Merchant Archive
Thread: Vendor Maintenance Fees coming – your input request
Not a good idea.
See, the point of having a vendor is to sell stuff with high cost. If i want to sell low cost stuff, i use the bazaar. Right now, the cost of 1 vendor is:
The skill points for hiring.
The lot for your building.
Your building's initial and maintenance cost.
The time to re-initialise ad every morning.
Add your inventory tax, and most crafter will just work on personal orders. The only intelligent way to do this would be to put this tax on artisan, but reduce it DRASTICALLY by skilling in merchant, so that, oh, behold, crafters come to merchants to sell their wares. (what a concept).
As for the money, just stop making it so easy to get!
You know what any player can do for money? Survey for a ressource 75% about 500m from town. Get 2 artisan missions, 1800 credits each, for that ressource. Run over, get your 3600, run back, rince, repeat, that's an average 1000 creds a minute. I know, i bought a PA hall in 2 days doing that.
My $0.02
Too-high vendor maintenance fees linked to the price of listed items could create two problems as far as I can see,
First, with respect to the economy, a possible scenario:
The cost of sellinggoods goes up, and at the same time, the rewards offered for doing missions at the low-end have already come down.
So it takes longer for our mission-running customers to save up to afford our prices, which means we have to list the items for longer, which means our prices go up, which means bigger fees, which means.... etc
Second, it has the potential to encourage grinding:
I make a bunch of mid-range probots. I know that better probots are available, so I don't give the hard-sell, wandering around cantinas spamming people with sales pitches. I have a store in a high-traffic area of Naboo, so I simply list them in my vendor and hope they sell.
If there's a chance that the expense of listing these items will actually cost me money, I may be discouraged from listing them until I can make a better probot. So I'm in a position where I'm making probots purely for the XP - I'm grinding, which is something I'm trying avoid. It's boring, and SWG developers have said on several occasions that they're trying to get us out of the mindset of grinding.
I hope the reason for introducing listings fees on the vendors *is* about the economy, and not about SWG reducingthe size of itsrapidly growing database.
A tax on sales sounds like a reasonable idea, as does maintenance fees similar to what I currently pay for my Personal Mineral Extractors.
Why 45 minutes? Everything should be standard. Make it 30 minutes or 60 minutes. There's enough crap to keep track of without having all the different maintenance rates.
While you're at it, make power requirements and (structure) maintenance fees standard also. Right now, Maintenance rate is in 30 minute intervals, power is on 60 minute intervals and the harvest rate is on 1 minute intervals.
Standardize the intervals, please.
As far as the actual amout of the maintenance, the higher it is, the fewer people will use them (vendors themselves, not buying from them).
My idea would be a 1-5% tax or transaction fee ontop of the price of the item (like a Bank transfer). That way, you're not punishing the Merchants for doing what they're suppose to do (have vendors) and the fee is properly (and easily) transfered to the consumer. I'd bet that a 5% tax will sink more money out of the economy quicker then some mathmatical wizardry on the maintenance rate.
I would make it so that the merchant/vendor owner sees his/her sale price and the customer sees the sales price + 5%. Make the sink transparant. Less complaining that way.
Another idea would be to make the "tax" planet dependant. Naboo has a 6% tax, Tatooine has a 4% tax, Corellia has 5% tax, Rori and Talus have a 3% tax. Make the planetary population determine the tax rate. Average population of the planet (daily, during primetime) averaged each week. This would get people to move around for better shopping oppurtunities ("Shop on Talus for lower taxes!"). Even location on the planet could determine the Tax Rate. The closer you are to a city, the higher the tax. Even adding an additional "local" tax for being within 2km of a city would work.
A "total value" method unfairly targets certain classes (architects, weaponsmiths, armorsmiths) while letting other classes off easy (or easier). The end result, merchants become too big of a PITA, and they get nuked in favor of "in person" trades. A master merchant with 6 vendors is going to be really hurting if they're carrying any significant amount of items, especially expensive ones.
