Merchant Archive
Thread: The Real State of The Profession
First off I'd love to say thanks to SOE for the love we got last patch 
The flat rate vendor maintnence is a good send for those of us selling high end products. The merchant tents are a great start down a path to making us more viable in-game. As for fixing planetary advertising, true we don't have to click 5 times now to readvertise...but if you don't visit your vendor everyday, it simply won't show up on the map. Ad barking works great, now if they can glue our vendor's feet in place so I don't walk into my tent and see my vendor staring at the wall. Overall, the current skills we have seem to finally be working
Now for the truth. SOE likes to talk about this ideal called class balance. Currently with the "crafting" professions SOE's main focus has been renewable income and the ability to participate more actively in the galactic civil war. Now the reason why crafting is in quotation marks is that SOE has left us out of that catagory. We can't craft anything, despite the fact that artisan is a prerequisite to our profession. All of the crafting classes can propser as stand alone classes, and even utilize a vendor provided in the artisan tree to sell their wares. The only profession lacking a "real" source of renewable income is the architect, but we'll forget them since they got some real good love in the last publish. Currently Droid Engineers have been begging for 2 major updates to the game using the plea "our class has nothing worthwhile to do or sell." SOE has responded by gifting them the upper level player vehicles (correct me if I am wrong, I do know artisans will get to make some as well) and be efectively turning DE into a combat class by giving them the ability to make and use combat droids. Now what Droid Engineers keep quiet is that they have a very reliable source of renewable income, it is called the seeker droid. It takes 30 units of metal, 70 units of chemical, 2 GP modules and 1 memory module to make. Most DE's sell these for around 1,000 credits and up, and they have 10 uses to them. Bounty Hunters tend to use these items up like crazy, thus giving DE's a good source of income. They also can make useful droids, such as droids with crafting stations, and other various items. Inarguably, Droid Engineer is a complete, "true" profession. Now I ask, if a person was to do merchant as a stand alone, as SOE intended, what can we sell? We cannot craft anything, so we have no way of generating a renewable income. We could buy items from other people, and resell them at profit, just to compete with the guy selling the items at a lower price. We'd get put out of business. So honestly, the way the "player economy" is and our inability to craft any items, what can we do? What are the benefits to becomming a merchant? Well, Artisans can make and use a vendor. Sure the vendor isn't the best lookign thing in the world, and it costs about 15 credits / hour to run, but it does get the job done identical to merchant vendors. So the benefits to becomming a merchant....Advertising on the map..reduced vendor maintnence....reduced structure maintnence....the ability to select different vendor types to use....Those are the only skills that really do anything for us. Personally, the reduced structure maintnence is a winner for me...But as a merchant with no other profession, does a discount matter if you can't earn money? SOE talks constantly about balancing the profession, but it took months to get our bugs fixed....some bugs still persist....but why have we not been made a viable class yet? What are the real points to becomming a merchant, besides prestiege or an ego boost? Why are we still nerfed to being a support profession instead of a true profession? Every other crafting profession, out of the elites, has the ability to generate their own income and products, and use the artisan vendor to sell the items. Some say take away vendors from the artisan tree, but that doesn't solve the problem of us not being allowed to be a true profession. So my question is, what do we need to be a true profession? Our professions description says we have the ability to "buy....cheap," so when do we get that? Where's our ability to buy items cheap in able to resell them at the same price as the supplier? It says we can sell cheap, that's only true if we can buy cheap. The point of this long post is to point out the hidden obvious...We are still not a complete profession. We have been side-barred to supporting the other crafting professions. There is no way to be a "true" merchant and be as successful as a DE/merchant, Architect/Merchant, or the other various "crafting profession"/merchant combo's. I think it's time SOE stopped listening to people who already have a semi-working class and truely "balance" the professions by finally brining us up to par with our artisan counterparts. I look forward to the day I can run around Anchorhead with my "Used Landspeeder Salesman" title over my head.
Flames are welcome if you really feel the need to waste the energy. Support, Additions, and Constructiveness is strongly encouraged.
The one theme in it I pulled out I can't agree with: Merchants are NOT Crafters! They buy and sell things. If they want to also make things they need to expend skill points on that goal.
Oh and while we are at it..it is just not true that you can't make money selling things you didn't make. I made a LOT of credits selling weapons that I didn't make. In fact my business was built around it. You CAN make money selling items for artisans. The trick is getting the artisans to sell through you and I agree that we need help making it more attractive to them and making the business relationship easier to manage. But the concept is there.
Agree! There's only so much product that my time and lots can produce. My business didn't really start taking off until I started buying wholesale.
