Merchant Archive
Thread: Merchant Correspondent Input Request (Week 1)
(Interestingly... for how much people complain about the bugs like high droid/terminal vendor cost and 1cr NPC vendor cost... those two bugs are a good incentive to use a decent Merchant's vendor rather than sell your first born to run your crummy Business 3 Bulky vendor. Not to mention the vendor trading being taken away. That could be a blessing to Merchants with already established shops and multiple vendors.)
My top 'beefs':
1) Premium sales basically does nothing, even had a CSR confirm that its not working, not that it ever really did much. Yea I know thats not a merchant skill, but to me its part of the package.
2) Ad Barking I and II, as you stated in your #3. So far my vendor on the map thing has been working fine. (crosses fingers). Also the barking trigger range needs to be increased so that you can get passerby's instead of folks that are standing on your doorstep.
3) Buggy vendors, as you stated.
4) Costs for maintenance on terminal and robot vendors has an insane curve based on the worth of what you are selling, likely the costs for NPC vendors are too low.
5) Admin/Vendor privs for PAs, houses, etc really need to be fixed so that we can put down vendors in someone elses homes, we can put things on the floor etc.
6) Why do vendor sales have timers? My vendor has maintenance when it dies so do my sales, I dont see the point of me going and reposting everything once a week, specially when often I have put lots of details into the item.
7) Need a way of moving vendors from one house to the other and items from one vendor to another. We wanted to move my house over a bit so we could make room for another bulding by our PA. The amount of work involved of me withdrawing each sale, then retrieving each item, then reposting each sale with details after move was insane, just like when I want to upgrade my vendor to a new type, just far more work then its worth.
8) Master merchant doesnt do anything.
9) Lots of useless skills in the one tier (costs tier), or mostly useless and not worth the skill points to get.
10) Fix missing vendor problems. Such as when your house gets destroyed with vendor inside. I recommend moving placed vendors to your datapad just like droids, so you can always delete them in a worse case scenerio.
11) I think the placement zone for vendors should be extended to the front steps, makes it more visable and doesnt mean your house has to be public.
12) Vendors since they cant fight back shouldnt be killable. Sure they just fall over until you put a credit of maintenance into them, but really I dont like having to check up to make sure some idiot hasnt shot them again.
13) I like your #4 idea, be nice if whatever it is, like a banner, shows up a good distance away like camps show up way before the house does.
Hope that helps.
Culland - Starsider
SAME here I set up my first NPC Vendors Monday night and now I can not Retrieve ANYTHING from the one loaded with resources.
I just read about the split resource buy someone was talking about in this forum so I'll have to see if thats it as I put my resources in as 2 lots of 100 and one lot of 300 for each resource so maybe thats what happening either way I have had to refund customers moeny and lock my store becuase I cant afford to just delet the vendor with over 61 items of resources worth prob close to 100k and I cnat just let open and let people use a bugged vendor either.
This REALLY needs to be fixed, I shouldnt have to spend this much time messing with the stupid vendors.
Ripper'
I'm a tailor merchant. One of the difficulties for you as Correspondent is going to be balancing the needs of merchants as a separate class against the needs of artisan-merchants.
I agree with everyone, first the bug fixes.
I disagree strongly with the notion of retrieving items from outside ones shop. But I strongly agree with listing items on the bazaar -- if all thethe items on all the merchants on all the planets are too extreme (I've heard this was removed because it overloaded the bazaar system database), perhaps an advertising section where you could "buy" free waypoints to merchants.
Vendors for Merchant only is unacceptable. If you do this, it will only lead to more people screaming for the limits on the bazaar to be raised, which destroys the merchant class totally. (Not to mention every other artisan hating you.) Some people already resent the business 3 requirement! Please don't advocate only for the "pure" merchant. Artisan-merchants are merchants as well. This kind of nerf would also make it very hard on newbies even if they wanted to go into pure merchanting. Are you really going to buy items to resell on the bazaar to get XP to get your own vendor?
Additions:
Bulk Orders -- I'd like to start buying some of my stock, particularly low level stock, from other players. Some type of "bulk order" (like BODs in UO) I could hand out and then pay off on would be a boon for purchasing. For those who didn't UO, a BOD was handed out by an NPC and called for, for example, "5 plate helms, 4 chain shirts, and 5 plate pants" You could do something similar through the vendor offer system. But right now people offer the oddest thingsand there's no way for them to tell what I want. That kind of system for automating suppliers would be a big benefit for pure merchants.
Blackmugen wrote:
There are still new players coming into this game and to shut them out like that is unfair, and ultimately ruins the long-term viability of the game.
