Merchant Archive
Thread: My Merchant Suggestions
Merchant Suggestions
Ok, I'm a master merchant and a tailor. In the last couple of weeks, I've made a
concerted effort to be a success as a merchant, more than a tailor. I've prowled
the bazaar, forged relationships with other crafters, open a 2nd shop on Corellia
(my first is on Naboo).
I keep my vendors stocked with every bargain item I can find. Stim-B's, furntiure,
harvesters, clothes, anything I can get my hands on. As a result of all this, I
have come up with some ideas for improving the Merchant profession. I expect that
some of my ideas are NOT new to this forum, but I thought I'd post them all together
anyway.
1) Commercials
Think downtown Tokyo/Manhattan on this. Large electronic signage that can display
a series of "slides". The slide text is supplied by a merchant. Each slide is displayed
for about 5 second and can display at least 256 characters of colored text. When a player
clicks on the billboard display, a merchant defined email is sent to the player. The skill
advances as follows:
Adv 1 - Can advertise in a single town only. Cost of the add is 1K/day (real world time).
When I say "single town only", it means the ad runns only at that town. The merchant could
travel to a 2nd town, pay another 1K and advertise there.
Adv 3 - Same as Adv 1, but for 3K/day the commercial runs across all towns on that planet.
Master Merchant - galactic advertising for 10K/day
2) Galactic Bazaar / Bazaar Browser
I love the bazaar in this game. Compared to other games, its pretty sweet. However, its
still rather medieval in design. The fact is that the Bazaar terminal is really like a web
browser. It allows the customer to browse the contents of Bazaar "stock rooms" across the
city, planet and even the galaxy.
However, it needs the ability to browse MY vendors also. Sitting in my cube at work, I
can browse the stock rooms of about 500 million retail establishments (read: vendors).
Amazon.com does not force me to travel to their warehouse to browse their goods. The bazaars
in SWG should work the same. I know that the process of selecting a specific merchant's
vendors could be a problem. I'm thinking of something like an in-game URL for each merchant.
For example: to browse all 6 of my vendors, the url would be my name (Syra). A customer on Rori
should be able to browse all of my vendors from the Rori bazaar terminal. The customer can also
purchase items from my vendors, via the bazaar terminal he is using on Rori.
3) Delivery Service
This requires the implementation of item 2, above. If the customer on Rori makes a purchase from
one of my vendors on Naboo, he ought to have the option to pay for delivery. For an additional
charge, the itmes he purchased can be delivered directly to his bank account.
Normall delivery charges should be about the same cost as a round trip ticket(s) from his location
to the city closest to the vendor from which he made the purchase. This cost of this delivery
service is reduced for each level of Efficiency that the vendors owner has. So, as a master merchant,
the delivery charges would be 40% of normal.
4) Restock button
I'm sure this idea is not new. When one of the items on my vendor ages for 7 days and gets dumpped
into the stock room, the stock room dialog need a "Restock" button. I should be able to select
MULTIPLE items in my stockroom and press the "Restock" button. Each of the items is then put back
up for sale, at its previous price AND with its previous description. The game already stores that
information, so this new feature should impact the database.
In Summary
I think that if these changes were made, the Merchant profession would not only be viable, but
actually fun. OK, let the idea flaming begin!
1. May be a more effective version of the planet map advertising. But eventually could suffer from a ton of ads, reducing the exposure of any one of them. The costs ought be much more inhibitive tho, imo. Also the issue of "does this disrupt the environment the designers wished to recreate within the cities?"
2. Cool. But I would be interested in thoroughly analyzing the impact of this in combo with #3 on the economy (i.e. pricing; would it lessen ability of some crafters to focus on sales strategies that rely less on vendors and more on f2f, specialty shops, etc) and player behavorial patterns (i.e. explore-->shop habits).
3. This would greatly benefit small merchants by hugely broadening exposure. But personally, this scares me. It is a challenge to my free time to maintain stock to meet the demand I currently have in one city/region. Meeting galactic-wide demand...I may not have the time for that. Perhaps it would be the same demand looking at the same amt of merchandise, but on a different scale. But in my experience, the more you put in front of customers, the more they buy. Would a side-effect of this be inflation in the economy? - most money flowing into the hands of crafters/merchants/suppliers, would demand then fall after non-crafters became poor or would devs increase mission payouts, thus possibly creating an upward spiral. If I had the ability to select what was displayed globally it may be manageable. But then... shouldn't this be more integrated with merchant skills as well. Meaning, generally small businesses have to work hard to gain exposure, they do not get it from the start. Hence, that exposure could be gradually increased as a merchant gains skills. This could be a good idea, I just feel it needs to be implemented in view of more than just the functionality.
4. Absolutely! Though the severity of this likely fell due to the news of the 30 day timeout.
I would actually be most interested in developing truly effective advertising options. Namely a yellow pages type listing to supplement/replace planet map ads (I'd rather just throw this out) where shops can be categorized by product type, planet/region/city and searched at various lvls.