Merchant Archive
Thread: Vendor Maintenance Fees coming – your input request
I have to say that I find this current proposed change as insane. I do not have a vendor but i do have someone that has setup a vendor im my house to sell goods on.
If it helps think of it like this. When a buissness or a lone merchant encurs a cost for doing buissness or making goods they have the option of passing that cost on to the purchaser of the good. Now they may decide not to pass a certain cost on the purchaser but that is thier choice. Under the current system that you have proposed it creates a cost for doing buissness that the merchant has no choice but eat the cost himself.
Having a set maint on the vendor or having a set sales tax on items sold would be a good way of adding your money sink without killing the usefullness of vendors.
If the main reason for your proposed maint is to keep people from using vendors as storage devices then you need to start looking at ways to do this without making that feature usless for what it was intended.
Before you guys even THINK about adding maintenance fees to vendors, you better fix PAs so that we have a central storage place for members to pick items up. Right now the only way to do this is to have vendors for storage.
You guys keep putting problems in before you make the fix.
I'm sorry but I don't feel vendors should get commissions or any other percentage type earnings. They do nothing to earn it. They don't add anything to the sale except bark. That is of course you don't mind setting up the barking everyday and seldom works anyway. I don't even think the barking helps make a sale. People entering your house know there are vendors by reading your house sign. When they buy off that vendor the vendor itself had nothing to do with the sale any more than a 7-11 cashier. They should be paid an hourly rate or a flat daily rate.
What you need to understand is,with what they plan you can be having a wonderful week selling items and stocking moreand more items on vendors.Then you have several days of not selling and you cango broke.
Isn't it funny how in real life you can go to Wal-Mart and buy an item for one price.Then you go to a Mom and Pop place in the mall you have to pay a lot more for the same exact item. In SWG I'm Wal-Mart with six vendors and selling hundreds of different items at very good prices. What they plan on doing is making it where my Wal-Mart won't stand a chance against Mom and Pop 
I think that 1-2% per day would be reasonable, with it being possible to lower the fee significantly with appropriate merchant skills. I would strongly encourage the devs to start low while there are still bugs with vendors and raise the fee if needed.
Sales tax will not happen because the devs are committed to preventing vendors as storage.
Free vendors were never supposed to be in the game. People are going to have to adjust to having to pay a fee and consider that a business expense that needs to be paid. So basically what this means is that you have to sell stuff for more money.
If vendors don't provde people with enough value for people to be worth the maintenance and markup, then either the fee is too high, or the value (features.capabilties) of a vendor are too low.
Also I think that vendor fees will make it more viable to sell things made by someone else. Right now with free vendors there is little incentive for a crafter to givea merchant a cut. However, vendor fees would mean that it costs money to have unsold items, so crafters could be better off selling the item through someone else's vendor at a high traffic location.
If having a larger stock increases the percentage of items sold compared to items in stock, then merchants/crafters can team up to create a larger inventory than any of them could manage on their own.
I am sure much has already been said, but just thought I would wiegh in on the idea.
First off 'fixing' the NPC vendors to be the same as the terminal and droid vendors is an outright nerf. I have slowly been surrendering skill after merchant skill because nothing works, leaving me with NPC vendors which was the only real thing that I felt made being a merchant mean something.
Thats said I dont think that the NPC vendors were working right as far as the maintenance fees, really they should be increased but using the droid/terminal vendors as a balance point is idiotic to the extreme. Basically anyone like an architech cant even use them, why because their items are to friggen expensive to be worth putting on a vendor. Further, I am a weapon smith, but not a master smith, to say that my sales are limited is an understatement thanks to the extremely unbalanced amount of benifit you get to being a master. I am sure other professions are like this. The only way I can compete is a wide selection., which is something I will now be punished for under the new system.
So in short before you go swinging your nerf bat, how about breaking with tradition and actually fix things first, or atleast fix them at the same time. I suppose the bright side is that I will now have a reason to fully untrain my merchant skills.
Culland
The problem is, lets say you have resources on your vendor (which is broken on npc's btw...)
50k power 50k
30k steel 90k
100k ore 300k
20k aluminum 60k
20k copper 60k
10k reactive gas 30k
30k inert petrochem 90k
So total maint on this would be (680,000/1000) x 32 = $21700/day. REGARDLESS IF YOU SELL ANYTHING OR NOT. If the server is down all day you eat the maint cost, if there is a nasty creature spawn near your house that prevents people from entering, YOU PAY THE COST, if anything happens you pay that cost. A merchant can't afford that.
Which is excessively expensive, there is hardly anyone who can get that kind of foot traffic.
The correct way to implement this would be a tax that is reduced based on the level of the merchant, start it at 20% and go down to 10% for a master merchant. The tax is applied when there is a purchase.
So if our example above applies, you would drain 68,000-136,000 out of the economy if he sold everything on the vendor. However, he wouldn't have to worry about going broke because he got low foot traffic for a few days.
