Merchant Archive
Thread: Vendor Maintenance Fees coming – your input request
Well, if you want every person who has the merchant profession to surrender all of their boxes, then by all means charge that idiotic amount of money. I for one am 6 boxes from Master Merchant, and if that is the amount charged I will not hesitate to try a different profession.
Unless there is a cap on fees, or fees are charged on a per sale basis, I will remove my vendors and start hawking armor in cities. My brother can sell his houses the same way.
At the proposed fees, anyone with high priced items will be unable to use vendors. No one in their right mind is going to pay 70 credits every 45 minutes to list a medium house. Instead, they will put an "advertisement" on the bazaar telling people where to send emails for houses.
The proposed "over time" listing fee will single-handedly destroy the merchant profession for 95% of us. The others have been Masters at their professions for long enough to build up a good client base that they will be able to stomach the fees.
My suggestion to the Dev's is to lay off the "spice" and actually look at the prices things are being sold for.
In my opinion, this isn't a money sink thing, this is a database thing. Once again the players are being punished for SOE and Oracle problems. If it were a money problem, they would start reducing mission payouts instead of looking at one, small profession (I'd like to know what percentage of PC's are merchants) to provide the sink. But guess what, if it costs more to sell an item, who is going to pay it. Me, not hardly. My 70k medium house will jump to a 140k medium house to pay for the listing time on my vendor.
You want to fix the database problem, find out why items that were on a vendor when I destroyed it still appear in my other vendors storeroom! I can't do anything with them, they are just sitting there taking up space. Yes, I did it on purpose because I didn't want to have to retrieve every item to destroy it.
If you are charging a fee over time at 45 min increments, you'd better add a zero to that number behind the slash.
I didn't read all 25 pages of this thread, so I'm sure I'm just echoing many of the sentiments...
But, please do not nerf a class that's already crippled. The dev's have admitted that the merchant class is "broken" - and instead of fixing it, you want to further shatter it.
If you want to take money out of the economy, you don't take it from the poor - you take it from the rich. The fighting classes of this game have all the money - the non-master artisan and merchant classes do not have all the money. Merchants and artisans are already spending all their money on resources and maintenance as it is. Do the fighting classes pay maintenance in near the quantity that artisans/merchants do? Fighting classes may have a house - that's probably all the maintenance they have.
Charge a sales tax to those who purchase goods - that way you are taking money out of the game from the people who have the money to spend.
I'm fairly certain that if you start charging merchants maintenance fees, they will simply remove the items from their vendors. Charging a sales tax, you may have some merchants who will try to by-pass it by doing secure trades or going to the bazaar, but I would venture the vast majority of the merchants will not, and will continue to use their vendors.
Please, SOE, stop throwing your internal database issues on the PAYING customer. To me, this latest change is yet another indirect way of reducing load and stress on your DB servers. I suggest a hardware upgrade instead. Please, don't try and push all those hard-working merchants out there to de-list their wares and close up shop.
As an armorsmith, I typically list 150+ items (a full suit has 9 pieces, and I usually list several types of armor). Even on a good sales day (which isn't that often these days), it would barely be enough to cover the new maintenance costs. Even if it were, the value gained from all that painstaking crafting and resource gathering would be so far diminished that I would seriously consider dropping my profession altogether.
Please, think this through, as it may be more trouble than it's worth. Merchants will just list 1 credit dice on their vendors to advertise the real products they are selling. These "fake" items would be purchased just as any item is now, but would require an in-game meeting to close the sale for the "real" item. If that's the way it needs to be done, rest assured, that's what folks will do.
So, in the end, you'll have the same number, if not more vendor items (those "fake" 1 cred items), and many, many, MANY more disgruntled players. If this were a free online game, then I believe it's fine for you to do whatever you feel like doing. If you want to make a Chuba have the HAM of a Rancor, then fine, do it. However, we pay the highest fee of any existing online MMORPG out there. While I agree with SOE that some game-balancing and treaking needs to be done (don't get me started on bug fixes 
), there's a fine line between trying to push changes through you think will improve the game, and customers being pushed too far and quitting.
That's just my little 2 cents 
Andymantium
Andymantium Armors
Coronet, Corellia(-103, -5567)
Sunrunner
I agree.
Flat per day fee for each vendor (100 Credits ??)
Flat 5% sales tax per item sold (I love the idea of shops nearer cities paying more)
Flatfee per vendor created(1,000 Credits??)
I hope SoE are listening to this as after asking us what we thought, and getting nearly 600 posts all saying similar things if they don't listen to us they can kiss my custom goodbye....
/deleteaccount
If this proposal is, as many have proposed and CSR's have alluded to, a way to fix database problems, it will fail. Your collective user base is very creative - it's didn't take long for us to figure out that stockrooms could be used as psuedo storage area - we will find ways to get around your unreasonable penalties on crafters.
Do not implement value based vendor fees - you will be sorely disappointed.
I for one will do the following:
My vendor will become an "Options to Buy" vending machine.
I will create hundreds of Carbosyrup's - after all each one is cheap, only costs 6 flora food to make and quality does not matter.
