Merchant Archive

HI,

I stocked my vendor with about 40 items and then put 10k in for maintenance. I looked at status and was somewhat shocked to see less than 2 days worth.

Is this a bug or is it to do with the way that maintenance is calculated etc. Just as anote I only have business 3 so dos this have anything to do with it?

Jazeera Tsung

The answer is it depends. (You could always read my guide.) Basically Maint is total price of all items /1,000. Thus the more money worth you have on them the higher your maintenance....

Now the good news. NPC Vendors are bugged at 1. So train in Novice and drop a NPC down.

I have 6 vendors with hundreds of items in each. They are all NPCs. 34 of the vendors say Maintenance: 0. They NEVER require maintenance. Two others (and maybe that is why my Installations vendor disappeared) all of a sudden require maintenance when they had previously said 0 Maintenance required as well. I don't understand what the heck is going on with vendor maintenance fees and it may have cost me a a very valuable vendor!

Sorry, I meant 4 vendors not 34 vendors. Also one of them that requires 0 maintenance is my furniture vendor which has over 400 items in it.

My understanding is that vendor maintenance that says 0 isn't actually zero, it's just less than 1 cr (something like 0.80 credits). So it stills burn maintenance, and that's probably why your vendor disappeared.

Slim Vargo, Corbantis

I lost 3 of my Vendors last night over 15 mill caus of this %$&$ BUG

Hmmm, when I was stocking my wife's vendor (She only has business III) I noticed outrageous prices for maintenance. After a little experimenting, I found that it wasn't the total price of the items, it was 1 credit PER item, but things like crates were counted at the number in the crates, not as one item like they occupy in your inventory.

This to me seems rediculous! Why should I (as a meds seller) be forced to pay 50 credits per hour to advertise a crate of Stim Bs for 50k? Yet a weaponsmith can advertise 2 weapons for 25k each for 2 credits per hour. This is hardly fair, and either I'd like to see a crate counted as one item (as it should be) or have the price counted by what you are charging.

It is tied to price of items. The big problem is that it only updates maintenance at each tick. So you have to wait 15 minutes or so to know what your rate is. Many of us have been burned by this in the past.

Baracou said --

-------------------------------------------------

Hmmm, when I was stocking my wife's vendor (She only has business III) I noticed outrageous prices for maintenance. After a little experimenting, I found that it wasn't the total price of the items, it was 1 credit PER item...

-------------------------------------------------

It IS the total price of the items. I have Bus. IV and set up a vendor droid today just to see what it was like. Without any items listed, the maintenance was 25 per day. The vendor said 1, but I had to put in 25 credits for a day's worth of time.

Well, when I put furniture in totaling 2,600 credits, the maintenance increased to 75 credits per day (the vendor said 3).

It is evident that unless we architects become Novice Merchants also (in order to have NPC vendors), the only way we can afford a vendor is to leave it empty. 260k credits' worth of merchandise is a drop in the bucket for an architect; that's 7500 credits per day in vendor maintenance! Far too much overhead.

My Master Artisan/Master Architect can't become a Novice Merchant, because he has only one skill point left. Well, I *could* give up Novice Musician, I guess. Ah, sacrifices!

I think I'll wait a while, until I see whether the Devs increase the NPC vendor maintenance fees or not. In the meantime, I've named my "empty" droid vendor "EmailMeOrders."

Jae Alinn, Coronet, Flurry