Merchant Archive

The problem with the proposed solution is that it doesn't address the problem.
If the price is increased vendors will become unusable to all but the most prolific merchants and power-gamers; which if I recall, was not how SWG was advertised to the consumer.... a game that both the hardcore and casual gamers can enjoy. And you loose the money sink because less people will use vendors.

I already have been using the droids versus the NPCs because of the split stack bug... and will continue to do so until it's fixed. I place a minimum amount of items on the vendor due to the cost and sell most of my stuff off my person. So if the price increases, I and many others will for-go the already bugged vendors and just use street sales... thus decreasing the money sink off the vendors.

If instead the bugs on the vendors were fixed, and the cost of the vendors were made more reasonable, more people would use them - thus increasing the economic money sink.

So now the issue of vendor-storage. When an item is placed on a vendor it could have a timer, so that over time the cost of storing an item increases... call it a wharehousing fee. And then make it like a cell-phone plan where once I go over my max storage time the item is placed into the storeroom and an large fee starts being charged per minute.
Now the "offered" item storage needs to be addressed, because players have easily figured out that offering an item is an easy way to store something for free on another player's vendor. Once again, start a timer when the item is offered and when the item passes that time limit the item begins to cost a large fee. In that way a seller needs to pre-arrange offering an item to a merchant/vendor so that the item is either picked up or refused in a reasonable amount of time.

So insummary simply increasing the fees will have the effect of decreasing the over-all money sink as less players will use vendors. Also, the casual gamer is punished by this system, which goes against the philosophy of SWG, that a casual gamer could enjoy the game. And it doesn't address either the buggy nature of vendors or the storage problem, but instead is an easy nerf... which is why it'll probably go through anyway.

As an architect that typically has 2-3 million worth of stock on hand at any time, this would cost me 64k credits per day. I would end up changing how I do business and strip most of what I stock off of my vendors. I would much rather see a VAT or Tax added for any sales. Or better yet a Vendor 'commission' that they recieve for selling my goods. I would be much more willing to pay 5% when items are sold as apposed to an ongoing maintennace fee.

1. the formular is to extrem, and im not happy with a timebased formular.

- my way: 5 or 10% of the price form the selled item. to draw direct by the cashtransfer to the vendor-owner

and a (really) small maintainance for the standingtime of the vendor. like 100-200c per day.

2. by the way of modify vendor's ... is posible to implement the vendor-name in the mailmessages? planetname/planetname is not really helpfull for manage more then 1 vendor on the same planet

So basicly there is a 3.2% (if my math is correct) tax on a item if it sits for 24 hours.

Do you still pay the maintance even if the server is offline, crashed, etc like harvesters.

If your going to charge a fee for vendors then how about making them more useful?

I was thinking it would be great if people didnt have to travel to my vendor to get my items, what if my vendor traveled? Like droids have waypoints, so could wandering vendors. Make them unkillable but interactive. On thier journey say from my house to the Vendor station in Kor Vella a player could stop the merchant by talking to it and buy from him!

Wouldnt that be awesome?

Then give them the ability to 'interface' with the local Bazaar and place items, for thier full purchase price on the galatic bazaar market, available in that city.

You could even have the vendors pick up items that havent sold in cities.

Give the possibility ofremote control. (with higher level merchant abilities of course).

Basically make the higher level vendors roam and interact with both players and bazaar terminals.

Of course this all would need to be scaled, but I think its a good idea to give some usefulness to vendors, instead of just needing more 'money sinks'.

Dek

Bounty Hunter (retired)/dabbler extraordinaire

p.s I started a thread with the exact same post, post there if you have more specifics you would like to see vendors do.

Sorry if there is a post on vendor usefulness/improvements but I didnt see any of those kinds of posts.

This is terrible. If you make the rate total items/1000 every 45 minutes, and say I have a single PA hall on the vendor for 450000... Thats 450 credits every 45 minutes? Thats worse than extractors. And I do believe maintenence on those would be much higher than say, a droid vendor. If this does get placed as the going rate of maint, I'm sure I'll only place things on vendors right before people buy them. Never keep my vendor stock like I assume they're supposed to be. And if my vendor is not 100% just destroy and remake it.

The vendors maintenance scaling due to the value of the stocked items is insane. I mean, if I hire someone to sell my stuff (a vendor) then I am going to pay that person a salary which will be fixed regardless of how many items I want them to have available for sale.

As we merchants have said in the past, the problem is not so much the amount, we know that there are going to be costs involved with vendors and sales, but a recurring cost for something that is just sitting there is ludicrous! Set a lower maintenance cost for vendors that is a fixed rate andimpose an imperial tax at the time of sale, say 10% of the total value. This will allow merchants to know what their costs will be and so they can plan their business to meet the new costs and it will be the money drainfor whichyou, the devs,are looking. But forcing us to blindly put things up on a vendor and hope that we have what customers want when we can only afford to put up 5 or 6 items will not work. Player vendors will cease to exist (and mercahnts with them) and all sales will be done through e-mail.

Please, please, please don't kill businessmen. For some of us, it's our favorite aspect of the game.

i still dont understand the need for a money sink...i guess its because i dont do missions...they are dull and a waste of time....all money i have made i have worked for and aquired thru menas of my own design....

if there is TOO much money according to Kosters precious metrics than they should stop creating the money in the first place...

