Merchant Archive
Thread: Vendor Maintenance Fees coming – your input request
LOL, 33 pages of replies, and I'm still going to add another...
Please make it a sales tax, based on sales. Whatever method of implementation you use to do this, I'm sure you can bundle in Merchant XP with it...i.e. Make a sale, get Merchant XP, pay fee...rinse, repeat.
Sure, you could power levela Merchant by doing this, but if it were a 5% sales tax, who would want to spend a ton of cash on just a few points of Merchant XP?
Anyway, I went off topic there....I'd just prefer to see vendor maintenance work as a sales tax, which has been suggested already about 12 billion times. 
Just adding my voice to the choir: Very tiny maintenance flat fees, and a sales tax/commission.
I must say that if you implement what you stated, Q, I will not bother with Vendors at all, as it will be far too expensive. A tax on sales is the only thing that makes sense.
if my vender didnt rip my arse off it may be better to start with
one day depostied 7500 one friggin hour later my vender is out of dam money and broken again so i have to ppay more to keep my vender good. after a couple times of this i pulled all 50 items off the vender and **edit**canned it
OK, all vendors and shops are not created equally, which means you cannot charge vendor fees the same on all vendors and in all shops equally. I run a small shop but put a lot of different items on my vendors because that is the only way I can compete with the competition I have, if my customers come in and see a wide selection they like that and will come back.
BUT
In order for me to do that I have to have a lot of items on the different vendors I have and that meansthose items total up to a lot of credits, and those items sit there a long time sometimes, right now I'm being charged a lot of credits on the terminal vendors just to have a wide selection for my customers sitting there!
NOT FAIR!
I don't do hundreds of thousands of credits a day in business like some of these master weapons and armor dealers do, why should I be charged the same as they are? Do it on a per item basis, as each item is sold then take 10% commission or more as a vendor usage fee or a storage fee or whatever you want to call it, but don't charge me per hour for have the vendor sitting in my house, isn't that why I get charged house maintenance fees already and why I have a house item limit?
I trained up my merchant skills so I could place more vendors and to get reduced vendor and structure fees, don't make me now pay more and place me in the same category as some Master Weapon and/or Armor or other dealer who never bothered training their Merchants skills who are making 100, 200 or more hundred thousand credits than me per day in sales and make me pay the same in vendor fees as they are.
My highest priced item is probably A Duster right now. Q: how does that compare to a T21 or a 41% Composite Armor Chest Piece? A: It Doesn't even come close.
When you put this in, please make sure it's fair and reasonable for everyone, not just for the High and Mighty in the game. Remember you have already done enough for them, with the original factory nerfs and other changes, it's time to make them feel it and pay back where it hurts for a change and not hurt the little guy so much, if you wantto make the game so everyone can play it on an even scale this is a great time to prove it!
Mrbledsoe Saidso
1) If the reason for this is a money sink, then many of the ideas people have come up with here are very valid and reasonable. While you can't give the players everything they want, you can't(shouldn't) punish them severly. I agree that it was the intention for setting a maintanence on these vendors and the change should be expected, it should not be severe.
By the time I am done paying the maintanence on my house, harvestors and vendors, there will be nothing left. If I was one of those people to get master crafting of some elite profession with the full xp crafting factory, I would be on top right now and less concerned about the vendor fees. Since I am not a master craftsman, and have no way of competing with those people on specialized expensive goods, I have to offer a variety of them, and a variety will cost allot.
2) If the purpose is a item sink... database improvement by lessoning the items that are made and stored on vendors till they are sold, then the draconian amount that is being proposed will suit this purpose. People wont be able to afford vendors, and since overal storage in the form of houses is lessoned, fewer items will be made and less the database has to store.
Honestly, if the REAL reason is to reduce money in the game, then all you have to do is slow the influx of it in. Less money from missions,
1) If the reason for this is a money sink, then many of the ideas people have come up with here are very valid and reasonable. While you can't give the players everything they want, you can't(shouldn't) punish them severly. I agree that it was the intention for setting a maintanence on these vendors and the change should be expected, it should not be severe.
By the time I am done paying the maintanence on my house, harvestors and vendors, there will be nothing left. If I was one of those people to get master crafting of some elite profession with the full xp crafting factory, I would be on top right now and less concerned about the vendor fees. Since I am not a master craftsman, and have no way of competing with those people on specialized expensive goods, I have to offer a variety of them, and a variety will cost allot.
