Merchant Archive

st

Make the maintenance on the vendors have a maintenance fee based on the formula anything near what you are suggesting will only lead to vendors disappearing or vendors just becoming sound boards advertising who to email for items. That is easy to see.

Here is a potential solution to the money sink problem (No reason for anyone to flame here just a suggestion). For each item sold in the game, be it in the bazaar, or in a vendor, calculate a 10% sales tax paid at the point of the transaction, on that transaction only, and by the consumer.

As an example,let's say I put 500 copper on the bazaar to sell at 3000 credits. When listed the item displays a price of 3300 (new max at the bazaar...set that aside a sec). When bought, I, the seller receive 3000 credits. 300 credits go to the MONEY SINK, effectively removing those credits from the game economy.

To further the same example from a different perspective, let's say I am an architectand I have business skills that allow me to place a vendorand that I put a medium house on my personal vendor. When I list the item I enter 80k. When a cutomer shops at my vendor the house is listed for 88k. The consumer buys the house and 8k credits enter the MONEY SINK never to be seen again. I receive 80k.

Let's keep going on that line of thought. Now what if for the merchant class each stage of Efficiency also allows me to massage the tax rate by .5%. So now let's assume I am a master architect and merchant with efficiency IV. I can now put out a vendor and list a medium house on my vendor for 80k. The customer this time sees a price of not 88k but 86.4k. So when the customer buys the house,6400 credits go into the MONEY SINK. I get my 80k and the merchant class influenced the sell price making it more attractive to the customer. This gives value to the merchant class, which it is sorely lacking.

Finally, I would say to make the vendors have a maintenance cost similar to harvestors which is a flat fee per day. Just for arguments sake the 1st bland terminal would cost100cr a day. There would be5 stages with the highest and fanciest vendor costing500cr a day. Again more money for the money sink, but not so bad that a merchant couldn't make out. In my last example, the merchant saves1600 credits on a medium house. That one sale would pay for the merchant for3 days. Crafters might even seek merchants out to sell items (a novel idea) so that the crafter and the merchant could split the tax savings.

Now, my numbers may not be exactly what you are looking for, but I think the general gyst of the idea is solid. It provides a nice money sink at every point of sell concerning vendors/bazaar and it adds value to the merchant class.

One last piece of advice. Concerning anything involving the merchant class. Fix what is broken first before introducing any new feature or nerf. That will just be more dependent code to changewhile making thesorely needed fixesin the long run.

st

Ok.. let's look at this idea here.

There is 224 45 minute segments in a week, 32 in a day. Looking at 1 day's worth here is the total amount of costs on my vendors:

Current Total Cost: 785308

785308 / 1000 = 785.308

785.308 * 32 = 25129.856

That's 25k per day just to have vendors! 175k per week!

I should not be penalized for having slow days. I don't even REMOTELY have the most expensive items for sale. Try an Architect who's each item costs 150k. What if he put up a PA hall? He'd be broke before it sold.

What's the point of vendors in the first place? The point of vendors is to have something to sell your wares while you are not there. With an insane penalty for vendors you might as well remove the merchant class and we'll just go back to EQ-style hocking wares in town wasting all kinds of chat server bandwith and pissing customers off left and right.

Charge a 5% sales tax or something. This way people in remote or low traffic places aren't penalized for their slow sales and you still have a money sink. Keep vendors at a flat fee like harvestors. You don't charge harvesters for the % of resource it's harvesting.. so why charge for vendors for a % of sales?

It's a good idea on paper but my customers love my store and the fact that they can purchase anything available at any time day or night. I've built my reputation on this and I'd hate to have to reduce my services because I can't afford to give them the quality store they deserve. I can't reduce my costs in hopes of reducing the fee because then my profit goes down the toilet and I can't afford it still. I can't raise my prices either because my fee goes through the roof and sales go down.. same problem.

-Raea, Corbantis

st

cant you make this after purchance and not 45 min? i really though this might be a mmorpg that you did not have to play every day!! but the changes you are making are in the other direction. with this its crazy. how in the world would you have a store open? what you are doing is maybe trying to force lower prices? is that it? there is no way a part time gamer can afford to have a store open and also have harvestors if they want. please rethink another way if its to many items on server then limit the amount of things on a vender and if its really money maybe have a program keep track of sales of each merchant and tax them a % and if they do not pay it then give bounty hunter missions. any thing but this extreme thing.

thank you for your time

Misty

stmybe the flat monthly fee would even be better have a declare buisness option on the house terminal and paying that is the only way you can place venders in the house.

st

Please don't access fees per item.

