Merchant Archive
Thread: Vendor Maintenance Fees coming – your input request
Well, after fuming about this a bit, I put my head into it constructively.
First, I agree that there needs to be a money sink because of the exploiters bringing in dramatic amounts of cred. But I do not feel it is fair to target one specific class with that responisibilty, especially a class that in all likelyhood had little to do with the influx of exploited money anyway.
But you might say "they can pass this cost on to the consumer." But that is just it, with this system they can't pass the cost on, because raising their prices will raise their maintnence fees. The burden will be the merchant's alone, and that is flat out unfair on so many levels I cannot begin to list them all, and I am no merchant, just one of the consumers.
I feel there are two solutions (not that any dev will read this). One solution is the aforementioned flat tax to any transaction. This will obviously be a shared burden. Do this temporarily until the exploited money has been flushed and the economy stabilzes.
A better solution, I feel, is to add a one time 10% listing fee on vendors. That is to say, you put the item on your vendor, you pay a 10% surcharge Thus a 120k large home would cost 12k to list, a 10k carbine, 1k to list etc. The key is that this is a ONE TIME charge, not a timed payment like the every 45 minutes thing.
This solves the database problem, because it is unlikely that they will want to pay that sort of cred for item storage. It also allows the merchant to pass this cost onto the consumer and share the burden of cleaning up the extra cred, because the fee is ONE time, and fixed. Thus they can list that large house for 132k, make some extra cred, still paying 1k of that 12k, while the consumer picks up the rest.
This has the consumer picking up most of the extra cred on single items, but the merchants picking up their end over a lot of items. We all share the pain, and no one is unreasonably punished.
Wow, 25 pages of responses and not a single wordof reply by a Dev. Are you guys even reading these responses from the players? I hope so.
I won't add to the long list of postson alternatives to your original input request, Q (some of them quite well written, I might add). I think you get the general idea.
My short response is this: Your plan, as proposed, will kill my business on the first day.
I run two stores. One is used for the free exchange of commodities between our PA members. Items listed on this vendor are 1 credit each. We don't use it as a storage facility, nor do we ever intend to do so. It's only used as a handy way to pass along resources and goods between our members who are not always online at the same time. It's a system based on trust and it has worked very well so far. The other store is a retail outlet used by the crafters of our PA to sell their wares to the public. Basically, they sell their products to the Merchant (that's me)with a smallprofit markup and then I sell these products to the public at retail prices. My percentage from the sale is very small, only 1% of the selling price. The rest goes to the PA's General Funds account, where it is used to finance PA member's tuition costs, runPA harvestors (whose output is shared by all members), sponsor field trips to other worlds, and other perks that the PA offers to it's members. These perks help tomake this game fun, by helping to alleviate the player burdens built into it by the Devs.
Because we need to offer a wide variety and volume of products (at competitive prices),on the vendor to attract customers, my vendor is usually quite full. We also sell a large number of high-value items, like high-grade weapons and deeds. I would estimate the total value to range between 300k and 800k credits. If your plan is implimented, my costs to run these stores would skyrocket into the tens of thousands a day.I, nor the PA, makes that kind of profit. We would have to pass the added costs on to the customer, driving up prices. What happens when we don't sell anything on any particular day? With your plan, we still must pay for our stock on hand...again and again and again. This would make the idea of a player-run retail store a moot point. Your idea also would create a highly inflationary economic situation by driving up Merchant costs to higher and higher levels, forcing the radical reduction of inventory levels, while player demand still remains.
Adding a sales tax is a much better idea, but make it reasonable. 5%-8% is a good range.
If you want a money sink put in a "tax" the user pays. If a vendor charges even when no sale is made you're going to force a lot of hard working artisans out of business. If you charge by the amount listed you'll stiffle inventory and no newb or intermediate player will be able to find appropriate gear they can afford for their level.
If you want to save your database then limit the number of items each vendor can hold so a novice merchant can only have say 10 items on a vendor and a master merchant can have 100. You can't charge on the inventory, you have to charge on sales or you're going to wipe out all but a tiny tiny tiny handfull of vendors and intermediate players won't be able to get the gear they want and need.
If you don't want to tax the player, tally up the sales from the last 24 hours, add in a flat 1k per vendor and then add in a percentage of sales to the total (but realize the merchants will pass that cost along to the customer as well).
Add my voice to the hundreds of posterswho object to the proposed idea.
