Merchant Archive
Thread: Screw this profession Its not fun, it won't be fun, let everyone keep their vendors.
I dunno what the rest of you do with your merchant skills, "exploited" or not, but I use my skills to sell things and I make a ton of money and am very happy playing the game. A million credits every couple of days enough?.
How I play the game may not be how you play the game or he plays the game or she plays the game. Each person makes the game what they make it based upon what the developers provide us. They also only provide us 250 skill points to use. That's why I won't be able to do Master Musician because I chose Merchant and Politician to master. Just because I want to do more doesn't mean I call for another profession to be dumped so I can have the skills I want for it.
If the developers remove vendors from people who have dropped their Merchant skills, a few things will happen:
1. People who are true Merchants will cheer.
2. People will regain their Merchant skills and choose wisely so they can still be what they want, altho they can't be everything they want, that's part of the game.
3. People who think it's unreasonable and don't want to deal with Merchants will drop their crafting professions and go combat full time, or spam starports with adds getting themslves put on /ignore by prospective customers(No great loss as there are another 100 Novice Armorsmiths and Weaponsmiths right behind you eager to take your business)
4. The complaining about useless skills will move to another forum, such as medic when everyone says they should be able to heal without medic skills (I'm not a doctor but I play one on TV), or scoutcos we all know how easy it is to skin an animal, or artisan, because we are all amature geologists. It won't end.
Too many people argue about too much in this game. You want all the skills without having to work for them. You want all the skills so you can be self sufficient. You want everyone to play the game YOUR way. I don't recall seeing anyone complain that Merchant was a profession BEFORE they got Merchant skills and dropped them.
I can understand crafters complaining that this will ruin their game for them. But where does it end? Combat professions complain because they can't fight/heal/call pets? Someone wants to be both a Jedi and a Master Dancer at the same time? You can't have it all. And from what it looks like, Sony won't let you have it either. Name calling and ranting isn't going to get Sony or other people to see your point of view. And at the end of the day, everyone in this thread are not the ones making the decisions, the Sony developers are... So why are you fighting with each other and resorting to childish name calling?
Constructive, rational, calm conversation with facts as opposed to "You suck cos I said so n00b!!!" will get you much farther.
I do favor the decision that characters without the necessary skills should not be allowed to keep their vendors. However, I do strongly believe that something needs to be done to facilitate merchant interactions with their suppliers. One of the biggest problems of selling through merchants is that themerchant lacks the tools to properlyrun a business.For the system to work the merchant needs to be able to handle hundreds of items from several suppliers.People appreciate well-stocked vendors. We would love it if merchants could buy out all of our stock, but that is not realistic. Merchants are more often not going have the capital to do this. The only system that has a chance at success for volume sale of goods is consignment. However, with the current game mechanics, this is near to impossible to do. It is too much tedious work for the merchant to sell hundreds of items on consignment. Keeping track of every item purchased and having to pay your supplierswould be a nightmare.
What the merchant profession desperately needs is a way for items to be placed on merchant vendors to be soldfor consignment.More specifically, I would like to be abletotell the vendor that when the item sells,a certain percentage goes automatically to the supplier and a percentagegoes to the merchant. This ability would go a long way in being able to efficiently sell goods through a merchant.
Other types of sales tracking tools are desperately needed as well for the merchant. If devs seriously want to make the merchant the ultimate salesperson to whom crafters actually want to sell their wares, then we need more tools to accomplish this successfully. It is hard enough as it is for one person to keep track of their own wares, I can't imagine how difficult it is going to be when a lot of crafters are forced to use merchants. For the sake of the merchants, we need to rally for these tools.The merchantsshould be given these tools first before they even think of taking away the exploited vendors. It is going to be very sad to see if many people decide to quit their crafting professions just because it is too difficult to find a merchant to sell all your wares. (On the other hand, if you quit because you no longer are getting 100% of your profits that is a whole other situation entirelyfor which I have no sympathy.)
On an additional note,if we want to see more pure merchants selling wares from multiple suppliers so they have well stocked vendors, then we certainly need to argue to raise the proposed vendor item limits. Forcing crafters to use merchants and then imposing strict item limits on the merchants' vendors is not going to bode well for the economy in my opinion.
Siekierah