Merchant Archive
Thread: Vendor Maintenance Fees coming – your input request
Architects will be hurt since they need to sell high-priced in order to net a profit (imagine the daily maintenance for having a guild hall on a vendor) and so will crafting professions who have bugged or relatively useless goods (Chefs for example) because they get penalized for not being able to sell (the more goods that sit on the vendor, the more maintenance is paid) and there's little demand for certain items because of bugs and poor implementation w/in the game.
I play a BE. I stock animals, petstims, and petfood on my vendor. Even w/ my vendor registered on the planetary map and everything for cheap, most of what I stock sits around for a week or more. This is because most of the BE pets have little use and w/out Master BE experimentation are innately crappier versions of those out in the wild. Next to a Weaponsmith, who can potentially clear his whole vendor inventory in 2 days (and watch his vendor maintenance nosedive to zero), I will end up paying more for vendor maintenance. On top of that, my craftables require organic meat, which is one of the most expensive things out there on the market, which also caps my profit. I'm guessing devs are also gonna make it so registered vendors will now have their maintenance fees upgraded, which will also hurt. This makes running a shop not worth my time.
And for those who sell items that cost under 3k, why set up a shop when you can use the bazaar (ignoring the item limit). If I had a 1k item, I could either pay 32 credits a day to keep it on a vendor a player has to travel to, or I could toss it on the bazaar for 20 credits a week.
Vendor based COMMISSIONS AFTER THE SALE GOES THROUGH are a better solution. From a RP standpoint it makes more sense too. You hire a vendor, if he doesn't sell he doesn't eat. A vendor is not a structure that needs upkeep.
Asianguy wrote:
Next to a Weaponsmith, who can potentially clear his whole vendor inventory in 2 days (and watch his vendor maintenance nosedive to zero), I will end up paying more for vendor maintenance.
Don't be so quick to lump us all in one basket please. I am a weaoponsmith and have as good a weapon as anyone in stock at better prices than most actually.. but my weapons are not flying out the door by any means. Out of the couple hundred in stock, I sold maybe 10 last week.
The WC profession is pretty much owned by those fewthat got there first, made the money to buy the best resources in huge bulk as they pop(as well as having the ones that will never be beat again) and us new guys on the block have very little chance competing against them. Heck, on my server there is pretty much one guy that supplies the entire server and a couple of backups. Themajority of WCers IMHO, are suffering just as much as anyone while the few make billions.
ed
I also support the tax system. As an architect I can definitely see how a time-based system of charging is going to put me out of business unless I spend all my time hanging out at my shop so that I can keep one of each item on the vendor until someone buys it... then quickly replace it. I play this game for fun and still have a job and life, and with this new system I can't see how I'd survive. Although we advertise heavily, are close to a major town, and sell items at competitive prices, my partner and I are barely making a profit off odf our sales. Taxes would be more reasonable - I'd know what to charge in order to make a profit and wouldn't be penalized when nobody happened to buy anything for a couple days.
Turgence Valenz
Deckord & Valenz -341, -4999 just north of Anchorhead
*best wacko voice he can muster*
helloooooooooo devs!
has the community spoken loud enough yet? 
Vendors are supposed to help you not hurt you
I don't know if anyone is reading this after 35 pages...but here goes.
1. Prices are already set for most items in most galaxies. This means that the merchant is the one that is going to take this hit, not the customer.
2.If your goal is to spread out a credit sink across the whole galaxy, then it must be easier for merchants to build the cost of this maintenance into the price of a product. It is currently very difficult to do this, so again the merchant is the one that takes the hit.
To illustrate this, even a 50% surchage of the item's sale price would be acceptible. Since we know flat out what the charge will be, we can then add that cost onto the item's cost to pass it along to our customers.
That rate is insane, and has clearly not been thought out. Take my profession -architect as an example. If I put a few factories, a few of each size house, a few of each size havestor on my vendor, we could easliy reach the 500-750k mark. maybe more. With 500,000 worth on my vendor, thats 16,000 credits a day. That's rediculous.
