Merchant Archive

Basically if you do get your wish of merchant removal you will just be universially hated

No one is going to let you make millions of credits for doing nothing but having vendor skill points.

All that will happen is that larger PA's and cities will find someone to put all the goods up on. Independent merchants wont get a sniff. Smaller weapons will be placed on the bazaar, larget in 1-1 trades. People will go directly to craftsmen because they will be fully aware that all vendors just have a huge mark up on them.

I dont see how, in any way that you think getting rid of these vendors will help you.

Getting rid of empty ones is just common sence, any merchant with no sale for 3 weeks dissapears from the map, after 4 weeks from the game.

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Calfek wrote:

Basically if you do get your wish of merchant removal you will just be universially hated

No one is going to let you make millions of credits for doing nothing but having vendor skill points.

All that will happen is that larger PA's and cities will find someone to put all the goods up on. Independent merchants wont get a sniff. Smaller weapons will be placed on the bazaar, larget in 1-1 trades. People will go directly to craftsmen because they will be fully aware that all vendors just have a huge mark up on them.

I dont see how, in any way that you think getting rid of these vendors will help you.

Getting rid of empty ones is just common sence, any merchant with no sale for 3 weeks dissapears from the map, after 4 weeks from the game.

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To tell you the truth I don't care how crafters sell their goods as long as it doesn't include using stolen property to do so(aka vendors not paid for with the proper amount of skill points, or the vendor poach). If they want to sell direct to the customer and forgo any merchants, by all means sell away. If there is only one merchant that sells all goods within PC's for PA's, more power to them.Why would any other merchant stop others in their endevors?

Just do it in the confines of what's legal in the game. That means no vendor poaching.

But with that kind of uncompromising attitude you will shoot yourselves in the foot.

A more sensible approach would be to make vendor maintainence 10-50 times what it is now and reduce it through merchant skills, this instantly solves the problem of empty vendors (as they will still expire) and ensures that if people want to keep vendors without skill points they have to pay through the nose for it.

In addition if keeping vendors is against the rules then why is it in the game, have the developers come forth and said it is an illegal exploit, if it is then i dont believe it is beyonf their wit to remove these vendors.

However at the moment your approach seems to be to get rid of the current system without anything to replace it. I stand by what I sais about people not letting you get millions of credits. When I talked about PA's and cities etting up there own vendor, i mean that they will use an alt (especially with the number of slots that will be unlockedafter publish 10) the will be the norm, with no bonus to your profession.

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Calfek wrote:

But with that kind of uncompromising attitude you will shoot yourselves in the foot.

A more sensible approach would be to make vendor maintainence 10-50 times what it is now and reduce it through merchant skills, this instantly solves the problem of empty vendors (as they will still expire) and ensures that if people want to keep vendors without skill points they have to pay through the nose for it.

In addition if keeping vendors is against the rules then why is it in the game, have the developers come forth and said it is an illegal exploit, if it is then i dont believe it is beyonf their wit to remove these vendors.

However at the moment your approach seems to be to get rid of the current system without anything to replace it. I stand by what I sais about people not letting you get millions of credits. When I talked about PA's and cities etting up there own vendor, i mean that they will use an alt (especially with the number of slots that will be unlockedafter publish 10) the will be the norm, with no bonus to your profession.

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I am uncompromising at illegal game play. From Thunderheart, dev at SOE posted by DocSavag 4/22/2004 2:22PM:

"It was never intended for players to be able to keep and manage vendors after surrendering the Management skill boxes used to acquire them. This is scheduled to be fixed in a future publish and we want to upgrade vendors also, but it’s a bit early to start talking about that."

The code may be there, but it has been qualified by SOE as a bug, thus any attempt to use this code is concidered exploiting.

You are the one that is uncompromisingin trying to find any way to preventthe game finally siezing your contriband. Sorry, your idea about maintenance upgrades is not a fix. Face the fact that you have stolen the tools of 9 to 92 skill points.

