Merchant Archive

Step 1:

Inform the entire community, via an update message and an in-game email, that all players who have a vendor, but do not have the required skills to keep it, will have their vendors deleted in one month.Explain that all vendors, and all items within, still in existance after this date will be destroyed. New item limits will be set on vendors based on skill level and those limits will be:

Step 2:

Inform all players with Merchant as a skill that there will be new limits placed on their vendors. The items inside their vendor after the date of this new patch will remain, but no new items can be added. After 30 days, all the old items will have to be-restocked and the Merchant will need the right skill level to place the amount of items they want on the vendor.

25 items at Biz 3

50 items at Biz 4

100 items for Novice Merchant

+25 items for each Merchant skill box (500 total if you have 4-4-4-4)

+100 item bonus for Master Merchant (600 items total)

Step 3:

Add a fully working mechanism for consigment sales. A new tag should show up when using a vendor "Consignment".This will work like "Offers" does but with a few twists. Each item on consigment will have a base price set by the seller. For the Merchant to offer the item, they will first have to add a markup, and then the item will go up along with all the others. Two emails should be generated now, one for the Merchant and one for the supplier. When an item fails to sell, it will return to the "Consigment" window and not the stockroom.

Step 4:

Add stackable items and a quantity field. For resource stacks the merchant will simply add a price per unit, and the customer will choose exactly how many units they want to by. Stacks should max out at500k. This will also work with crated items. A merchant will set a per unit cost for each item in the crate, and the player can then buy as many items from the crate as they wish. If 1 item is purchased, only the item itself ends up in the buyers inventory, if more than one item is purchased, the crate will be split and the buyer will receive a crate themselves.

I think it would take three months to implement these changes and it would make our profession extremely useful and far more balanced. To be a super merchant you will have to level more skill boxes than just management. Having stackable resources means a player can run a resource shop out of 1 vendor and make some decent credits. Other artisans who want to maintain their combat skills will have to find Merchants to sell their goods on consignment.

These seem like good ideas, but I do have one comment on them. Limiting the amount of sales per vendor AND allowing individual item sales from crates and stackable items seems counter-intuitive. A Weaponsmith could have 25 crates of weapons on his vendor, period. That would have been 625 items previously.

There would be very few people that would feel the need to get to MAster Merchant with this plan, for you can get 3 vendors at Management 1, and you would have ALL the room you would ever need.

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BaudGnarly wrote:

Step 1:

Inform the entire community, via an update message and an in-game email, that all players who have a vendor, but do not have the required skills to keep it, will have their vendors deleted in one month.Explain that all vendors, and all items within, still in existance after this date will be destroyed. New item limits will be set on vendors based on skill level and those limits will be:

Step 2:

Inform all players with Merchant as a skill that there will be new limits placed on their vendors. The items inside their vendor after the date of this new patch will remain, but no new items can be added. After 30 days, all the old items will have to be-restocked and the Merchant will need the right skill level to place the amount of items they want on the vendor.

25 items at Biz 3

50 items at Biz 4

100 items for Novice Merchant

+25 items for each Merchant skill box (500 total if you have 4-4-4-4)

+100 item bonus for Master Merchant (600 items total)

Step 3:

Add a fully working mechanism for consigment sales. A new tag should show up when using a vendor "Consignment".This will work like "Offers" does but with a few twists. Each item on consigment will have a base price set by the seller. For the Merchant to offer the item, they will first have to add a markup, and then the item will go up along with all the others. Two emails should be generated now, one for the Merchant and one for the supplier. When an item fails to sell, it will return to the "Consigment" window and not the stockroom.

Step 4:

Add stackable items and a quantity field. For resource stacks the merchant will simply add a price per unit, and the customer will choose exactly how many units they want to by. Stacks should max out at500k. This will also work with crated items. A merchant will set a per unit cost for each item in the crate, and the player can then buy as many items from the crate as they wish. If 1 item is purchased, only the item itself ends up in the buyers inventory, if more than one item is purchased, the crate will be split and the buyer will receive a crate themselves.

