Merchant Archive

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Coreena wrote:
From newest patch notes:

- Added bid column to new vendor location pane

I hope this is not what I fear it is

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DocSavag wrote:
A user who is banned from a merchant shop can purchase an item from that shop remotely. They cannot retrieve the item once they have paid for it. Tested and confirmed on TC tonight.


I don't really care how they solve it. The remote purchase is game breaking for merchant shops and that is the reason I oppose it. The code required to cover all the possible sources for people to get screwed out of their merchandise will be considerable.

You have to handle bans, vendor deletions, and access fee changes.

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Appears the Dev's did not read much from our complaints, or suggestions, last time....

S'ok, after this weekend there will be one less merchant in the Intrepid Galaxy and a huge "nothing over 1 credit" sale that will run for 30 days (until items fall back into stockroom (and oblivion).

Bye folks. This one put the last nail in for me.

My other concerns:

• The system currently pulls items in a random fashion to list on the front page. If you sort items, it only sorts for that front page. So say I'm looking for Vibro Knucklers, for example. I go to the appropriate category, sort the items on the first page alphabeticallyand go to the Vs. I then have to click through how many other pages and check in the Vs there as well. It would be much more effective if sorting went beyond the first page. Meaning Icould sort alphabetically and then go to the page where Vs started.


• Remote purchase is a flawed system from my understanding. Not only can you buy an item from a shop you are banned from, the distances listed aren't very helpful without storing the waypoint and checking the map. It also discourages one-stop-shopping at the actual Merchant location because the customer may have already bought it from another place on the bazaar. Making the galaxy-wise search exactly that--a search--would solve this issue. Look all you want, but you have to go to the actual location in order to buy the item. The possibility of getting there as someone else has just bought the item is a much better compromise than the issues remote purchasing presents.


• Vendor/Bazaar categories are horrible right now. It's bad enough searching through what's already listed on the bazaar doing a galaxy-wide bazaar search. How much worse is that going to get when you add the huge amounts of vendor items on top of it? Fix the categories first. *This is a huge issue already.*


• The current live Bazaar system has no way to filter out auctions. If I'm looking for something to buy *now*, I don't want to have to find what I want only to realize that it's an auction listed at 6k credits for advertizing purposes. Add that on top of the influx of items from vendors, and it becomes even more of an annoyance. We need more ways and filtersto search in the current vendor/bazaar system beyond categories.


• Not tying the bazaar listing to a Merchant skill devalues the Merchant profession even more. What's the point of planetary advertizing if you can be seen galaxy-wide at Artisan Business 3? Perhaps a change to the advertizing system could help the problem of customers not finding what they want: make planetary advertizing (when enabled on a vendor) automatically determine what categories the vendor is advertized under by adding the vendor name under the categories of the items listed on that vendor (perhaps even with the number of items on that vendor in that category).

I would much rather see this system become exactly what it says it is. A *search* function. Either part of the current bazaar or a separate terminal. If it was an actual search function rather than a remote purchase function, you could also make terminals available for placement in Player Cities.

Any help answering my intial question is appreciated!

Come on people

Only a few months ago you could drop *all* merchant skills and all artisan pre-reqs and still run a business with full vendors and merchant priveledges...

Was the economy in shambles? Did it prevent those people who wanted to actively be a merchant or run a well maintatined, well stocked, well decorated vendor house from doing just that - *and* making money from it?

By all means express your concerns, work with the staff to close loopholes in the new system, but all those shouting "Fire" or "Armageddon" are just going way overboard.

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Ragnaat wrote:
Come on people

Only a few months ago you could drop *all* merchant skills and all artisan pre-reqs and still run a business with full vendors and merchant priveledges...

Was the economy in shambles? Did it prevent those people who wanted to actively be a merchant or run a well maintatined, well stocked, well decorated vendor house from doing just that - *and* making money from it?

By all means express your concerns, work with the staff to close loopholes in the new system, but all those shouting "Fire" or "Armageddon" are just going way overboard.

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I would trade that fix for the death of this feature. Running a merchant vendor shop without skills pales in comparison to the ability to sell items on a galactic level without ever even having merchants skills at all.

I think I would be cool with this change if...

1. No price anywhere when looking from the bazaar.

2. That leads to this, you can get a WP to where the item is located.

3. Needs to be an advertising IV skill.

a. This fixes issues about griefing.

b. Comparison shopping is much easier then before.

c. Not anyone can do it, as it is the end all of end all ways to get items seen by the public.

