Merchant Archive

First, let me say that the biggest problem with the Merchant Class and the Economy in general is that people have to run around all over the place and basically stumble across player run stores at random. This is crazy in a universe where we have datapads, waypoints and so forth. How difficult would it be to impliment a Yellow Pages Terminal.

Has anyone suggested to the developers that they maybe should attach most of the advertising options to the house control instead of the vendor control?

Another thing that might really make the Merchant profession more useful would be if merchants could declare housing type structures as a store. The developers could then also add a new terminal type that shows all of the stores in a given region. I'd say this should be entirely separate from the Bazaar (commodities market) and that people should still have to travel to the actual vendor to pick up their merchandise. But the new terminal, lets call it a Yellow Pages Terminal, would show the location of the shop. I'd say this should be regional only. They could even simplify it all by just making one of the Advertising levels allow for posting say a waypoint to your "store" with a small description of what you sell....forget about listing each item and even letting people buy your items from afar. Just have a terminal that provides waypoints to shops and a small description of each shop. Ideally, it would be something like:

Advertising I.....Barkers (but attached to the building not the vendor)
Advertising II....Listing on the planetary map (again, the building not each vendor)
Advertising III...Local listing in the Yellow Pages Terminal (again with the building...and a waypoint)
Advertising IV....Planetary Listing on the Yellow Pages Terminal(like Advertising III but Planetary)
Master Merchant...Universe wide listing on the Yellow Pages Terminal (ditto but universe wide)

They could make us pay a listing fee to stay listed on the classifieds terminal. That would keep the terminal less cluttered with run-down shops that don't have any inventory.

Come on folks, hammer this idea at them. It would make the Advertising path very useful in the game universe and make Merchant truely a viable profession. And it would make the non-Bazaar economy worth paying attention to, plus it would give us a reason to have NPC vendors in our homes. Right now, unless you happen to be right on the edge of a town, there isn't even any reason to have a vendor. And even if you ARE on the edge of a town, you still have to spend half your time standing around the Bazaar terminals and the shuttle ports hawking your wares. This idea would fix the economy period. Right now, the economy is seriously broken because customers have no good way of trying to locate needed goods that cost over 3k. Folks would still use the Bazaar for trading low end items and as a spot market for resources, but there would actually be a MARKET for all the nice high end craftables that right now, one has to search half a planet to find half the time and thus simply decide they are just as well off without most of the time. But it would do it in a way that keeps some balance because not just anyone would be able to post waypoints on the "classifieds" terminal...just folks who wanted to devote the skill points to the merchant class. My guess is most any Artisan type would push up in to Advertising at least far enough to get a regional listing on the classifieds terminals, which would make them decide between being a shopkeep and being a warior-artisan a bit more...which is sort of what the devs were after anyway with the merchant profession.

Your post doesn't relate how this is going to fix the economy. It doesn't even say what is wrong with the economy. What should I assume?

I personally like the vendor planetary ads. They are soon to be fixed so they don't have to be registered every day. Pulling a waypoint from a yellow page ad won't really give me a reference to the stores location except for a set of coordinates. I have to load my datapad with the coordinates then figure out where on the map this waypoint is amongs all the rest.

With the current planetary ad, I can select the vendor and get instant feedback where thelocation lies. I select a category, and I can find the closest vendor. Besides, no matter how sophisticated you make a method to find a store, you still won't know what stock is in the store until you visit it.

I always put my name in the vendor name, and find I get tells asking if I'm stocking <name your favorite spice>.

ok, first off The planetary ad works fine as a "yellow pages" of dedicated merchants. And since the ad's reset every day only those with active shops should even show up on the listings.

And yes, how does this help the economy? I don't see how? The economy is generally screwed I'll admit, but this won't fix it. The reason the economy is screwed in my opinion is that players don't have to rely on each other enough. It's too easy to be a one man show. If the professions were more diverse it would help. It would be nice if there was a miner class and they were the only ones who could collect materials...and if the crafters were forced to buy from these miners, and then forced to sell to a merchant class....right now it's too easy to do all this by yourself...and THAT is what is killing the 'economy'. There is no real economy.

LaFes, in case you did not know, you can make a waypoint to any shop by right clicking on the green marker, and creating one. This will give you a waypoint to follow instead of having to trust to the unwieldy planetary map.

