Merchant Archive
Thread: Vendor Maintenance Fees coming – your input request
I posted above but i had a few thoughts after the post that may solve a few exploits if the system becomes based on a sales commission as most here have asked to be implemented.
the fear by the developers is that players will use the vendors as an exploit storage solution. Currently vendor listings time out and the item goes to the stock room ....... simply make the vendor charge a fee whethor an items sells or doesnt sell. this will prevent players from using the storage exploit top some degree. also put a limit on the size of resourse containers in one stack at say 1000 max (after you fix the resourse bug naturally) that way folks will have incentive to keep the bazzaar active.
also there should be building districts ....... the closest distircts to the city for business, the next for residential and the furthest for industrial. This will eliminate some clutter and make shops easier to identify. ofcouse a place would have to be identified as a shop to be accessable to host a vendor.
Im all for things working properly... however, Im also for all things being fair. If you take 2 people... both masters in their professions : Architect and a Weaponsmith. As an architect my high end items (Fusions Gens, Heavy Harvs, PA Halls, etc run well over 100,000 each. An average Weaponsmith item, even high end barely breaks 20k, if that. Now we all know that a low stocked vendor isnt a vendor we want to visit again. So stocking up my vendor with say 5 fusion gens, 5 heavy harvesters and 5 PA halls. With prices of 100k each, 100k each and 300k each respectively. Thats a total value of 2.5 million credits. Using your formula 2,500,000/1000 = 2500 maintinence every 45 minutes. Keep in mind the average player may not be able to log on every day... and since we want our vendors in business while we work, sleep, play with our kids etc... we need to keep them maintained lets say for an average of 3 days at a time. 3 days is 60 minutes times 72 hours for a total of 4320 minutes. 4320 / 45 minutes = 96 maintinence cycles in 3 days. 96 times your formula which in this case was 2500 = 240,000 credits. So a vendor which is stocked with ONLY 15 items... (scantly stocked) has to shell our 80,000 credits a day... something doesnt seem right here. Its not fair to base your fee of of TOTAL value because some professions simply have items which take more resources.
A flat fee per item isnt all that fair either since it will be a much higher percent of the weaponsmiths avg price than it would be for the architect. But wait! There is a SIMPLE SOLUTION and here it comes :
Also some people have different ideas of the way they want to run merchants. For instance some people want mass volume and in turn charge cheaper prices. Others charge top rates but ALWAYS have things in stock 24/7... people shouldnt be punished for playstyle. A slightly fairer way would be to charge the fee by resource count of all items on the vendor. At least that way what you actually charge gets taken out of the equation.
But the fairest way of all would just be to charge a flat fee for a vendor per day like ALL the other mmorpgs do. Vendor fee is 1000 credits a day. Or 5000 credits a day, whatever. At least that way we all pay the same regardless if we have the best stocked or worst vendors ever. Not to mention architects can sell things also.
Q, this is VERY important. At least for me, it's one of the most absolutely important things I've had to say about this game, and it will make a good deal of difference to me and my ability to have faith in the way you guys manage this game.
It is a good thing to turn on the vendor fees for all vendors. It is a very, very bad idea to simply roll over the scheme being used now for droid and machine vendors. The whole thing scheme needs revision because right now it is neither a particularly effective or fair "drain" on the economy NOR does it make any economic sense.
You guys continue to think that the value of the items on the vendor is the meaningful piece of information that should be used to set the fee. That makes no economic sense. The tax should be on *profits*, as a percentage of profit made per sale. There are merchants who deal in goods that are necessarily expensive because of the cost of the resources that go into them, but who make a very small profit margin. What you will do with a flat rate tax is either force merchants dealing in those goods to conduct sales off-vendor, cut their rate of profit to almost nothing, or charge customers even more. Essentially you will force two classes of goods off vendors that ought to be on them: resources and deeds. Also perhaps certain "rares" like very strong skill enhancers.
You guys continue to think that the number of items on the vendor is the meaningful piece of information that should be used to set the fee. It's not. Some merchants operate high volume businesses of necessity (tailors, chefs).
Now if you did it right, and say, Master Merchant got major discounts on vendor maintenance, it would create a dynamic where a merchant could offer a real service to some other artisans, and some deals for wholesale rates might finally make real sense. But the best system, as many people are telling you, would be a transaction-related fee, a sales tax, with a small flat fee for operating a vendor on top of that.