Why in the world would I want to sell structures on a vendor at (total value)/1000 if I'm selling Medium Harvesters at 30K each? I have 10 medium harvesters for sale, that's a 300cr hit every 45 minutes for 10 items. 9600cr/day for a stinkin' vendor? I don't think so... Even with the Efficiency line savings, it's still not worth it. That's enough cash to run 6 (6.67, actually) of those harvesters each day. I'd have to say thats a bit outta line.
A 5% flat fee/trasaction would be 1500credits each (15000cr for the 10 harvesters). That's as much as having that harvester on the vendor for about a day and a half (960cr/day for a single harvester @ 30K.). It's a much more fair way to do it. It would encourage the use of vendors because it's cheaper for the owner to sell that way (no maintenance fee, or a small constant maintenance fee for the NPC "wages").Just for good mesure, add a 5% transaction fee to the Bazaar terminals too.
If the maintenance fees are too high, I'll find another way to sell things and I'm sure others will as well. So, there goes your cash sink. The benifits need to outweigh the costs. Otherwise, people won't do it. Offline sales arn't worth that much.
I would also suggest that this "fix" be held off at least until you guys can straighten out the Planetary Ads and Vendor Barking resetting everytime the server restarts.
I'd rather see it wait until player cities comes out (in addition to fixing the Advertising line of skills), but that's me. Why would I want to wander out to the middle of nowhere to go to a vendor when I have no idea what the heck they're even selling? With a city, at least there's kind of a reason to be there (banks, hospitals, cantinas, cloning facilities, shuttle ports, etc) Without a landmark or secondary reason to be there, there is little incentive for a customer to wander way the heck out in to the sticks to visit a single building of vendors and (maybe) buy something.
Marduke Akkad
Architect (4/3/3/4)
Merchant (3/2/4/4)
South Beach, Talus
I am in favor of a flat fee for vendors instead of a percentage/unit time setup. That is more realistic as it represents daily salary/upkeep,issimilar to upkeep on houses and other structures,and won't penalize merchants who are casual gamers and/or keep pricey items in their vendor.
If there is a need for money sinks concentrate them on the people who've taken advantage of the various exploits and not the folks trying to ply a trade.
Are we forgetting about architects here? By your formula, if I have any kind of factories or medium-large installations or houses on my vendor for sale, it's gonna end up costing mehundreds every 45 minutes? What's the use of a vendor to me now?
Even with just listing my furniture, totaled up at this current time, I'd be paying more maintainence than a factory, and for some reason thatjust seems wrong. Why should I have to limit my business due to money restraints like that? How am I expected to pull in customers when I can't list 50% of my stock because I'll be charged too much?
I don't disagree with the need for a fee here, but I'm thinking it should be more flat rate per day. Or even charge tax on items sold. Whatever price we listed is what the buyer pays, however 5% or whatever is taken out before it even hits our pockets. There's a nice fat money sink without us worrying about suddenly losing 50 items worth 100,000 because our vendor wasn't paid it's 3,200 a day fee. Yes, I realize 5% would make that fee end up being 5,000, but I'd rather not worry about having to earn money some other way every day just to keep my business alive. I'm pretty self sufficient right now with my store, and I'd like to keep it that way.
At least if the 5% tax is taken out of the money we recieve, it won't scare away buyers that have to worry about paying extra money to purchase an item. And wouldn't the tax be easier to manage when it comes to reduced vendor fees in the merchant skill? With total value /1000 every 45, I don't see an easy way to drop fees there... with the tax, you could simply turn 5% into 4%.
Unfortunately, your system is extremely flawed. It doesn't really think about the implications to low volume vendors.
Let's take two cases, a high volume vendor and a low volume one.
The high volume one has stocked 80 items at 1k each... let's say a doctor selling stimpacks.
The low volume one has stocked 1 item at 80k... let's say an architect.
There are 32 pay periods per day in your system. Let's break that down into 1/4s, or 8 pay periods (6 hours.) For simplicities sake, let's say that the sales are occuring JUST after the 8 pay period cycle.
PAY PERIOD 1
HV Vendor pays 80000/1000*8 or 6400 in fees.
LV Vendor pays80000/1000*8 or 6400 in fees.