Lower mission costs or gasp...make missions scarcer....

The problem is, if they adjust missions, they have no game and lose over 1/2 the player base...there is no real content beyond the terminals for these guys...

Also something that Koster doesnt take into account is that many people who plan on playing for months to come are SAVING their credits for swoops and starships....

All this idea does is make life miserable for us merchants who dont have alot of extra cash...

___

So lets say the real reason is to reduce the Database....

The EASIEST way to do that is to make VENDORS ONLY AVAILBLE AT NOVICE MERCHANT.....

but but , that would leave all the noobie boxes blank..well your right because they just made themup in an afternoon with no real thought....

here is a revised skill tree.....

Biz 1 ---- Reduced Bazaar Fee 5% so 15 instead of 20

BIZ 2 --- Premium Bazaar Sales

Biz 3 ---- 1 additional weeks listing on Bazaar

Biz 4 --- 5% additional Bazaar listings

NOVICE -- Vendor +1

Ok it could use some polish but it removes about 80% of the vendors from the game and strengthens our profession

Flat rate only.

There is too wide a range in pricing from the different crafting fields to base this on the item prices, which will result in someprofessions being more penalized than others.

Putting the burden on the buyer in the form of sales tax won't work either, since most will stop buying from vendors and just track the crafter down for direct trades, wasting both buyer and crafter time.

Flat rate ala house maintenance is the only fair way to go, so each crafting profession pays an equal share.

Tedra

The more I think about this subject, the more it appears to be just another inventory limiting scheme. If it were "truely"just a money sink problem, they would be looking at fixing theirexisting money sinks before they tossed around the nerf bat!

Are you seriously tryingto tell us that merchants have to foot the entire bill to get money out of the system when you are still giving away free deaths? There are insurance terminals all over the galaxy collecting dust! It sounds morelike a load of whitewash to get merchants to limit their goods in a weak attempt to fix data base woes to me.

If your only purpose for this proposed nerf is to get money off the streets, then address free deaths, free vendors, training, and any other broken money sink not working as intended first! If you think there's still too much cash floating around, then come talk to us about increasing our vendor fees. If the intent is to limit the over stressed, over cost DB system, then cast your nerf bat a few more times at inventory related subjects, maybe you'll loose enough customers your DB won't cost you as much.

Wyntyr

Value of items on vendor / 1000 = matinence cost in credits, charged every 45 min?

I hope that was just a number off the top of your head?

On servers that haven't had much resource duping, where specific resources have been scarce, its not uncommon to find suits of composite armor that cost 250-350k. Based on your numbers for one suit of composite armor to be placed on a vendor that vendor would charge in matinence 250-350 credits every 45min.

250-350c / 45min

500-700c / 1hr 30min

1k-1.4k / 3hrs

7k-9.8k/ 24hrs

So its going to cost that armorsmith almost 10k every day just to keep one suit of of composite armor on his/her vendor. I could pay the matinence on a heavy harvester long enough to mine enough Low-grade-ore to build a PA hall with thatmuch cash. Not only that but how many armorsmiths do you know that only have one suit of armor on their vendor at a time? I would think they would want to have at the very least, one of each type, probably two of each type, and then some spair parts. We've just pumped the matinence costs for that poor vendor probably cose to the 100k/day mark.

Your making the NPC vendors into the middle men of retail. I though thats what the entire merchant class was for?

I've seen some alternate suggestions posted here, and I like the ones that talk about the % of the sales with minute matinence fees. Something along the lines of.

NPC vendor gets 2% of all sales. So on a 10k item the vendor takes 200 credits off the top, before the remainder of the credits are trasnfered to the owners bank.On a 300k suit of armor the vendor would still take 6k credits, but not every day. The vendor could also have a nominal fee, something along the lines of 250 credits/day.Now you would need to sell over 7.5k worth of items a monthto make your vendor worth while. This is slightly less than the cost to maintain a small house.

In the Merchant line, the Efficiency II (Reduced Vendor Fees) could lowerthe vendor's cut by 0.5% (down to 1.5%).

In the Merchant line, EfficiencyIV (Reduced Matinence Fees) could lower the vendor's daily cost down to 200c/day.

Once the Merchant reached master, you could give them a bit more of each skill and let them reduce the vendor's cut down to 1% and the daily cost down to 150c/day.

Its important that any system implemented take into account the casual player, who may not sell much on their vendor. But, it also has to consider a person that dosen't want to keep restocking their vendor every day. I've worked in retail, I know many of us here have or do. The supply truck dosen't come every day. It comes once a week, maybe twice, at best. If we can't have a weeks worth of supplies to sellon our vendor without going bankrupt then whats the point?

OK, I didn't read all 27 pages of responses here, so sorry if I am repeating ...

BUT

I do'nt think we need another money-sink for Crafters. They have enough money-sinks as it is! If you charge a high amount to sell items on the vendor, it prevents us poorer artisans from putting high value items on the market and actually making money, especialy if it might take a few days to sell the item.

Here is an IDEA - how about a 1 time fee to put the item on the Vendor, similar to the Bazaar. Of course it should be cheaper, because this is our own personal Vendor. Or maybe based on the cost of the item being sold. I don't think there should be an additional maintenance rate on the vendor since it is in the house, the house maintenance rate should cover that.