Merchant Archive

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How about taxing items as they are sold????? I have items on my vendor and 100 credits in the bank. If things are not selling then why should I be penalized. I could live with a stiff tax that goes down as merchant skills increase but come on, tax the items as they are sold. Taxing items before they are sold is rediculous. How about theEmpire(IRS) taxing your income for the next 10 years in advance, can you pay your harvesters or house then????

Deric-Commando-radiant Mech-armor smith-shadow fire

stalso dont you think that this will end up hurting the wrong peoples venders? you are going after the people with alot of money arnt you? not the people you try to make alot of level 3 cloths and are trying to make some money to run harvestors. but those are the people who it will hurt. not the merchant who is selling weapons for 30,000 each and is up to about <from what i hear> 40 million credits. this will not affect those people this will affect the person with like 30000 credit that plays a few days a week and alot on the weekend who is trying to be a merchant. just please rethink this. % based on sales <flat % > i think would be the best way.

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I thought I'd post a rundown of my current business model and how this is going to affect me.

I'd estimate I pull in around 20k a week from my vendor atm. I'm a Master Melee crafter and Spice Merchant, I'm by no means the grinder (I find it tedious, I do other things for 5 days a week and grind on the other. I only do this cause there's no way of selling anything below tier 2 adv professions and making a living)so I forsee it taking me months to get anywhere near master.

So here's a typical vendor list (I used to stock other things but now share a PA hall to help trade)

Single tier 4 Spices - 3 types x 5 of each @ 699 per item

Crate of 5 tier 4 Spices - 3 types x2 of each @ 3k per item

Crates of 10 tier 4 Spices - 3 types x 2 of each @ 5k per item

Crates of 25 tier 4 Spices - 3 types x 1 of each @ 10k per item

10 asst'd tier 1 - tier 4 melee weapons @ 27k Total

That comes to a grand total of £115378, I work on a profit margin of around 25-35% sometimes less. I'm selling perhaps 5k's of goods on a good day. Ususally around 1k and I'd estimate it's about 20k a week all sold.

It will cost me 5192 credits every day that these are on my vendor, so for me to break even in a day I'll need to sell 17.5k of items per day just to have this choice for customers. With my vendor, these goods and the suggested maintainence rate I'll be losing a nice 5k per day. From those goods I'll make around 35k so if I dont sell anything for a week (which as the spice trade is slow at the best of times, isnt unrealistic) thats my profit gone!! If this happens I then I forsee me and a lot of other jacking the crafting trades off all together or only selling on the bazaar/forums/shouting, only the guys who've cornered the market since day one are going to be able to maintain a vendor like this and make it profitable.

This isnt the unattended sales that I thought was such a breath of fresh air when I read it on the forums, more and more every day this game reverts back to the same old grind, they say it's a game a casual player canplay?!? certainly not a crafter class,

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As everyone else has said, time based fees are stupid. I'm pretty sick of all the crafting problems as is, I don't want to CONSTANTLY play to update vendors with items. I'd like to be able to load up items and leave them and free myself up for other things instead of dealing with STOCKING issues on top of all the f-ing problems there are with just MAKING items at this point (factories...still not fixed).

Here's the bottom line. You make it a transaction fee I won't care. You make it a high maintaince fee for items on a vendor, I'm done with the game. I've tolerated more problems with this game than I would normally tolerate from any product I pay for because I see the potential and what is enjoyable *is* fun, but I'll be damned if I'll continue to play something that SOE has essentially made a very unrewarding job between bugs and nerfs, and calling some nerfs "bug fixs" and calling other bugs "features".

If your goal is to free up the database by having fewer subscribers by all means, continue on. There's not really much I can add other than I'll be damned if I spend ALL my time crafting (and no we're not all super rich, I have 3 million credits yes. And the other day I spent well over a million just buying resources. And I'll do it again in a day or two. I have ALOT of cash flow come in, but I have ALOT of costs too: maintance fees, paying for resources, power, etc.

If I had put the time and effort I've put into crafting into JUST running missions...I'd have quite a bit more money. I'm certainly not playing this role in game for JUST the credits, or I'd pick another way to make more with less expenses and hassles. But my job hasn't become easier, it's become exponentially more difficult with all the bugs and problems. Now its being proposed to make it even MORE difficult. I run a weapon shop that carries all kinds of weapons. I may not sell many Long Vibro Axes in comparison to FWG5 pistols, but when someone comes in for an LVA, it's important to THEM that they be able to buy one. So I stock them, even though they're not a hot seller. If these changes went through, I'd LOSE money stocking them, so why the hell would I bother?

Oh I suppose I could become merely a specialist, perhaps sell only specific pistols that sell the most and forget the rest, but that wasn't what I wanted to do with the game. It certainly won't help players who depend on the crafters.

For me, and probably for many others this would merely be the straw that breaks my back. I'm not opposed to paying for vendors, to carrying a fee, but a time based fee is just asinine. And it's going to force players out of more exotic roles and into cookie cutters ones. Because most crafters won't stock unusual things, and to have it made special order will either get them something sub-par, or something they pay MUCH more for. Why bother to do that when their class ALREADY sucks, and it would be just that much easier to go pistol like everyone else has been doing because it's so unbalanced already.

Me? I'm playing to have fun. Most of the problems have made the game not very fun lately. But I've had faith, as I said previously. I don't think anyone would *really* object that much to a transaction fee per purchase.

