Merchant Archive
Thread: Current Merchant Issues List
Tharryth wrote:
From DocSavag:
Tomoto
Sorry but your proposals basically take all the skills from the Merchant profession and give them to other professions.
**** end C&P
This is a bit late Doc. Everyone has already gotten the ability of a scout to pull pets and vehicles from their DPs without investing any SPs in Scout. So you are saying no comprise is possible? Then you don't mind never calling a pet (if you have one) or a vehicle anywhere you like without using a camp? Even if your in the middle of no where scanning for resources and your bike autostores? And he wasn't talking about all of the skills per say. Just the ability to place 1-2 vendors (novice/master) to sell items from.
Just a thought
I empathise with all non-merchantpeople who need an outlet to sell their goods... It's called a MERCHANT!!! If you want to sell on a vendor, be a merchant. Otherwise, enter into an agreement with a merchant and sell through them. That the way it is. I hope the DEVs give everyone running an illegal vendor some time to get rid of their stuff before they delete the vendor, say 14 days. Then BAM! Get rid of the illegal vendors. When a person deletes the skills necessary to place vendors, the vendors should immediately begin to deteriorate as if they had no maintenance. After a few days, they should fall.
Can someone tell me when to expect the patch to fix the illegal vendors?
Thanks,
Myuki - Mayor Mountain View, Chilastra
Politician/Merchant
DocSavag wrote:
17Game PlayStop Vendor Rotating during Ad bark
You have removed the rotate commands from the vendor menu but the vendor still rotates himself when ad barking to someone outside the room. This causes the vendor to end up facing the wall. We request that the rotation during ad barking be disabled.
DocSavag wrote:
1ExploitMerchant Skill Point Exploitation
Currently it is possible to set up your merchant tent. Get your vendors, set your advertising. Dress the vendors and then surrender all merchant skills and business skills without any effect. You are then able to run your merchant enterprise without any merchant skills until you need to change some aspect of your shop. Many merchants feel this is unfair to them and allows people to use those skills for other crafting professions or combat professions which is against the spirit of the skill point system.
Perhaps you can clear somethings up for me, DocSavag.
I agree that yes, the profession needs to have this issue fixed, I have a few questions on the matter.
First of all - is this going into publish 9 with the 'empty vendors' not appearing on the map? And, if they do make it so you have to have the merchant skills to have merchants, are they really going to make the vendors just poof? While many of the merchants may feel it is 'fair' that these people loose all their resources and items, etc for exploiting, that is not a very wise idea PR wise because people do quit the game when they loose their items - and where many people may have quite a few things on their vendors, unless they are given a way to get them off after the change over, they will quit the game. And while people can feel it is fair, it comes across to non-merchants as petty of a person to wish such a misfortune on another player - I have lost items, not due to merchanting issues, and the feeling is not great. Loss of items forced upon the population by the devs will have horrible results and while many merchants will feel justice was served, the larger picture needs to be looked at here.
Secondly - will merchants be given more vendors in the skill trees? The reason for this question is two fold - one personal and one on the larger scale.
You see, my guild has set it's hall up as a Nightclub (smuggling guild, we use it as a front) and the idea was to have people drop non-functional vendors (non-initialized) vendors as NPCs to add to the atmosphere. The ones with actual items for sale were going to be run by the merchant in the guild, but the other vendors were to add a bit of flare to the Nightclub for RPing purposes.
If she can get more vendors, that would be great. If she can't, we won't be able to do this very well because most of her vendors will be tied up as city vendors. Yes, it's a selfish reason to ask the question, but that's part of it. I'm hoping that maybe they will give Bio-Engineers craftable faction pets that are humanoid so I can just drop deeds as NPCs, but chances of something like that are probably slim to none.
The second is for people who do run their city merchant areas and 'rent' out their vendorsor host vendorsso people in the city can sell their items. Six vendors is not going to cover all the various crafting professions very well, and a lot of cities only see one, maybe two dedicated merchants. Additional vendors would greatly help to keep item types seperated and give all the people in a city someplace to sell their items if they don't want merchanting skills (or the lame box vendor).
Again, I agree that this needs to be fixed, but I think that they will need to do a lot of things to merchant all at once to make it work right and not totally upset the non-merchant player base. If you can answer my questions, Doc, it would be great.
AlanjaAngeli wrote:
DocSavag wrote:
1ExploitMerchant Skill Point Exploitation
Currently it is possible to set up your merchant tent. Get your vendors, set your advertising. Dress the vendors and then surrender all merchant skills and business skills without any effect. You are then able to run your merchant enterprise without any merchant skills until you need to change some aspect of your shop. Many merchants feel this is unfair to them and allows people to use those skills for other crafting professions or combat professions which is against the spirit of the skill point system.
Perhaps you can clear somethings up for me, DocSavag.
I agree that yes, the profession needs to have this issue fixed, I have a few questions on the matter.
