Merchant Archive

Ok... right now, from what I can tell, NPCs are SOOOO far superior its not even funny... it has to be a bug.

I have a bulky terminal (that I haven't gotten rid of because it had 20k in maintenance pool, now I can take it out, but its such a pain to remove all the items, retrieve them, put a new merchant up and put the items back.. almost ALL of my items have descriptions specific to that item. )... apparently, it has a maximum capacity of 97. If I try to put the 98th item up, I get "Unable to sell invalid item"... this isn't related to value, as it is an item per item basis regardless of the cost of the item. This number includes items linked to the vendor ni the stockroom, or offers... so if I have 97 items up, people can't make offers on my vendor.

This terminal has a maintenance rate of 100. For some reason, the maintenance rate of vendors is per hour, while on almost everything else it is per half-hour... I don't know why... but anyway, this vendor costs 2400 per day, and can only hold 97 items. Basically, all non-NPC vendors I've seen have a maintenance fee of 1/1000 of the value of the items on them + 1.

Every other droid and terminal I placed had the same maintenance fee formula. I don't know if they have higher capacities or not, however, I wasn't willing to try to test it. Too much time.

Now, NPCs... no matter what I do, I can't get an NPC vendor's maintenance rate over 1. My co-shopowner has NPCs that she's NEVER run out of room on, she has well over 200 items on one, might have more on another... there may be an upper limit, but I don't know what it is.

So why would ANYONE use a terminal or droid that costs a LOT more to maintain than an NPC vendor, that doesn't hold as much anyway.. I'd like to use some of the terminals, but I'm not willing to pay 100-1000 times the price for this.. I might pay more if that were intentionally, but I can't believe that it is.

Basically, I think NPCs are bugged at 1 maintenance rate... I also think there needs to be some info released on the benefits or disadvantages of different types... if the bulky vendor has a limit of 97 and costs 1 cred / 1000 value / hour, and other types are different... I'd like to know that. It's no good to run into a max limit on items that you had no idea was there... also, it seems like instead of basing the max size and credit cost entirely off of the vendor type (if that is the case... maybe it's just that droids/terminals are also bugged but all the same), it should be based off the merchant's skill.. I know one skill allows decreased maint fees, but that's the only thing.. no changes in inventory size.. if I am a master merchant and I WANTED to use an inferior model, I'd need to either KNOW that it was inferior and be ok with that for the look, or be able to use any type knowing they all work basically equivalently.

But as it is now, a merchant is insane to use anything other than an NPC vendor.

Seems like the same bug they had for Harvesters. Maintenance was stuck at 1 for them as well for a while.

It's a bug which will be resolved soon. NPC's will be the MOST expensive of all vendors soon.

Personally i think this should be the standard in the game. Or at least NPC's should charge a flat rate because you are not paying matanace on the NPC you are giving a salary. Terminal and Droid vendors need upkeep and the more items you have the heavier the load on those vendors are. So maybe it is bugged being at one but i like the idea of a flat fee.

As for using NPC vendors. No way will I use them. I don't want to wake up one morning to my vendor poofed when they make changes and this raises npc vendor maintaince a lot thus killing my vendor and items. Can you afford this to happen? I can't! This issue would be considered an Exploit as far as SOE is concerned.

I would hope they fix some of the other problems we have before doing this. It would be like a stab in the back as far as I am concerned. I really wanted to be a merch but if they can't start giveing ETA's or at least start to communicate with us saying that they are fixing the problem I might have to quit and come back to it at another time

I'm on the track to mastering merchant now. I have ad 2, vendr2, and hire 1, andI should have eff1 in an hour. I'm hoping to get the merchant job that was posted by sony to help get merchant fixed right and in the correct order

I really don't want the job but i think that Xcal you would be just fine for it. So far i have never seen you post something to aggresive or controversial and you seem to be on the same page as me, so i would say that you would be a good rep for the Merchents. I just hope that they choose someone soon