I could make the obvious point that you ought to fix the vendor bugs and the bugs with existing Merchant skills before you fix the fees, but I don't get the sense that this point matters much to you.
Now I know full well why you really want to fix this drain, and why you want it to be a flat fee, and why you're probably going to ignore all the sensible suggestions here. The economy needs drains, but doing through vendor maintenance just stacks even more drains on the people who are already experiencing most of the drains--it doesn't hit the people who really have the big cash surpluses. Why you want a flat fee is you don't want people sticking 200 items at 999999 credits on NPC vendors, as some have, where the vendor is essentially being used as a giant backpack.
That's a problem, I agree. There are betterways around it: cap the number of items per vendor to 100; cap the price on a vendor to something reasonable, like 200,000, forcing anyone who is dealing in something bigger to do it off-vendor, privately, and making everyone else expose themselves to the risk an item will be purchased, and yes, gate the vendors more extensively through the Merchant profession. Keep a vendor in the Artisan tree, but make it the most expensive, price-capped and item-limited of them all--say 15 items with a max value of 10k, something of that sort. Make people who don't want to climb the Merchant trees pay a premium price and suffer inconvenience because of it, but don't gate them off entirely. All of those steps will cut down on the number of people using vendors as storage devices. Redo the Hiring and Maintenance trees as a single tree and put the gate to more than one vendor two tiers up, so that you don't have people with three vendors who've just filled out two tiers of Merchant. Basically make Merchant more of a reward, and make the vendor benefits beyond the expensive minimum harder to get to.
Don't get confused here. The storage problem and the database issues it causes is one thing, and you should pursue it in ways that don't make the fee structure for vendors flatly irrational, or that punish Merchants for doing the right thing (having low-profit high-cost businesses or having a wide selection of basic goods). I know it'll be impossible for me to run an all-purpose "general store" with a wide variety of items (as opposed to a specialist artisan store) if you set the fees the way you propose, and yet, it's exactly what a Merchant player ought to be doing, at least some of us. Don't slam a fix in here to save your database that messes up the way vendors and Merchants ought to work in the economy. That's the wrong development path to go down.
This is presuming that you actually care what we think. I get the impression from your message that the solution is already set in stone and you're going to do it the way you want to do it regardless of what we think about it.
Currently I think it is far too high for the casual gamer. For the Merchant who wants to have a little shop hidden away somewhere, or the vendor who wants to put items that are special, but not in high demand.
At that rate, 1/1000 every 45 minutes, I will have paid half the sale price of the item in 2 weeks. That's tough on any merchant. But then when you have merchants who want to sell their stuff at a smaller profit even one week becomes too long to have something on your vendor.
Personally I think the vendors maintenance should be very low, and then just charge a small percent of the sale price when the item sells.
If you are looking for another money sink, why don't you add resource npc vendors in cities. They would have all the resource types (random stats of course), and be very expensive. Many people would spend a ton of money just to be able to make an item. I know on starsider many things still have yet to be made because we never get any of the required materials.
Assuming we go with a rate based on total value, an important question is what is a reasonable average time for an item to be on a vendor? 1 day? 3? a week? In other words, what will be the average cost per sale?
Assuming the math on previous posts is correct, the planned rate will be 3.2% per day. So what's the average time for an item to be on a vendor? If it's 2 days you are looking at about 6.5% per item. If it's 3 days it's nearly 10%.
10% might be about right. After all, everyone (except merchants) will have the same cost, so the only way to get an advantage would be to use the bazaar (which is limited) or do direct sales. Merchants can use the savings on the rate to be part of their profit margin to give them an advantage over non-merchants.
IT IS INSANE TO CHARGE US FOR ITEMS JUST SITTING THERE....
also with the tax idea that everyone but Koster favors, once towns actually happen, the Mayor could set a tax rate that would go into the towns coffers to help them pay for that shuttleport and other items....5% imperail, plus 1.5% city tax on the items sold....THESE TAXES SHOULD BE PAID BY THE BUYER NOT THE VENDOR
Q---- i have had it with the money sinks.....there are too many...they are all directed at crafters...we are not the ones with all the money.....please pull Kosters head out of a certain appendage and get him to add sinks to the combat people...tehy have ALL the money....MISSIONS ARE PAYING 16K in some instances...PEOPLE ARE MAKING 32K EVERY 15-20 MINUTES...its takes me a day or two to make that if i am lucky.....the money sinks arew just really adding to the tedium of the game...i am sick of wasting an hour or more a day just running around checking the meter on everything.
