Merchant Archive
Thread: Current Merchant Issues List
AlanjaAngeli wrote:
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.
OK so SOE needs to be held hostage to the legions of exploiters in the game? How will this affect their corporate image about letting major exploits run their games? Just how will customers trust them in the future if they know that exploits will never be fixed by them? Sorry, this arguement has no weight for me. SOE is indeed in a tight spot on this, but I would suggest that SOE would do better in the long run to fix the issue and not to let the game rot in exploitation.
Remember that fixes that are wide ranging are not without presedent in the game. The massive change to the CH system that changed the entire landscape of how PvE was done is one example. Every combat-centric player had to completely realocate their entire skill points set to deemphasize the CH and balance the game out. This is just a continuation of this work. The utter migration out of this game just didn't happen like everyone thought it would.
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.
Then I suggest you push for manaquins from SOE as hard as possible, since in the end that is what you are looking for in the firstplace. Using vendors to fill that role opens the door to too much mischief, and for a professions that has been beaten up to hell already, I would suggest that an addition to the tailor skill set would better serve you then our much maligned merchant tool. Become a champion to a cause, not a reviled person to a whole profession.
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.
The Global Map is littered with vendors which are empty. This makes finding things a difficult and frustrating journey to one empty vendor after another. It lessens the impact of advertising since people no longer trust that the global map listing means anything. There is considerable debate on the full implementation of this issue since it is justly pointed out that making the item count simply be greater than 1 will allow people to use high priced items they know won’t sell (99999999 chance cubes) to keep their vendors on the map. How to address that isn’t universally agreed upon but it is universal that no one wants empty vendors to show up on the map. We suggest that the vendor simply remove the registration when it is empty forcing the Merchant to re-register it when he refills the vendor.
Cooperative Merchant shops suffer from the extremely limited control the owner of the structure has on the vendors inside. Short of removing all items and destroying the structure the owner of a “Mall” has no method for evicting a vendor. This is a problem on a number of fronts but the two most common are vendors that are abandoned by their Merchants and are taking up floor space that could be better used by another vendor or disputes between the Mall owner and the Merchant running the vendor (refusal to pay agreed rent for the space etc). The structure owner needs a method for evicting the vendor while mitigating against griefing. The suggestion is to allow structure owners to issue an eviction notice to a vendor which will be served in one week from the time it is served. This will give the Merchant owner of the vendor a week to clear his merchandise out and remove the vendor himself. Suggest a method for rescinding the eviction as well in case an amicable resolution is worked out between the two parties.
The Vendor interface is clunky and inefficient. The search features need to be enhanced to allow more robust searching, the offers and stock room interfaces need fewer clicks and batch processing support to allow large scale sales and re-pricing efforts to be done with a minimum number of clicks. The offers system itself needs to be enhanced as well giving the supplier more slots to offer merchandise and more information to be captured (Suggested Retail Price etc)
Wholesale purchases for Retail sales is only one method of merchant-supplier collaboration. Another is consignment sales. Consignment sales is defined, for the purpose of this feature request, as items purchased by the merchant with little or no up front cost with the understanding that a split of the sales revenue will take place upon the sale of the merchandise. This relationship is desirable because it removes the financial burden
Both for customer orders, PA or Factional specials etc the vendors should be able to allow a merchant to place an item up for sale that can only be purchased by the indicated party or group. (e.g. guld:WAH, faction:Imperial, Chataka)
7New FeatureImage Design Support for NPC Vendors
The current method for creating a vendor is cumbersome when your goal is to create a vendor with a specific look. You essentially have to create vendors over and over until you randomly get one that you can live with. Merchants would like the ability to have their NPC vendors Imaged Designed to customize their appearance. We believe that Image Designers are ideal for this job and would support a /consent system that allowed a vendor to be altered by an Image Designer.
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The global map advertising is a great tool for getting people into your shop to browse your wares however many merchants would like a global item listing that could be searchable and would allow them to compete with the bazaar for sales. One method would have a “premium auction” feature in Merchant that would allow merchants to place items (for a fee) into the global listings that would be in a separate tab on the bazaar terminals. This would be searchable and show the item details and the price listed. Purchasing the item could still be handled at the local vendor, this method would be an advertising method and not a sales method.