For the casual/new player they can use the bazaar. That is how most of us started.
And once they're past that? and they're not allowed to put multiple vendors in other people's homes like those who did before they nerfed being able to trade vendors?
That's what I'm talking about.
For me, the Bazaar is sort of an extended advertisement for my shop. I can put samples of about 10% of what I can make out there for sale, and give an idea of the scope of what I have to offer in styles and colors, etc. I'm based in Kor Vella. I'd *like* to be able to have a Corellia-wide bazaar presence, but it just isn't feasible. Yeah, I could list 5 items per city or somesuch, but I can't present a very good idea of my shop's total wares that way. What I do now is list a 3000 credit Ribbed Shirt named "ADVERT" with directions to my store; I'd like to be able to do more than that for other cities.
Culdor wrote:
My top 'beefs':
2) Ad Barking I and II, as you stated in your #3. So far my vendor on the map thing has been working fine. (crosses fingers). Also the barking trigger range needs to be increased so that you can get passerby's instead of folks that are standing on your doorstep.
5) Admin/Vendor privs for PAs, houses, etc really need to be fixed so that we can put down vendors in someone elses homes, we can put things on the floor etc.
6) Why do vendor sales have timers? My vendor has maintenance when it dies so do my sales, I dont see the point of me going and reposting everything once a week, specially when often I have put lots of details into the item.
7) Need a way of moving vendors from one house to the other and items from one vendor to another. We wanted to move my house over a bit so we could make room for another bulding by our PA. The amount of work involved of me withdrawing each sale, then retrieving each item, then reposting each sale with details after move was insane, just like when I want to upgrade my vendor to a new type, just far more work then its worth.
8) Master merchant doesnt do anything.
13) I like your #4 idea, be nice if whatever it is, like a banner, shows up a good distance away like camps show up way before the house does.
Hope that helps.
Culland - Starsider
I really would like to see those fixed/worked on. Also, something that I wish vendors had is a Withdraw All Sales/Retrieve All button, maybe with a double confirmation for the Withdraw All Sales. I know that's more than 5 things, but it's a good list to pick from in my opinion.
Mike
Fix the very complicated and ineffective categories in the Bazaar!
Yes, the bugs have to be fixed first. I haven't actually been using any of the Merchant abilities (except an NPC vendor w/o barking) because of them.
Right now, Merchant is a fine occupation, but the Profession has nothing worthwhile in it except the titles -- I am looking forward to becomming a Propagandist! Some worthwhile benefits are needed to justify using the skill points. I liked Khaludun's list of "long/mid term" items as suggestions.
One not mentioned that I would really like is a bookkeeper function, though that would take a fair amount of developer time. I should be doing a better job of tracking what I paid for things and what they sold for, but it is a real pain to work a second window to record sale emails (when they work). The books could be kept on the client and not impact the server at all, just automatically record sales, purchases and calculate profits and inventory. It would be nice to be able to calculate my cost basis for resources, but that might be a bit difficult when I harvested some and bought others. I would be satisfied by just a way to export a CDF file of my system emails.
A reliable CONTRACT function of some sort would be good, where I could agree to purchase or sella particular item or resource at a stated price within a stated time period. This would work only for resources, as quality varies on crafted items. As it is, I can spend a lot of time chasing a resource, just to find that the intended buyer has already satified his need.
Sorry I was a bit late with my suggestions; hope you can use them in your next communication.
The suggestion about the ability to create contracts is a fabulous idea; I've also thought that this could be a great step towards player bounties for Bounty Hunters--a broken contract could trigger an automatic bounty offer specified in the terms of the contract.
Those original 5 are pretty much the top issues.
I'll add a few--
1). Resource=split=unretrievable bug.
2). Business II not very useful (maybe this is an artisan issue <shrug>
3). Huge gap in marketing ability which makes transition from bazaar sales to vendor sales sort of tough. Wasn't there suppose to be the in-town NPC barker to help with this issue?
One other item for the list of improved vendor skill capabilities - a sign or notice schematic. If it could be placed outside (on the porch) it would help identify stores, but even one that could be dropped indoors would help.
It should be trivial to develop, right now I use packs hanging on the wall inside to notify customers what I will buy. Kind of stupid looking, and many don't seem to see them (or do and leave stuff I don't want anyway), but they do work a little. A different design that made them obviously a sign would help a lot. Worst problem for developmentis extendingthe limitation on the sizeof the name field for a great product.
The outdoor sign models exist, I see them by and in cities. If I could put one on my porch I would be a happy camper. Interestingly there is already a bazaar catagory for them.