Merchant Archive

Pretty much the *only* thing we know for certain at this point is that nothing's happening in Publish 6.

Well, I suspect (and hope) items won't just go poof.

If I were implementing this change, each merchant would have a "vendor item limit" stat. When they are over their limit, the "Sell Item" button is just grayed out, unclickable.

It's a very simple change, and allows the "overstocked" merchant to withdraw/retrieve their items or wait for them to sell out until he is below his limit once again.

This change would also ensure that anyone who drops the "vendor item limit" skill would be hindered in their ability to sell without instantly losing their stock.

If a harsher penalty were needed, I would increase the vendor maintenance rate for overstocked vendors.

thank you! at least I can rest a little easier that it's NOT in publish 6. which means a little more time to... I dunno... get some answers and hopefully get my act together so I don't lose all my goods

It isn't clear to me how they will handle the vendors over the cap. I'm pretty sure it won't just delete the items they don't do that on purpose. I am sure it won't be pleasent no matter what the solution is. Major design changes like this are rarely much fun. As soon as I can get them to release details about this I will.

I am curious, is this 150 cap for ALL vendors? Or as a master merchant is my cap higher than someone with novice?

The original proposal was 150 limit per vendor. There was a universal opposition to that and the development team has promised to come up with a different proposal based on the feedback they have received. The assumption is that the solution will be some sort of scale of vendor limits based on merchant skill. They haven't released the new proposal yet however and we won't know for sure until they do.

I belong to a consortium of players who are trying to set up a chain of stores that will all carry similar items, but a very wide variety of items. We are in the process of making contracts with various masters, so that we can carry their lower-end items in all of these stores. We are working on the premise of name-recognition and convenient locations (possibly as many as 18) to carry this through. We will likely end up with 3 master merchants, and can envision each store having a minimum stock of 2000 to 3000 items. We will have stims (A, B and C), health packs, clothes, weapons, armor, powerups, vehicles, personal harvesters, food, survey devices, crafting tools, crafting stations, small houses, etc.

We see this as the way that merchant was intended to be used. We will be buying items from crafters in bulk, so that they can give us a 1 to 5% discount on what they would charge if they were selling it themselves. We will then turn around and sell it, using that 1 to 5% discount as our profit margin. There will be no specialty items, everything will be made in bulk, and some items will only be sold in factory crates (such as stims). Clothes will only be made in black, and will be strictly low-end items.

We are not competing with the master crafters for their specialty items. There will not be any medium or large houses or harvesters sold on these vendors. None of the high-end clothes or food. However, if this vendor item cap is implemented, that will be the end of this idea. We cannot make this happen unless we have very large stocks of inexpensive items, with the low price being our way of turning over our stock quickly. With as many as 18 stores, spread out across all the buildable planets, there is absolutely no way we could restock these stores twice a day. With the 6 vendors that we are starting with, we are looking at trying to restock perhaps once every week, probably going to once every two weeks.

I plead with the devs to not break the vendors. At least allow someone with master merchant to have unlimited items on their vendors. We are trying to use them the way they were intended, as an outlet for multiple crafters to sell their goods. Please give us a chance to make this work.

personally i feel the 150 Item cap is insane. As a resource vender i like to keep an extremely well stocked vender...i.e. i have over 150 listings just in Inorganic minerals...at what point am i supposed to list Gas, Chems. etc...?? If in fact, the cap is presented and anything over 150 is lost or must be retrieved..I (i'm sure a few others also) will have to retrieve/hassle with almost 600 listings.. Just a thaught

I fear that with less vender space we all will be forced to set as many Venders as "humanly" possible within our shops just to maintain some sort of stock level, thus creating a large "clutter" of venders and somewhat a state of Chaos. This, i fear, will aslo increase the need for custom/special orders packed per persons requests (my meathod)

LadyGray,

I can almost give you 100% assurance that the word "unlimited" will vanish from vendors forever soon. I don't know what the final upper limit but it won't be "unlimited" I doubt it will even be in the 1000's. They proposed 150. They aren't going to settle for 3000 or anything near that. We are going to have to figure out ways to do business with less vendor space. That is the bottom line I am afraid.

They just want people to get a second account. Most serious crafters already have a second account because of the lot limitation.