Bandlero....paragraphs, sweetie!
It was tough to read, but I think I can summarize it in a few bullets:
* Merchants have limited stand-alone capability (no combat, no goods to sell).
* This makes them "under-balanced" in the overall scheme of the game.
Indeed, by itself the Merchant class would make for very challenging play. I believe developers assumed that most Merchants would have some other crafting profession, which is why they were on the Artisan tree to begin with.
That aside, even if you had no other crafting skills, here are some ways you can take advantage of your merchant skills and make it a business:
* Resource Sales. Just buy some harvesters, plunk them down. Even if you don't have survey skills you can just look for fields of other peoples' harvesters and put yours down and get whatever they're getting. Then sell the resources in large quantities and/or lower prices.
* Become a reseller. Smugglers, Doctors, Entertainers, and Bio-Engineers have productsto sell, and may not want to work up the Business skills to get their own vendor. As a merchant, you can make it clear that you will buy products from these classes and sell them with a mark-up. It will take some effort for you to manage your cost-risks and determine the appropriate buying and selling prices, but if you really are doing nothing but merchant this is pretty much all you have to do with your time.
* Sell your merchant perks. Offer to change peoples' signs for them, for a fee. Or work out a deal to put maintenance in peoples' buildings so that they can benefit from your 20% building discount.
* Become an advertiser. Use your Novice Artisan skills to create and re-name items for other people. Include the name of their shop and waypoint, then post it in the bazaar using your bazaar discount, as a 7-day auction. In effect, you're placing an ad for less than it would cost your customers to do so. Best still, they must pay you every 7 days if they want you to re-post the ad.
* Become a land-lord. Rent your lots out. Most artisans are always hungry for more harvester, factory, and house/shop lots. If you really aren't crafting, then you can use your lots as a money-making venture. Factories-for-rentwould be an interesting business appealing to high-level crafters.
In short, if you really don't have crafted products to sell, there are still ways that your merchant skills can be used to play this game. The good news is: You still have lots of skill points for other training. Use them.
Bandlero wrote:
lol sorry bout that Doc, was having a bit of insomnia when I wrote it, but ideas got the point. We're under balanced. Mainly, I'm just expressing a desire for us to actually be more than a support profession. As for reselling, the economy on my server is such that it's impossible to resell at a profit.
You are the expert on your own server. I can only talk about my own situation. But I suspect that it isn't impossible, but just very difficult right now because it is difficult to get the artisans to use us for selling their goods. The smart artisans realize their time could be better spent on their own pursuits rather than handling vendors all day but the current methods for building business relationships are very weak and cumbersome. If we can get that changed somehow we will have a much easier time of getting people to let us work for them in selling things.
Instead of trying to come up with ideas to change the profession, try focussing on thoughts that would enhance it. Merchants Buy and Sell, that's their purpose. Put forth some ideas that would help that happen in a more beneficial way.
Such as making the Vendor Fees higher, but making the Vendor Discounts more pronounced. This would deter dabblers and award people who work their merchant skills. This would allow you to compete more easily with a person who just has a business vendor.
Don't compare yourself to other classes, compare yourself to the concept of a merchant class instead. I think we come pretty close to what they set out to make us, now it's just enhancements and fine tuning that is needed, with eventual upgrades to come later.
If you really feel the need to craft something of your own to sell, spend the skillpoints and do it. If you chooseotherwise don't start whining that you can't make anything of your own. You'll start to sound like those DE's that want a DE-only Combat Droid because they have no combat skills of their own. Or maybe youfeel that Merchant should have some weapon certs so they can protect themselves when out in the wild....
Yeah, if you consider that the rest of the Artisan l33t professions only use general crafting xp to get to novice and merchant actually requires merchant xp It seems like the novice merchant would be the first level to obtain vendors.
With that, when SOE considers nerfing our xp to "balance" our profession they can just bump the number of vendors up. i.e. first vendor at novice last at Master.
-H
I have to agree with Ackale 100%! I think the merchant class has the skills it needs to be viable - from there it depends upon the skillfullness of the player.
My success in getting artisans to sell wholesale to me depends upon my personality, business acumen, salesmanship, and 'networking' skills, not the 'game skills' SOE writes into my character class.
I'm getting ever closer to having the 'ubiquitous vendor' image on Scylla that I've been striving for. I'm attempting, quite honestly, to be the Wal-Mart of Scylla, offering every type of consumable product needed by any character class. The day I overhear someone at the starport saying "Heck, just go to the local SunDance vendor, she'll have it." - that's the day I'll call myself a merchant!