Merchant Archive

stI think the general consensus of the proposed change is while it is probably necessary, it doesn't take into account the current bugs with the merchant profession. This particular change would require the merchant to maintain a pretty constant stream of customers inorder to afford the vendor fees, something that is nearly impossible for beginning merchant, and remains very very difficult with higher levels of merchant given the map advertising bug. This would be a good money sink later in the game, after more options for advertising have been added and the current ones fixed, but right now it effectively pushes anyone who is not part of a PA or master merchant out of owning a shop.

The sales tax applied to the merchant is the best suggestion so far, as it increases the money sink the more money you make. Plus doesn't severly punish those merchants who don't have a large customer flow, due to being either too new to the market or due to lack of advertising. 10% seems to be a good number right now.

Additionally, the merchant definately needs more methods of advertising that doesn't require the merchant sit near a starport all day, /shouting his/her store location. I run through player cities all the time, and if there was a way for merchants to advertise in the immediate vicinity of their shop, that would get my businessmore readily. If vendors occasionally spammed a /shout advert (say once every five minutes) I'd be able to find stores more easily. Or have an option that allows the vendor to show up on the overhead map, before the level that they show up on the planetary map (currently, when advertised on the planetary map, the vendor shows up on both). Or let merchants have the ability to advertise on the bazaar.

Once you've given the merchant more ways to advertise their wares and stores, and definately more ways to advertise at the first level of advertising, as suggested in this post and others, THEN and only then should you consider adding a vendor fee related to the TIME a product remains on a vendor. Otherwise, you punish merchants who can't, due to time constraints, advertise their wares continually, and force them from the profession.

st

1. Not ALL Players have money (let alone too much money) - as a not-yet-master DE you have already made it impossible for me to actually make a living in the SWG universe. Through nerfs, a broken profession, broken implementation of droids in SWG (uselefullness)and permadeath to droids the droid economy is a joke. You do this you will kill us all except for Masters because they alone can make lvl 5+6 mods and advanced Probots (only selling probot).

2. I am fine with you trying to reduce the number of dollars some player/professions are able to make (architects can sell houses for 100k, 250K, creature handlers can sell pets for 100s of K, weaponsmiths and armorsmiths can sell armor and weapons in the 10s of K and at a lower resource cost than droids). This can be done by properly balancing out the profession, yes it's harder, yes it's not a quick fix, but ultimately it's what you SHOULD do to fix the problem.

I IMPLORE you to think about this - don't hurt EVERYONE because a FEW are abusing - do this the sensible way - in the form of a SALES TAX that is a % fee deducted from the sale profit of an item at the time the sale is completed. That way those with professions that can charge 10s or 100s of thousands of K on items will be hit fairly (larger) than those of us with STILL BROKEN ECONOMIES/PROFESSIONS where u will likely drive me and other non-master DEs like me out of business (and u can bet cancelling my account).

Q: Either Implement a FAIR system that does not kill already broken professions/economies OR wait until you FIX those professions/economies before you implement this.

And surely you must realize as already pointed out in posts here - that this will NOT STOP people that can abuse and make scads of money from making more money - either by charging more because they have a high enough demmand product to do it, or by abusing the system/powergaming.

Do not go to the extreme to treat the extreme, do not give in to an easy and cheap fix to an imbalance issue because that just confirms to us that you really do not give 1 iota for those of us who play fair, who have to work to pay for our playtime, who have responsibilities beyond the fun we seek online, those of us who don't abuse, don't powergame.

stI find it extremely upsetting realize that you guys (the devs, not that they're actually going to read what I have to say) are more interested in nerfing everything in the game--everything that makes the game fun to play--then fixing the huge bugs. With every new patch, there's more nerfs and new bugs. Why on earth are you so intent on ruining the game while at the same time turning a blind eye to all the bugs? Your priorities are waaaaaay off. If these nerfs keep up, I'm going to be done with this game. I can't keep playing like this, and I'm sure neither can anyone else.

stAbsolutely nuts. I run my PA's shop for multiple professions, i'm a master armorsmith and merchant. I have on average 3-4mil of items in my vendors to offer the best selection. I have about 150k a day of income. My expenses are already on average 50k a day. Add in a 150k a day maintenence charge and i'm out of business. In fact i already am already having a firesale to reduce inventory so i dont get burned when you patch this (If i decide to stay), since its clear you already made the decision.

The bottom line is that you SOE, will save money at the cost of your customer base to an already flawed game. You have already admitted that more people are playing crafters then you expected and your DB can not handle the load. Obviously by putting in this change, similar to SCS, you realize that you will drive X number of merchants and crafters like me out of the game. Since i have near a thousand items on my vendors i use more then my 15$ in DB storage.

