Merchant Archive

Ok after some comments from others its seems that Merchants only having shops with vendors might be hard on the economy. As such here is my suggestion.

1) Phase out this business about person keeping vendors and merchant tents after they drop skills. If I drop CH I get a message that saysI have no hope of controlling this. Same thing for dropping merchant skills. The vendor exists and only allows retrieval of items from the vendor by the owner for 30 days. Then it is gone.

2) Thereafter, since every other profession crafts things. Let the merchant craft vendors. Possible schematics to make the robot and machine vendors and some other flora based schematic to make NPC vendors. Then like droids and pets, a non merchant can only have one vendor out at a time. The non merchant goes to a merchant to purchase the vendor.

3) Merchant vendors. I suggest both sell of vendor and maintenance fees to go to vendors for special functions. If you want planetary ad its 20 credits/hr half goes to the merchant half to the system. If you want ad barking, matching vendors, etc.. there is a maintenance fee attached that gets paid to the merchant and to the system. Additionally standard maintenance fees for regular vendors are substantially increased for non merchants. The reason the merchant is paid the maintenance is that in concept the merchant has to coordinate the planetary advertisement and he charges an advertisement fee to the person accessing his services. Ads cost money over time, they are not a one time fee.

4) Business tree in artisan. OK i suggest allowing reduction in the cost of the vendors to exist in this tree. Everyone gets one free vendor to place like they get one CL 10 pet or droid without using any skillpoints. But again the maintenance fee for a person with no merchant or business skills in equivalent to the rate on heavy miners and this rate goes down as the person increases in merchant ability.

This allows the merchant to become an integral part of the SWG system. They now serve a function, as if you need a vendor you have to buy it from them. Also the vendors should be crafted, to tie the merchant into the dependency on resources faced by every other crafting profession. Possibly the best vendors require really nice resources.

OK anyone.... comments.

Toasted.
I like my piks toasted, with a little butter.