I say the problem of economy is a deep and hard to solve problem. First, there is too much money in the system. This in turn drives up the prices on goods, as some people can afford the high prices. The other problem is the blending of classes. Most crafters end up being part merchant and don't need us to sell goods. They just sell them wholesale, which in turn makes them rich, and us fighting for the scraps.

There are other problems, but these are the top ones. Take that as you may.

I'm not quite sure how you can say I didn't say what is wrong with the economy. I explained in great detail what is wrong, customers can't easily find shops that stock the high end items they are looking for. I had to try like 10 different shops the other day just to find a Mineral Mining Installation! The planetary ad thing is useless because even if you do get the general area of a shop that looks (from a one line vendor name) like it might have the stuff you are looking for, you still have to use that clunky planetary map interface to try and stumble your way to the shop. We have waypoints for crying out loud, why not let players post a waypoint to their shop where it's as easy as taking one quick look at the planetary map to see what city it is nearest, hopping on the next shuttle and following the arrow straight to the shop instead of stumbling around and walking right past it 3 times because the planetary map is so unreliable? The other thing is, if you make folks post a little description of their wares every few days by making them pay for a listing on a terminal, the descriptions would be more reliable I think, and if they did it right, more descriptive. They could use the details screen to let folks give a nice description of their store. They could even let folks get an idea of how well their advertising is working by sending an email each time someone downloads the waypoint. Like I said, player vendors are all but useless right now. I have a relatively good location for mine, and I get like maybe 3 or 4 sales a week from it...and that is with me selling everything at deep discounts over what anyone else in the area sells (Personal Harvesters for 400 apiece when everyone else has them marked at 800).

Aside from all the above mentioned reasons, a better advertising system like that would make the economy more efficient. The reason that is the case is that, no doubt, folks would post pricing info in their descriptions on certain items. With the consumer able to quickly browse pricing from several different vendors, the vendors would be forced to compete on more than just location. They would need to compete on price and quality as well. For example, I wanted to buy Composite Leg Armor. Yesterday, I tried about 25 vendors in about 8 different locations before I was able to find a set. It took me about 2 hours to do so. Once I finally found them, I was pretty much willing to pay any price to get them. This is a very consumer unfriendly system. The price of those leggings was probably inflated by my inability to compare prices with any other vendors. Who wants to spend another 2 hours after already spending 2 hours just to find one piece of leg armor? This system is ALSO very unfriendly to anyone who didn't get in to the game from day one of the launch. By the time I got in to the game, most of the best locations were already gone. I'm about a 1 minute trek behind Bindermans coming out of Anchorhead on Tatooine (Chilastra). If you are unfamiliar with Bindermans, it is a supermall with about 10 different vendors (and yet still nobody with composite armor . Since anyone coming out of Anchorhead looking for a vendor is going to run in to his place first, they will almost surely never even know I exist. Yet I sell harvesters at half his price. Location should be important, but it shouldn't be everything. It certainly is not realistic at all in a universe with all of these other advanced communication devices that the only way we have of letting anyone know about our shops is to stand in the Bazaar and hawk our wares. They've got the artificial 3000 credit limit on the Bazaar because they want the consumer to have to go to player shops to buy high end items. That's fine. It makes sense. But then to cripple player shops by forcing them to compete almost entirely on location is rather silly I think. Actually, this runs in to a performance problem as well. If everyone hangs out in the cities all the time (which I'd say at least a very sizable chunck of folks do) then that causes all sorts of performance issues. If, on the other hand, folks can be enticed out to the hinterlands, say, to buy that awesome cheap heavy harvester for 60k instead of the 120k they are going for near town, so much the better for everyone. There really is no good reason not to create some sort of advertising terminal, and a whole host of good reasons to do so.

LaFes, I think you are presenting some good ideas. I really like the idea of a yellow pages terminal or something that works better than the planetary map. I think it might be a little strong to say its going to fix the whole economy though. There are numerous issues with the economy right now and finding vendors is just one of them.

I think that while the map works technically, it does not work that well in practice. This will probably get a lot better when the daily re-regsiter thing is fixed, but I think we will still be left with a situation where a majority of the shops (that might just have exactly what you need) won't be listed.