Merchant is worse off then commandos, yes its fair to say. Hiring line = joke. Advertising = Broken. Effeciency = underpowered. Management = ok.

Pure merchants are gone the way of the dinosaur, which is the way all crafters are heading on this trainwreck. Merchants dont add money to the system we only take it from the combat people, at great risk and cost to ourselves. Do not make US pay for your baz nitch errors. Do not make us pay for your duping errors. Do not make us pay for your design flaws. You forget we are already paying 15$ a month for this beta. Do not take away our fun. Do not take away our vendors.

st

Well the thread has snowballed beyond my ability to keep up with it in the time I have to read the forums, but I will say this

For those of you begging the devs to fix before you nerf I would offer this (may not be chronologically accurate)

DE's are gimped - The DZ70 got nerfed

DE's are still gimped - The Data module got'fixed' to not store missions

DE's are more gimped - The Probot got nerfed

DE's are even more gimped - Perma-death was introduced

DE's are horribly gimped - Storage modules were 'fixed' so now hold 1-6 items depending on level

DE's are unbelievably gimped - Data modules 'fixed' to not hold pets (they cant hold waypoints btw)

I dont think that the DE's have actually had anything fixed in their favour yet (Medical modules over lvl 3 are all the same and dont believe what you saw in the patch notes about Surgical droids being able to heal)

The devs dont have a history of putting stuff right before making you pay - theres to much money in the game apparently, but rather than sort out the corpse looting so people need to start paying for insurance and cloning they'd rather hit the people already suffering with maint fees because of bugged factories, bugged resource shifts (resulting in additional re-deed costs) and bugged maint calculations due to server downtime - dont hold out any hope.

st

This is totally and utterly wrong!

Lets say I am using my vendor in my shop (keyword here is 'my') and the proposed maintenance and I am selling a 3,000 credit item, then it will cost me 96 credits per day for that item, and therefore over the space of a week the cost raises to 672 credits. Now this is MY shop and MY vendor (I bought the shop, and I earned the vendor through hard work and experience).

A noob wants to sell some sampled ore that they macro'd for 3000 creditson the bazaar in Theed. Its costs him 20 credits per week. He does not have the shop maintenance, or this stupid unrealistic vendor maintenance and has a wider captive audience to browse his item.

What I will do the moment this is imposed is create a batch load of Survival Knives and name them - Ticket for - Deeds for Small Generic House, and sell this for 1 credit. The buyer of this would automatically send me an e-mail, which I will then respond to and close the trade by selling them the house they wanted. Is this what you want to happen to the Merchant Trade. I could even use thebazaar in Theed for this and shut my shop down.

Talk about planning to impose a way to totally destroy shops!. Its what you have done. Your removing a money sink and having the bazaar fill up again with CDEF's. Congratulations on a stupid idea!

ue

Well since you are trying to make the game more realistic how about some of these real life ways of sinking money

1. 25% income tax

2. Hefty property taxes

3. Medical insurance (this can have you waiting even longer to get healed)

4. Guild dues and professional dues

5. Oh how about a fee for every time you shoot or swing a weapon

6. Town toll booths

Oh I am sure there must be more ways we can remove money from the game besdies the already existing ones like harvesters, maintenance fees, weapons/armor deterioration, training fees, shuttle/starport fees oh and myfavorite one....the random harvester maintenance fee

ue

I am jusy utterlt disgusted. I am also amazed how some serious problems and biugs are left unfixed and then SOE picks up a huge nerf bat to hurt merchants.

I am an architect, so I sell high cost items that DO NOT HAVE a high profit margin. There are too many yahoos that flood the profession chasing the installtions branch for mining. Ridiculous vendor fees will break me.

Too much money out in the 'economy'? Well I certainly do not have it, and you will probably find, if you really look, that the majority of players are not 'rich'. It is all I can do to make money to pay the maitanance I have now. I am so sick and tired of maintenance fees, so adding more high cost fees will ruin my character.

Everything that could be said, has been said. Vender fees should be kept low at a fixed rate, not dependent on item value. Make merchant worth while! If yahoos are abusing the venders as storage, then make it so these yahoos have to dump skill points into the profession to reap the sweet rewards.

I have worked too hard to get where I am, and I cannot take this insane change if it becomes reality. I will close up shop, sell resources, and go fighter. I have enjoyed crafting and selling, and that has been the glue that keeps me on the game.

