Merchant Archive

Good post

I do think the high fees serve three purposes all you listed. They serve the purpose of gating craftsman through the merchant profession, being a money sink for people selling things for a lot of money, and a way to make it so people didn't have a ton of items for sale on their vendors. (I presume that at some point in time vendors item limits wouldn't count against your house item limits and this would make the last more important as they wouldn't want people using a vendor as a cheap way to store extra items in their house).

I do think the most fair way of dealing with this problem would be instituting a vendor maint of maybe 10 or 15 flat fee, perhaps you could add 1 credit per 10 items on the vendor so people don't use them for storage and fix the vendors being placable in private buildings (I thought I read somewhere that they were only supposed to be placable in a public building?) and then institute a 5% sales tax. Reduced vendor fees would then lower the maintance fee and maybe the sales tax (hell they could combine the two market efficiencies and then have a second efficiency just for sales tax reduction).

I do think they will fix the NPC bug before they adjust the prices of vendors. All I can say to this is make sure you get eff2 if not master merchant before it happens so you won't be hit as hard=P

Right. But on the money sink for people selling items for lots of money, what doesn't make sense about that is that selling items for a high price may not be the same as selling items for profit. The profit margins for architect are pretty thin right now even though the items go for high prices. So in that case, it makes little sense to charge the person with those items on their vendor a very high price.

I think there are more elegant ways to accomplish all of those objectives than the current approach.

And I really do think they should fix the entire system before adjusting NPC vendors--they're the only hedge against the crude design of the vending system as a whole.

We've seen before that the devs sometimes value fixing an "exploit" (really a workaround) over fixing a broken skill or profession--when they 'fixed' the vendor-drop method of circumventing the broken vendor permissions.

What I'm really afraid of is that they're going to fix the maintenance on NPC vendors *before* adjusting the absurd, ridiculous maintenance fees on terminals and droids.

There are a lot of good ideas about how to adjust those fees--a low flat fee + a fixed percentage sales tax on items sold strikes me as the best approach. This is assuming that the high fees are intended to differentially be a money sink for players who are selling very expensive items--in which case a sales tax is the fairest way to go about it.

What I'm afraid of is that the high maintenance fees are either "intended" to keep people from listing many items in vendors (and thus burdening the database) or "intended" to gate vendors through the Merchant profession informally, by making them prohibitively expensive for anyone who hasn't climbed the Efficiency tree.

In both cases, if this is the intent of the high maintenance fees, there are easier fixes. If it's about trying to keep the number of items down, then just put a fixed ceiling on the items that can be listed per vendor. If it's about gating the vendors through Merchant, then gate them already, and take away the vendor from BA3 (which I personally think is not a good idea).

In any event, I would strongly, strongly ask the devs to do the following:
1) Don't "fix" the fees on the NPCs without first fixing the entire maintenance price structure for all vendors.
2) Please, please tell us *WELL IN ADVANCE*--like three or four days--if you're going to "fix" the NPC fees. I do not want to login one night to find that the maintenance fees that paid for 30 days have been burned through in one hour by an NPC vendor.

And if they do this (and I tend to expect they will), it'll especially hammer tailors (again.) We need to have lots of inventory on our vendors due to the high number of possibilities we have for clothing types and colors. Just to give a halfway decent look at the possibilities to customers takes up a lot of items, and even at relatively low prices, it adds up.