Find what you want, get a WP to it, if you are banned (works just like now, except you know what you are missing in there), find the item on the vendor, buy it. Tons of time saved! Isn't very damaging to the economy or to our prof, the sales by browsing are still there, shops are still visited for more then just hitting the available tab.

If I missed anything let me know. This seems to be a good balance between helping buyers and not hurting sellers.

**EDITED FOR** This needs to be a merchant skill somewhere, advertising IV?

Message Edited by GreenLeaders on 03-16-2005 09:59 AM

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pykescylla wrote:
Well, I've read through all of these posts and there are a LOT of good points made. In my opinion, if you're going to implement a system like this, prices have to be available to the customer doing the search. Imagine your disappointment after travelling out to a shop only to find you can't afford the item you wanted.

That said I don't think many folks are going to use this feature once they've tried it. Say I want a suit of 80% kinetic composite armor. How do I find that? What is it called? If they were my customers, they'd know to buy Brawler Composite. Some folks might call their kinetic composite or something like Comp Chest 80K80E68B. People will have the pleasure of browsing thousands of pieces of armor to find what they want. Once they do find a piece they liked, how do they find matching pieces? They can't search for other pieces by the same maker. Do they piece together a suit from all over the galaxy or just go pick up their chest plate and assume the merchant has the rest of the armor in stock? Did they remember to look under Misc=>Wearable Containers to check for prepackaged suits? If they did, what a pain. Can you imagine all the other stuff that is listed in pack? Heaven help the poor soul who actually wants a backpack!

Frankly, this is nat a system I'd want to use.

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Buy a whole suit in a backpack? That is how I sell them most of the time, but this system will likely encourage naming packs something and just putting X unit of metal in them. There is an amount of trust that is lost if you are not in the shop and cannot see what I am saying is in the back on display. This is at least me belief, being in the shop maybe not... but being able to see the armor on display and seeing that I can make what I am saying is in the pack helps. Off course anyone one person can not do this forever, word will get around. But what if this a second account, for the single purpose of making a new character to do it again every week after tipping all the money made to the persons main account? Sure CSR could probably figure out who is doing it, but there are a lot of servers and a lot of people.

Personally I don't think the changes are up to par with what needs to be done if this is really something the devs are sure they want in live.

Just a few thoughts

If it ain't broke don't fix it. Is the current system broken? No. At the moment people come to my shop seeking weapons/buffs/armour/food and a bunch of other stuff. I'm usually standing there crafting away in the back room. Yes they see the 35+ Mini R2 droids I have, the Mando, the RIS, the BH armour, the Jetpack parts (full set). I've more or less stuck anything of worth/looks cool in there. I've generated a rapport with a number of customers. Often I'm in tell hell because a customer has arrived and wants some help because I've run out of stock. Jeeeeez I can't stock my own vendors at the moment so I'm doing a progressive price increase... what used to be 6k is now 12k. Hell to them 12k is nothing to pay for a vk or gaffi. I won't be naming all my items AAAALOOKAAAATTHISPIECEOFRANDOMJUNK!!, when people come to my shop they know that if its in stock it will be of high quality guaranteed. I aim to please my customers and to that aim I've even started selling junk/loot for 1337 creds . Please I know you guys can't do much, but please, hopefully the devs will take heed the CURB is going to be the downfall of all crafters if this is the sort of new stuff the devs implement. Is it just me or does it seem that crafting is being sidelined. Ents are being appeased with new dances while their no.1 problem isnt fixed. Yet there is an upcoming COMBAT revamp...

Devs... for what its worth, if it ain't broke don't fix it. Combat is broken to some degree fix that. Crafting isnt broken, merchant isn't broken, do what the ents want and fix AFK buffbots.

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JangoFett100 wrote:

I haven't been on TC yet, so I'm wondering what decides which items show up on the first page when doing a search. Is it proximity, when the vendor was registeredor something else? And if it's just random, then the market will get flooded with even more goods as everyone loads up their vendors to try to get noticed.

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There is no real way to test this but my assumption is that it works just like it does now on the bazaar and vendors. The items that were added first show up in the first pages and the items added later show up in latter pages. You can resort an individual page but not the whole listing at once. It means that once your items sell you have to wait until everyone else's sell until yours are back on the first page. That is my guess about how it works. It certainly isn't alphebetical or by distance that I can see.