Chefs would be killed.

st

I'd like to throw my voice in to the masses of voices asking the Dev Team to reconsider this step. A "sales tax" system, preferably with the tax being paid by the buyer, is much preferable to a maintenance system for vendors. Vendors are meant for big ticket items and the formula proposed will result in 10s of thousands of credits in maintenance being paid daily by many merchants.

This sounds to me like a stealth run at lowering the number of items in the database again. Somebody determined there were too many items on too many vendors and said "how can we fix this?" The merchants in our PA are already making very little money. With this "fix", most of the won't be in business any more. That will leave crafter to run a "special order" business -- which many of them don't want because it results in so many tells and e-mails as to make the game unplayable for them.

Please, reconsider the method and the size of the money sink required for vendors. A sales tax seems to be universally acceptable -- let the buyers pay, not the vendors who are barely making a living as it is.

st

First of all if you are going to charge Maintenace on vendors, there are a few things that need to happen;

1) Fix the vendors so the work right.

2) Add the ability that others can place stuff up for sale on ourVendors at the same time allowing us to either charge a flat fee per sale or a percent of the sale.

3) Allow vendors to easily move merchandise between stores and place items where we want them to from one location. You can do this by giving us a transfer window and chargeus5-20 cr per item to move between vendors outside of the same region.

4) Give us a way to disply flags or make signs that are different then a Bone armor segment. We need eye catching ways to attract customers.

5) I agree with the others. We need to be able to place vendors on our porches and other items as well.

6) I also agree with having slider on resources to make it easier to sell.

Ok now the "Money Sink Issue".

You want to make more money sinks, but yetwe are currently strappedwith a big time sink running to harvester locations making it so player cities have to be a certain distance from an NPC cities. Most PA's are over 2k or more from a PA. Some good hunting locations are over 4k-5km from the nearest city. Oh here is a current money sink that is just annoying and irritating, a critical failure on a heavy harvesters. Depending on theArchitect that is an average of 100k cr money sink. To lose a 100k cr item and not be able to recover any items from the critical failure is real difficult to take. Here is the other problem to that. The resources are so different, you can'tget enough of one kind, even with 2 accounts tohave enough harvesters running toacquire the reources you need( The frequency oftheresource swtiches do not help this at all) , you still can't get enough resources to make a significant amount to make Large harvesters from Schematics to be cost effective ( This may only be for the Architect profession.). Not to mention all the other trade skills where people use resources and try to make a schematic and come up with a poorer item they have to turn into a spare part or end up destorying becuase it might be worthless to them.

If you want money sinks Charge money along with faction points for the items that peoplepurchasingbased on the items they are receiving. Make it so people have to always learn skills from NPC teachers. Make More luxury items that Can only be bought from NPC's, for example. when you kill certain mobs you get negative faction with them, but in some cases you get positive Townsfolk faction. You can have it so that if people have a certain amount of faction points and credits for certain items thatare made available from Special city vendors maybe like schematics for certain items for each profession. The reason I use this example is to say that you should consider creating other things that pull money out of the ecnomy thatdo not a directly affecta professions.

DATABASE Issues.

It seems that this game has all these great and wonderful resources of varying qualities and other attributes. What seems not to great is that this creates a situation where instead of people having 3-4 different types of metals....a couple of different types of chemicals....a couple of different crystals....etc...etc... The whole point of this is that now with all these huge combinations of rescources required, creates a huge glut of different items for the crafters to hang on to in there inventory. I have been to crafters home where they have so much stuff in their house that they hang on to for when they may need it, even if they don't need it. It is not just a to many melons issue. It is you have to many different items issue. You the Dev's are the creator of your own Monster. 8)

st

I think it should be based on sales more than what is on your vender per 45 minutes. Like if you have 100,000 credits worth on your vender you should PAY your vender a % for the sales that can happen. Not per hour or 45 minute. That really makes no sense at all. It should be a commission for the NPC and having an NPC should be a perk of the novice mechant and being a novice merchant should lower you fee somewhat (Until you advance to the bigger drop). So let's say a 5% comminssion. If 100k is on your vender it should take a maintenance fee of 5k to have the vender sell. Kind of like initializing.

Not sure how easy this is, but it sure makes more sense. 1:1000 per 45 minutes is a LOT, especially if you want to have a good selection on your vender of what you make. I think it will hurt even having a vender to make it so expensive, but it should take some more than it does.

