Merchant Archive

"See, the whole point is that Merchants get NOTHING from taking away a vendor from an Artisan. A vendor is USELESS without advertising...if no one knows it's there, then no one will ever buy off it."

Is there some super great thing in advertising I missed? I have advertising 4 and don't use it at ALL!!!! too much work to relist my plantary map thingy daily. I still manage to sell 500-750k a day in items. I'm 110% positive if I can just use a vendor with nothing else to make that when artisans can do the same. Now why in the world did I MASTER merchant if I could just have business 3 to do the same thing?!?!?!?!? OOO yea merchants geta ton out of removing vendor from the business line. Just you can't see it till you do the time as a merchant.

Is there some super great thing in advertising I missed? I have advertising 4 and don't use it at ALL!!!! too much work to relist my plantary map thingy daily. I still manage to sell 500-750k a day in items. I'm 110% positive if I can just use a vendor with nothing else to make that when artisans can do the same. Now why in the world did I MASTER merchant if I could just have business 3 to do the same thing?!?!?!?!? OOO yea merchants geta ton out of removing vendor from the business line. Just you can't see it till you do the time as a merchant.

I agree, I have no idea why you would become a master merchant. But if your premise is correct (and I do not believe it is, but just saying), why would you become a master merchant if you get your novice merchant vendor and that's all you need?

Really, wouldn't fixing merchant be a better idea than nerfing a few newbies?

"...why would you become a master merchant.."

Same reason people become Commandos or Bounty Hunters or other broken professions. In hopes it will be fixed. And when it is fixed you'll get 100% of the new things. But the fact is until they fix the little bugs like house limit counting against all vendors but npc's and vendor access list permissions merchant is screwd hardcore.

I see merchant as a waste of skill points other than the additional vendors line. But I hardly see us as screwed. I'm making a fortune. I would like to have additional tools at my disposal, but the fundamental function of merchant is selling things and, well, I'm selling a LOT of things!

I would only agree that Novice Merchant required General Crafting XP if Business I-IV actually had certs to go along with them. That's my biggest complaint with the business line, if you take a vendor away from Business III, you make the business line 100% completely useless and it's the most useless path out of any novice profession in the game right now.

How about asking to enhance the business line, to make the grind up to Novice Merchant more fun first, then having some changes made to the merchant there. I'd like to see merchants be able to make signs for their shops and enhancing the advertising tree (and actually have a shop, not having to have a house), have parts for those things in the business line.

Lets work on enhancement and nerfing at the same time, it makes the transition so much easier.

Doesn't help me I can have 6 vendors if I can sell 250 items in 1 vendor or 250 items collectively in 6 vendors. Only 2 ways around this. Exploit npc vendors or have a vendor in each house seperiately.

I think before we start making a 'wish list' of things that would be nice to add to the vendors (like slide bar resource amounts, etc) how about FIXING WHAT IS BROKEN already??

Namely Ad 2 (which is on your list) and my biggest gripe, Hiring 4 (dressing your vendor). Personally I don't care about Ad 2, but I'm know lots of merchants who wanted that line specifically. Same goes for me with Hiring---it was the first line I raced through to be able to do that and its broken. Please get them to fix these type of bugs first so the Merchant class simply works as intended before we start with the wishlist.

The wishes you have listed, tho, are great ideas Would enhance the vendors considerably *cheer*

If you've managed to make use of multiple vendors in the same house without explioting the npc vendor bug I'd love to hear how you do it. Currently you must exploit the npc vendor item limit bug to be effective as a merchant with multiple vendors in the same house. Otherwise you need to have multiple houses to accomidate the volume of items.

I have three vendors. The one on the left is a wookie and has wookie items, the one in the middle is a human and has women's clothing, the one on the right is a rodian and has unisex and men's items. This makes it easier for my customers to find and buy items. They have a smaller list. The guys know that the item will actually be equipable, where some of the female only clothing isn't really all that clear.

There's a fourth vendor upstairs with the name of the shop that I use for advertising 3. I have a fifth vendor available, but my architect has quit and I haven't been able to get the medium generic for my second shop yet. I might set her up as a separate jewelry merchant.

Taking the time to split items up a bit so people can find them is something customers really appreciate. I've gotten a lot of complements on it. It's especially important with clothing since it's not always obvious who can equip what.

I honestly don't know what the "npc vendor item limit bug" is. They are NPC vendors. Their contents don't count towards the total of the house--I'm not sure that anyone has officially decided whether items on a vendor counting or not counting is the bug. In any case, I have about 150-200 items on them at any one time so it wouldn't make a difference anyway.

I think in any event, it's better to focus on bugs and buggish things than grand ideas for redesigning professions at this stage of the game.

Suggestion for #5, along those lines:

PLEASE, please, turn off the "automatic 7-day delisting" of vendor items! This has become a serious annoyance to me over time. I'm a tailor, so I need a large inventory. I have 300+ items on my vendor, and on average, have to manually relist 20+ items every day, not to mention the non-trivial hassle of dealing with all the "Auction Unsuccessful" e-mails this generates. It's about 20-30 useless minutes every day, essentially the equivalent of treading water just to get back to where I started.

PLEASE, please, turn off the "automatic 7-day delisting" of vendor items!

That's a good one and it's also an easy one for them to do. My guess is they will refuse because of database issues.

"Their contents don't count towards the total of the house--"

Exactly. If you use a terminal or droid items count against the house items. So your forced to use npc's to avoid this issue. It's unclear if npc's are correct or driod/termianls in item limits but I'dguest npc's are wrong since maintance on npc's is also messed up at 0 no matter what you do to them.

Uhm, add me, Hyla, Mosthula, Roley, Lun, Porthos all to the no pile for #4. This is simply a terrible idea. Please don't suggest that to improve one profession via the means of nerfing another, particulary one that we must have.

Also, why on earth are you suggesting that people should have to grind to be able to join a class? That is one of my favorite things about the merchant class, and I have around 3/5 of the class. I've dropped weaponsmithing and armorsmithing for the most part, and just have master Tailor because I tire of grinding out the xp, it isn't any fun....With the way merchant xp is, I can sit in my shop and carry on conversations with my customers, or travel and sell to them, and *gasp* have fun rather than grinding.

IMO, this suggestion really represents a disconnect with the playerbase and what you were selected to do. Your other points are well thought out and valid, this one seems to be a personal pet issue, and everyone else be darn. I don't see how this improves the merchant profession one bit, but it does greatly impact the others. Given the issues we face, this in no way should be on the top 5, much less top 20, for this profession. And yes, I have read all 3 threads now for your weekly posts, and I'm sorry butI counted the opposite of you, more people DISAGREE with you, not agree.

I realize you are here to represent the Merchant profession, but I dare say that this change would cause a large uprising amongst the rest of the crafting community. You can't wear blinders in your goal of improving this profession...

Candi, Master Tailor, Radiant

And whilethe Merchant's are trying to take over the Galaxy, the rest of us are focusing on JUST OUR PROFESSIONS!

You know.... I'm an armorsmith.... but I see that Artisan's can make Bone Armor. And by god the experience earned for Bone Armor is GC XP, so that means that future Weaponsmiths and Architects are digging into my market so they can reach theirs. Well hell, if the Merchant's want to nerf Artisan by limiting (or removing) our lowly droid merchant, then we Armorsmith's should unite against Bone Armor in the Engineering tree!!!

See how rediculous that sounds, and then to read that most of the Merchant community DOES NOT want to remove the Vendor from Bus III.... make's you wonder who has an agenda after all.....

You think you are getting shafted? Go check out the Chefs!