First of all - is this going into publish 9 with the 'empty vendors' not appearing on the map? And, if they do make it so you have to have the merchant skills to have merchants, are they really going to make the vendors just poof? While many of the merchants may feel it is 'fair' that these people loose all their resources and items, etc for exploiting, that is not a very wise idea PR wise because people do quit the game when they loose their items - and where many people may have quite a few things on their vendors, unless they are given a way to get them off after the change over, they will quit the game. And while people can feel it is fair, it comes across to non-merchants as petty of a person to wish such a misfortune on another player - I have lost items, not due to merchanting issues, and the feeling is not great. Loss of items forced upon the population by the devs will have horrible results and while many merchants will feel justice was served, the larger picture needs to be looked at here.
Secondly - will merchants be given more vendors in the skill trees? The reason for this question is two fold - one personal and one on the larger scale.
You see, my guild has set it's hall up as a Nightclub (smuggling guild, we use it as a front) and the idea was to have people drop non-functional vendors (non-initialized) vendors as NPCs to add to the atmosphere. The ones with actual items for sale were going to be run by the merchant in the guild, but the other vendors were to add a bit of flare to the Nightclub for RPing purposes.
If she can get more vendors, that would be great. If she can't, we won't be able to do this very well because most of her vendors will be tied up as city vendors. Yes, it's a selfish reason to ask the question, but that's part of it. I'm hoping that maybe they will give Bio-Engineers craftable faction pets that are humanoid so I can just drop deeds as NPCs, but chances of something like that are probably slim to none.
The second is for people who do run their city merchant areas and 'rent' out their vendorsor host vendorsso people in the city can sell their items. Six vendors is not going to cover all the various crafting professions very well, and a lot of cities only see one, maybe two dedicated merchants. Additional vendors would greatly help to keep item types seperated and give all the people in a city someplace to sell their items if they don't want merchanting skills (or the lame box vendor).
Again, I agree that this needs to be fixed, but I think that they will need to do a lot of things to merchant all at once to make it work right and not totally upset the non-merchant player base. If you can answer my questions, Doc, it would be great.
It won't be happening with the "Remove Empty Vendors from the Map" that is a small change. The vendor skill point fix is a major change and it will be a while yet though I don't know exactly when. Certainly not until after the Jedi Publishes (9 and 10)
As far as I know there is no plan to increase the number of vendors merchants have. I have asked a question about that which will probably be answered this week (but I don't know that it will be an answer that will help at all)
Balkstar wrote:
Frankly, I won't be sad to see exploiters go if they choose to leave. You seem to be worried about the exploiters feelings. What aboutthe rest of the players that have stolen extra skills outside of the alotment of skill points we all must work within? I'm still waiting for their apology. I have no sympathy for them.
Again, while it may seem like justice for the merchant, SOE is a business, and they are not going to stop treating things from that perspective. While I don't think that it should be easy to get the items back off the vendors once they revamp merchant, I think it still needs to be an option.
It would be a better move to make the vendors no longer accessible for someone without the skills. They should also be made inaccessible for customers, so they aren't still making money off of it. In order to regain access and get your items off of it, you have to pick up merchant again. Then if a person was unwilling to pick up merchant and did not retrieve their items off, they aren't going to have too much room to **edit** because they were given a way post-revamp to get them.
Problem is that they can become vending machines at any time. If you could hit the permenant vendor-off swtich on them, I wouldn't be as opposed to it, but as of now there is no switch, so therefore people should not have vendors that are not backed up by skill points, no matter if you are looking for ambiance in your club..
See, that's what bites about being an honest individual about it - even though I never turned on the vendors, people will always be paranoid that I would. I agree, maybe if there was a perma-off switch it would be better; there wasn't so I just never turned them on. A lot of RPers who use vendors as NPCs are the same way - they aren't poaching the merchant class, they are only being storytellers using an NPC.
Ask the tailor profession to see if they have an escalated time table for the development of manaquins. I think that is more to what your club needs more then vendors.
Back when I first started using vendors as NPCs, they weren't even talking about bringing in manaquins. The only way to have ambiant NPCs was to use a vendor or a droid deed, but really, droids give a different feeling than human beings. And if, like everything else, the addition of content for tailors is after JTL, then for the next 3 - 5 months my guild and my city is going to have to choose between having a bunch of vendors or having the NPCs we want. While yes, we can set the NPCs up as vendors, that leaves us only six because most people only have an artisan merchant or are now expecting Ylena to run a merchant for them. Personally, I liked having uninitialized vendors as the NPCs so they were distinctly seperated from the actual vendors.
And above that, 6 merchants still won't effectively handle an entire cities crafting population - people really do get put off when there are multiple types of items on one vendor because the interface to sort through them isn't always as user friendly as people claim and tends to bug often (at least on Lok, but I've heard the planet is having issues). If they really want to make merchants useful, more vendors will help because that's one more person the merchant can cover without having a hard to sort through vendor.
If you remove the empty vendors from the map, wont this just encourage those who place vendors purely for xp to put 1 or 2 items on them ? even if you set a figure of say 10 items, it only takes then 10 individual units of resources to keep the vendor shown.