I think this is related to the database problems, which are completely unexcusable really, and are certainly NOT the playerbases fault. There are other alternative methods to dealing with that which doesn't punish the player which I proposed previously in another thread. This merely seems to be a massive money sink most of us won't tolerate, and a quick fix to your database woes.

Of course as people keep canceling accounts, I imagine the database problems will be somewhat self-correcting...

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We will not take up Bounty Hunting.

We will quit.

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I think fees should be based on how much you sell, not how much you have for sale.

Fees onvendors that no one is buying from will hurt new, undiscovered, and struggleingmerchants.

Like SOE said the fee should come from the transaction.

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A tax system is best. Make it a percentage of the sale. The up comming player city add on is going to have a tax system to support the towns. Makes sense that the Empire and planetary government would charge taxes too.

Also a small maint fee on the vendor. This would represent the NPC's wages (you do have to pay your employees after all).

This will make it so the new merchant has a chance to make it. They will have the small vendor fee. While larger operations will be paying more since they will be moving more or higher prices items.

Then the question just become what percent is a good amount for sales tax? And what are resonable NPC vendor wages.

I also have to agree with a prior poster. Move the bazaar fee reductions to a reduction in vendor fees. This would represent the merchant becoming more efficient with their store. With the bazaar limit capped at 3k not a lot of worthwhile things are being sold there. None of the higher end toys that people want the most definately. So the skill as is is pretty worthless. By the time you get it and can use it there isn't a whole lot you can make that you can use it on. Sure I could use this to reduce the listing for a personal mining unit but I'm not going to list a medium mineral unit on the bazaar with a 3k cap.

ueFix it before you charge us more for it.

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Most crafters are happy at this point, and this "IDEA" of a gold sink will only hurt crafters. We arent the only ones well off. Fix item insurance first before eyeballing us please. And FACTORIES .

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I think it has very little to do with a money sink. It's a sort of backdoor attempt to lower item count because the Oracle DB is fat and old and lazy and bloated and choking to death. Unfortunately it does nothing to fix this; people can still store unlimited stuff on their vendors. This change would only force everyone to shut down their vendors, including me. (except for lots of machine vendors with a bunch of full backpacks at 1cr in the stockroom.) I'll go do missions and harvest cash instead of resources with my harvesters that mysteriously don't cost any less to offset something like this. I hope all the new casual players enjoy their base stats CDEFs and bone armor for as long as it takes for a change like this to get reversed, as this is a gigantic punch in the groin for everyone who tries to craft above bazaar level. I don't even want to think about what it means for architects and tailors, or god forbid dedicated merchants who have a lower margin than anyone as their reward for spending points in a field supposedly centered around credit transactions.

The idea of a cash sink at this point in the game is silly anyway. Except for fixed costs like maintenance and fixed payouts (missions), SWG is a totally player based economy, and with no NPC selling stuff to base your prices on, prices get regulated by the marketplace. The game hasn't been out two months yet. Insurance (the biggest sink) isn't on yet because they still have corpse issues. Unless a mission is paying insanely well, or maintenance on something (cough) is insanely high, requiring a fix, I don't think the economy will ever really settle for at least 6 months to a year. Of course, if all the vendor artisans quit, it may take less time, since nobody will be selling anything anymore.

I'd gratefully welcome a day or two of downtime if if was used to migrate to a better, more robust database, instead of plopping bandaids onto the database problem that cause more problems down the road.

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For my two cents I'd have to say I agree with all these people. That kind of vendor fee would hurt me alot. I have 4 vendors that I keep a good selection of items on for my customers. If you up the fees that much I'll just use my vendors to advertise, nothing else. A sales tax on any item sold sounds reasonable to me, with the tax going in the vendor maintenance pool as well as a Small set fee each day for the vendor, with the cost going down as your efficiency skill increases. I would have no problem with that. Right now my vendors cost 0 maintenance and I agree that is not right at all. But the fee you are suggesting means I'll become a tailor who works on comission only, and I already do a lot of custom work. I charge enough to get by, but am by no means rich. I finally have reached some stability and stay around 1 mil creds.

BTW--you had better give us all fair warning about the exact date this change will take place, since you tell us it is unavoidable--so we can all jump on and either pay our vendors right after it happens or have a huge sale to clear them out. To not do so would be unfair, I don't get to log on until late afternoon, I'd hate to log on to see that not only am I being charged this huge rate, but I also have a huge repair bill on top of that.

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nooo

**edit** guys comeone

I sell weapons on naboo im close to theed but not on the map and i am a master smith

I like to keep 5 of each type of weapon that I can make on my vendor to give a variety to the consumers

im making about 5k on a good day because i dont beleive in ripping people off weapons dont cost aton to make

so if i have on average 150 weapons on my vendor (thats only 30 different types of weapons)at average 4k and 20-30 power ups at 150cr

thats a total of 604500cr sitting in inv

604500/1000=604.5 every 45 minutes 1440 minutes in 24 hours /45 is 32 chargable blocks in a day equaling

a total daily cost of 19344 credits thats completly and totaly unacceptable

where do u guys get these ideas at i knew it was just way to hard for a game to make player crafting worthwhile i shulda just went melee and ran mission no vender fees no harvester fees stupid ya like 42 specificly required resources to make everything avalible in a proffesion tree then low house item limits come one my god if you cant havea database be able to handle the load o these things then you need to make the cutbacks in other things not by ungodly vendor fees