I have been very vocal about having a vendor leasing system and consignment system put in place to allow widespread access to vendors leagally. What have you brought to the table? Just more ways to color a cheat?

Just how many millions did you make off of the stolen skills anyways? You complain to us about wanting to steal "millions". Why don't youanswer for the millions you stole from the game exploiting?

Do you have the CSR's name or a ticket number? I'd like to follow up but I need that info to ask about it.

This isn't new behaviour on behalf of the vendor it has always done that. I agree that deleting the items seems wrong. I also don't want the merchant forced to buy them to remove the vendor. returning them to you might not be technically possible to do though.

Thanks Doc... I can't imagine this happens too often, so I hope it would be in the power of the CSRs who have logs to be able to reimburse those people who's items get deleted...

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TheWalt2 wrote:

Thanks Doc... I can't imagine this happens too often, so I hope it would be in the power of the CSRs who have logs to be able to reimburse those people who's items get deleted...

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Item reimbursment is problematic and usually not possible. Generally CSR's can reimburse you in credits or in resources that were used to make the items but not the actual items themselves. They don't have access to retrieve the items. It is possible for the devs to retrieve them but that process is apparently fairly complex and takes a bit of coding each time to do so they only do it in special cases (like when all our vendors were deleting our items every 14 days)

Well in this case that would be good, because all the items were resources... I'm still waiting to hear if the person who's items were destroyed has gotten a CSR response....

Well, nice to see this list Doc!

I heard about this a few weeks ago from some friends, then I heard some rumors about the merchant revamp. I found this thread and fly over it, so now I decided to let you know my opinion, my ideas and hope to find a better way for the Issue #1.

Let me first say, I didn't see there a skill point exploit, because everybody is doing so and the merchant skill is not really a profession like AS, WS, Tailor or what ever by now. You have nothing more to do then put up some vendors and waiting for the xp. Wow what a great profession. I mastered the profession without doing anything great within 2 or 3 weeks or so. But anyway.

I appreciate the revamp of the merchant profession. But, .... most of us crafting people need a minimum of one vendor to sell things at times when we are not online and at prices we want to have for it. Otherwise it would be very hard to make money with only a crafting profession and the option to sell for a cheap price on the bazaar or a merchant who wouldn't by things at a higher price when he couldn't sell it for more. This way it would be hard for a crafter to sell things and earn some money.

Also you could only sell 24 items at a time for a maximum at 6000 credits. Wow! I would be rich in 100 years. Everybody have to sell other things like droped items, resources or what ever for a higher price than 6000 credits. Otherwise a crafter had to sell his crafted things to a merchant for a small amount of credits so that the merchant can sell it for a price like crafter who also have the merchant skill and selling things for the normal price. I hope you understand what I mean.

Your plans to kill all the vendors of owners who doesn't have the skill anymore is a direct hit to my personal roleplaying story. Cause I am the leader of a small PA that named "Wasteland Hunt And Trade". The idea behind this RP-PA would no more possible in the future like now. So either we are spending all our money on a second or third account or we only can do hunting respectively do trading. But both won't work for us with that publish. We have also a merchant tent and other vendors at different locations to get a great present for customers. But, ok thats my personal disaster.

So, I sit down and was thinking about this problem the last days. Now, I have an idea for two possible compromises and I hope you take care and use one of it in the upcoming publish.

IMHO every crafter needs to sell things, my proposal is to have every crafting profession one Vendor at the novice level and a second at the master title. The vendors are bulky or randomly. When the master title would be droped, the master vendor would not functioning and could only be used by the owner to withdraw and retrieve the stored items. The same goes for the novice title. When surrender the needed skill the vendor will disappear from the maps. A Novice should only be able to create a bulky vendor. A master crafter should be able to place random NPC vendors and have the ability to let a merchant customize his vendors. Let's say you want a barking NPC or a registered vendor, a merchant could setup the vendor as wanted for you.

