Merchant Archive

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Bachreus wrote:

Background: I am a master merchant, and i love it. But lets face it folks it kind of sucks and does not give you any benifits really other than being able to place vendors. The advertising is sub par, the uniform and hiring options are a complete joke and the efficiencey line has no real benefit. So here is my list to be ignored by the devs. Feedback, comments, flames, are welcome and appreciated but I hope to keep this to a freindlyy discussion. So here are my issuses, feel free to add yours

1.) Make the system automatically remove vendors registered on the worldmap that do not have a minimum of 100 total items on them. Thats right I said it. There is nothing I hate more than being at the bottom of a list of empty vendors. if you cant stock 100 than you dont deserve to be listed plain and simple. And crates and travel packs and stackable items will count as 1 item

2.) Do not allow people to keep vendors to store stuff. Throw your extra stuff out or get another shop, and stop complaining when all of the items you stored in your travel pack on your vendor disapear. you asked for it in my opinion. If i had the credits I would byyour pack full of the 100k blocks of resouces in a heartbeat only to destroy them and give you the empty pack back.

3.)Move the planetary add campaign to Master Merchant. (It will get rid of all of the dabblers and add some reason to be a master) Also add the ability for master merchants to have a 10k selling price on the bazzar.

4.) Make the uniform optionsREAL options, rather than having us blow through clothing and armor to dress our vendors. Make it an interface similar to the character customization screen at player creation but with a few standard uniform options. This way we can have a little customization instead of having Joe Vendor with Pink and blue clothes ( I swear they are theugliest colors )all the time. We would still be able to get tailors, and armorsmiths to make custom uniforms.

5.) Give MASTER MERCHANTS more lots. Mabey even only a bonus of two at master. F!! all the other crafting classes ( I am a master weaponsmith too by the way) that want extra lots, put them in master merchant.

6.)More reduced maint fees on all structures, more sign options and a whole lot more.. This is where you come in. Add what you like or dislike.

Later,

Bachreus

And yes i was bored at work when i wrote this

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#1 I really don't agree with. 100 items isn't any magical number. I might do very well selling 25 swoop bikes at a time.

#2 I suspect this will be fixed by the coming changes that will add vendor item limits. The cost of course will be to legitimate businesses who will no longer be able to stock 1000's of items at a time.

#3 You would have to come up with a replacement for Global Advertisement. I would rather have a new form of advertising at Master. The idea present recently to give you a 500 character text field that could be accessed from the Global Map would be a nice advertising add for merchants.

#4 I support allowing Image Designers to customize our vendors looks using their existing tools. I think that gives us what we need and gives the ID's a new business. Not sure about clothing though.

#5 More lots aren't going to happen. Everyone wants more lots and giving them to master merchants makes no more sense than Master Artisans (for harvesters) or Any Elite Crafters for factorys and stuff. The lots are limited for a reason. They represent the bulk of your item storage abilities and the number of resources you can retrieve from the universe. THe devs are very adamant that they don't want to drastically change this.

#6. New signs would be good especially ones that could be put up in a Player CIty.

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Bachreus wrote:

6.)More reduced maint fees on all structures,

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Actually, I find the reduction in maint and bazaar fees an insult. At most they add up to 2k or so per day, if most of your lots have heavy harvesters up,and realisticlymuch less if you have small houses for storage.

This is chump change for a successfull merchant! On the order of the markup on one sale.I am offended by the implication that it is a meaningful benefit at the levels it comes in, I would rather see it all moved down into the business line of the artisan tree where it would have a real impact for new crafters/miners.

BTW the board now complains about your subject. Was there a STEALTH NERF of board subjects?

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DocSavag wrote:

I think the biggest problem with the Effiency discounts is that they don't matter by the time you get to them. Putting a vendor discount at III and Master and the Structure Discount at IV means you have to be a substantial merchant before you ever get those. This is counter to the needs of the profession. If you got vendor discounts at Novice (which lowers the base cost in Business III and IV and would be an incentive to get and keep merchant) and additional discounts at Eff I and II you would help the young starting merchant get on their feed while still simulating the increasing effiency of a more veteran merchant.

I think that maybe the base cost of the vendor is too low. If it were a bit higher the reductions would be more impressive especially if there was a substantial difference between Business III and Novice Merchant.

I agree that the discounts for the bazaar are completely useless. The charges on the bazaar just don't amount to enough to worry about a discount on them.