HV vendor then proceeds to sell 20 of his stimpacks.
PAY PERIOD 2
HV vendor pays 60000/1000*8 or 4800 in fees.
LV Vendor pays 80000/1000*8 or 6400 in fees.
HV vendor then proceeds to sell 20 of his stimpacks.
PAY PERIOD 3
HV vendor pays 40000/1000*8 or 3200 in fees.
LV Vendor pays 80000/1000*8 or 6400 in fees.
HV Vendor then proceeds to sell 20 of his stimpacks.
PAY PERIOD 4
HV Vendor pays 20000/1000*8 or 1600 in fees.
LV Vendor pays 80000/1000*8 or 6400 in fees.
HV Vendor then proceeds to sell 20 of his stimpacks. He has none left and therefore will pay no fees.
LV Vendor sells his 1 harvester. He has nothing left and therefore will pay no fees.
In this example, the high volume vendor has sold 80,000 worth of merchandise and paid fees of 16000. He nets 64,000 in that day.
The low volume vendor, on the other hand, has sold 80,000 worth of merchandise and paid fees of 25600. He nets 54,400 in that day.
That's a loss of 15% simply because one vendor caters to a high volume market, the other a low volume one. You are punishing architects mainly and resource sellers, armorsmiths (armor doesn't move at the pace weapons do.) You are also punishing tailors and chefs who overstock because customers need selection. You are not rewarding, but not hurting as much weaponsmiths, some resource sellers and medical vendors.
It's unfair. It can't be put in the game. Make it a flat amount based on the item sold... 5-10%. On top of that, put in low vendor fees, LOW as in 300 a day. You can make more money sinks when you give us content worth it--- planetary advertising is supposed to be a money sink but it doesn't work. Having a way of differentiating our houses as vendor houses would be worth a money sink. Additional vendor functionality (allowing sliders on resources, allowing the ability to create a shopping cart and assign discounts based on the total amount in the shopping cart) would be worth more in the money sink.
This system isn't. If these changes go in as planned, I will remove my vendor because as an architect, it's economically unfeasible.
You need to rethink the way vendor maintenance is charged. Big ticket, low sales volume items need a home on vendors. Charging maintenance based on the offer of a sale, as opposed to the actual sale will remove these items from the economy. The point behind vendors was to reduce the marketplace spamming in towns (I imagine). This will do just the opposite. I will nver find any architectural items more complex / expensive than a medium mineral harvester on vendors. I'll be running around town spamming for a heavy harvester or large house. Sort of destroys the concept of a merchant.
I'm fully supportive of your need to remove money from the economy. But this skews market prices in a way that biases transactions that are only occassional. To illustrate, ask Holo what he would do if his real estate agent for the sale of his home charged a commission, regardless of whether a sale was made, and that rate was based on how long it took to sell. And then toss a (unrealistic in this example) possibility that no sale would occur. Under this scenario, renting suddenly looks like a better option. In the same vein, large ticket items with low volume of sales will disappear from vendors.
If you want to remove money from the economy, add in a sales tax and de minimis vendor maintenance fees. To stop people from using the storeroom for extra storage, make them pay some fee to remove items from the storeroom (I'm a bit fuzzy on this last one, but I can see it being a concern of yours).
As a beginning level weaponsmith on Tatooine, I have the following installations:
Ashop (which requires maintenance)
Afactory (more maintenance costs), (By The Way, The factoriesareScrewed UP).
Two solar generators ( again more maintenance costs)
Four various harvesters (Yet again,more maintenance costs)
A terminal vendor (Maintenance fees that are sucking the life out of me . . . )
I have sold MAYBE 3 or 4 items off of the vendor. The vendor is kept full to allow the best selection of weapons of the ones that I can make. This vendor is NOT often used. It has come to the point where I am considering taking the vendor out and maybe making a little profit from my sales off of the Bazaar. I try not to gouge my customers, but I have been playing this game from day one and have very little extra credits to show for my work. Money sinks, no doubt are needed to maintain a balance, but the fees off of the Personal vendors should be more like a sales tax or commission on ITEMS SOLD ! A small flat additional DAILY fee would also be reasonable. Bag this idea of a fee calculation that is based on a value of items NOT sold, sittingin a vendor every 45 minutes. Are you trying to reduce the number of merchants? Because that is the result that you have calculated in your proposal.