"So just put less items on your vendor" you say. ThenI get to stock my vendor every 12 hours. Great. More micromanagement. Gee that'll make the game even more fun. thanks.
The simple solution? A flat fixed rate.
Vendor maintence doesn't help the economy it hurts it. Vendors don't "make credits" meaning that the excess credits that are in the game are not coming from us. But you expect us to pick up the tab. If you want to fix the game economy reduce the credits at thier source. There are about 50 people where I work playing SWG and all I hear all day long is how they go on mission runs and pull in 100k to 200k per hour. As it stands right now. Architects have the smalest profit margin in the game because it's really difficult to make a sale if you try to charge more than 1cr/unit over cost. To supplement I have set up my own harvesters which sink most of my profits into maintenence and power already. Add 2 houses on different planets and at least 2 vendors to keep things tidy and I still have to spend over half my game time running missions to make up for the shortfalls. What money do I have left to sink?
I'm not a combat class and I can't get destroy missions for more than 1k credits per mission. Delivery missions take forever because of the distance and I can't craft anything worth selling while I run to an NPC 10k m away for a 300cr return. I sell on average about 40-80k worth of merchandise per week. even at 80k my profit is only 10-15k per week and it costs me 7k per day for maintence. New math:
7k maintenence/day times 7= 49k maintence per week.
49k - 15k profit = 35k per week that I have to mission for.
Again I ask... What money do I have left to sink?
I am already wondering what is the point to playing this game when it take sooo much work and time to accomplish anything. It's not fun anymore. It's a stressful job. If I have to pay more after this change,
I QUIT!
Sure you sucked $100.00 out of my pocket for two accounts but you won't get anymore.
I wish to echo the sentiments of my brethren above ... a sales tax is much more realistic than a maintenance fee - since it is assessed at the time of sale rather than starting from the time of item availability. This will allow the guys struggling to move up the mastery tree (whose items are slow in selling due to their skills) to NOT get penalized by all the Beta Tester Masters that currently dominate many of the markets.
As a Master Weaponcrafter/Master Merchant - my weapon industry is dominated by the earlier masters who were all beta testers and were able to charge 500,000 credits for a single gun. Today, they are armed with millions of credits and any "per hour maintenance fee" will allow them to operate unimpeded - while I have to offer only what weapons i can AFFORD to place on a vendor.
You are adding to the imbalance that exists by assessing an hourly fee based on quantity of items present.
If my weapons are good enough to sell, then they will. Assess my taxes at this time and I will be able to offfer a full range of merchandise and have my wares compete with the "Biggies" on a QUALITY basis - not on a "deep pockets" basis.
....and while you are at it - stop making my vendors dump their entire inventory every six days! He's my vendor, I payed for him - I want him to maintain his inventory until I decide to remove it.
I am a furniture maker and have to stock an insane variety of product and often in large numbers. Instead of being punished for being a casual gamer and maintaining a well stocked store why not have a percentage charge for each item sold. This has been a frustrating class already. If vendors are changed like your suggesting I guess I'll be getting skill points back as I'll no longer bea merchant. I can't believe that when there is a desire for a money sink (which I do agree with) that the most broken class in the game is targeted first. If you want less money in the game how about lowering the money paid on missions. I don't think the merchant class deserves this kick in the teeth just because players can make over 1k for a couple minutes of killing paralopes.
-Jerhal Aurhas; Master Architect, Master Artisan and Merchant on Eclipse
I guess they want a time based cost so you don't use your vendor as a personal storage box. I think they played with the idea of having these things count as items in your house, but people complained.
Still, as a DE that is lucky to have 1-2 sales in one day, in a typical moment I have:
-2 crates of probes: 18000
-2 crates of seekers: 9000
- 2 probots: 14000
- 1 3p0: 10000
- 1 medical/crafting droid: 3500
So in a standard day I have 55000 cr worth of items in my vendor. Daily fee for this according to your formula would be 1760 credits or so, which is 20% of the value of an average sell!!!
As they said, follow real life economy trend and charge a tax per sale. It's not our fault that items take too much space on a database or something, it's not right to penalize the players for something the machine can't handle.