The merchant tent is a wonderful structure that indicates the high likelihood that there is a merchant vendor inside. The tent however lends itself to smaller operations or specific types of markets. New structures like a small store front shop and a larger Mall like structure would enhance the merchant ability to have identifiable structures that indicate merchant vendors inside.
The addition of the mailsave command has made creating offline sales data easier, however the game still needs in game support for basic sales reporting. This feature would enhance the ability of merchants to manage their vendors and maintain relationships with their suppliers.
Currently merchants get email when they purchase and item. When an item is purchased from them but not when they are offered an item. This seems to be counter intuitive. The offer must be acted upon within a certain time frame or it is automatically rejected. An email needs to be generated when an offer is made to the vendor.
Yep needed.
12BugVendors not appearing on Map after Server Reset
When the server is reset all advertising is removed from the global map. A vendor registers itself with the global map the first time it is loaded. The problem is that it requires someone to go into the room where the vendor is located first. This creates a Catch 22 situation. You can’t advertise globally until someone wanders by and loads your advertising which isn’t likely to happen if there is no way for someone to realize you have a vendor in the first place. Some method to return vendors to the map automatically needs to be put in place.
Never noticed, though i guess it happens if people say so.
13BugPlanetary and Overhead Map Vendor Name Overlap
The number of vendor on the global map (and over head map) has increased to the point that the names often overlap and are unreadable. (the same is true of city names) This needs to be cleaned up somehow so that labels on the map don’t overlap and are readable to the players.
Dont care.
14New FeaturePer Unit Crate/Resource Crate Sales
Resources and to a lesser extent created items in a factory crate can be sold more efficiently if they don’t have to be divided up and removed from the crates. This would allow someone to buy 1 or more Units at a set per unit price without having the merchant determine the specific number of units that can be bought. If I have a 100k Crate of Iron for sale at 5 Credits Per unit the buyer should be able to buy 1 to 100k of those units at 5 credits per. The same should be true of a factory crate of T21 Rifles {Heave Damage Edition}. This would be more efficient for the merchant, the buyer, and perhaps the item database.
For this to work in my opinion, it would have to be a clickable box to activate it, as i would hate to see some griefer take 1 fiberplast panel from every crate to mine just to make them incomplete lots. And also i offer discount on larger orders, so if it did come in, then it could be nice to have something that gives instant discount if X ammount of X item was bought (say in my case i sell 10 of any crate for the price of 9) though this might become limited to the same serial number.
15New FeatureBackground Music in Shops
Atmosphere is important to many merchants and the idea of music playing in the background while people shop is very appealing. One idea that has been presented is a craftable item by Musicians which would play a selected background piece and need to be replaced from time to time or upgraded to another music selection.
Dont care.
16BugVendor Count Corruption when Vendor is deleted
When a vendor is deleted by means other than “Remove Vendor” (e.g. deleting the structure) the number of vendors a merchant has in place sometimes isn’t updated correctly. This causes the merchant to have to wait for a CSR to manually fix the count before they can get back to their business.
Needs to be fixed, though if your stupid enough to blow up your house with your vendors or stuff inside, you are preaty stupid.
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.
Yep, would make sence to be able to add an option for fixed position.
18Game PlayAllow Protocol Droid to Ad Bark
The Protocol Droid granted at master is unable to ad bark. It is understood that most of the droids would be unable to do this in an understandable language it doesn’t seem to make sense for the protocol droid to be similarly limited. Protocol droids exist to speak. To translate, to communicate. The fact that the droid that is the major reward for attaining Master Merchant is mute is a severe letdown. Please allow the protocol droid to ad bark.
Again, makes sence, even an R2 unit could be programed to speak though as if its a bark thing it only needs to be a recorded message like the one from leia to obi wan.