What if, instead, there was a number next to the vendors name indicating the number of items on the vendor. such as;
Vendor (37): <Name>
for a vendor with 37 items
Yes this will lengthen the name of the vendor, and a little more clutter to the map but it maybea solution to the problem and would indicate to anyone the well-stocked vendors.
AlanjaAngeli wrote:
It would be a better move to make the vendors no longer accessible for someone without the skills. They should also be made inaccessible for customers, so they aren't still making money off of it. In order to regain access and get your items off of it, you have to pick up merchant again. Then if a person was unwilling to pick up merchant and did not retrieve their items off, they aren't going to have too much room to **edit** because they were given a way post-revamp to get them.
Then I suggest exploiters start unpacking their vendors now. There is ample time before this fix is in place. There has been more than enough postings here that stated that SOE is in the process of fixing the vendors. Why not save them the hassle of the the inevitable? The poachersare in the wrong. It's only a matter of time before they are going to have to fess up to it anyways.
See, that's what bites about being an honest individual about it - even though I never turned on the vendors, people will always be paranoid that I would. I agree, maybe if there was a perma-off switch it would be better; there wasn't so I just never turned them on. A lot of RPers who use vendors as NPCs are the same way - they aren't poaching the merchant class, they are only being storytellers using an NPC.
How far is ambiance going to go? Concider me a pessimist of human nature. The thought of finding illegal arms sellers, or spice dealers, or, heaven-forbid, abartender in cantinascan appeal to too many people when decorating a cantina, so much so that the temptaion of using them more then just dummies appeals to them.Just by having empty NPC vendors there opens up the possiblilty of their use for more that just human decorations. If the vendors are deleted once the merchant player drops the necessary skills to maintain them, all of this argument is eliminated.
Good bye! Good Luck! Don't let the door hit your A$$ on the way out! We don't need any more exploiters!
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Balkstar wrote:
Then I suggest exploiters start unpacking their vendors now. There is ample time before this fix is in place. There has been more than enough postings here that stated that SOE is in the process of fixing the vendors. Why not save them the hassle of the the inevitable? The poachersare in the wrong. It's only a matter of time before they are going to have to fess up to it anyways.
Again, as much as you, a merchant, consider it Poetic Justice, SOE has to look at things from a larger perspective. Yes, they will probably give an official announcement on the launch pad, but they know that people skip over reading that logging in. And we all know that a very small percentage of people who own the game actually come to the message boards, and some players don't even know they exist, so saying "They were warned on the boards" will not cut it either.
SOE does have to look at the PR impact of this regardless of whether merchants feel not deleting the vendors is fair or not - they are already seeing a lot of cancellations, and it's just smart business not to do something that they know will drive players from the game - regardless of whether or not they are 'poachers' as you call them.
Vindictiveness of this level is not good for a game - yes, it wasn't fair to the people who actually kept merchant skills that people could drop the skills and keep the vendors, but turn the other cheek and be a nice person. I'm not saying let them access the non-skilled vendors without regaining skill, I am saying that the player base needs to be given the option to get the items and money on the vendors back off of them even after the change goes in - whether that requires them to pick up enough merchant skill to make the vendors legal again or a CSR's assistance or paying a fine, the option needs to be there or it just makes the merchant community and the developers look like a pack of rabid wolves.
And again, while some people read these boards, and read the newsletters and read the information on the launch pad, most people don't and that has to be taken into account. Screwing someone over because this is their first game and they don't realize how important things like that are is completely off-base and will lose a lot of respect and customer support.
How far is ambiance going to go? Concider me a pessimist of human nature. The thought of finding illegal arms sellers, or spice dealers, or, heaven-forbid, abartender in cantinascan appeal to too many people when decorating a cantina, so much so that the temptaion of using them more then just dummies appeals to them.Just by having empty NPC vendors there opens up the possiblilty of their use for more that just human decorations. If the vendors are deleted once the merchant player drops the necessary skills to maintain them, all of this argument is eliminated.
And how far does the merchant community need to go in it's paranoia of saying that someone who uses vendors as NPCs without the skills will always become one of these 'poachers' and use the vendors for goods?
The reason I'm arguing on that mentality is that I'm sick of people instantly accussing others over something so silly. A lot of people I know that use vendors for NPCs either don't have them turned on, don't have anything but a chance cube stating that it is just an NPC and not a real vendor or actually keep enough skill to cover ones they do use as merchants. But time and time again, so called 'honest' merchants refuse to see that not everyone who has a vendor up without the skills is a 'poacher'.
Ambience is something a lot of RPers really care about, and while that might not matter to you, it matters to some people in the game, and I wish people would stop being jerks to those people because they are paranoid that they might become a 'poacher'.
As far as it goes, player created ambiance is far more important to me than almost anything else in this game. There is content in SWG, yes, but most of it has to be built upon and further created by players. If dropping an empty or uninitialized vendor furthers that, then why worry that they are stealing from you and your skill points.