Merchant Archive
Thread: Vendor Maintenance Fees coming – your input request
As it stands there are some serious vendor problems. these all assume thatyou DO have the appropriate skills to use the features.
1) vendors do not wear the clothes you give them, they thank you and throw them away.
2)vendors stop ad barking when servers restart
3)vendors drop from the planetary map when servers restart
4)vendors dump unsold items to the stockroom after a week (the bazaar does the same except the bazaar has a visible timer indicating this is the case, vendors do not yet also dump items. In the case of a vendor, some of us stock literally hundreds of items only to get hundreds of ''auction unsuccessful'' emails a week later and a long, tedious restocking job.
Given all of this, the thought of also having it be a giant money sink sounds to me like, as someone said, we shall turn Hiring IV into Firing IV.
Vendors already cost, yes, but quite cheaply. However, we also have houses to place them in, and those cost. If you have seevral branches, now you have several houses. The idea of merchant skills and Vendors is to MAKE money. if with one hand you give and with the other take away you will find only worse problems and frnakly alot of players will give up their shops. Whats the point then?
On the subject of needing money sinks... Players are already frustrated waiting for things like vehicles. Surely the swifter introduction of those (as they were promised a good deal of time sooner than they are arriving) will provide ample things for people to buy. As a GM I understand the need to drain the player coffers a bit, but I only do so when they can get soemthing for their money. If youre thinking up things to just take without giving I say you are doing the players an injustice. Want to fleece those pockets? Make more things to purchase that are not player-made. don't just say hmmm well theyre making money so lets stop that hehe. There's a right way to do it and a wrong way. and so far, this sounds like the worst way. You will crush the player market entirely. Dont discourage player vendors and shops, you should be encouraging instead. Drain credits a more reasonable way.
Consider this. You are a Tailor. You PAY to buy a shope (house) , a mineral harv, a solar gen and a wearables factory (and that costs alot). Now you erect them. You PAY their whopping fees. You are PAYing to maintain the solar gen and using its power to feed the farm. now you erect vendors and PAY to maintain them (thankfully, at present, the first bit of relief as they are not expensive like farm equipment) Now you load them up with goodies and eh sell a few each day. My costs do not get factored into my price, im afraid the market will not bear the prices we might need to ask, so we make slight profit. Personally, selling about 20 items a day on good days, i seem to break a bit above even. How much more should we pay? I have spoken with the master crafters in my area and all have said the same thing. we pay enough to ply our trade. If the vendor fees increase they will close their shops and unfortunately I agree.
Want to remove player wealth? well first you have made it a goal to achieve wealth (I give you an entire merchant profession) dont complain if they are succeeding.If you feelyou should keep a caste stratified poverty level like EQ with ''ubers'' and ''have-nots'' I fel you again do the players an injustice. But again, if you wish to drain the coffers of those you feel have unfairly made too much too soon or just want to somehow control the wealth, then by all means give the players a WORTHWHILE outlet for the cash. Dont just take..exchange.
addendum--
Also bear in mind that you need either a money sink...or a character point sink. We are giving up an awful lot of points to become Master Merchants. shall this be repaid with vendor costs so overwhelming we just dump the shops, vendors and merchant profession. please just pick one. if you want the costs to be high then give back over half the points. We simply will not spend BOTH.
edPlease fix this issue before you fix the bug. If you dont ill have to be forced to shut down my shop. Maitenance should be taken away completely, and you should be chargeda certain 'tax' rate on each item sold.
Best idea ive seen,i mean,what if my stuff just sucks for people that comes to my shop and out of luck i cant sell a thing?
Really easy solution here...
Just charge whatever droid vendors charge for maint currently...
Then for all vendors, require an additional charge per item purchased = to X% of that item. Call it a usage fee. This would require merchants to pay their usage fee before adding new stock to the vendor, or alternately, the usage fee could be deducted from the amount of the revenue generated by the sale, so that X-100% would be received by the merchant.
If Usage Fee is 10% (which is kinda high), than the merchant would only get 90% of the revenue generated by the sale.
This might really get passed on to the consumers, but any other way where it is paid up front is likely to put merchants out of business, and make it almost impossible for them to generate revenue in the first place.Other ways will also cause an uproar by non-merchants since merchants will have problems keeping their vendors stocked since they don't want to incur the higher Maint Costs for having so much on their vendor. You can't have a player based economy and then tell the players that they can't effectively sell items on their own vendors due to the enourmous cost of that.
This way still creates a money sink, and it may create an even greater money sink if merchants increase their prices as a result of it. (10% of 110 is more than 10% of 100, not by much, but you get the idea.)
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=443576
Thank you Holocron
I have 6 vendors and a increased vendor fee just kill me
MONEY SINK
ok, firstly im a bit bothered by the notion of a money sink. You have created a Merchant profession and a player ''economy'' so that people who wish to make money can. Now, youre upset that they are making money and want to to fleece them. oh great. The problem is NOT vendors, my friend, its missions. That's money that comes from nowhere creating a limitless supply of credits coming from nowhere. This does not make an economy. An economy is based upon a fixed and finite amount of money that is in constant circulation. As it stands, if you wish to place a PA hall you must have 9 free lots. this translates to only pure combat characters (who have no farms, homes, shopsetc) will be running PAs. Now youre making it thoroughly unprofitable to be a merchant. Are you favouring combat chars? They can already do the following: Go grab a hunting mission to kill 40 worrts. go grab a general mission to clear a worrt lair. repeat the lair missions until you have completed the hunting mission. now youve made 6500 cr from the hunting mission and probably 10k from all the lair missions to get you to your goal of 40. btw, hide harvest all worrts. now sell the hides. ahhh see? youve raised your weapon skills nicely from fighting and made a huge sum. Oh? a crafter? spend on a harv, practice away saleable items and improve your skills...at a cost. So fighters make mony to level and crafters lose. lovely. Not good enough? hey remember all the costs to buy those farm and factory deeds? gotta pay maint fees too. same for your shop, and your vendors. say, how about we just make the vendor fees crush them? what fun! Seriously, if you want to create a money sink how about offering non playermade items people will want. then the money flies back out into the obscura from whence it came and he players will feel theyve gotten something worthwhile (like vehicles) the Devs will be happy to see their money-making class lose money and crafters can get a tiny bit of cost relief. frankly, you already have many costs applied to crafters and not to combateers...and then a combateer will look at a tailor's wares and say, ''oh 2k for your best item? nah too much'' ARG
Sales tax, please! =0
Making vendor costs based on amount of items listed will KILL the non-crafting (pure) merchant. A pure like myself has to have a HUGE inventory to make the sales. If the % based system goes in, I'll most likely be out of business relatively soon. =/
Here is the responce to this post. Go figure they put it in a different thread other then the one they started.
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=443576#M443576