Merchant Archive
Thread: Vendors and private houses
Good point, I did not think about selling to people in your factionor PA for REDUCED prices before submitting my post. Now I see the other side of the fence. Please disregard my last post. Maybe a good alternative would being able to make restricted vendors in a public house...one where you set who can access it and buy things from it. Or maybe a way to give a discount on your vendor to certain people...so the price would be listed at retail, but then people in your PA buy it for 50% of that price.
Zannon
Holocron wrote:
gatekeep wrote:
In general, I agree. However, you DO have a way now, which is the way that was intended--giving your PA members admin rights so that they can freely pick up and drop stuff in the hall.Now, I can see that you want to have more granular permissions on the hall, which is fine, I think we can manage that.
I think this is a CS nightmare in the making. Give everyone in the PA admin rights so they can pickup/drop, but you get one bad person or even someone that just wants to "borrow" something and you have PA morale problems, CS tickets, accusations, and generally unhappy players.
There needs to either be far more granular permission controls, or a vendor/terminal where people can arrange their trades while both parties aren't necessarily in the same place at the same time.
I use my "private" vendor for two purposes:
1) Special orders - I have a public vendor in our PA's common shop but fairly regularly I get larger custom orders where I want to give people discounts for ordering alot of stuff. If we're unable to sync up in person, generally I would put the marked down special order items on my private vendor and add the customer to my entry list so they were guaranteed to be able to get what they ordered (even if it wasn't for the discounted price, it was worth it to do this to guarantee the product was there when the customer was able to come in later). Playing on Eclipse means I have quite a few European customers so this has been a pretty important feature to me as our timezones don't usually line up that well.
2) As a PA guild box and extra storage - as you said, with the admin rules fixed we have alternatives to this now but with the new item limits in structures it's not enough.
So the simple solutions I'd like to see happen are:
- Either give us vendor access lists or put it back the way it was and just don't let people buy stuff from private vendors from the regional/global market list (this latter solution really seems like a no-brainer if this is the real issue rather than this public/private house declaration thing).
- Let us access our bank boxes from the PA Hall or declared residence so we aren't using the "offer" part of the vendor for extra storage.
- Give the PA a bit more storage space or a shared "bank" like container so PA's can leave stuff for each other, pool resources, etc.
Holo, there's two seperate groups here, only one is really speaking up much it seems.
1. PA's who want a drop off. You need to up PA hall storage if you want to use the hall as a drop off. A 200 person PA cannot use a 250 item hall as their warehouse.
2. Independent merchants who use these vendors for orders, as well as distribution points for larger supply networks. An example was given of the person who makes armor for someone on order and puts it in a private vendor. Another example I could give is a couple people working together, who are not a PA. Say an armorsmith doesn't want the hassle of distributing goods, so they contract a merchant. The armorsmith could offer armor up to the merchants vendor in the current system, but that involves travel and waiting for shuttles. An easier solution would be a private vendor only the merchant can access (easier at least for the smith.)
Even if you say the armorsmith just has to wait for a shuttle, that still doesn't solve the private order issue.
One way you could fix this would be an in game shipping system, that would drop things off at bazaars or vendors. The shipping could cost money.
This would be useful for plenty of other reasons as well, AND would allow you to fix vendors to be what you want them to.
The primary use for "closed-door" vendors for my PA was to exchange items at 0 cost. Now, you couldn't use 0 cost so it was always put at 1 credit.
Basically, we used this as a work around for Admin permissions not working correctly. We would setup a vendor in a limited access house and sell items to it for 1 credit. The owner would buy the item and use it or put it back up for sale for 1 credit. Anyone who needed the item would buy it. Since an email went to the owner of the vendor about who bought it then we could regulate if someone was taking more than their share.
Fixing the Admin permissions MAY fix this. However, there are two reasons to still use private vendors.
1) having the email for who bought something helps track who is taking what
2) Since, vendor's items don't count against your house (or PA) inventory then vendors are preferable over just droping stuff for others to pick up.
Holocron wrote:
In this update, vendors can only be in public structures.
The first problem with vendors in private houses was that people were getting griefed using them. They were putting items up for sale which were reflected on local commodities markets and purchased, but then were not available for pickup because the vendor was locked away behind closed doors. The result was people getting gypped out of their money.
We plugged the grief hole short-term, but the long-term thing that needs to happen is probably having a PA-only vendor, if there's a big need for it. Can you explain to me what purpose your PA vendor serves? That would help me design the replacement.
