Merchant Archive
Thread: Vendor Maintenance Fees coming – your input request
The maintenance fee suggested by Q-3PO is too high in my opinion.
As a good crafter/merchant you will always have a large stock of items listed on your vendor to have customers happy.
Some are cheap, some are expensive.
It is rather rediculous to pay a percentage based maintenance on what the value inside the vendor is:
A) The vendor should cost a fixed maintenance fee per day: in my opinion around 500cr /day
B) Additionaly the vendor should "keep" 5% of all the sales done.
If you have several 100K creds worth of items in your vendor, and a few bad days were customers do not come (which happens sometimes) then the percentage based maintenance fee would eat you up.
2-3 days... 50K maintenance gone for no "return service".
How are sales people in RL payed?
With a low fixed salery (if at all) and a "bonus" system based on sales volume.
This is how it should be done here as well.
Well right now..my vendormaintance is250..makes maintance about 5-8k a day. On average I sell 1-2 10k items a day. So I'm loosing credit since these items cost credits to make.
Any further increase only encourages people to lag and spam with selling shouts in already laggy towns.
By basing the fee system on stock price you figure you reduce the amount of stuff in the game.
Maybe this will work, maybe not, but I think you can accomplish the same thing without killing off the entire merchant profession and hurting casual players and dabblers in the merchant profession.
The better idea is to limit the max number of items you can list to some reasonable number. I will not say what because I am not a merchant, but I would guess about 150 items/vendor for master merchant level vendors.
You could also tie vendor max inventory size to merchant levels to give dedicated merchants an edge in variety and amount of stock. People might even start selling to merchants instead of end users resulting in a more healthy system and one in which the sales tax can take its necessary cut for the sink.
By combining max vendor inventories with a flat fee + sales tax system you accomplish both goals while making a system we the players can actually work with.
You other idea does neither very well and would not be popular with the player base.
1) Change the formula to be per hour rather than 45 minutes;
2) The cost is way too much.
The best idea I like so far mentioned is a flat fee(2-4cr/hr for vendor) + a small sales fee(2-5% of the price).
Actually I think a flat fee+flat fee would be even better than that. 2-4cr/hr for placing the vendor plus 10cr per listing. This emulates the in-city bazaar, makes it a little cheaper since he is your own employee and doesn't penalize the seller for having large ticket items and not being able to sell his wares.
Tailors have nothing of real value to sell. Since tissues aren't working properly yet or at all, we can't get a high price out of anything, even at master level, but are forced to keep a high number of items for sale because of the selection available. If you do this, you will drive a lot of tailors out of business. Others have posted flat fee+ sales percentage, please at least consider this.
BTW - shame on you guys for using this thread as an advertisement for your shops.
I agree, a tax makes more sense.
Having to calculate vendor costs and item costs and manage resources, factories, items, and the shop itself, it all gets to be confusing.
Can't you just tax, say 5% or 6% or what ever % of the item sale, like what happens when you tip someone?
The same effect would occur, but not until after the sale. This will allow new crafters to get into the game easier, rather than perventing it altogether. Plus, this would allow others that are not primary crafters, such as myself, to have a vendor for items.
What this amounts to is a user fee. Who should foot the bill for it? The buyer or the seller? IRL it would be buyer, but with this convluted system, the seller is the one who will have to foot the bill at first. Once the crafter developed a name and they were moving items at a regular interval, the ywould know how much to upcahrge, but until then, they have to eat the costs themselves.
A straight tax would have the buyer foot the bill and be eaiser to figure into the cost and would be a set amount, rather than having to be retaxed on teh same items over and over and over and over again.
a bit confusing, and I am no expert, just my thoughts.
I think it's been stated by SOE before that they want to make sure that vendors are not used as storage, if this is still true, they will most likely be averse to implementing a solution that does not penalize pricing items to stay indefinitely on a vendor. For what it's worth, I don't think that thisshould remain a seriousconcern and I hope that they do switch to a transactional versus a 'situational' cost scheme.
That said,if the 'fixed + variable sales tax' model is not palateable to the developers, the model must be revised. A straight-line function, as has more than adequately been pointed out in this discussion, becomes prohibitively expensive for high price items with low margins (e.g., the architects, of which I am one) and using a vendor really doesn't make sense.
I'm not going to claim that any of these are 'the' best solution, but here are some ideas off the top of my head that might be worth kicking around. I'm trying to be balanced with them, and address the issues:
1. Sales Tax + Fixed Cost (as advocated here, major drawback from developer view is litte/no penalty for holding items indefinitely)
2.Specialist Vendors: If there were vendors where the only saleable items were deeds (or clothing, or armor, etc) we could have multiple pricing schemes. Either you can't sell a 'non-compatible' item on this vendor, or it costs much more to maintain)
3. Capacity Controlled Vendors: Similiar to 2, allow choice of different vendors (and pricing schemes). As a shop owner, I could choose between these vendors, as an example:
V!:
Yet again its out with the nerf bat instead of fixing the problems with the class, oh well you wont stop doing that so heres my suggestion.
Have a basic flat fee, not too much just something that will keep you happy. Base the main percentage of the maintenance fee on sales say 10-20% of the sales. Then increase the effect of the reduced vendor fees for merchants, upto 50% at least for a master. Then allow merchants to give vendors to other players with the full benefits of that merchant ie advertising, styles etc. Then allow the receiving player to have conplete access to that vendor and the merchant takes a cut from that vendor, say along the lines of 50% of the maintenance cost saving. That would make merchants a lot more usefull.
Oh and 1 more suggestion too, increase the bazaar fees significantly, this would reduce the load on the database (and give the mouse an easier time) and make private vendors more worthwhile.
To be honest this nerf wont really effect me as I sell resources which means I have to use terminal vendors as you still havnt fixed NPCs having a problem with split resources.
I am a soon to be master weaponsmith. Anyone who has been to my shop knows that I carry ATLEAST 5-10 of every weapon I can decently make. Thats HUNDREDS of weapons. I have 1 vender for ranged weapons alone and it has 130ish items ranging from 2k-9k. My melee vender has about 75 weapons. Thats 200 weapons total, and the planned maintence costs will totally destroy my way of doing things. I cannot afford 20k a day in maintence for 2 venders (I actually have 4 venders total clothing/architecture/2 weapons). I have gotten repeated tells/emails from people telling me that my shop is very nicely stocked, and they will be faithful customers because of it.
I say 500 a day per vender and 10% 'sales tax' (vender fee) would be sufficient. Each box in efficency (and the master box) should drop the % cost by 1% (so 5% at master).