. This is especially true of the starting professions; new artisans should be able to make a place for themselves in the economy more easily.
2. You should look at rebalancing the experience points awarded vs. crafting time. Maybe instead of needing to make 300 mouse droids I should only need to make 50, but they would take six times as long to make. This would keep the leveling rate the same but it would reduce the flood of items into the market.
3. Something needs to happen to encourage more trade between low and high level crafters. What I mean is that all those newbie artisans should be making stuff like fiberplast panels, and the higher level artisans and tailors and armorsmiths should be buying those in bulk instead of making their own. I'm not sure how to go about this though...it's been suggested that characters should "forget" low-level schematics, but that seems like a kludge to me.
So to sum up: get the money flowing between players more. Once that's done, and it's eaiser to make a living off of other players from day 1, you can start scaling back some mission awards to reduce the inflow of new money into the system to match the outflow. Raising the outflow to match inflow is just going to drive up the cost of operations and probably make things worse for the average businessman.
If you wish to exclude casual gamers from being able to craft and then sell their own wares anywhere but the Bazaar or through street hawking - then your proposed vendor maintenance fees is your solution. If I knew that I could not afford to open my own shop as a casual gamer (2 hours for 4 nights a week) then I would probably quit the game. I can go to otherMMORPGs and be a fighter/healer/thief.
Merchant: Come on...you couldn't pick up banta podo witha binary load lifter and a team of jawas. What's really going on here? Why are you really asking for a raise?
ROFLMAO
Outstanding!
My wife stocks her venders, 6 of em with 100 items each.
So that in coming customer have a decent slection to choose from(Tailor). A per item fee will make large stocks impossible to do.
The best solution I can see would be a base fee charged to the merchant on each item sold.
Ok, its been announced by the Dev's that they are getting ready to fix the NPC vendors so they start charging a resonable fee. This is something I agree with.
Their proposal is that the fee be the following:
Total Listed Value of Items on Vendor / 1000 every 45 minutes.
That means in a 12 hour period (the time a heavy player is typically off line between sessions) a vendor is going to charge you 1/1000th of your total offering cost, 16 times.
Or for me, if I have 10 suits of composite on my vendor (not an outrageous offering) at $150,000 each and they don't sell ... I will be charged 24,000 credits for that 12 hour period. Extended, that's 50,000 credits a day.
Or to put it in terms everyone can understand ... if you don't sell an item in 72 hours, it is now costing you money to sell it, and you will not make any profit.
Can we look at this a moment?
1) If you are a casual player, you need to restock your vendor on the weekend. Then you drop in for an hour or two a couple of times a week and 'fill in' the important stuff.
This is not something I am making up, this is something MANY of the players in the game do currently. I can't tell you how many times I'm asked by people to get them their items before Sunday because they can't play a lot (or at all) during the week ... or how many times I'm asked to hold something till the coming weekend when they can play (do missions) to get the money. And this is only going to get worse with school coming.
In a nustshell, as the game is designed, it is critical for the casual player to be able to stock their vendors, and have those vendors sell while they are off line. The power-gamer (people like myself who can spend 4 or 5 hours a day in the game) won't be anywhere near as effected by this change as the casual gamer. So thank you.
2) The game is supposed to promote dabbling ... and how do people dabble? They Master one profession first (for the most part) dabble in something else, and set up their vendor(s) to sell the items they dabble in.
If it is the intention of the Dev's, with this change, to force people to use vendors only for the items they are serious about crafting, then I can only congratulate them, because it will certainly do just that. I don't agree with it. But it will work.
3) There are gamers who can't play "prime time" ... these people are dependant on stocked vendors to get the items they need during non-prime-time hours.
It is simply a fact that a lot of people (myself included) will simply pull large items off the vendors until they are back on. Which sort of defeats the purpose of the vendor. And the off-prime-time player, they are just screwed.
4) Tailors and Armorsmiths get killed with this change. Tailors are required to stock at least four or five of every type item, because different people want different colors.