The second problem: For what it's worth, vendors were always intended to be a "public structure only" feature. That's because they are not intended for storage, but for commerce. At the same, we can appreciate the desire to have drop-off facilities for PAs, or the ability to deny sales to specific groups (such as those scummy Rebels).
This is why the maintenance fees for vendors are scaled off of the price of the goods--since anyone can get to them, to keep an item safe in one, you have to price goods exorbitantly high, which results in high vendor fees. If you price it cheaply to avoid the fees, then you run the risk of someone buying the item at a steal. This mechanic only works if the vendors are publicly available, of course, so that's a big reason why we didn't ever plan for private vendors.
Can you explain what you were using the vendors for? Was it storage, sales to PA members only, or something else?
Haven't read the replies so this may be redundant:
our PA uses vendors to pass goods... our hunter section would drop loads of resources for our crafter divisions to use in crafting. The one thing that would be most useful in a PA vendor is if we could safely put those crafted items onto a pa only vendor so our crafter devision could more directly supply our hunters. A pa vendor should be a company store of sorts that can help to supply our own pa at reduced costs. This would be a major aid to cooperation withing PAs in attracting and keeping valuable people.
I used a private vendor for special customorders, only lettting trusted customers in my house. Otherwise I'd have to sit around and wait forever for them to show up and pick up their stuff.
As I'm sure it's been suggested, it would be nice if there was a vendor feature to put up salesonly allowed to be bought byspecific person. Perhaps a custom order vendor could be allowed for people with artisan business III, and public vendors restricted to the merchant class (to address the concern of merchants feeling not particularly special).
As for selling stuff ina private vendor for 1 credit to get merchant experience, why not base experience off of profits, rather than just giving exp for a vendor standing there for hours twiddling his thumbs? And charge a sales tax on all sales (in lieu of the current weird vendor maintenance system) to discourage people selling and reselling the same items for powerleveling.
Can you explain what you were using the vendors for? Was it storage, sales to PA members only, or something else?
-Raph Koster, Creative Director
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Heres how we are doing it in our PA. Our members get a discount so we sell off a PA only Vendor. Now we arent using it as a storage area, but rather a way give our members a discount on items. For example, a miner will go get 1000 units of ore and sell that for 2 credits per unit to our Resource Vendor, the Resource manager would then buy the ore and sell it to members at a small markup price of 3 credits, or take the ore to the main market and sell it for 5 creds per unit. Exactly the purpose vendors are used for.
So to solve your problem i would like us to be able to set if we want our Vendor to show up on the Public bazzar or not (as well as merchant stores on the maps). Private vendors are a needed part of our business unless you give us a way to run a PA storehouse.
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Now, I can see that you want to have more granular permissions on the hall, which is fine, I think we can manage that.
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Yes i would love to see MORE permission levels, a Guild box container for everone to use, a deposit hopper on a Hall, as well as a withdrawl area. This is seperate from needing a vendor.
KStarfire
Try over 150 members.
gatekeep wrote:
. . .and over 30 members,it's obviously not a very feasible solution.
"Can you explain to me what purpose your PA vendor serves? That would help me design the replacement."
It's that the PA gets a discount on all items... you could fix this by either letting us put 2 prices on each item (public and pa) or let us put a vendor in the PA hall or something.
They esaiest way to avoid that the vendor being used as storage is to increase the itemlimit in houses.
I haveitemsfor three lots in my small naboo house befoer the update and now, but now i dont't know where to put them. The only way to me is too put over 75 items in my Vendor or two biuld a second one for it.
We had a number of vendors used by our PA for distributing items. Items/resources were sold at cost to PA members. We could make sure specific members got the items they had ordered by placing the items in named containers on the Vendor. We could make sure the crafter got the credits for the items due to the emails recieved. With the email system we could insure the correct person was picking up items as well.
We also used Vendors to pass on schematics and resources to factory owners so that they could run things for people. At the moment factories only allow someone to place an admin person to place a schematic, not the ingredients nor even start the process. So this helped us insure schematicsgot to the right people and the resulting items made back to the right person.
Admin rights in the PA hall helps with making sure items are available for collection, but it does not cover the cost issues, or the correct person picking up the item. Doesnt help with passing schematics and resources for those.
I suppose we used our Vendors as a mailing system with a cost. Which in many ways, the admin system on the pa hall does not cover.
Enygma
TBHG/Eclipse