Thanks SWGMerchant,

I maintain though that making it easier to find items located on vendors would go a long way toward "fixing" the economy as it would actually allow for more direct competition through NPC vendors. There are lots of things they could do that would achieve this. One would be to make it so that player shops can be shown as "locations" on the Bazaar and have everyone's items on their NPC vendors show on there. I think there is a serious technical problem with that though, as it would be very difficult, given the current Bazaar controls, to do something like this from a performance standpoint. We all know how slow the Bazzar loads currently sometimes. Can you imagine how slow it would be if it had to load lists of all the products available on all the NPC vendors in even one region? There are ways they could redesign the Bazzar controls to get around this. For instance, if they structured it so that when it first loads, no products are loaded. And then you had to drill down to a specific product, say, Mineral Mining Installations, before you could load a list of assets available, then that might work. But it would still make for some rather large lists if someone say, tried to load all the CDEF Pistols available on Chilastra Server. This is pretty much what they HAVE done I think....but only for the Bazaar offered items. If they did it for all NPC vendors as well, it would simply not work I think.

That is why a far better way would be to allow people to list a waypoint to their shop, with a nice description of the shop at a terminal. I agree, the planetary map listing thing is sort of like doing that. But it doesn't allow for any real description of what you might find at a vendor, and worse, it is tied to the vendor instead of to the location of the shop. Thus, if you get 10 registered vendors at a single location, its just a big cluttered mess anyway. I'm an Asset Management guru by trade in the real world. And a database administrator for a fortune 500 company in charge of their Asset database. I can tell you, the data structure they are using does not lend itself well to what they are trying to do. What we are really talking about here is a procurement system. The size of their datasets is what is holding them back on being able to give us a better way of finding things we want to buy. This in turn is leading to a serious distortion of the economy as a whole. The distortion, most directly is being caused by lack of availability information. Unfortunately, I can't really see a viable way for them to give us a way to compare prices at player vendors accross the whole of even one planet (a region MIGHT be doable). Instead, what they COULD give us, would be a way for folks to advertise what they think is their shops biggest selling points. Would that be as good as being able to compare pricing at every vendor everywhere...no. Would it be a nice alternative given the technical limitations. Yeah, it sure would.

Another possibility might be to allow folks to list their stores, and then to allow customers to drill down to the actual products available at that store by drilling down to the actual vendors inventories via a terminal. You could make the top level of the drilldown a simple list of shops with maybe a number of vendors column and a button for the details of each shop which would get you a description posted by the shop owner. Maybe something like the Bazaar terminal, only the hierarchy could be: Universe...Planet...Region...Shop...Vendor...Products...Inventory And for performance sake, they could limit us to looking in the region we are currently in.

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LaFes wrote:

I maintain though that making it easier to find items located on vendors would go a long way toward "fixing" the economy as it would actually allow for more direct competition through NPC vendors.

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My comments still hold true, you haven't said what is wrong with the economy. I can't even figure out what context your using the word in. Do you mean economy as in "saving money?" Do you mean how it will impact the economic system? Or do you speak to the economic activity on your galaxy?

And what exactly is wrong with the economy? I'd say currently there is too many credits in the money pool, but there really hasn't been skyrocketing inflation which would be expected. The devs have already addressed that by reducing the payouts on missions. The reduction in money supply will definately have an impact on the economy.

Making it easier to find items located on a vendor will increase spending perhaps? Increasing direct competition will reduce monopolies? I understand your argument with regards to the vendors and how they will impact the Merchant profession. However, I don't understand what is wrong with the economy, nor why any intervention is required.There hasn't been any inflation, growth, recession or deflation. If anything there has been stagnation, which from a classical econimist view, would probably be the state you would want your player economy to run. The economy is relatively fixed.

Oh...maybe that's what you meant. Fixing the economy making it secure, immobile and static? Don't take this personally, I'm not flaming you. I'm just trying to put your thread into context.

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LaFes wrote:

Aside from all the above mentioned reasons, a better advertising system like that would make the economy more efficient.

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Wait I think I get it. I think you have economy confused with market? That would put it into proper context and make your argument reasonable.

