Merchant Archive
Thread: Vendors and private houses
A friend and I just recently started a cantina out of his large house on Naboo, it opens today. We're probably going to have a door access fee, and we're usinga Vendor as the distribution point for all the food and drinks we can sell. We have instruments, I think we have a hired band, and we have fireworks for the opening night.
One idea might be to have vendors in private homes forced off the global markets.
1. OurPA has a Crafting and Merchant group inside. We were using the vendor as part of the supply chain. i.e. people with harvesters put resources on the vendor at cost plus a small profit, but below what the market would pay. Just like any business would make an exclusive agreement to buy all supplies from a provider at a reduced rate. Then the crafters could buy the resources needed to grind and craft. Partial goods (or those needed by other crafters) went into the vendor at a small profit to the crafter. Final goods went into the vendor to be bought by the merchant (me) at a profit that reflected the time and skill of the crafter, but still at enough of a discount that the organization would make a profit from selling a certain percentage of these goods to the public. Costs of travel and maintenance for the merchant are also covered by this margin. This doesn't have to be a PA Hall situation, it can be any organization with an established supply chain who wants to keep a vendor who only certain people can access for the same purposes. the merchant still controls the pricing, as he has to turn around everything offered to the vendor. The easiest way to fix this, I think, would be to put an option on the vendor at initailization for Public or Private. Private vendors' stock would not show up anywhere but that vendor.
2. Maintenance fees on stock amounts to a property tax. Perhaps a better way to handle this is making the vendor capacity limited by the skill level of the merchant. (but PLEASE don't go low on this!!) A fair proposal might be 50 items/vendor for the novice merchant. 200 items/vendor for Hiring I, 300 items/vendor for hiring II, 400 items/vendor for Hiring III, 500 items/vendor for Hiring IV, and unlimited for Master Merchant.
3. PLEASE take the time to read the Correspondent communications to you. There are a hundred good ideas on this forum for other fixes to the skills tree, etc. Advertising and efficiency, especially. (Perhaps efficiency increases the number of items that can be stored on a vendor as well as reduced fees for structures.)
Thanks for asking! If you listen to us once in a while, we'll take your amazing crafting system and turn it into an amazing economy for all players!
I apologize if this is duplicate information, but this is what I was using vendors in prvate houses for.
Special orders. You make your building private and set your few current special order customers on the entry list. This way there is much less exposure to people possibly buying your goods, none if it's your only vendor. If you could redesign the normal vendor with a "Sell only to" field in it where a public vendor would only allow this one person to buy the item it would satisfy my needs for a limited access vendor.
This eliminates people haveing to hope their items that they ordered does not get purchased. It eliminats haveing to play tag with ppl and hope they are on line as the same time that you are.
Unless you add access list on vendors to control who can acually buy from that vendor, removing vendors from private houses will make my job as a tailor a pain.
As for people seeing stuff on a vendor and not being able to pick it up, how can this occur? When ever i go to an NPC vendor, I only SEE what THAT vendor has, not something another vendor in the same region has. If u are supposed to see what is in the region that will make the purpose of a Master Merchant having multiple vendors in his shop useless.
I think somewhere someone got something twisted. No need to nerf the private house vendor, fix the issues with a vendor showing regional items to buyers. If i click on a vendor to purchase something I should ONLY see what he has to offer, not items on a vendor 10 houses away.
Both of these seem better fulfilled by simply having a shared guild vault, so to speak...?
Logix wrote:
Holocron wrote:
We plugged the grief hole short-term, but the long-term thing that needs to happen is probably having a PA-only vendor, if there's a big need for it. Can you explain to me what purpose your PA vendor serves? That would help me design the replacement.
Well, I'd probably have two or three of these.
The first purpose would be to create a "Community" vendor, where members of the PA could just toss up free resources, hide, bones, et al, that they've picked up in the wild. So crafters of the PA are able to pick them up at a convenient location without having to hunt it down themselves.
The second purpose is for an "Equipment" vendor, as I supply and outfit my guild with guns. Currently, the way I do this is have them purchase the guns from my Sales vendor when I am not available. When I get online and check my auction e-mails, I see my guildmate bought a gun from me, so I tip him the cost.
Theoretically, with the new changes in, I'd like to just have both of these vendors in our PA Hall now, with everything priced at 1c, no worry of bored travellers coming in and buying out fine-quality wares for pennies that was intended for guildmembers.
Lastly,
Eudmin wrote:
Can you just make it so that vendors in private houses do not show up in the global bazaar terminals when searching for items?
Not easily. Plus, it does run contrary to what vendors were supposed to be for. Again, they're not supposed to be a sotrage device. They're kinda overkill for a storage device.
We'd rather have a cheaper simpler method in place for that.
Bailis wrote:
Someone posted this, but I'll reiterate....
What if I want to sell things from my vendor for reduced prices to a select group of people? I can't now. No private shops for a select group. How can I control to whom I sell, not based on faction or some other in-game tag, but based on a list of people if I can't have a vendor in a private home?