Thanks For Your Time,
P.S. Why in the heck do private vendors have a time limit on items placed? Why do we have to retrieve items off our PRIVATE vendors, then WASTE time on restocking the retrieved items !?!??!?! I can see the rational on the public bazaars. Where is the reasoning for the PRIVATE vendors???? No sense whatsoever.
"Kill 'em all, and let the Pentium sort them out ! "
I am happy to see vendors are being fixed, but I do not think your suggested implementation is a good idea.
Total Listed Value of Items on Vendor / 1000 every 45 minutes
Maintainance over timeis a terrible idea. A couple of my vendors only sell lightly. Whatif I have a vendor that is costing me 10,000 credits per day, yet it sells items that people generaly do not buy often? What if this vendor is only earning an average of 5,000 per day in sales? I cant just not sell the product, that is not fair to my customers that do buy it. I cantjust raise the prices to compensate, because the maintainance rate would just go up also.
Vendor maintainance MUST be on a per-sale basis. Like 5% of the total sale price. 3% if you have vendor efficiancy.
If maintainance is implemented as stated above, I can say for certanty that I will have to permanently take down at least two of my vendors, because their products simply do not sell fast enough.
Ahhh, forget it. Why am I bothering to put down some careful thoughts about alternatives? Why are any of us bothering? The fix is in, the decision's been made, the ideas are fixed, the doctrines are immovable. Every single person here recognizes that the fee structure proposed is a bad idea on multiple levels: it makes no economic sense, it sticks another drain on the only "taxed" population, it makes the kind of high-stock, low-volume store that helps the game a lot completely non-viable, it more or less drops a bomb on the remaining non-master crafters sticking it out. And so on.
But you know they're going to do it anyway, because it's not about the player economy and it's not about trying to drain cash out from where cash has been reserved. Otherwise, they'd be talking about a tax on credit savings.
It's about the database and getting items out of circulation. It's about wanting to stop people from using vendors for storage. Never mind that there are tons of better ways to do that, some of them not terribly complicated. This is what they know how to do and they're going to do it.
I'm feeling terribly cynical, I guess, but I just have this feel, re-reading Q's post, that the decision's been made and they're just trying to soften us up. God, give us some hope, Q. Tell us you really are open to the alternatives that almost EVERYONE agrees are superior, that make good economic sense AND help credit drain more equitably out of the economy. Tell us it's not set in stone, and that you hear, really hear, and really care, what we're all saying. I mean, look at this thread--it's almost unanimous. It's polite. It's constructive. It's by people who have a lot invested in this game, who are trying to make each of their servers more fun to play on, who are trying to make a player economy actually work.
Please listen for once before you slap a solution for one kind of problem onto something else entirely and muck it up in the process.
this alone will cripple me! i'm just starting off as a weaponsmith and i don't even have a house let alone a vendor?
maybe add content and new stuff to buy and make instead of keep increasing the cost for everything making it impossible for a casual newbie to play?
No this is bad and i don't agree.
create more content instead and new stuff to buy!
I paid this cost on a vending machine style vendor for almost a month and I can tell you it is too much.
The problem with this system is that it penalizes the small crafter that does not sell much. Items will sit on their vendor for a long time since they only sell a few per day. These are the people that need the money most! The successful crafter that sells 20 items an hour gets away with almost paying nothing since the items are only on their vendor for a few hours.
The other problem is that crafters that sell an item that requires customization like Tailors are really hurt by this. They need to have 20 different items on the vendor representing each major color that people will want. Since they need hundreds of items on their vendor they will be hurt the most.
There needs to be a commission that is collected when an item is sold and not a maintenance fee. 5% makes sense to me. This way both the large and small businessman pays the same cost.
The real problem right now is the supply side is broken.. people can make 40-60k an hour on survey missions and thus money is coming in too fast.