Merchant Archive
Thread: Merchant Specials?
Has anyone seen any of the merchant special abilities in use? I'd like to know a little bit about them... Also, how do vendors work? Can you just set them up anywhere? Upkeep?
-Q
Merchants received very little attention during the beta. I never personally saw any of their abilities put to use.
Vendors can only be placed in structures that you own (may apply to structures you have admin priviledges to, although those are currently broken I believe). You set them up and fill them with goods to sell and pay maintenence (wages) for them.
Merchanting definitely interests me, but it would be a very difficult profession as a 'primary.' Something I'm very much considering picking up on the side, though.
I think Merchant XP should be gained when someone purchases something from your merchant... and yes... just think.
A player city with your Store as the center of town.
I smell power, richness and xp!!! :-p
What ya think?
I never made it to Novice merchant in beta because the merchant XP came in so sloooooow (about 125 XP/day).
The way a vendor works, is once you get business III (and you have a house). You will get a new option when you click on the house terminal. This option allows you to create a vendor. Once you select a vendor type (and you get more types as you get more skills), you geta deed in your inventory. You can now place that vendor in you house.
At that point, you can click on the vendor to pay the maintenance. You can also post items for sale. There is no posting fee.
The maintenance fees are hourly. The computation is based the value of your inventory posted and the number of items posted. When I had a shop at the end of beta - I had an inventory of about 20K and 60 items. This cost me about 400cr/day.
I was making a lot of money as long as I kept it stocked. That was the hard part.
The best thing IMHO, is the ability for people to post offers of things to sell on your vendor. You log on, see what people have offered, buy what you like, mark it up (my favorite part 
), and repost.
Even in its current state, this is a fun profession. Just know, it is the least tuned of the profession and will not likely see much attention for a while, so it will takea very long time (like at this point 70 times longer than other professions) to progress. Hopefully this speed will pick up sometime in the next three months.
The thing about being a Merchant is that there is no real 'uber' one. With a Rifleman or Bounty Hunters, the master will always be better. With Merchants, it's basically all social work with no guide for advancement (which is the best part).
An accomplished Merchant is what I would consider an 'end game' feature.
As far as I know, these changes are in the live game right now, so as soon as we get some Merchants, they should be able to progress quite nicely. Personally, I'm looking forward to it.
On a related note, it seems from Holo's posts that it's really easy for them to tweak XP and pricing to balance the game, so it's probably not fair to say that it won't get attention anytime soon. This is the sort of thing that Holo can probably kick back and tweak from his office each morning...
-SierraBravo
SierraBravo wrote:
With respect to Merchant XP, the devs made an announcement back in the last few days of beta about tweaking the XP gains for various professions to balance them. Merchant was one of the biggest increases, something like 10-15 times what it was in beta.
-SierraBravo
Good point SierraBrava. I just remembered that chart that Holo posted that showed how much slower merchant xp was to everything else. I don't remember if he commited to changes in the live game. I should start getting merchant xp by monday, I'll report then.
Either way, I am not too concerned. They did the basic vendor functionality right. Everything else is a nice to have, and I can have enourmous fun with just a couple vendors. I am not really concerned if the merchant XP is trickling in as long as the money is FLOWING. IMHO, we merchants needed the updates they did to the maintenance fees far more than the XP rate.
Has anybody ever been registered on the planetary map? Throughout beta, I had never seen any player vendor in the Vendor Waypointfolder. It'd be interesting to even see if it works. Same for the NPCtext strings.
The most disappointing cut for Merchant was the ability to place an NPC in town to advertise your store with personalized text strings. I had been looking forward to it for a long time only to find it cut within a few days of the end of beta.
If anybody puts up a vendor, post the coords, planet and server. I'd like to stop by. Maybe buy something for the hell of it.
I wasn't aware that they took that out? The Vocalizatin tree still lists that you can have someone 'hawking' your wares in a city....at least the sites that offer skill tree charts still list that information.
I got to merchant but like everyone else, never made it past that in Beta since XP was almost undetectable!! I agree, that some of the xp should come from when people make purchases...being proportionate to price so one can't put things up for 2creds and reap in xp hehe. If they tweaked it I will be happy. 
I think a few people out there are ready, just need the houses to put them in.
There is no reason why a crafter can't just hit buisness 3 and call it a day. Everything above that, as someone mentioned already, is largely a social part of the game rather than strictly beneficial to gameplay. That appeals to me, but we'll see how this merchant xp goes hehe
I have a house and vendor up on Lowca right now. I put a Crafting Tool up for 100 credits, and another up for 500,000 credits.
Had a friend come buy the 100 credit one. I got paid, but then he couldn't retrieve the item.
Also, the experience rate has not been increased. 10 experience over a 2.5 hour period.
Merchants are still broken.
I'm an aspiring tailor and I've been thinking of getting some merchant xp to help the tailor side of things. Two questions though.
1) Does it increase how many things you can post? If so when does it kick in, business 3?
2) I assume they do not have a hard cap with how much you can charge right? Does that kick in at business 3 when you get vendors?
DevinDevine wrote:
If anybody puts up a vendor, post the coords, planet and server. I'd like to stop by. Maybe buy something for the hell of it.
Chilastra.Tatooine -1819 -4060 Just SW of Bestine.
But, I don't have anything posted for sale because atm, no one will be able to retreive and I don't want to greif anyone.
You can, however offer things to me for sale. I tested that with a friend and that did work for me. But it has not worked with others -- so there is no gaurantee it will continue working on mine (but it is atm).