Mathematically, if I have four of any item (regardless of price) on the vendor for a week, by the end of the week the maintenance fees will equal the cost of one of those items! That's insane!
I'm all for a reasonable FLAT hourly fee for vendor maintenance, and a small commission fee on each sale. This takes the money out of the hands of the spenders, which is how a money sink needs to work. As for getting a cut of my profits? Well I already pay that in the maintenance fees, but I don't keep all my money in my mattress you know. I spend it elsewhere, and that's where I'll pay my cut.
The system already has money sinks every time we take a shuttle or a ship, every time we bind a clone, etc.
Fix the corpse bug and people will start to pay for insurance. Heck, require a rebinding each time you clone if you must, so death will have some sting.
But penalizing people for being merchants is totally against the whole notion of a player-driven economy. Before you initiate this change, I expect that you'll fix the vendor problems in the first place - I paid 30k for a latrge amount of copper that I cannot retrieve, and have lost several thousand credits on other vendor problems. The CSR ticket I filed was closed without resolution or response, so you already have your money sink in the form of bugs and poor customer service.
You already get $16 of my real income every month - now you want to part me with my virtual income too? And I'm expected to pay you for this dubious privilege?
Stop penalizing players because the system the developers created doesn't work as you intended. Your failure is not our problem.
Shaan'ti Hokai (Kauri) 
I'm an Architect with a good high foot-traffic location. Iwas about halfway to Master Merchant before I noticed it wasn't doing anything for me really.
My merchant skills are on hold until something improves for the class, and this would probably make me drop it.
I'll not be paying the fees either way. If implemented as stated, I'll either make a small house with a drop off, or find some other weasely work around. This is an irritation, not a solution.
One thing that WILL happen though is Clothes and Furniture will nearly VANISH form the game. Customers like to browse, and since there is no official site displaying all of the avalible furniture and clothing they don't know what to ask for for custom orders.
I didn't wantto have to go all caps on you SOE, but:
DON'T TAKE AWAY MY CASUAL AND IMPULSE SHOPPERS!
Needing and wanting are two different things entirely. You don't need more money sinks, I sure the heck don't need more money sinks, and no one but you wants them.
The current system would be fine if you'd get the bugs fixed. Obviously that's not going to happen any time soon, tho...
This change is going to wreck my installation designer business. Don't do it.
GLOBAL ADVERTIZING
Global advertizing should be moved from the vendor to the house control. It's uncool to have 6 vendors all in the same room all on the global map. So move the option to list from the vendor to the house. This doesn't penalize merchants that maintain more than one shop and it keeps the global map a little cleaner.
The global map also needs to randomly sort the listings each time it is viewed on the client side. Right now the system only rewards those people who can get on the moment the server comes up. A random sort every view would be much nicer. It would be nice if the global map would offer a 'local vendors' option which would only show vendors within 1000-2000m of you.
VENDORS
Vendor maintenance should be a flat rate per vendor (say 1k per day for terminals, 2k per day for droids, 5k for npcs, you can even get fancy and have it base_rate_for_vendor_type X number of vendors, so if you have one droid it would be 2k a day, 2 droids it would be 4k per droid per day, 3 droids would be 6k per droid per day. You could even make this a logorithmic curve so the successful merchants with all the vendors would be hit with a large fee while the novice merchant has relatively modest charges. The logorithmic scale also solves the vendor storage problem for all but the most successful of merchants and hey, consider it a perk).
In addition to the base vendor daily fees the vendor should charge a commission on the previous days sales. If 100,000 in sales were made a novice merchant might pay 20,000 (20%), a master merchant might pay 10,000 (10% because of reduced fees). Again this protects the novice merchant who generally will be lucky to make 2,000 creds in sales a day.
Vendors should be limited in the number of items they can store but one of the skill lines should increase the number of items a vendor can hold, so a novice merchang may only store 10 items per vendor while a master merchant can store 100 (I'd suggest 10 novice, 20 level 1, 30 level 2, 40 level 3, 50 level 5, 100 master -- be nice to have master merchant actually mean something).
So each vendor is (vendor_type_base_rate*(Number_of_vendors+some_multiplier)-vendor_reduction_value)+(previous_days_sales*(some_percentage-vendor_reduction_value))
AND
Number_of_Vendor_Items based on how far up one of the merchant skill lines you are.