My ideas
I would like to see you to be able to rename your vendors. As its a bit of a pain if you used to use it for one thing and named it for that, then you deside to drop that skill and take up anoughter one. As then you have to remake a vendor you like the look of, and take away the old ones wages to feed to the knew one, and also transfer over any stock you had, and still wanted to clear. And also reclothe it, as some people dress their vendors in fancy stuff.
I would like to see new signs, maybe ones that reflect whats being sold inside. So Tailors get a picture of a suit or a dress. Weaponsmiths could have a gun or sword, smugglers can have a pirate flag (ahhhh matey )
I would love to see merchants be able to sell more items on the bazaar if they wanted (maybe +4 per merchant skill box and 5 for novice and 6 for master. So you got 100 total.) Still keep the same max cap on price though as if not it would make vendors useless.
Now for the last bit.
Viake wrote:
Well actually if you give up doc or master dancer or musician, your cantina, or hospital fall down. Or atleast they did a few months ago, not sure about now.
Though the vendor as a storage bot is anoughter thing that i dislike, as it means anyone with a house who got artisan 0-0-3-0 can have this thing with all their junk on they havnt got room for, thus illiminating all use for having limited storage allowences in houses. Maybe your idea is right and that would stop them putting expensive stuff on them incase it was bought
Both for customer orders, PA or Factional specials etc the vendors should be able to allow a merchant to place an item up for sale that can only be purchased by the indicated party or group. (e.g. guld:WAH, faction:Imperial, Chataka)
Daroul wrote:
- Exploit vendors (those that are used by players who surrended Merchant) should be destroyed without warning. It is just that: an exploit. And I think that, somewhere in the User License Agreement, or whatever the name, you can read something about cheating and exploitng bugs as a big, big, bad thing... People are alreday warned. And if they cancel thier account. Well, Why should I care about cheaters?
It is being sorted, so thats that. Though no idea how they are sorting it and if they are going to take any of the ideas me or other people have said.
- Some changes could be made to the profession to make it more dynamic.
With the actual system, vendors are static and if you remove them, they're lost. For my part, I want to play a traveler merchant, placing his tent on a new planet each month, meeting new customers, seeing new lands. But I must do it again each time: taking my stock back, removing vendors, redeed the tent, etc... boring, and too long. Why not a new feature for the tent: if you redeed it while vendors are inside, the vendors will reappear when you place it again, with all their stock unchanged. Of course, it could lead to other exploits, like keeping a store in your inventory, wich would contain 6 vendors fully packed. So, I propose that the tent will keep its content intact IF the merchant place it within two hours. When the two hours are done, the content disappear.
Would be a nice idea, but what happens to you if you connection dies for X ammount of time, or you reach your download limit without realising or servers crash, or power cut.... or whatever. And this means that those X ammount of hours you have to replace the tent go by without you being able to be in game, you would lose all the stuff for posibally reasons way beyond your control.
- I can understand people who have a cantina, a hospital, or even a town, and who want to add some life with NPCs. Their only choice, when you listen to them, is to take some merchant skills, place vendors, and surrend. Weel, if you keep apart the fact that they could buy a droid named barman and drop the deed into your cantina, we could find a satisfying solution here. After all, we are merchants, and we should be able to sell everything, including employees or slaves. We should be able to somehow "craft" NPCs and sell them to a customer. These NPCs won't be vendors, but just that: NPCs.
Yep i said that before, and i segested (others probably did aswell) being able to place things like the junk dealers, bartenders and all that like the ones you can find in the current town cantinas (serve rubish drinks for about 5-20 creds each). Or maybe with the proposed new mission systems comming in then you could have NPC things rather than terminals for entertainer missions, healer missions and stuff like that. Aswell as the normal mission terminals posibally being replaced by a friendly person who has a computer next to him giving out normal hunting missions.
DocSavag wrote:
The deadline for submitting this list was Friday the 9th so I have sumbitted this list. The lists are not static however and if a bigger issue comes up or more design becomes available we can probably update our list without too much fuss, but it is vital that we don't let the devs sit around without a list. The risk that some other profession will get our 5 minutes of attention is too great.