No, I mean Economy in the broadest sense. You can have a market in say, harvesters or a market in CDEF Weoponry or any other sort of market. They are all messed up. The pricing across the board is being distorted by a general lack of consumer information. When that's going on, the Economy itself is distorted. Perhaps what you are meaning is the consumer goods market. If by market, you mean that, then ok, I'll buy it. But I used the word Economy because even consumer goods doesn't sound right. For instance, housing prices are being distorted too...and that wouldn't normally be considered part of consumer goods. About the only things that AREN'T having their prices distorted is low end items like CDEF weoponry, and stimpack A's...stuff like that...things that SHOULD be cheap enough to sell on the Bazaar. But look at Heavy Harvesters. Nobody is going to sell one of those on the Bazaar...so what happens? Folks who make them put them on their vendors. Now, ordinarily, if I want to sell Heavy Harvesters, I would be competing with all the other folks selling Heavy Harvesters. I would be competing on price and quality and somewhat on location. Because I have no way of letting anyone know I sell heavy harvesters, other than barking in the bazaar myself or getting a location right near a heavy traffic area, I'm forced to compete primarily on location. That hardly seems right. I can make the best Heavy Harvester on Tatooine and sell them more cheaply than any of my competition, and I won't hardly sell a one because it is too much work for the consumer to find out about me, figure out where my shop is, and travel about 60 seconds longer to get to my shop than to Bindermans which is right between me and Anchorhead. So what we end up with, is an overcharged consumer and a lot of guys like me, stuck a few hundred yards beyond the first rank of houses outside of towns all over the universe who, even though though we're probably less than 60 seconds farther out, nobody will ever find. Why won't they find us? Because they don't want to go running in to 20 different shops to find the goods they are looking for. They'd rather go play the game some more and get enough money to buy that overpriced harvester at Bindermans. Why else won't they find us? Because there is no GOOD advertising system to give them some sort of clue that if they DO make that little extra trip, they will find what they are looking for and save themselves some credits. The cost of information in SWG, when it comes to shopping, is WAY too high. Most folks would rather be off hunting or checking their harvesters or building things than spending 2 hours shopping. Which leads to another point. To the extent that people ARE out shopping when they could be building, killing or harvesting something, our overall productivity (GDP if you will) is being hurt. So yes, the Economy is being harmed by this lack of information. I would say drastically so.

"And yes, how does this help the economy? I don't see how? The economy is generally screwed I'll admit, but this won't fix it. The reason the economy is screwed in my opinion is that players don't have to rely on each other enough. It's too easy to be a one man show. If the professions were more diverse it would help. It would be nice if there was a miner class and they were the only ones who could collect materials...and if the crafters were forced to buy from these miners, and then forced to sell to a merchant class....right now it's too easy to do all this by yourself...and THAT is what is killing the 'economy'. There is no real economy."

You don't think that making it easier to find that harvester or that droid you are looking for will make people more reliant on each other? I'd say that in a small way at least, making it easier for folks to find things they want to buy, would make them more likely to specialize more...at least to the extent that folks sometimes train up on how to make something rather than waste a ton of time looking for it at player vendors. I know that the difficulty of finding Heavy Harvesters has led me to decide that I need to just become an Architect and make them myself. If I could easily find them, I'd be more inclined to become an Armorer. But in order to be a good armorer, I need resources. In order to have an abundance of cheap resources, I want the best harvesters I can get. With Harvesters costing 120k apiece, makes my decision rather easy. I need to go learn how to make them.

Here is a good analogy to what giving us a "Yellow Pages Terminal" would do for the economy in SWG. Think for a few minutes about what the publication of the first Yellow Pages in the real world had. Suddenly, people had a single place to quickly look to find products they were looking for. They had the phone before, but now they had a way of locating businesses that they never would have known about. But this is even better. The information in the original Yellow Pages was static...or only updated once a year anyway. My idea would be like jumping from no business index straight to the internet. Do you doubt that the internet had a great deal to do with the expansion of the US economy in the 80's and 90's? The reason for that expansion was information...plain and simple. Folks could now make buying decisions much more quickly (at least to the extent that they were able to locate web sites with good up to date information on them). This freed people up to spend more time being productive rather than being consumptive. The increased productivity led to increased consumption...and so on and so on....a productivity spiral, due almost entirely (in my opinion) to the increased productivity generated by increased access to information which in turn was driven by increased technology...which leads us back to my example. The yellow pages terminal would be an increase in technology, which would inevitably lead to a decrease in information cost, which would almost surely lead to an increase in disposable time, which would, almost without a doubt, lead to increased productivity....hence, an expansion of the economy.