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DocSavag wrote:

I think the biggest problem with the Effiency discounts is that they don't matter by the time you get to them.<snip good revision suggestion>

I think that maybe the base cost of the vendor is too low. If it were a bit higher the reductions would be more impressive especially if there was a substantial difference between Business III and Novice Merchant.<snip Bazaar discounts worthless comment>

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You are almost suggesting going back the way things were at the start. Then the terminal vendors charged a fortune if you put much on them (1% / hr IIRC), but an NPC (available at Novice) was almost free.

Of course that was obviously a bug, since Merchant level terminals cost the same, and the 1cr/hr NPC price didn't make sense, especially when discounted.

But overall, the system had a lot of good points. When I got Bus 3 and that first vendor, I wanted to be very sure that what I put on it would sell right away. It taught me a lot, even though it greatly limited the business I could do. I advertised heavily in all ways I could find, and really worked the business. That education has stood me in good stead, even though vendor cost has become trivial.

Now I see lots of pretty shops with vendors full of unsalable junk, or priced like they were a monopoly. The so called merchant that owns it probably runs missions for his income, as I can't believe the shop runs at a profit. Usually the vendors go empty at some point, probably from expirations, and then the shop evaporates. Perhaps he just mastered for a holo, but I think many are reallybusiness failures because I often see protocol droid vendors there. It can take someone a while to realize that his "profession" is really just an expensive hobby that he doesn't know how to do very well.

A high fixed cost on vendors hurts the little guy a lot more than a percent system. If you raise the price high enough that the fees are significant to a successful merchant, it will be really hard for the newbie to ever learn how to make it work. It doesn't fit my image of what the game should be -- a place to learn and try out new roles.

Better to just leave vendor prices alone and give up on the idea that the discounts are significant. Admit that we have 3 empty boxes (tents are nice) in that column to go with the other empty boxes and the more-of-the-same column. Then we can try to get some good things to fill them in. (Like maybe some combad droids:smileywink

Well almost but not quite what I was getting at. Though it has the same effect.

Ok. You all know that I feel that there are too many vendors in the galaxy and too many part time merchants. My vision of merchant is that while it is perfectly legitimate for a big time crafter with lots of business to run their own vendors it should make no sense for a smaller crafter with lesser volume to run their own vendor. It should be cost prohibitive to sell a few items a week on your vendor. This would encourage people to pool their items on fewer vendors. Two or three crafters could supply one merchant with goods and the volume of those goods would pay for the cost of running the vendors.

Right now the costs of running a vendor are so negligible that that isn't going to happen. Only something like a change to the skill mods for vendorsand vendor item limitsis going to affect that in any serious method.

But consider if the cost of the vendors were much higher at lower levels and came down to where they are now at near master.. this would make running a vendor at busienss III a fairly expensive operation again and only doable if you had a lot of volume or very high prices or if you are just rich and don't care how much you lost selling your merchandise. That would mean that smaller one vendor shops would be encouraged to seek out either someone else to host their vendor.. or see out additional merchandise to offer on their own vendor thus making merchants real shopkeepers and less one trick pony shows.

The would have the effect of making the discounts real and useful instead of nearly invisible. Now .. that also means that we would have to take a step back in order to go forward and that is a tough thing to get people to agree to so i Don't think this will happen. But if it had worked this way from the start most of us would acknowledge that it made sense to make young merchants far less efficient than they are at master.. right now they aren't. from 15/hr to 9/hr is hardly a massive change. If the change were 30-50 per hour or higher then getting down to 9 would be far more significant.

X0_V__V_

Beaten dead horse begs for mercy.

Until we can open a dialogue, this kind of talking is futile. When we have a solution for THAT issue I'll be glad to talk about all this other stuff until we're blue in the face.

I take it back..we at least need to respect each other. In the past thirty minutes our 'one star' bandit managed to defame this post completely. That wasn't my intent.

I support your right to speak out for what we have all be shouting about for months. I've just lost my enthusiasm for screaming at the wall. Take up the torch and run with it. I hope you have better luck with it.

I dont' think any profession has had less 'red-name' attention than ours..I'm runninga search now to tally up the totals.

Edit:** I was wrong on the red-name thing...there's no board that's's had LESS attention (some have had as little), but whining about those who've had more smacks of childishness.**

Message Edited by Csin on 02-11-2004 01:14 PM