Quote: " I have all these skills, now what happens if I give them up? Right now due to an oversight in the code it is possible to surrender all of your merchant skills and not lose any vendors or real functionality. You lose the ability to add new vendors, change adbarking or re-register the vendors. But everything continue to work as it did before. The SWG Development Team has confirmed with us that this is not the intended behavior of the game and that it will be fixed in an upcoming publish to require you to maintain your skills in order to continue to operate vendors as a merchant. Until then many merchants consider using vendors without skills to be unfair and would suggest that you don't do it. Let your own conscience be your guide. "
I think that is a good way of putting it myself, although what you said about a specific sticky about the subject rather than adding it to the guide could have more of an impact. However we do have a point of reference already, if people choose to read the guide to the profession (even browse the highlights to find the answer) before actually asking that question it shouldn't be a problem..
WHY?
because the devs can spend time making sure you get screwed, while they cant fix something as small as cutting off the ability to keep vendors that your shouldnt have. you cant tell me that fixing the keeping vendors is anymore difficult then keeping items in the store rooms. yes i know there are problems with database size growing, find ways to keep it down apart from taking items from players!
after having the above stuff happen i asked my friend who took over my account to protest the fact that i had lost items. to do so i suggested that he keep all items on the selling list so that it would cause customers the inconvienence of having to sift through all the items, even those listed at 99999999999999 credits. this helps the merchant in 2 ways.
1. the item will stay on the sell list for a period of time, then fall with a notification email, in to the store room. then they will at least have some warning that things are about to fall off the face of the universe.
2. customers will complain. how does this help you ask? just send them to the correct complaint department, Sony's. imagine a conversation in tells:
customer: "hey why are there all these items in your vendor selling for 99999999999 credits? cant you store them in your store room?"
you: "oh i am sorry about that, but until the storage problem is fixed i cant be guaranteed more then 7 days of storage in the vendor store room, so instead i store them with all my for sale items."
customer: " what do you mean cant be guarenteed more than 7 days? isnt it a store room?"
you: "that is just a label that Sony put on it, but in reality it is just a recycle bin like the one in microsoft windows. if you put to much in, and wait to long, you never get it back."
customer: "what?!?! you mean things are deleted out of it on purpose?"
you: "oh yes. just the other day a crate went missing."
customer: "They have got to fix that bug!!!"
you: "oh no, it is not a bug, it is "working as intended." Sony and the Devs arent willing to put out more money to fix the ability of the database to handle more player items, or to find a nifty way of storing stuff in the database so as to cost less in terms of harddrive and processor useage. but thats alright because once you understand why all those items are there you just get used to it. after all, everyone has known from the start that smugglers were broken, but at this point we are all use to that, so why fix it?"
customer: "that is ridiculous! why if my class was broken like that, paying the amount of money i do a month, i would demand it to be fixed! is there anything i can do to help?"
you: "yeah, bug Sony and the Devs, and tell your in game friends.
i think its a bit over the top, but come on, let be real about this. i paid good money with the understanding anything i created in game was my characters and that i could use it or store it in any way i saw fit. i was never told, anywhere before i became a merchant, that items would disappear by storing them in the STORE ROOM of my vendor.
yeesh.
Naufragus wrote:
Issues 1-3 i find completly irellevant....i would say move them to the bottom of the list....
You know how many of us feel about Issue 1...it is irrelevant to my game and wont improve anything for anyone...I want the devs focus on real game improvements instead of this.....i could live with this issue for years...lets make things better instead of fixating on this
Issue 2 is just a non issue as far as i am concerend....if people have the skill and pay the fees who cares...irrelevant to improving my game....
Issue 3 really only effects people running those awful mega malls....those of us just using OUR OWN vendors dont really care...it isnt an issue...irellevant to improving my gameplay or business
The main focus should be on improving the interface and making resotocking after the pointless timer delists things much much easier...this effects ALL merchants and improves things
Message Edited by DawnTreader777 on 07-14-2004 12:38 AM