Merchant Archive

In real life, I am the proud owner of two businesses.

Part of the real life pain that comes with those two businesses, is having to pay Value Added Tax on the goods and/or services that are sold (you may call this sales tax in the US - I live in the UK however, and we have much meaner tax systems, and itsapplied tonearly everything at a standard rate of 17.5% ).

In addition to this, to rent a shop, costs a fixed price per month.

Then I have the fun and games of paying employees to be at those stores in order to actually get the goods sold. They have the obvious expense associated with them - salary (or per hour for a temporary employee), and then the non-obvious expenses like a staff room, car park spaces (if they are really lucky) and so on.

We also have those other relevant services we pay for on a monthly basis - water and power and the like. These are actually charged on a usage basis.

There are obviously many more aspects to commerce than what I have listed above, but these are the main ones that are already implemented in one way or another in the game.

All of that is mostly irrelevant to the Star Wars Galaxies environment. Real life however, is what every game in existance that has a merchant side to it gets its implementations from. Because afterall, its what we understandin real life that we can apply to an in-game system.

Your proposed change to the Merchant profession in the realms of how NPC vendors charge us for the privalege of selling to our customers is totally out of sync with how things 'should' work.

If I had an employee that turned around and said 'I am now going to charge you my new salary based on the current stock levels for each 45 minutes that you have me sellingthose items', then I would quite rightly tell them where to go. This is what you have decided to do in game though.

A vendor is either the equivalent to renting a shop, or hiring a member of staff to sell stuff on your behalf in that shop. I'm hoping like anything you are thinking along the lines ofa member of staff, because the house deed and associated rental charge _should_ be what we consider the shop.

Even in the real life commission based employee market, the money owed to that employee is based on sales, never on toal stock.

The concept you are about to implement on the live servers doesn't mesh well at all with real life. By the number of replies you have had to the original thread (and that the majority of them are totally against this concept) should hopefully be a clearindication to you that you need to rethink this.

There are a number of solutions that people have proposed. I'm not going to recommend any of them other to say this: don't try to reinvent commerce. Use any of the various commercial models out there, as they are tried and proven.

Reinventing commerce to try and create a money sink is detrimental to the game, not constructive.

Cheers! to Keba!

More sense from sensible merchants! Are you listening Devs? We're professional businessmen, we know economics like you know game development and coding. Don't pretend that game developers automatically understand the reality of economics. The theory you get from books is a far cry from how it works when live beings are involved in the process.

Yes, please do something based on how commerce works in the real world!