Well, at that point what you're saying is that you've found a way to make the system do something that it wasn't actualy intended to do. It's an awfully cool thing you've managed to do, mind you, I agree. But it is an unintended side effect.
In the merchant skill tree at one point we had "custom order" and "one person pickup" and "PA only" as sales flags you could set on items. I think they all went away because we didn't think there was much demand for them. Clearly, we were wrong.
Bailis wrote:
What I want to know is why? Why can't we have vendors in private homes? Why were they never designed to be this way? What's it hurt? If people are storing more than you want them to...well then wake up and realize people want more storage space and provide it.
We cannot give people all the storage they want. In UO for a while players had effectively unlimited storage. The result nearly killed the game. There have to be limits somewhere.
The key problem with private vendors is that they serve as a huge storage multiplier.
Tstorm wrote:
I don't recall seeing this in the patch notes, although it was a HUGE list. The first time I saw note of it was on the Merchant board where others were none too happy.
You're right, it's another thing that seems to have slipped through without getting noted in the patch notes. 
Have you looked at NPC vendors lately? Regardless of how much you dump on them, they charge 1 maintainance (0 if you have Efficiency III). People use NPC vendors to avoid maintenance charges.
Yeah, expect that to be fixed.
Holocron wrote:
Both of these seem better fulfilled by simply having a shared guild vault, so to speak...?
Unless PA halls were changed to automatically give all members pickup/drop permissions, a vendor will be far more convenient than a backpack or room or whatever. We shouldn't be forced to put every single member of PA on the admin list just to facilitate resource sharing.
It seems to me that while this may not be what you intended, the players have actually put the product to a better use. Necessity is the mother of invention, after all. We desperately needed a way to share goods and products while working on a common goal and we found in the private vendor. Now that admin rights have been fixed, that is an alternative, but not a viable one. Why?
It will increase frustration levels exponentially – with no way to sort through what is lying around how will anyone find anything? Our group (which will be placing our PA hall soon) typically has between 60 and 80 items in our vendor. Do you know what that will look like scattered on the floor of a house. Egads? The casual gamer (and that is the target market, right?) will spend half her playtime trying to find what she needs in the common mess. And forget about aesthetics.
It will be a bookkeeping nightmare. How will I make sure that this Lokian Wheat goes to our doctor? If I just drop it on the floor in a common room, the best I can do is send him an email, announce who it’s for in our channel and hope that no one else picks it up before he can. That’s ridiculous in a game full of business skills. For heaven’s sake – I’m a merchant, but I can’t control who I supply things to?
I hope that the developers will take a hard look at how the PLAYERS are playing and work to accommodate their needs, rather than try to force them into a preconceived box of how the developers wish they would play. I second those who respectfully ask that functionality at least be returned to our vendors until an adequate solution can be implemented. It really does seem like we are being left in the lurch here. And what of the thousands of us who have millions of combined resources on private vendors now. Are they simply gone?
I was using my Private vendor to distribute and collect items for my guild. As the Finance and Resource Officer of my guild, I would collect donated resources on the vendor and give them to the appropriate crafters. Crafters would drop their "crafts" of the vendor and I would place them for sale at 1 credit for guild members.
I posted some suggestions about various levels of access to PA halls. Giving administrive access to all members is just asking for trouble. All it would take is 1 disgruntled member to wipe out the hall.
A 250 item limit to the number of items in a PA Hall is way too small. When we first set ours up, we used 250 items without putting anything in the basement or the roof. And no vendor. With the PA hall taking 9 lots from one person, and all houses taking at least 2 lots, the PA leader must "live" in the hall.
Maybe a way to alleviate the storage issue for PA halls is to allow PA members to donate lots to the Hall. Have each extra lot donated add 75 to the item limit.
With the "fixes" that just came out I can no longer just put things on my vendor for PA members to pick up. because someone else can wander in and buy it.
With the problems I am having with my vendors, I have a phantom storeroom and about 70 items I cannot retrieve , I just store stuff until I can personally deliver it.
One improvement of vendors would be to allow the merchant to destroy the item right from the vendor. There should be no limit to the time of an auction on a player sale.
Oldog Neutrik
Master Artisan
Expert Armorsmith
Merchant
Jedi Praxium, Kauri
There are still ways you can sell an item on yoru vendor and have it blocked so no one can get to it. Certian items in houses cannont be walked thru.. I want to someoen shouse they stuck a toolcchest in the doorway to teh basement so no one else coudl go down and bother them working because you cannot walk thru that object. I am sure there are many other items like that or you could drop a large piece of funiture on top of the vendor so they occupy the same space being unable to target the vendor.
You need a better system to counteract that if that was the purpose...
A Mailbox on all houses where items can be left or sold to owners (COD) would be good. As well as in PA halls.
The idea of cauclating maintence off potienal sales is a VERY bad idea. though I understand yoru reasoniong for it.. I figure thats why items un-sell after a week and get deleted like a week later.