I think it would take three months to implement these changes and it would make our profession extremely useful and far more balanced. To be a super merchant you will have to level more skill boxes than just management. Having stackable resources means a player can run a resource shop out of 1 vendor and make some decent credits. Other artisans who want to maintain their combat skills will have to find Merchants to sell their goods on consignment.

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An excellent overall step-by-step approach. The only issue I'd take is that the "Step 1" implementation seems a bit draconian to me.

People howl bloody murder (and rightfully so) when valuable items disappear. While I'm quite strongly in favor of bringing vendor allocations into line with the necessary skills required to support their placement, I don't think we need to get this nasty.

I realize that some folks would like to "punish" those who are using what I consider a loophole in the current system. I'm not one of them. We need to fix the problem, but not cause any more pain than necessary in the process.

The "problem" that I see with allowing vendors beyond the supported skill boxes, is that people using that loophole get to continue to COMPETE on an ongoing, long-term basis with those who still have points invested in their Merchant skills.

I think a kinder, gentler solution is to simply disable the "sell item" button when there are too many vendors (when compared to the amount granted by the skill boxes). That naturally gives people time to clear out their vendors, no one ends up losing valuable items, and we get the system working in line with other professions in the game.

The nice thing is, this is probably quite easy to implement if taken in conjunction with the proposed vendor item count limits. Having a vendor count in excess of the supported value just (temporarily) sets your allowed item count (for the purposes of listing items) to zero. Either deleting vendors or re-acquiring the necessary skill boxes takes it from zero back up to whatever levels the Devs finally decide to implement.

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BaudGnarly wrote:

Step 1:

Inform the entire community, via an update message and an in-game email, that all players who have a vendor, but do not have the required skills to keep it, will have their vendors deleted in one month.Explain that all vendors, and all items within, still in existance after this date will be destroyed. New item limits will be set on vendors based on skill level and those limits will be:

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There is actually an easier solution. If you do not have the skill to maintain a vendor, simply make the vendor unable to sell stuff. Everytime you enter the access control to the vendor, have a large message to this effect. Have the vendorgenerate an e-mailevery day this situation persists.Players are only allowed to remove items from the vendor. This will give them all the time they need to remove all items and the vendor. Conversely, they could re-gain the skills needed for the vendor. In which case the vendor would function normally again.

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jbeck wrote:

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BaudGnarly wrote:

Step 1:

Inform the entire community, via an update message and an in-game email, that all players who have a vendor, but do not have the required skills to keep it, will have their vendors deleted in one month. Explain that all vendors, and all items within, still in existance after this date will be destroyed. New item limits will be set on vendors based on skill level and those limits will be:

---

There is actually an easier solution. If you do not have the skill to maintain a vendor, simply make the vendor unable to sell stuff. Everytime you enter the access control to the vendor, have a large message to this effect. Have the vendor generate an e-mail every day this situation persists. Players are only allowed to remove items from the vendor. This will give them all the time they need to remove all items and the vendor. Conversely, they could re-gain the skills needed for the vendor. In which case the vendor would function normally again.

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I like this approach, although I would add 2 more things...

1) when a disabled vendor is empty, it will be removed.

2) When reducing the number of vendors (going from 3 to 2, for example) the most recently placed one is the one who becomes disabled.

The only real problem with this is that those limits still force every tailor wanting to run a shop to be a Master Merchant instead of dabbling in merchant just a little for extra vendors. We have over 200 schematics, and our shops are judged on their selection. We can't really use the "sell items from crates" concept because we need to offer things in a variety of colors. As a Master Tailor/Master Merchant, I'll have a much harder time running any of my other non-tailor shops, but I guess I can wind up dealing. But tailors who wanted to dabble in combat or some other skill instead will be ruined.

Tailors find it very hard to sell to pure merchants, because the clothing business is kind of fussy and high-maintainance. Most pure merchants would rather spend time on something with a larger profit margin that's easier to deal with.

If any kind of severe vendor limit is introduced, you'll have many tailors closing up shop, which will lead to just the kinds of monopolies they're trying to prevent...