SUGGESTIONS
Allow some mechanism so that an entire store is not lost if maintenance is not paid (as the net failures this month illustrate it's possible to get knocked off the net for a substantial period and a lot of verizon customers are going to finally get their ports unblocked to come in to find all their harvesters on fire and/or dead). If vendor maintenance fees aren't paid they should simply stop selling (and wracking up fees) until they're brought current or the account is closed.
Something cool
Give archetects 2 distinct building types a merchant can use, something that is OBVIOUSLY a business/store and designed to be such (IE large open area, no narrow hallways on entry). Let one be used only be a medium level merchant or higher and let the other be set only by a master merchant (IE the archetect can make the deed but only someone with the pre-requisite merchant skill can place it). Bonus points if the buildings can scroll advertizing (ie times square ticker, and other gimicks to attact attention) (maybe even an outdoor area just outside the building where furniture can be placed.
I can see the need for vendor maintenance fees. There is little to no point to being a merchant if I don't get some benefit from it. Why vendors were put in without their maintenance working properly I don't understand. What that fee should be... I'm not sure. I don't like the idea of it being based on the value of the items, but I can't see what other way you can go about it. Per number of items would be my alternate, but in that case then the little guys would be hurt (think of Chef's) who sell a lot of very low cost items (relative to say armorsmiths and architects).
Re: "Total Listed Value of Items on Vendor / 1000 every 45 minutes"
First of all, why on earth can you simply not make it an hour? That would make it easier to calculate than .75. Honestly it'd be a lot easier if there were a standard in the whole game, as it is it's very difficult to calculate maintenance on harvesters, houses and now, a new way, on vendors.
Taking my vendors typical items into account, I usually have about 63 items @ 450* each, that roughly would total a value of 28350. So my cost per every 45 min would be 28.35 (whatever that works out per day, which I'm not really up to calculating). It would be rough, but I could do it (I don't have a good income as a Chef, I still end up making most of my money from missions or selling resources, when I can.)
I think for just me, since my costs are not that high, it would be ok - but, and here is the big issue I have, are the merchant skills working? Everyone knows vendors are broken. As Dragonian stated earlier... are we going to get what we pay for? because quite frankly you're ruining it even more so, instead of fixing Vendors. This is not a case of "I don't want to be nerfed" or I don't want to have to pick up Merchant skills/pay more for vendors, this is a case of not fixing the only GOOD aspect of being a Merchant, the reason people *should* pick up the skills (lower vendor maintenace if nought else) .
If you cannot FIX such things as: 1. higher skilled merchants paying less maintenace costs (as they are supposed to!) 2. the planetary map registering not only sticking around, but also costing more in maintenence with Advertising IV to offset that increase (also as it is supposed to), and other bugs such as not being able to obtain items from a stockroom/vendor, then you're going about this backwards.
*Actually most are under 450, but as I don't have my game open at this time, I'll use the highest figure.
These things have probably been said before, but it's an issue that's worth adding another voice to.
First, any charges on vendors should be based on ITEMS SOLD, not number of items collecting dust on your vendor almost nobody visits. I prefer the fictional element of a vendor commission on NPC vendors. This rate (whatever is decided) should be the same for all NPC vendors. However, vendors should also receive a "maintenance" fee in the form of wages for doing their basic job of standing and waiting for people to use them. These wages are the way to make people pay for storing items on vendors. If the NPC vendor is a higher level and does things like barking to nearby players, they should cost more in commissions.
How much? I'd say a 5-10% commission base would be fair. For players who operate on a slim profit margin, this allows them to survive without going broke. The base salary should be equal to personal harvester daily maintenance -- this is not too much of a cost, but does mean you have to pay to have the vendor in place rather than having free storage of your items until they get sold. Number of items should not be an issue, since they are doing the same "job" whether you have 2 air cakes for sale or 50 laser rifles. It only matters if they actually sell the items.
Vendors should also have aCAP on the number of items they can hold, which goes up with higher merchant skills. A non-merchant (artisan with business skill maxed) should be able to carry perhaps 15 items at a time, including the stock room. Novice merchants should go up to maybe 25 (equal to bazaar), with a maximum of 100 items for a master merchant PER VENDOR. This gives merchants a real advantage over non-merchants other than advertising abilities, and gives people a reason to bother being sellers and dealing with the fees and hassles the profession incurs.The cap improvement should be along the lines of 25--30--40--55--75--100.
I don't know what would happen to item caps if you were to forfeit a skill level, but optimally you should not be able to forfeit a skill box if you are over the lower skill's cap, so you don't accidentally lose items or find them stuck in limbo.
