Merchant Archive

I am a master merchant and i pass most of my time running for one crafter to another all over the galaxy, getting incapacitated, running, getting healed, running..to collect the best items to bring back in my shop. this is extremely time consuming, i spend about 10 hours a day just running, waiting for shuttles etc etc.

My idea , which was already introduced in the master merchant advantages offer, would be to give a special ability to merchants, allowing them to teleport themselves from one markpoint to another. This ability would be more and more efficient depending on the level of the merchant...increasing the zone where he could reach different markpoints.

As stipulated in another thread, we have to face direct competition with crafters, but our margin is 30 times lower that theirs. The time we spend visiting crafters can not be reflected in our prices, while the time spent by a crafter crafting is directly giving him income. More over a crafter doesnt take much risk selling, as even at lower price, he will still make a profit, while if we have to lower price, we might have to sell under our pruchase price (market fluctuations).

This abilitiy to teleport would give us some kind of balance against this hard fo face competiton that makes a pure merchant almost impossible to play (not speaking of vendor costs).

Merchants, you are welcome to comment about this idea, and even develop it...comment drawbacks as well...but i think this might be a skill that would really give something playable for pure merchants.

This isn't everquest. We don't have magic, we don't teleport, you're not going to wonderously create a pocket sized teleportation device that only Mechants can use.

I'd say reduction in shuttle costs for master merchant, but we all know the Devs would freak that it'd imbalance the delivery mission system (which is already getting more worthless by the day.)

I was going to say

Spot the Ex Everquest Wizard / Druid

I'm late for work but in a word: Bodyguards

Two NPC non-exping, non factioning killers who scale up via Hiring line.

Nuff said

No never any type of teleportation of any kind ever. This is not EQ this is not StarTrek.

Vehicles and creature mounts will help cut down on runtime.Player Cities will help keep supliers from being out in the middle of nowhere. And heck when the space expantion comes out, if you buy your own ship you can just fly to other cities.

There is no question of magery, but dna workout. Bio engineers can work on dna to modify animals structure, why couldnt we work on our own to transfer ourselves somewhere else? Is this undoable without respecting SWG background?

Another idea...why not allowing to teleport our goods from one vendor to another, instead of teleporting ourselves. Our providers would just need to offer some goods for sale on our vendors, and we could stock them up on another vendor...

We need to find a way for pure merchants to become viable...we need to find a way to reward financially the time they spend to select the wares they sell.

I'm also opposed to teleporting, but I agree with his issue regarding marginal costs. There is very little in the Merchant tree that actually allows us to increase our margins.

The solution isn't teleportation ... it's item delivery.

What about an Efficiency IV or Master Merchant skill that allowed you to purchase something from the Bazaar (or another merchant) but have it be retrievable from your merchants after a delay time. Call it the "Importing" skill, and make the delay time considerable (like an hour real time) so that it is not instant, but allows you to have your purchases "shipped" to a central location.

This would mean that Merchants with this skill would have eliminated both the inventory and shuttle/spaceport expense from their margins, allowing them to either survive on smaller markups or with higher profit at the same retail price.

Carvin Abrok, Merchant/Smuggler (Lowca)

A quick reply to dna teleportation to mr dark...this is how teleportation is most often explained in sci fi novels. You reprocess you dna to vanish and rebuild it in another location. I don t know how accurate the prediction of sci fi novels is, but i like it, it has some kind of scientific background that we can believe.

Yes delivery might be the right option, to give us time efficiency reward against other professions. A crafter is getting rewarded for his time crafting by the security to sell over his crafting cost (for the masters), the pure merchant doestn get any financial reward for the time he spends running around the whole planet.