What I mean is, that noone of the crafting profession should have to invest skillpoints to have one or two vendors. So, please let every crafting profession have a minimum of one vendors (or two at master). The merchant profession should be able to have more then 6 vendors. I think 10 would be a good count.

The second possible compromise could be, when an master crafter who has also owned the master merchant title at anytime, gets a status of holding all the vendors like they are standing, as long as the maintenance is paid. But the vendors are only functioning if the owner holds a master title in anyone of the crafting professions. Otherwise the vendors would not functioning for other then the owner, who only could withdraw and retrieve items from the vendors. The vendors would be disappear from the maps but would be standing until maintenance is empty and status is 0%. The disadvantage is that the owner only could move, customize or change vendors when he learn the merchant tree again.

I thought this are two good compromises for the merchants. I'll be sure, when loosing my vendors I haven't fun anymore in this game. I mastered the merchant tree nearly two times (i missed some skill points for the second time), cause I moved my shop to another location and I had to skill the merchant again to bring up the new vendors. For me it's ok, when I must have the skill to customize or move vendors, but I am not willing to do so a third time, drop my hardly earned pistoleer xp and hold it for only be able to sell things at my wished price.

With the publish the merchant gets many interesting new abilities but in my eyes it is not a good idea to kill everybodys vendor when the skill is missing. I think SWG will lost a good diversity of nice shops when the publish goes out like announced. It's one of the great things I liked from the beginning in SWG, that you could be a crafter and a hunter at the same time, but a crafter needs also to be able to sell those things.

The game I was playing before, was at least needing a over high specialism after many balancing changes, that you had to have one account for a hunter and a second for trader or crafter. Only doing one of those professions would made me tiered. I hope you do not make the same mistake. I think you can feel how sensitive I am reacting on those changes, but nevermind it's only a dumb customer. :/

At least I want to have a definite answer about what would be happen on the Publish? Would my vendors disappear? What's with all those things in there? Are they lost? (I haven't enough place to save them all in my house. Cause my shop and my second house is full of items). After the publish, will I be able to sell things that where already in the vendor before the publish, but not be able to sell new things?

BTW! Is there a way to /addignore those silly barking drones, like I do with every silly player who is spaming me down at a spaceport?

Greetings from Germany,
Toma Hawk @ Gorath

(Sorry for my bad english, I hope you can understand what I am writing.)

Tomoto

Sorry but your proposals basically take all the skills from the Merchant profession and give them to other professions. Would you also compromise by giving the Merchant profession 2 draft schematics from every crafting profession? Even if you were for that it wouldn't fly because we don't craft .. and you can't use a vendor ..without the appropriate skill points. It costs 9 points for you as an Artisan Based crafter to get a vendor. That is it. If you aren't an artisan the cost is 24.

If you want to role play someone with lots of vendors you need to get the merchant skills to support them. Its just going to have to be that simple. We have our profession and you have yours.

A compromise.

To a degree I have to agree with toma, just removing those vendors and all the stuff on the vendors would create havoc... I propose a way for a soft transition:

How about this:
If somebody drops the Merchant skill, the vendor will not disappear, but will be more expensive to maintain.
Say 1.5 the maintainance for the first week after dropping the skill,
1.5*1.5=2.25 times the maintainance for the 2nd week,
1.5*1.5*1.5=3.375 times for the 3rd week and so on
After only a few weeks the cost wil be prohibitive
After 6 Weeks we are at 11.4 times maintainance, after 12 weeks at 129.7 times the maintainance.
In this way, nobody will be able to hold his merchants for a long time after dropping the skill, but he will be able to empty the vendor without loosing too much stuff.

Remark: the factor of 1.5 is just a number that seems to amke sense to me. A larger number like 2 could also be chosen: 10 weeks for maintainance increased by a factor of 1024.

Regards

Niacia