Merchant Archive

I agree 100%

The most annoying part of being a merchant is having to reload venders. Not everything sells in a month... Who in their right mind would list the 1000's of items allowed by a master merchant knowing the mess they will be in 30 days from the time they listed.

That is a very good point.

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Mariki wrote:

I agree 100%

The most annoying part of being a merchant is having to reload venders. Not everything sells in a month... Who in their right mind would list the 1000's of items allowed by a master merchant knowing the mess they will be in 30 days from the time they listed.

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Every month? Try every day. Yep if you sell resources you get to reload the vendor every *&^%&% day.

-Indene-

i was a merchie for a little while,... i found this situation to be so frustrating that i became a pistoleer -- yup, im a masochist! ehhe

Aye, wise this idea would be, however gravely foolish at the same time. I completely agree with doing SOMETHING, ANYTHING to help the merchant profession, but doing this would cause people of the combat type to get merchant 0004 chuck their vendors full of stuff and then drop it. As long as their vendors matinence is paid up they are good to go since they wont ever have to restock without their vendors being empty. As soon as their vendors are empty rinse and repeat. This would make merchant a novatly profession.


Edit: this is my idea: I heard this posted a LONG time ago, but I think its a great idea. Completely get rid of the merchant profession and build it into crafting professions. That was the idea I heard, here is my idea to go along with it: Droid engineers can place droid vendors, tailors get to cutomize their vendors with clothes, armorsmiths get to customize their vendors with armor, weaponsmiths can put weapons on them, image designers can re make how they look, architects can place terminal vendors, and chefs get something to do not sure yet.

However, here is the catch you can give "rights" to your vendor so you could have an image designer come in and design your vendors after they are placed as well as a tailor place clothes, armorsmith give armor, etc. Or you can deed over vendors that have no items placed. So if you wanted a droid vendor call up your local droid engineer have him place one of his vednors and deed it over to you as long as it has no items on it. This would let crafters "The ones who need the vendors" have their vendors built into their profession, but would also give all the crafting professions more to do with one another. If the devs teamed this idea with a updated interface for vendors and fixed some of the problems it would greatly help the whole merchant problem. You could also be sure people who do combat for a living wouldnt grind crafting professions just so they could get the vendors for that profession. This would be a tremendous ammount of work for the devs, so I am guessing we wont ever see anything better than what we have now

Message Edited by Bviper47 on 06-27-2005 11:08 AM

There is a saying, "Form Follows Function" that I do not think that the devs have learned yet. For many players in this game they simply cannot get enough storage space, no matter what. Back when vendors had unlimited storage and was still useable after all merchant skills was dropped, storage vendors was a common use by everyone.
The storage vendors of old ate not longer and option for non-merchants, partly due to items dropping from sale and partly do to the cant realist with out the skill. But there are still many crafter that use vendors that way, and monthly re-listing is the only thing that holds that back.

This is partly due to the way vendors are designed, and partly due to the way the game is designed. Part of the solution should be obvious.

If vendor maintains was linked to the combined cost on the items on the vendor say 1% or 0.33% daily, that could be prevented. Listing something at 99,999,999 cr with a 0.33% daily fee would still be 330k cr a day while an item genuinely meant for sale would still take 300 days to consume its cost in maintains fees.

So while a re-list button would be nice, all it would do would be to encourage storage vendors with 4000 items, witch is the same storage space as 4 accounts if houses was placed.

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Tarnak_Archvold wrote:
There is a saying, "Form Follows Function" that I do not think that the devs have learned yet. For many players in this game they simply cannot get enough storage space, no matter what. Back when vendors had unlimited storage and was still useable after all merchant skills was dropped, storage vendors was a common use by everyone.
The storage vendors of old ate not longer and option for non-merchants, partly due to items dropping from sale and partly do to the cant realist with out the skill. But there are still many crafter that use vendors that way, and monthly re-listing is the only thing that holds that back.

This is partly due to the way vendors are designed, and partly due to the way the game is designed. Part of the solution should be obvious.

If vendor maintains was linked to the combined cost on the items on the vendor say 1% or 0.33% daily, that could be prevented. Listing something at 99,999,999 cr with a 0.33% daily fee would still be 330k cr a day while an item genuinely meant for sale would still take 300 days to consume its cost in maintains fees.

So while a re-list button would be nice, all it would do would be to encourage storage vendors with 4000 items, witch is the same storage space as 4 accounts if houses was placed.

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We had this type of maintenance before and we asked for it to be changed. No.. we demanded loudly for weeks for it to be changed. When the game came out there was a bug that set the maintenance for NPC's to something under 1cr/hr this was glorious for Merchants because it meant that all those non merchants were paying a maintenance fee of [Sale Amount]/1000 every 45 minutes. The rates for resources and other high priced merchandise were outrageous on a daily basis but we didn't mind because it gave us a skill to sell.
Then we got a nightmare in the form of a notcie that they were fixing the NPC's so they used the same method which was the intended maintenance method in the design of the code. We freaked! The costs to what would in RL be called durable goods merchants would have bankrupted them. Imagine putting up a 300k guild hall on your vendor for a month..the cost of maintaining that was 9600 credits a day.

Even lowering the maintenance to .33% per day you end up with people losing more money to maintenance than they sell. This is punative taxation. I realize the goal is to eliminate storage but the cost to real merchants is too high. As an exercise calculate the cost of your merchandise at .33% per day. I think you might be surprised how fast that adds up. Especially if you operate a business that has a large stock of items to try to satisfy any possible customer need. It means that items that don't sell rapidly won't get stocked, no one can afford to pay those amounts on items that aren't selling in a few days.

If its an issue of purging vendors so non-merchant folks lose their vendors then have them go poof when the appropriate box on the merchant tree is lost. Put a popup screen upon login that says.. you no longer have sufficient skills to manage the XX vendors that you have. Two(?) vendors will be randomly removed in 1 hour if you chose to ignore the situation. Otherwise, you have 1 hour to empty two vendors and remove them. If they don't qualify to manage any of them, then they all go poof after giving notice. This should be tied to skill-loss and not to a monthly dump.

Thats a pretty good idea - I like it!