2) If the purpose is a item sink(I think this is what the intent is, to improve the database problems)... database improvement by lessoning the items that are made and stored on vendors till they are sold, then the draconian amount that is being proposed will suit this purpose. People wont be able to afford vendors, and since overal storage in the form of houses is lessoned, fewer items will be made and less the database has to store.
Finally, whatever you do, I think the fair thing to do, would be to fix the broken class, and I am not talking about what is percieved to be broken by players, I am talking about what IS broken by looking at skill trees and reading the manual.
Basically, before you fix the maintanence fee bug...
- fix the hiring IV bug
- fix the add barking bug
- fix the sign bug
None of these are working correctly, and these affect the merchant in a negative way.
Be nice and let the reduced vendor fee bug in to COMPENSATE for the other bugs that hurt our class.
Probably a poor analogy, but it is like....
"Waiter, my meal was cold, the service was bad, and I ordered a steak and you brought me a hamburger..."
"Sorry Sir, let me knock off a few dollars off your meal or give you a certificate for a free one on your next visit."
Plainly put, if the service that is provided has a problem, a good business will make it up to the customer. In this case, the "make up" is simply NOT doing something.
NO vendor fees till those other bugs are fixed PLEASE!!
This is turning into quite the long thread, but here's my input, anyway...
I have struggled along as a Chef since almost day 1. Which means, since factories were bugged for us, I had to make everything by hand in small stacks and sell piecemeal--100 here, 250 there, and so on. Needless to say with 4 or 5 harvesters I wasn't making very much money. Now that I'm a little higher up on the skill tree, I can finally make some pretty decent stuff, so I was able to get a small house with a vendor, who is advertised on the map. And while I still may only make 2 or 3 sales a day, along with running missions I can keep my little operation going.
So, food factories are finally fixed! YEE HAW, I think, I can finally sell CRATES on my vendor to people, they'll get all the food they want and it will save them inventory space!
However, if these vendor fees are increased to the formula stated at the beginning of this thread, I will have to completely get rid of my vendor and start selling things in town. I can't put a crate of Tatooine Sunburns up on my vendor, I was charging 500 a use and those crates could have like 200 uses in them. While I wasn't planning on selling them for 100k, it was going to be AT LEAST 30k. It's only fair considering the pricing I have already had in place, and the fact that with 200 sunburns, that person is not going to be buying from me for a long time. But if those things just sit there, and sit there, and sit there, there's no way on earth I could even afford to have one up for sale.
The way I see it, also, is that NPC vendors are the last type of vendor we get. They are sort of the "uber" vendors. So perhaps they should be more cost-effective then other types.
Again, leven if it was said countless times before- DO NOT base the cost of a vendor on time/value, but base it on the value of sold items plus a fix cost. I heard one argument that might stand against this is players will use vendors for storing instead - but thats just laughable, since there really are enough other ways of storing stuff (and of course there is the vendor "storeroom" - so if you have a proplem here limit the max. amount of items per vendor!).
The timebased maintanece just means that I cna only put items on the vendor that sell really good, while i now like to have two of each weapon time in my vendor so that everybody could find what he is searching for, even if most of the people just buy highend stuff. That will crippple the merchant class completly!
Laos
I agree with what most people have said so far...
A percentage of sales is totally legitimate, and/or an hourly wage that is not based on inventory.
If you absolutely have to use this kind of formula, put a cap on it so the max is 1k per day or something.
As an industrial architect, it is complelty worthless to have a vendor that would cost me that much. I would just leave them empty with all the deeds on the floor.
I know people dont like it when the game is compared with real life, but imagine a place like costco, or ikea with this kind of structure. they would be out of business in a week.
-tac
My views on Merchant Fees:
A percentage like 10% of the item's cost when sold should be charged out of the Merchant's profit, or since the sales can only be posted for 6 days, a fixed weekly salary.
This percentage rate, of course, represents the Vendor being paid fromcommision based on sales, which is fairly realistic. I can see more exotic vendors making a higher commision, but certainly not per hourbased on inventory.
Sales are very unpredictable and large hourly fees like this will only serve to make sure that merchants cannot offer a wide selection without actually losing money.In an economy where Salespeople made an hourly wage based on the volume and price of inventory, someone working at Radio Shack or Compusa would be making 500$ or more per hour.
That, in a nutshell, is my biggest argument against an hourly mercantile charge.