Merchant Archive
Thread: Consignment, is it an endless cash machine for merchants?
DocSavag wrote:
A full feldged banking system with lines of credit would be the only thing that would close that gap from those who have Merchant skills but no cash to those with both cash and skills. I haven't seen a good proposal for that yet they all end up being a potential money faucet and that can't happen. They have to be revenue neutral or a slight sink to even have a chance to happen.
In answer to yourquestion, here is a system of secure loans and credit ratings I thought up the other day, andhow it could work. I know its complex, as was pointed out when i first posted it, buts what is wrong with complexity?
At novice merchant you get a credit rating, this allows you to purchase items that are offered to your vendor without having the credits to do so. The person who offered the item will recieve payment when the item is purchased 'on credit' by the merchant. The purchasescan be put into the store room, and be offered for sale, but they cannot be retrieved from the vendor by the merchant unless they pay for them at the original price.
However the value of items that can be purchased / held on credit at any one time will depend on your credit rating and this can only be increased by repaying loans already taken out, and only when the sale is to a customer, not a paid withdrawal by the merchant. There will be a maximum cap for each level of merchant and this can be increase by going up one of the trees (efficiency maybe?) but there is no automatic increase in your current credit rating, just the maximum possible.
Any time an item bought on credit drops to the stockroom and then off the vendor without being sold then your credit rating will drop, and the drop would need to be far harsher than the equivilant rise for the credits involved in the unrepayed loan. Each item that dropped off the vendor in this way would also stop the purchasing of items on credit for a certain time period, and this delay would increase rapidly if a number of items dropped according to the credit value of the loans on those items. If the value of items dropped was high enough to cause your credit limit to drop to zero (this amount would be less that the number of credits you can obtain using that credit limit) you would never be able to make use of the system again. If the merchant has the funds to pay for dropped items then they will be automatically removed, and if the merchant didn't have the credits they could be taken from the vendors maintenance pool.
The starting credit limit would need to be quite small, and take a reasonable amount of time to build up. This along with the checks on loans not repayed restricting future loans should hopefully be able to prevent the system from being exploited. Possibly a deposit of real credits may be required or other saftey measures implemented.
This system would give crafters a good reason to want to use merchants, they will get payed up front for their goods and wil not have to wait until someone decides they want them, and it also enables merchants to start a business without significant start-up cash.
Go on, pick holes, offer suggestions, i think this is a system that will address many of the issues raised, (encouraging the use of merchants, risk vs reward for the merchant, making master better than novice, enabling a novice to still function etc.)
DocSavag wrote:
The problem with your plan in my opinion is that it has the potential to be a money faucet for merchants. Not repaying the loan results in not being able to borrow more money but it doesn't result in you actually having to repay the money. If you tied the payments into a structure maintenance fee and couldn't be redeeded without repaying the loan (and defaulting on would result in the deletion of your structure) you might have something. Though the value of the available loan would have to be structured to the "relative" value of the strucutre. I.e. you couldn't secure a 200000 loan with a small house because buying a new 10k house is cheaper than repaying the loan.
This is all just discussion at this point. I don't really think we will see a money lending system in the game.
I have to say i never foresaw that as a POV, i could see how it could become a money tap for crafters, but the merchant never actually sees the money or the goods, the money goes straight to the crafter and teh goods are stuck on teh vendor unless sold or the loan is repayed.
With the safeguards i added a you would have to spend the time building up the merchant skills and loop sell, buying of items with three toons involved , one to offer, merchant to accept and third party to buy... all the time this happens no money is added to the system. Once you hit the level of credit you want you can make one credit rip, let the goods expire from the vendor (only way to get rid of them if they are not bought) and then lose your ability to have credit ever again on that character as your depts would hit the limit if your entire credit ratings worth of goods expired from the vendor.
Its hard work and a one shot so not the best method of duping ever really.
Haruspex77 wrote:
How about a skill tree that topped out at Master by giving a merchant full access to every vendor in the galaxy while sitting at home. A nice interface that allowed you to see everything for sale, where, and at what price, with the ability to buy it and send a droid off to fetch it within an hour or so at a cost the same or less than personal travel.
...
Truely awesome power for the Master Merchant without nerfing anyone.
I actually thought of that one at one point, but had two issues with it:
1) I don't think the commerce server can support it. Ever used a single vendor and had it take ages to load each item? Now multiply that by the amount of time it takes to get a galaxy-wide bazaar listing, to reflect that lag on a galactic scale. It'd be unusable.
2) It'd "globalize" the SWG economy and cut down in variation in prices across the galaxy, which eliminates the possibility of clever merchants being able to take advantage of pricing differentials and locating their stores strategically. Any lower-level merchant who sold at a price below the galactic norm would be bought out by a master's droids, rather than getting end-user type customers,and anyone who sold at a price above the galactic norm would get very little business. This seems to me like less interesting gameplay, and new skills should be enhancing that aspect, not detracting from it.
Darkov wrote:
Mandatory repayments.. everyone earns money, so once they've broken the agreed repayment options, the baliff goes round, siezes good to the value of the loan or as much as possible and the debt is repaid, or alternatively a percentage of all money they make is taken upon it entering their bank account as a mandatory sum towards the loan until it's repaid.
There are many ways you could control the repayment issue, the question is, will the devs see the seizing of assets as grief play or will they see it as a fair return on those who refuse to pay the loan back. After all, taking out a loan is entirely optional.
The problem with this is who makes the judgment as to what is a fair amount for siezure? Once the SOE repo boys show up to repo goods from the lendee, it gives a voice to SOE as to how much items are worth in the galaxy. That I believe is going against the spirit of a "hands-off" ecomony that they have been trying to perpetuate.
Doc is right. There is no easy way to give create a lending system outside a player-created system. It reaks too much of being a never ending faucet, and the last thing that any MMORPG is a glut of money.
p4Samwise wrote:
When trying to make a system grief/exploit proof, bear in mind that SWG credits currently go for about$20 per million on many websites. If it's profitable to start up an SWG account, take out a million creditloan on each server, "launder" the credits by trading them to another account, and then cancel the "fugitive" account (or maybe just delete the character and start over, depending on what the system allows), and then sell the credits for real-world cash, someone will do it. In large numbers.
/agree
THEN THE EARTH EXPLODED IN A SUPERNOVA OF DISBELIEF AS SAMWISE AND BALKSTAR AGREED!!
p4Samwise wrote:
You can sic me on a semi-formal writeup of my crackpot "tiered vendor" idea. I doodled a revised Merchant skilltree in one of my meetings today.
Why don't you do that. Its an intriguing idea. Enough to explore anyway. I'm not sure I'm sold yet on it or that the Devs will buy it but its worth writing up.