Merchant Archive

Firstly, i think a pa vendor is a great idea and is much needed because i do both internal and external sales for my PA.

Secondly, if a PA vendor is issued i think that the merchant class should be the only one's to implement this vendor (would give some much needed viability to the class).

Third, If it's a PA vendor it should cost nothing to maintain it as long as it is in the PA. (permissions actually need to work correctly for this however).

Currently i have my house locked and private for all my PA members. Reason is because they drop of resources and pickup items and equipment they need daily. it's not just for storage but for transferring mass items to others taht are in the PA. Our pa is currently 100 people so this is a much needed vendor. It is used daily by 50-100 people and thousands of products go up and down. Need to get rid of the 1 credit situation and have this vendor as a seperate entitiy period.

My pulbic vendors are just that, public. This allows me and many others from the pa to sell their products (however i hate the spam and there has got to be a better way to let people send stuff to me without me having to rifle through 1k of spam mail a day, yes it is that many for me). This should be accessed via any bazaar system and should either be airshipped via a modest price tax or they can pick ip up at the vendor site. Permissions need to be fixed so you can make the public station in anyone's house anywhere and at anytime move it or use it.

Hope this helps Holo,

Some people are suggesting having vendors that are private only.

That doesn't solve Holo's problem with them being safety deposit boxes.

Improve PA hall admin. levels and increase the storage of PA halls. Put a shipping system in the game! You can distribute the items through vendors and the bazaar.

The obvious solution here was mentioned in your very own post Holocron. As has been stated here already simply take the private vendors off the global search. I can't think of a reason anyone would want a private vendor on the global search list anyway, as everyone is using them for their bulk order customers or for distributing extras to ther freinds instead of destroying them. It allows PAs to distribute theri tiems efficiently and for merchants to sell theri goods to whom they choose.

While I did nopt use the Privat house thing. I would like to be able to set a venbdor to PA only, so that I can offer the PA members a significant discount over the "public" price.

Also a way to send a "key" to a person would be great. This Key would allow them to access a particular vendor, possibly even a particular ITEM on a vendor. This would allow for easier Special Order's and other special sales to a particular person.

To prevent "free" storage... make these special vendors charge you when an Item fails to sell in the 7 day period. Only do this to the SPECIAL/Private vendors... not the "public" vendors.

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Can you explain to me what purpose your PA vendor serves? That would help me design the replacement.

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To provide materials at cost to our members. Making this vender non searchable on the bazaar would do the trick.

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Tstorm wrote:

I think this is a CS nightmare in the making. Give everyone in the PA admin rights so they can pickup/drop, but you get one bad person or even someone that just wants to "borrow" something and you have PA morale problems, CS tickets, accusations, and generally unhappy players.

There needs to either be far more granular permission controls, or a vendor/terminal where people can arrange their trades while both parties aren't necessarily in the same place at the same time.

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I agree with the potential problem. However, I think an easy solution is to email the owner of the PA Hall when someone other than them picks something up. You don't need to limit stuff as much as you need a tracking method.

Friends,

I would like to see us having public and private Vendors.

I would whole heartedly like to be able to declare a vendor public or private.

Also the Faction permissions is a Great Idea.

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Over the past few days as my buisness has expanded. I have been wanted to place items on my vendors for people in my pseudo PA to pick up. at reduced or 1cr. I have found that to be impossible while maintiaining an Public shop. I have reduced rates for Members of my group and I want to be able to extend that to people with special orders and not prevent new customers from shopping.

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Xader_Vartec wrote:

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Zannon wrote:
Now that administrators can drop and pickup anything in a private or public structure, the arguement to make a private vendor is moot. The only point to a private vendor now would be to grind merchant XP with the people in your guild and this would be an exploit of the merchant profession. If your guild members are all administrators, you can drop the stuff for them in your structure and they can just pick them up now.

Zannon

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WRONG!!!!

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Geez Xader, You don't have to be a jerk about it....he said later he understood.

Sorry Z.

PA's need a drop box, with a LARGE storage capacity (perhaps dependent on PA size) in the PA hall. E-mail notification when someone retrieves an item from the box would be nice.

People who want to do special orders though are still in trouble.

You could implement a shippin system easily I would think, although I'm not on the programming team, so what do I know?

When you go to a bazaar or your vendor you get another option "ship item."

You then choose an item to ship, and a destination and a recipient. Cost would be dependent on where that destination is in relation to you.

Shipping would take some amount of time dependent on distance.

It would then show up under the available items tab for that person on either the bazaar or the vendor.

Make it impossible to ship to yourself, or to your current location if you're at a vendor.

This solves the problem with safety deposit vendors, because the shipping costs money. It will not replace shops because people like to browse and special orders will take time, both for the crafter to read and respond to your request and for the item to ship. It will not even be that difficult because the bazaar and vendor structure lays much of the ground work for it.

