Merchant Archive
Thread: Merchant Correspondant List (Week 3)
My spreadsheet shows:
4 in favor of artisannerf
4 in favor of partial nerf: move vendor to business 4
12 against artisan nerf
SueDenim,
The 7 day issues was in last weeks list, but I will resubmit it. I think this is a huge pain in the rump, Thank you for your feedback.
As for thelist, I have everything I need, thank you all for the PM's, and I will compile "My list" on the train, and send out tonight when I get home from work.
Draznar wrote:
Actually yours was. There is a great difference between armor types, where vendors are much the same, except for bugs.
Vendors are much the same? How do you figure?
Mine is either a big stupid box taking up half a room and looking like overgrown furniture, or a tiny droidthat everyone overlooks. Its space is limited by the number of items in the house. I can only have the one. I can't dress it up, have it respond, or configure it in any way. Did I mention I can only have one? And of course it doesn't appear on the overlay map.
But I'm not here to point out who gets what and who doesn't. You completely missed my point. Keep your hands OUT OF ARTISAN and focus on Merchant. Just like most merchants already want!!
Perhaps merchant just isn't for you then? I DO find it worthwhile. Especialy if they fix the broke stuff. I DO need more than one vendor, and I perfor the NPC types. I like being able to pick the race, sex, etc. I would love to be able to have them wear my goods (again, something broken that should be fixed).
I also know a merchant who has NO other crafting skills, he just has several vendors and made a one stop shop. He buys from me and others and resells the goods, we sell to him at a % discount. He has fun, I have fun.
I still disagree with the nerfing of another class to improve your class when it could be improved in other ways. Sure, if the other class made yours useless that would be one thing, but, when fixed, if you think merchant line is useless perhaps it isn't for you?
I fully intend to keep my points in Merchant. I have advertise 3, management 4, and hiring 3 (almost 4). To me it has been a worthwhile investment.
So far, my favorite ideas that have come up are the following (note, these are more wishlist items then actual "fixes"):
Mass Retrieval: We should be able to retrieve everything we have purchased or put into the stock room in 1 click.
Unlimited Time: I should not have to go back to my vendor every week and tell it to sell the items I tried to sell all over again, they should never "expire."
Business 3 Vendor: Still up to heavy debate, but independant non-crafting Merchants should have their niche, which would be the ability to provide vendors.
Default settings: When you "Use Vendor," why the hell does it look at the region and not the single vendor you are looking at? The whole point of seperating the vendors is to list producttypes seperate from each other. We should either be able to control the default settings or they should be something that makes a little more sense.
Vendor Names: If I name my vendor Brenda and put them on the Planetary map, that doesn't really help me...I need to be able to name my vendor something that is helpful like "Brenda's Droid Batteries" or something. The regulation on their names is way too strict.
Items counting against house inventory: Pretty much, we need to be able to sell more things than a house can hold.
Thoughts or additions?
Just throwing in my 2c 
The #4 idea of removing artisan vendors Stinks: I only use my vendor to sell items with bank style transfers. With the vendor i just pop it up for sale at the asking price, set the house so only they can enter, and log out for the night. The customer can come get it whenever they want, and they dont have to carry a huge sum of money (for furniture or housing deeds) as they run to the shop.
Just leave it as is, give merchants something of worth... Like the ability to place vendors on the street in cities 
DToxWeaponsInc wrote:
Merchant is a joke. It does nothing. Fix the Merchant, THEN go off and Nerf other things. Don't waste my time, or your energy working to nerf something that isn't even going to help Merchants.
Merchants asking for the removal of Vendors from Artisan is like a Rifleman asking for the removal of Head Shot from the Marksman Rifle tree. Hey..listen...you can both do it...but one does it MUCH better.
Cha-ching!
I was gonna write something along those same lines, but why? DToxWeaponsInc hit it on the head.
Marduke Akkad
Architect/Merchant
South Beach, Talus
There's been a lot of good ideas about what to do to fill in those empty boxes. I assume Marqie has saved all those ideas. Efficiency is the easy one to fix, because we all recognize that travel fees are a major cost to Merchants and a savings there would help a lot. The benefits of Efficiency IV could be upped a lot (I mean, come on, it's the fourth tier of an advanced skill tree). I think we've all had good ideas about what the replacement tree for Management could be if Management is compressed into Hiring. I think we all know that the Word-of-Mouth skill would be great in Advertising IV if it were brought back in.
Those all strike me as things that could be done. I think all of that needs to be done before we look at the artisan tree-merchant tree relationship again and decide if there's a problem there.
I still can't shake the impression that Merchant is going to get no attention because Merchant is a placeholder profession intended for implementation primarily in relation to player cities. It's almost as if a build of Politician was in the game with no real working skills. So I wonder if the devs aren't just going to continue to ignore us and keep everything in this profession more or less broken or of little value.
Travel fees not only for me but for my couriers, I have someone on another planet nearly every night of the week, buying something, selling something, delivering...
Numtini--I have exactly the same set up you do (wookiee, woman, man, and random upstairs for the map LOL) and also have 100-200 items on each. Also have alot of items dropped in store. No problems here (at least not yet).
I have a large house, if that helps tho.
XCal78 wrote:
"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 it just me, or does this entire post scream "I get nothing out of Merchant. The problem isn't the competition, it's the fact that Merchant offers nothing useful, above and beyond a vendor."
Sorry, but we're arguing the same thing...you just seem more than happy to nerf Artisans for no real good reason. Personally, I was 1 box from Mastering Merchant...but, you hit the nail on the head...why would I want to bother? Merchant gives me NOTHING. The problem isn't that Artisan gives me something. It's that Merchant gives me NOTHING. I'm still going to keep Novice Merchant, because I want to keep exploiting the NPC vendors, which means that whether Artisans get nerfed or not, I really don't care. I don't think I'm alone with that sentiment either...taking the vendor away from Artisans isn't a big deal because it's still easy to get Novice Merchant. If Novice Merchant were acquired through GCXP, IT WOULD BE EASIER STILL...yay, a quick grind...that's easy as pie...2 hours, and I'm there. Having to wait 2 days for the 5,000 Merchant XP to accumulate...that sucks.
The point is, Merchant + Artisan Nerf = Merchant. It's like adding 0 to anything. With or without the Artisan vendor, Merchant is a pointless profession. You were 100% right in having "missed something" when I mentioned Advertising. The power and skills that a Merchant SHOULD have are NOT there. There is NO Advertising, NO Efficiency, NO Market control WHATSOEVER. Planetary Map is BS, Structure Efficiency...Chris, by the time you get to Structures 4, 20% off your Harvester is like 0.003% of your total daily income, Market control? LOL...
Merchant is a joke. It does nothing. Fix the Merchant, THEN go off and Nerf other things. Don't waste my time, or your energy working to nerf something that isn't even going to help Merchants.
Merchants asking for the removal of Vendors from Artisan is like a Rifleman asking for the removal of Head Shot from the Marksman Rifle tree. Hey..listen...you can both do it...but one does it MUCH better.