As an added note, adding more fees, taxes, etc. is NOT the answer. The crafter/merchants are taking the load of maintenance fees as it is with structure maintenance. Find a money sink else where (ex. fix insurance instead), and address the storage abuse issues in a sane way without punishing honest players.

st

Ed

Should have a fixed maintenance fee (nominal) and a success fee (a % base on the item being sold). The fix fee should be at or similar to maintaining a house and the success fee should be around 5% (same as the bank transfer).

Can make it more interesting (or realistic) for fixed maintenance fee by:

Droid/vendor machine - need to use power as the maintenance fee (just like the harvestors)

NPC - food (maybe cash also).

Creka- Corbantis

st

Well there is a work around the problem of vendor fees.

1- Work from Email Orders only...

2- Put stuff in the vendor only when customer is at shop. or Sell Face to Face.

I personally will keep my vvendor empty.

stMy only worry is what about all the stuff in the stockroom on my vendors that seems to be locked in limbo? Can't we get a fix in for that first? To me it seems that if the vendors charge for these (which they possibly could, seeing the past changes) then there's a lot of people who might have expensive items that are stuck in limbo that will be drained for things that they can't even get in the first place because you guys haven't fixed it. So while I agree that something needs to be done to sink some credits, maybe you should get it working right first before you start charging me more? Maybe when the vendors are doing the job they SHOULD be doing, we won't mind paying more for them. But paying more for something that's broken in the first place seems a bit like extortion.

st

I would prefer a sales tax on all purchase. I would even be willing to loose as much as %10.

For those of use way out in the middle of nowhere, it would kill us to have a high maintenance fee. but a sales tax on purchases would not hurt as bad.

Charge me a Sales Tax not a Maintenance fee.

--Seogae

eq

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ashia wrote:
ueHere is my two cents,

It seems there are two seperate issues: storage on vendors and vendor costs. I think there should be a separate aolution for each. First, limit the number of items that can be sold on a vendor. This limit could be small for a player with only business 3, say 25 items like the bazaar. The merchant tree would then increase the number of items you could sell, say +25 for novice and +50 for each box in the management branch, for a total of 250 per vendor. I don't what technical limits the database has or how the number of items increases the cost of running the servers for SOE, but this data could be used to tune this limit; in any case, increasing your merchant skill should give a large benefit in the number of items you can sell. Perhaps a separate per vendor limit and a total item count limit, to control the total number of items a player can stored.

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This solution has the same problems that the Inv_Val/1000 proposition has -- it treats all professions the same. An item cap may be fine for weaponsmith and architects. However, as a chef, this would kill me. It's not uncommon to have customers come in a buy 20 to 30 items in one shopping tour as they stock up on food. I'm suspecting that it would be the same with most merchants offering low-cost/high-volume items like stimpacks and power-ups... except those things can be sold in crates.

Any global vendor money sink is going to have to take a few things into consideration:

1. Not all professions make the same margins on their goods. While a Inv_Value/1000 system may be appropriate for a master weaponsmith who has high turnover and high profit margins, it would hurt those big ticket items with low turnover (architects) immensely.


2. Not all professions require the same inventory in order to be successful and provide a service to their customers. The architect can probably just keep 1 or 2 of each item on their vendor where, as I mentioned, the chef needs to maintain a stock of a couple/few dozen of each of the most popular items.


3. Does the money sink promote a work around? The "chit" system that has been mentioned numerous times in this thread is a good example. People can avoid the maintenance fees by selling tokens for 1 credit then handling the order personally. Thus, no money is taken out of the system, the players are having less fun, and the 24x7 core merchant is given an advantage over the casual merchant.

The best solution is still the sales tax. When the purchase confirmation box comes up, just add another line to it. "Purchase X for 10,000 credits plus 1,000 credits Imperial sales tax?" Merchants don't have to deal with figuring out new pricing, the money comes directly from the people bringing it into the system, and it's not a regressive tax. (It's also works within the lore of the game as it would make sense that an Imperial gov't would charge some kind of tax to maintain their armies and infrastructure.)

I realize that taxes have always been kind of a cheesy way of implementing a money sink. However, a sales tax is the best way of doing it fairly without destroying a few professions. They could even be creative and tie the faction costs of different items to the amount of taxes brought in by each side's merchants. Thus, if rebel aligned merchants brought in 55 credits and empire aligned merchants brought in 45 credits, the cost of faction items would adjust proportionately to reflect each side's access to R&D money. (As the Rebel merchants would sponge off the tax money and direct it to the rebellion leaders.)

Just anything but the draconian nerf hammer...

Cheers,

Kaizen Jonzun

Proprietor of The Drunken Jester and Master Chef

2380 3819 Radiant-Naboo-Keren