Personally, I sell 98% powerups at an average cost of 450 credits per item. Occasionally I resell some armor or deed I'm not using anymore, but that's rare.I usually make absolutely NO sales from my vendors on a given day. On a good day, one or two people visit because of my blurbs on bazaar sale items and buy up several powerups of a given type. Under the proposed model, I would not use a vendor at all. I make most of my credits on powerups (as low-price items) on the bazaar, anyway. If I someday manage to grind enough to make some good weapons or armor or something, I would have to use a merchant for sales -- if there were any left. Because of the hassle being a merchant would bring, they will be few and far between, plus VERY expensive to do business with, as the demand onthem would be high.
The proposed change will not only put the small entrepreneurs out of business, but would FURTHER BLOAT the bank accounts of those who already rake in the credits,since fewer people would be competing with them. Those crafters who can afford to handle steep prices for their vendors because they sell high-priced items in volume would barely feel the pinch. Such a system would only server to create a wider "haves and have-nots" gap. Do we want such a caste system? You might as well tell casual players to take a hike.
The real problem with theses "cash sinks" isn't the idea behind them, but the implementation. It severely penalizes those with smaller bank accounts and less play time. The ones with the huge amounts of disposable income are not really hurt by them at all, and in fact can just use things like this to further inflate their prices or become even more powerful than other players because they can afford such prices. Those who don't sell but only buy (full-time fighters, for instance) aren't really affected because they can easily make the kind of cash they need to deal with any sink you care to create.
Unless these sinks are somehow scaled to hours played (which is still an inadequate measuring stick), they will only serve to alienate the mainstream, non-nutter players you should be ENCOURAGING to play. The nutters are already getting more bang for their monthly subscription. It's the casual players who are going to leave because they aren't having fun, don't see improvements or even responses to the issues killing the game for them, and don't have the time to waste on something that doesn't have the enjoyment factor needed. There are a lot more people with jobs and limited play hours than there are nutters. Alienate them, and you might as well bury the game now.
quite frankly i think it's STUPID to charge maintenance based on the price of the item. i mean... does my 100 credit cdef rifle cost me any more to keep on a shelf thank my 15000 credit laser rifle ((just an example... i dont sell weapons LOL))? I understand the need for maintenance but charging over time based on item price makes no sense whatsoever.
simple solution (and i think its' been mentioned in various forms before) would be:
1) sales tax, a percentage of the sale price of the tiem sold (be it 5%, 10% or whatever)
2) a lowcost for maintaining the vendor over time (represents wages, connection fee for terminal, etc)
those would be reasonable i think. but punishing me for keeping my vendor stocked with plenty of goods to sell is bloody INSANE.
Merchants get just don't work.
There's no current reason based on the skills of the profession to be a Merchant besides having more vendors and planetary advertising. More vendors just allows categorization of items. Planetary advertising gets shut down daily (since I can't play for about 10 hours after reboots, that time is wasted from using that skill) If you want to make selling items a money sink, you have to make the Merchant class attractive and also make the cost of business fair.
Business is made up of direct and indirect costs. Direct costs are those to acquire inventory. Indirect costs are those things to sell inventory and upkeep the shop.
As a money sink, here is what I propose (based on what I believe and in support of what others have written):
- a fee for creating a vendor. It could be a flat rate, say 2000 credits minus 10 credits per Hiring point (Master Merchants have around 50 points I believe). If people never switch vendor types, they never have to repay the fee.
- a higher fee for ad barking, custom ad barking, and planetary ads. Advertising 4 and Master Merchant should lower the fees. I also think there should be other forms
of advertising, such as billboards in cities, or something else to 1) be a money sink 2) provide more opportunities for advertising 3) lessen advertising bots in
populated areas. Advetising is where the money sink should be since it has more of a direct effect on selling.
- maintenance on the vendor should be based on number of items, not price of the item. It costs more to run a store with 1000 items than one with 100 items. Charge 1 credit per hour per item.
- charge a sales tax per item, which is variable based on location. Within 2000 meters of a city is 6%, 2001-4000m is 5%, etc. This would create some degree of
property value.
There's just no sound reason to charge a % of inventory price as maintenance.
Also, make it more costly for non-Merchants to place and mainain vendors, and strengthen our skills as Merchants. As a pure merchant (not a crafter), I have to
obtain inventory. Aside from advertising, there is no tangible reason for a crafter to sell through me, and the advertising that does occur is based on my efforts and
networking more than the advertising skill.