Merchant Archive

Dear Devs,

The merchant profession is broken.

Thank you for announcing the upcomming change (nerf?) to vendors regarding maintenance before implementing it. This goes a long way towards building the SWG community that we all talk about. Also, thank you for soliciting our feedback on the proposed change. However, this proposed change will effectively destroy the merchant profession because there are much more serious problems with our class that need to be addressed. The "broken" npc vendor fees were the only thing that was keeping many of us afloat.

Allow me to explain:

Q states that there is too much money in the game and that we need more "money sinks". I can assure you, Q-3PO, that the merchant class aren't the ones hoarding all of the credits. We did not gain our money by:

1) Exploiting Baz Nitch missions which went unfixed for how many weeks by the development team allowing players to amass huge quantities of credits with almost ZERO risk.

2) Spamming "Knock-down" special moves in combat thereby allowing players to run destroy missions with allmost zero risk - which went unfixed for nearly two months by the development team.

3) Exploit slow moving Kimas by "kiting" with very little risk. Again which was a known bug that was unfixed for almost a month.

4) Operate one (or more) factories for 100% XP allowing certain enterprising individuals to leap to "Master" level in record time - which was subsequently fixed by the development team but not before these players amassed millions of credits (and there are many per server).

5) Exploit sloppy coding that allowed crafters to get a 25% bonus on "practice mode" thereby further allowing individuals to springboard further into their profession and amass even more credits.

6) Duplicate resources through a known bug that was never fully addressed by the development team thereby introducing even more "Masters" that can amass even more credits.

7) I could go on . . . .

I'll tell you who we, the merchants, are:

1) We are the ones that are at the mercy of crafters to buy goods for resale at prices that are near-market value beacuse crafters want to make a credit too. Sure, we can bazaar-dive searching for bargains to resell in our store or we can negotiate contracts with crafters - but this is the exception rather than the norm (see #2 below).

2) You see, we are the ones that are in DIRECT competition with the crafters since anybody with business 3 can place there own vendor and sell their merchandise. (I'm not necessarily saying this should be removed) Why on earth would a crafter want to pay a middleman when they can do the job themself (while EASILY accumulating their own merchant XP to get the one or two "good" merchant skill boxes).

3) Since the merchant has virtually NOTHING to offer to a crafter for reselling their goods it is nigh impossible for us to contract with crafters. Even the skills that are considered beneficial are largely broken and bugged.

4) Because our arguably "best" skills are bugged (namely advertising 2 and 3) the merchant class is forced to log in every morning so that we can re-initialize our advertising so we can hopefully get a few people to stop by our stores.

5) We are the "secondary" class for many players. Because merchant isn't viable on it's own we are forced to take-up crafting professions so we have something (anything) to sell. Many of us WANT to be merchants, most of us CANNOT be a merchant with the present game mechanics. It just isn't worth the effort.

6) To top it all off - being a merchant is not FUN (isn't that the point of playing a game??). And before the naysayers pipe up and say "well then stop playing or can I have your stuff or play another class" - I started playing SWG for one reason: To be a merchant. So, I do my best to make things fun, but when the game mechanics are working against you it gets frustrating. The irony is that it doesn't have to be frustrating with a few EASY changes by the development team this game could be fun for us. There are hundreds of threads that detail the things we want, yet we have been ignored.

7) We are the ones that have to choose from largely worthless skill trees that offer nothing for our profession (4 credit savings on bazaar listings??? Please, don't insult me)

Nerfing npc vendor costs to the proposed value WILL drive most of us out of business plain and simple. At that point everything will be made on demand with low priced items listed on the bazaar. I'm not sure what kind of dream world the devs live in but we have to fight tooth and nail for every single customer that walks through our door. There are A LOT of players with shops - a lot more than anyone ever imagined, I suspect. The net result is that any given shop can go for days without selling a thing.

Personally, I've had to slash my prices to the bare minimum to stay competitive. But, I also make my own merchandise - having been FORCED to be a crafter due to the unplayability of the merchant profession. I like to keep a large stock of merchandise - furniture, armor, clothing, and weapon power-ups. At any given time I easily have over 100 items for sale at prices ranging from 300 - 5000 credits (and I am a small time merchant with nothing for sale above tier two in the elite professions). This is REQUIRED stock in order to make it worth someone's time to visit my shop and come back. Let's say I average 2000 credits per item. 2000 times 100 = 200,000 credits in value. 200,000/1000 = 200 credits per 45 minutes. 200 times 32 (1440/45) = 6400 per day in vendor maintenance. (Remember -- I am a small time vendor - imagine the costs for a master weaponsmith/armorsmith). Don't forget to through in home maintenance. The merchant also has two additional "money sinks" that the devs are overlooking:

1) The merchant must pay the crafter for the merchandise that he is selling. At best case this is 3-4 credits per resource, worst case this is 95+% of the retail price of the value.

2) The merchant must pay for their own harvesters/factories since they cannot buy anything from the crafters (because the crafters charge near-retail to the merchants or the crafter has their OWN vendor that takes an hour or two of grinding to get). Using my merchant as an example, I have nine harvesters that are necessary to craft the furniture, armor, and power-ups that draws customers into my store. I average about 9000 credits a day in maintenance off of these harvesters.

So, just to stay afloat I will need to pay over 15,000 maintenance per day to keep my small operation afloat. I'll bet that non-crafting merchants are at similiar levels after buying their merchandise from crafters. I also know that this will ramp-up sharply as the merchant sells big-ticket items (10 suits of 300,000 armor will run 96,000 per day in npc vendor fees!!!). How is this viable???

Instead of adding "money sinks" for professions that are barely surviving, why don't the devs stop the EXPLOITS that are the real source of the credit influx in this game?

Looks like it may be time to start a Pistoleer/creature handler/bounty hunter like the other 85% of the players out there. Is this the vision that the development team has? "Pet Wars" is sounding like a better title for this game everyday . . . .