If you insist on charging / 45m basis then you NEED to hook vendors into the bazaar so people can see them from anywhere. If you are stuck on the timed maintanence issue at least boost it up to an hour so you can figure your costs on a 24h day rather than a base of 32.
I haven't read all of these posts because...well it's 9+ pages but here is my two cents. Why not treat it like the bazaar and charge a fee every time you list an item...whether it be a set amount per item or a percentage. That original proposed formula is far too much. If it takes me 5 days to sell a 10000 credit item it will cost me 1600 to sell it. And if it doesn't sell! even worse.
As more and more people start to hit Master in their craft...the customer base is going to start to spread thinner; therefore, more and more items are going to sit on vendors for longer. The original formula will drive too many people out of business.
As far as putting the money back in the market is concerned, with the exception of NPC training (ok and a little bit of gambling), the 80K+ I spent today all went back into the economy.
Sable Brava; Master Tailor; Naboo, Bloodfin
Much has already been said here, but I feel the need to add my own words in to try to save an interesting professions.
A large and unpredictable maintenance fee will motivate me, and many other merchants, to shift our sales from our vendors to other methods of sale: to the bazaar for items up to 3000cr in cost, and face-to-face sales for big ticket items, facilitated by shouting our ads by the banks and cantinas. Some mid-priced items may remain in the shops, but only in small quantities. Not only will this make player towns more empty and cities noisier, but it will fail to be the kind of credit sink hoped for.
I wouldn't mind seeing a flat increase to vendor maintenance for novice merchant vendors to discourage dabbling into the profession, but a dedicated merchant with Efficiency II should have the low overhead we enjoy currently in order to be able to make a profit on items bought wholesale from artisans. This inexpensive distribution is the merchant's edge in making the business deals that are the most enjoyable part of the class.
Some possible alternatives:
Purchasing Faction: Wealthy players that aren't sitting on their bank accounts to save for swoop bikes and starships are looking for things to spend it on. Even 1000cr per point of faction would be attractive to them and the coding is there, or will be there, for the smugglers who will be able to buy it at greatly reduced rates I assume.
Remove Player Training: It was a good idea to encourage players to interact as students and mentors, but like the bind affinity and transport spells in EQ, it has only created beggers and brief, impersonal transactions. Having to pay for all training would be a large credit sink and the apprenticeship requirement for mastering a profession could be replaced by a large payment to the NPC trainer.
Fix cloning and items insurance, and increase those costs on the more dangerous worlds.
Pet Licensing Fee: Charge a fee to bring a creature into a city. This may not generate much revenue as most will choose not to call their pets, but this is also a happy result and some will pay it to defend themselves in PvP or to show off their rancor herd.
I hope that views in this thread are taken to heart and that I can continue to enjoy being a merchant.
Eshren Jandl
Sunrunner, Dearic
You know... if this all a database problem... and there seem to be many database problems... don't you think its time to sit down and rethink the entire database schema? Call in some Oracle contractors, sit down, and tighten the whole thing up? Or if that's too much of a problem, throw more hardware/disk space at the problem?
Just making sure you all realize that this is what we say
NO VENDOR FEES!! Stop trying to make us pay morelike its a privelegeto grind for hours tosupply the galaxy with weapons! No More Nerf Fix the Bugs!
and this is what they hear
Blah Vendor Fees! Blah Blah Blah Make us pay more Blah Its a Privelege blah blah blah blah to supply the galaxy with weapons! No More Blah Blah Blah Bugs!
dont want anyone to actually think they really wanted our feedback. They just wanted to warn us up front so we scream ourselves to sleep like 2 year olds and then when the nerf hits we won't have the energy to care anymore.
With this the given formula, a crafter is better off putting any items > 593 credits on the bazaar assuming that it'll take only a day to sell. If the item happens to be on there a whole week, any item selling for more than 21 credits is better off on the bazaar. (it's actually around 18, but I assume you want to make back at least 1 credit.)
This can't be what the devs intended, is it?
If it goes in like this, the only reason to NOT sell on the bazaar is for items over 3000 (which I realize is a lot) and to sell more than the bazaar allows.
Anyone who is just interested in selling resources is a fool to put them on a vendor. Just split the batch up to cost 3000 credits and drop them on the bazaar.
The vendors will basically punish players for having one.
I would suggest a sliding "tax" on items sold based on the merchant skill, and a set rate for the vendor itself. That's the only way the merchants can pass the cost onto the customer thereby increasing the sink. Money sinks don't work unless players want to use them. What merchant would rather spend 672 credits to put up an item vs. 20 credits?
Leave us poor artisans alone. First we have to spend hours of mind numbing clicking to get where we can finally make some creds all the while watching the combat types brag about how much an hour they are making and now you want to make it hard to survive.
If this warped idea does not outright kill the player economy, it will cripple it. Use half a brain, if I have to pay more vendor up keep, guess what, my prices go up, not down! If no one can pay, then I go out of business, and therefore;have no further reason to be around and go retire to some other MMORPG.
Tara Blackheart