Beebo

stI wanted to sit back a while and figure out what goes through my vendor in a day and what the new fees would cost me before I gave any input. So, here it goes:

The cost of maint. per hour is waaaaay too high. If you want to tax my transaction, fine, but a per 45 min (not even an even hour) fee is a joke. If a 1000c/45min fee based on what is on the vendor is instituted, then I'm just gonna stop using my vendor and close up shop. A vendor, as I understand it, is SUPPOSED to be so there will be player stores in the game. A store carries a stock of the items it sells so that things do not run out leaving the store without product to sell to the customers that come in off the street. Now imagine if a store like best buy had to pay a fee per hour based on the value of the stock in the store. Best Buy would be out of business in a matter of hours...and so will all player stores. I work with a tailor and a droid engineer and I am an architect. At any given time, we have 136k worth of houses, 30k worth of droids, 25k worth of clothes/armor, and 80k worth of furniture. Based on the equation offered, we have 271,000/1000 = 271c/45 mins x 32 payments per day = 8672c per day in vendor maint, on top of my house maint. Now, my shop is not really that busy, but we make enough cash to get by and have some down time to see something other than our crafting stations. We sell, on average 40k/per day which includes some bazaar sales (that we already pay a fee for).

Or how about this example: I just sold a med house for 50k off my vendor. It had been on there for 5 days. My cost is about 17k on making a med house, the vendor fee for 5 days on 50k is 8k. The vendor fee alone just cut my profit by 24%! Nothing should cost a merchant 24% to sell!

Why should a store have to pay to keep items on the shelves? Is the purpose of this to keep money flowing OR is it to cause players who craft to jack up their prices and reduce sales? I set out in this game to open a multi purpose general store to provide the community of players near it with quality items at REASONABLE prices, but now YOU are telling me I can't do that! You tell me that players accumulate too much wealth too quickly...I started last night with 90,000 credits in the bank and ended it with 15,000 credits. I'm not accumulating wealth, so why are YOU punishing me?

The only thing vendor fees do is punish the players who do not have the time to play 24/7 by making them non-competitive in the marketplace. I play about 3 hrs a night during the week to keep my store going and stocked, so that when the weekend comes, I can spend 4hrs a day exploring the game and not having to worry about money or stocking my store. With Vendor fees, I have to make sure I sell things every hour of every day just to keep my vendor going. I realize no fee is not an option, but why can't you just tax SALES? Don't tax me on sales I Might have, tax me on sales I DO have.

Here are my suggestions for a nerfing vendors and still keep the average merchant profitable (choose one).

1. Charge a transaction fee or tax per transaction that is like 5% of the price.

2. You pay employees a salary for running a register. Charge me a per hour fee for a vendor of 50c. 1200c/day I think is a reasonable amount to pay a slacker Rodian vendor who, never works right (still waiting for ad barking to actually work longer than 5 mins).


I have been open and honest and supportive of this game since Beta. I have adjusted my style of game play to fit YOUR idea of how I should play far to many times to have to sit here and take what you offer with a smile.

Zannon

stSales taxes by the buyer are much more appropriate. Why should we have to be penalised for selling our goods? The money in the game is not with the artisans, the bulk of money is from those combat guys who sit and do 19k/mission destroy missions all day and amass huge sums of money. They're the ones that need the drain, not us poor artisans that can barely eek out a living. I havent even been making enough lately to stay even, little own make money. Ive had to borrow money from the combat guys in my PA just to stay in buisness. If i'd been alone, I'd be bankrupt right now.

st

i know you guys are trying to work around people using the vendor to store stuff. but damnit, just increase the housing limits, a small house can hold barely more than a back pack is not reasonable!

plus, i got 40k of energy stuck on a vendor that i can't get out and will be gone in a few days, how about fixing your bugs before nerfing us and introducing even more bugs? seriously, this is pissing me off and you have no clue how much restrain im showing even though my tone isn't exactly calm.

aiyia

stif they can charge a transaction fee on bank to bank transfers, they can certainly add in a 5% sales tax...

stIt seems fairly clear to me that the central problem is that there are conflicting objectives:

1. Devs: Objective = a healthy player-run economy. They don't *want* to destroy whole crafting professions.

And some combination of one or more of the following:
2. SOE: Objective = not spending sufficient money on database hardware, and/or
3. Database guys: Objective = not being fired for incompetence in their design and/or administration of Oracle - a DBMS that in the real world typically handles databases not unlike SWG's without requiring companies to do the equivalent of "eliminating newbie melons"

So far, it's group 3 that seems to win out most of the time.

I'm really not trying to be a wiseass here, but I sincerely think SOE might be very well-served by hiring a good independent outside Oracle consultant to verify what Group 3 above is saying. My gut suspicion is that it'd be an eye-opener.