They will be created with different names:
"Option to buy Large House for 150K"
"Option to buy Crate of Powerups for 4K"
etc.
I will sell these "options" on my vendor for 1 credit each.
Let me see - what would my daily maintenance be on 200-300 of these? Total value of 300 credits? Not much!
Your money sink will fail but I will have 4-5 times MORE items on my vendor and your database will explode as this technique catches on.
Please do not "nerf" us - we will hit back.
Ewach that is a beautiful example of EXACTLY what the richest player base will do to continue to stay wealthy. This money drain will only effect the poor… and if they are looking to remove cash from the system that’s going to be like squeezing a rock to get water. They just need to find a better money sink. (cities)
However, for my profession - Tailor - I see no easy way to duck the full force of this nerf bat if you really intend to swing it so hard.
Clothing is a fantastic money-sink ingame. The number of possibilities for clothing in terms of colour and style is immense, and whereas there's some players who are happy to stick to one or two outfits - there's also many others that like to have extensive wardrobes, buying the same item over and over again in different colours and spending thousands and thousands of credits in the process.
Yes, this increases the database - till you implement decay.
Once decay is implemented, this money-sink will be even more pronounced.
Now, the primary sales technique of the tailor is in being able to maintain stock and variety. The entire profession is a visual bit of fluff. It is imperative that tailors can display their wares, one way or another, for the customer to see - or the sales simply do not happen.
IF we had not had the item capacity of our houses/shope nerfed, then we could have simply displayed all available items, between them showing the range of colours, and then adopted an 'option' system as has been outlined above.
HOWEVER ... this has been rendered all but impossible - unless you have a large house to display goods in - and even then, this would cripple the tailor as they would not have enough housing lots left in order to place the factories and machinery they needed.
So ... we would not be able to display the whole range.
So ... the customer will have no way of knowing what, for instance, 'option to buy Woodland Spec-Ops Duster, 2K' will get them ... what would that look like, anyway?
So ... that being useless ... we'd have to show stock by placing it for sale on the vendor.
Except - aha! We couldn't do that, could we? Because the proposed vendor fees would price us out of the ability to do this .....
Result? Few or no tailors.
Extended result? One of your main ingame moneysinks goes up in smoke.
The Tailoring profession (I don't presume to speak for all crafting professions here) would easily be able to absorb a sales tax on items, perhaps along with set vendor installation and hourly fees. However, it cannot absorb this.
(the suggested low limit on items stored on a vendor, per Merchant tier, would also cripple tailors, by the way.)
PLEASE do not institute this change until you fix the efficiency line and for that matter THE OTHER 75% OF THE PROFESSION THAT DOES NOT WORK!!!! If you really intend on driving all merchants out of buisiness (an out of the game) by all means swing your nerf bat without bothering to look at EVERY OTHER ISSUE THAT THIS GIMPED PROFFESSION HAS! I have NEVER felt the need to post angrily on these boards before, but this truely makes me angry. I have just spent the past month trying to build up a cool store, but with this system I cannot afford to stay in buisiness. I will be forced to take it all down, and say goodbye to my friends and leave the game.
MERCHANT is supposed to be it's own proffession....a merchant buys things from the people who make them, then sells them to people who want them. IF this change is made, the only way merchants can be successful is by making their own products....because there is no way I up my markup on my suppliers goods enough to cover the maintenence fees AND stay competitive with those who make and sell their own goods. This change eliminates "merchant" as an independent proffession. PLEASE think about this seriously before you do this.
I support a sales tax model, and a flat fee
1/1000th every 45 mins? Jeepers! That's 3% per day!
So if I had 30 items on my vendor, I'd have to sell 1 a day just to pay the fees? Crazy....
Time to shut my shop I think...
Doing some quick math, this change would cost me about 75k a day in maintenance fees. Bye bye, vendor.
does anyone else see ST or ED on top of every post on this thread?
is some one at SOE taking a tally?
It is the last 2 characters in the subject line... "request" the st or "requested" the ed
I noticed it too
Take your vendor fees and shove them. Take player cities and shove them too as this basically kills that idea. While your at it just remove the merchant class because there is ZERO reason to have it now.
All of my vendors have been removed. I'll be closing down my shop eventually to reduce my money pit. Then going back to surveying by hand to get what I need.
Your money sinks in this game hurt the people who produce.
This vendor fee was the final straw. My vendor still constantly eats things I put up for sale, I still owe several customers items, materials, money from things eaten on my vendor that NO CSR has responded to.
Quit nerfing and start fixing the bugs. Your game should be in beta still. Its sad that no player wipe will occur to reset the balance for the people who have exploited the HUGE number of bugs present in this game.
The player economy is falling down as I speak. Casual gamers dont have the money to buy what artisans make. Artisans can't afford to lower the price unless they have have a communist based guild supporting it with money and resources collected from various other exploits.
I think your game is spinning around the great toilet in the sky and about to go swoosh down the drain unless you get some people who actually play the game to work on your vision.
Thats my input on your new nerf bat.