Wanted to add one thing:

If you do decide to nerf vendors you will basically kill the Merchant class. However, if you decide that a private pa vendor is fine that will solve the pborlm (one that is listed off the global market)

As well, i'm sorry to say that i service 100 people or more daily in my PA and 250 items in a pa hall is a joke. Do you realize how many items i give out per day being an armorsmith and artisan (both masters). No way is 250 adequate. Just to keep things decently organized i use 5 different vendors for internal pa work. (Im still missing my 6th vendor btw it has never been returned to me. But that is another issue =))

I'd have to agree the best way to make the vendors a non-issue is make it a private pa one (i'd personally like more so it doesn't bog the vendor down, maybe selectable like vendors are now for races) but if i's only 1 vendor i can live with it. Take it off the global market would solve the issue of it supposing to be a public vendor.

Regards,

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Holocron wrote:

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gatekeep wrote:

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Holocron wrote:

Yeah, that's exactly what they are NOT supposed to be for.

Don't get me wrong, I understand that you want and needa PA vault and storage space. But that's not what vendors are intended to be, hence this change. We need to find an alternate solution to PA storage and distribution.

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It would be nice if the alternate solution is implemented before the current workable solution is removed. Otherwise, we're all left hanging with no way to do things we need to do in order to work together as a PA truly should.

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In general, I agree. However, you DO have a way now, which is the way that was intended--giving your PA members admin rights so that they can freely pick up and drop stuff in the hall.

Now,I can see that you want to have more granular permissions on the hall, which is fine, I think we can manage that.

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Take a good hard look at the big picture here.Users obviously aren't using the vendors within the constraints of your original design. That would indicate to most people that the design needs to be rethought, not rigidly enforced. Consider the following points that don't fit the current design:

1. Item Limits in Houses: The current limit to items in a personal house is 250. This is a house for one person to use. The PA Hall also has a limit of 250 items. This structure is for use by umpteen-million people at the same time. What's the point of having a PA hall when you can just haveeach member of thePAgive you administrator rights to his personal house?


2. Aesthetics: Do you really think that people in a PA are going to want to show off their wonderful PA Hall when all it is is a warehouse? "Where are your conquest items?" "They had to go to make room for the 8 jillion stacks ofresources we have laying around for ourcrafters to pick up."


3. Ease of Use: You drop a deed, it looks like a deed. Nobody wants to sort through a stack of deeds to try to find the one Solar Generator your PA Architect made for you, when the Architect and Droid Engineer are probably creating stuff for everyone in the guild.


4. Ease of Use #2: What hard working PA Architect with 30-odd requests for houses, harvesters and the like is going to take time to make sure the deed for yours is not underneath or otherwisejumbled togetherwith the other items laying around all over the floor?


5. PA Management: As the PA appointed Power Harvester (tm) it is up to you to make sure that you are gathering enough power to supply the rest of the PA. An email notification every time people picked up some from your vendor made keeping track A LOT easier. You don't want your Weaponsmith using up all thepower and leaving none for the Armorsmith, for example.


6. Friends and Neighbors: What about the poor people who don't enjoy the politics that are generally involved with a PA, but would like to be able to make their excess resources and such available to their friends? See all the above reasoning for not wanting to just drop crap on the floor.

Sounds to me like you need to rethink the design of the vendor to allow for both private and public use, as the current design is too narrow to support existingenvironment growth and user expression.

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Holocron wrote:

This is why the maintenance fees for vendors are scaled off of the price of the goods--since anyone can get to them, to keep an item safe in one, you have to price goods exorbitantly high, which results in high vendor fees. If you price it cheaply to avoid the fees, then you run the risk of someone buying the item at a steal. This mechanic only works if the vendors are publicly available, of course, so that's a big reason why we didn't ever plan for private vendors.

Can you explain what you were using the vendors for? Was it storage, sales to PA members only, or something else?

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Holo im sorry to PUNCH A HUGE HOLE in the above statement but i have to. When u say people would put things on vendors to keep them safe, u completely forgot about the vendor stockroom. When the item limit bug when in due to the patch... the only way i could store my huge inventory of stuff was to "fake sell" my items and then withdrawthem to the vendor stock room. This allowed me to have unlimited space! FOR FREE!

so tell me... how charging off of items on the % value of goods does anything but greif people like me who have master weaponsmith/architechs who have millions in goods for sale, but also have TONS of things that require large amouts of storage space. I think that crafters should be given extra storage space due to the need to have backup items ready to sell to keep the market happy.

The only greifing i know of is the droid/machine vendor 1% per hour costs... heck if u dont sell an item in a week... u pay 168% of or goods value... now thats what i call useary charges.

My PA includes a House of Commerce which is divided into department heads. There is one for resources and one for each crafter type. Each departmenthas or is working towards having its own vendor andmost areused as dropoff points for resources and merchandise. This is the way we transfer goods and resources, placing them on the vendor for 1 credit. However, I believe our Architect also sells items to the public through her vendor, and this has been a consistent source of income for the PA.