Some of these items will sit on their vendors for weeks. What this change says now is, as a merchant or an armorsmith, you take custom orders only. That's not so bad for the typical armorsmith because they can stock the "standard" colors ... but for the tailor; why even use a vendor.
5) Architects might as well go back to hawking their wares in thhe cities.
I just don't see how an Architect (who has enough problems making money now) can afford to have 2 of every kind of factory, 2 of every type of harvester and two of every type of house, on their vendors.
Why would an architect put these items on a vendor? Using current Radiant pricing, an architect just stocking 2 of the items he/she makes (and using conservative round numbers) is looking at ...
10 personal harvesters - 15, 000 credits
10 medium harvesters - 450,000 credits
10 Large Harvesters - 900,000 credits
4 small houses (2 generic, 2 specific) - 28,000 credits
4 medium houses (2 generic, 2 specific) - 100,000 credits.
4 Large houses (2 generic, 2 specific) - 400,000 credits.
2 Wearables factories - 90,000 credits.
2 Items factories - 60,000 credits.
2 Chemical factories - 150,000 credits.
2 Food Factories - 150,000 credits.
1 structure factory - 150,000 credits.
That's a total of 2,343,000 ... mind you I'm using conservative prices, and I haven't even factored in crafting stations, portable crafting devices (which need to be made by architects now), or any furniture for sale. This is just the deeds.
2,343,000 / 1000 = 2,343 credits every 45 minutes.
16 45-minute periods in 12 hours = 37,488 credits for those items to sit on your vendor over night. If those items sit there for a full day, it just cost this architect 75,000 credits. A casual player with a shop in an out of the way place on a low population planet ... it will cost him 225,000 credits for these items to sit there three days.
6) Resource Merchants? Get serious. How is someone supposed to be a resource merchant now with the shifts taking place and the constant changes in qualities. A well stocked resource merchant is going to have 200K to 300K worth of resources on his vendor. That means its costing him 3200 credits an hour for that vendor to sit there.
And here's an occupation that MUST keep their vendors stocked. The crafter will not come back if they can't find what they are looking for there ... and how does resource sales work???? You put up 30,000 credits worth of copper ... and you wait for someone to come buy it all ... it may not sell for weeks, but when it does sell, the guy buying it wants it all.
In conclusion:
If the real purpose of this change is to get people to reduce the number of items on their vendors ... then let be up front about it and limit the number of items on the vendors.
If the real reason really is to create a money sink, then a tax or some other static fee has to be arrived at.
This change, as proposed, simply hurts the game and the casual player ... it doesn't effect the power player at all because he/she is on-line all the time and can carry the items or custom make them on the spot ... and now you've lost your money sink.
This change kills the low level crafter because now the Higher level crafters will be standing in the "hot spots" selling three times the quality at just a little more.
This change hurts the "graveyard" player, because the vendors won't be stocked, and the crafters will be gone.
This change all but kills the Merchant profession ... why in the world would you have merchants spread all over the galaxy if you have to stock them up and then be charged massive penalties for doing so?
If you give the merchant a significant enough discount, then EVERYONE will simply become Merchants, then you're back to wanting a larger money sink.
Finally, BEFORE any of these changes should go into effect ... VENDORS NEED TO BE FIXED!!!!!
Given a static amount of time, and an equal number items at similar values, the merchant who does more sales ends up with less maintainence cost than the emmerging merchant, due to those sales being removed from the calculation earlier. The established merchant finishes the run with more money and less overhead.
Granted the more established merchant will post yet more sales in that time frame, but that only reinforces the problem because he's making money to afford it from previous sales, whereas the novice merchant is still trying to sell his original items.
Some could argue that this is the benefit of being a more experienced/established merchant, which is good for the individual. But it also creates an artifical barrier to emerging competition, allowing monopolies to grow, and in the end, damaging the economy severly. It reinforces the "Rich get richer, Poor get poorer" scenario.
Merchant fees need to be restructured, this is a given. But actual sales are the key, not potential sales.