VENDORS DO NOT NEED THIS MONEY SINK
Low matanence with a % taken with each purchase. If we need to be penalized, penalize us when we are making more money (sales) not for having a vendor in existence. We are using valuable skill points to have the priveldge of having a vendor at all, why put the hammer down even further? If you need to tax my sales, fine, go ahead and do so, don't tax me for having something I've spent skill points on and earned the right through the game mechanics to utilize.
--Jewel
Without player cities, ie shuttle port/star port within 30 second walking distance of your vendor, the whole merchanting system is broke. You can't move items like a shop should so the only way around it is to have cheap vendors. If the maintenance was charge as intended, then the whole merchanting profession is broke till player cities. As it were it still doesn't work well.
The only people getting rich off this game is armorsmiths and weaponsmiths. I really don't know where all this supposed money is. This will kill architects that are already low balled on their pricing and the little guys don't sell much as it is so they never list anything. If nothing is ever listed, no one comes. I've seen a lot of business 3 vendors with nothing on them. Their shop probably had good intentions until they got the maintenance bill.
This is a game breaker for the would be shop keepers and crafters.
If you do the percent of sells made, then do it a the time of purchase. If there is going to be a listing fee or purchase fee up front, do not have sales expire in one week. It is so boring and 'I-may-stop-suscribing-not-fun' to have to relist items after a week. Game promises that you can run player shops, but the mechanics of it is just not appealing. Fix the listing time and fix player cities BEFORE you break the game for those that of us that run shops in the middle of no where.
Please understand that breaking shop keeping also breaks crafting anything other than tool kits.
BTW anyone on Starsider looking for work after this goes into effect pm, I'll be hiring PC vendors from now on. Send me a mail.
If the sales Tax is a technical Problem, you might charge it when putting the item on the vendor, so everyone can decide and knows what it costs(you of course have to remove the timer on the sales for that) Reduce rate with higher Merchant skills.
That plus a fixed Maintenance Fee per vendor comparable to Harvester fee.
Best would be as stated: Sales Tax when sale took place plus fixed fee plus reduction with higher maintenance fee plus working Merchant tree and vendors.
Vir
Lowca
Manager
Charging a flat fee based on the values of items up for sale is going to cripple many crafter merchants. The current given formula means you get charged 1/1000 every 45 min, with 1440 hrs per day, that's 32 times a day you get charged. That's a 3.2 percent tax per day for having an item up for sale, basically if you don't sell in 2 weeks, you lose half your money IF you ever sell, and if it doesn't sell in 4 weeks, you lose everything you might ever make on it...and past that, you're in the hole for making the item.
For one example, lets look at tailors. Variety is the key to selling on vendors, having a large stock and selection of colors available. It could easily take 2 weeks to sell a specific item of a specific color, often more. With this change, tailors may as well stock up on cloaks, dusters, leather gloves, and uniform boots all in balckand drop everything else, telling customers to order only directly. You kill the variety. You ensure that no one takes a chance on a 'might sell' type of item.
Also look at Arcitects, who on the opposite scale may have a smaller number of huge ticket items sitting on their vendor. There would be no incentive to place a large house up on a vendor for 150k, when you're losing 5k a day on it waiting for it to sell. If it's not a fast moving item, you'd be insane to place it up and hope for the best. You're forcing all architects to put up messages in their shop to contact them directly for purchases. And anyone selling something near cost would really have an issue on a vendor.
The absolute best solution is to charge a sales tax of the item at the time of sale, along with a small flat fee to run a merchant on a daily basis. Ensure that the merchant class has use, and can lower the sales tax of items and cost of merchants if you go far enough in that tree.
As a tailor/merchant in game, with 2 shops on 2 planets, your proposal really scares me. I would have to do as above, remove most of my stock, and probably shut one of the shops down completely. That's completely against how I was envisioning playing my character and my career in game, and I have no desire to give it up and play a fighter type class. In other words, unless something changes I'd be leaving, and I don't want that.
Also, keep in mind that the lack of clothing decay is really slowing down the sales of clothes in game. Over time, more and more enter the world and none leave. Over time, it takes longer and longer on average to make a sale. That mixed with a daily tax on unsold items wouldkill most tailoring long term.
You mention it being a transaction-based sink -- how about doing that instead of making it a time-based sink. At least my harvesters are *doing* something while they're eating my credits. My vendor could go largely unnoticed for weeks but still cost a bunch of cash.