Merchant Archive

I am a Bounty Hunter, but deal with merchants a lot and also have friends in the game you are merchants. Below is something I posted on the Discussion board, but no feedback was given. This might already be an issue that Merchant's gave in feedback.

A big complaint I have seen from merchants, such as Armorsmiths and Weaponsmiths, is that they are bombarded by /tell. Any half-way decent merchant has to use the AFK command so people sending a /tell can get a canned response about location and why they don't answer /tells directly.

Now, many of these merchants complain that they are bothered way too much by this. The reason why is that there is no system for these people to manage these types of messages. All people trying to contact the merchant see the same AFK response, including their friends or Guild members.

To solve this problem with merchants getting frustrated and eventually leaving the business (like several I know), I believe the tell system should be modified for the following:

Create a filtered response message that everyone could use, but would specifically apply to merchants. This would work just like an AFK, but would be used with the following feature...

Modify the tell system so that users can select a "Allow only /tell from people on my friend list". This would only send tells through from people on the friend list. For people who ARE NOT on the friend list, a new merchant-specific message would be displayed. This new message would allow all non-listed people to see the auto-response that could contain detailed information about location, vendor supply, etc. No extra beeps each time a tell comes in from people not on the list -no seeing your long auto-response in your chat screen.

Now, the problem with this is that if the merchant needs to private message someone but doesn't want to add them on the friend list. In this case, a targeted tell could take precedence over the above system. This would allow the merchant to talk directly to people privately who aren't on their list.

Bottom line is that there needs to be a system for merchants in SWG to manage requests better. Having them use AFK is not sufficient, and the current system is driving many mad. We want merchants to stay around in the game to make higher quality items. The system should be enhanced to help this, otherwise, some will walk away from the profession because the lack of an interface to handle their demand.