Merchant Archive
Thread: Vendors Should NOT Disappear if One is No Longer a Merchant!
I am trying to be understanding of the position you are in, but what you are asking is for us to agree to continue to be worthless.
Merchant is a profession, and our vendors areour skills, they are not just items. We didn't build them from resources, they are not houses. We get XP, we train, we get more vendors. If I give up Pistols, I don't retain Body Shot 2. If you give up Merchant, you should not retain your vendors.
If some trained in Master Weaponsmith, then dumped all their Weaponsmith skills, would you mind if they kept all their schematics?
You can still be a successful Weaponsmith without Merchant. You just need to know a Merchant.
"Vendors Should NOT Disappear if One is No Longer a Merchant!"
Yes they should.
Goff McMerrii
Miner (Master Merchant)
Ok so they dont disappear but you lose the ability to administer them (pay maint, add/remove/relist stock, accept offers)
Happy now?
If you no longer have the skills to make the vendor, you should not have the benefit of the vendor.
Vendor go byebye = good
No Merchant skills = no working vendor. End of story. Anything else means you continue to steal our business using our own skill perks to do so. I don't much care how they impelement it. They can make your vendor continue to sell items until it is empty but remove your access to administer it. It will vanish soon. If you want to continue to use it you can go get your merchant skills again.
But what cannot continue is you using skills you don't have. The whole idea that the skill perk is just making the vendor is absurd. The skill is called Management not Vendor Creation. You have no vendor management skills you get no vendors. Our class has one purprose: SELLING THINGS. Your system has everyone competing with our one purpose without having to expend a single skill point.
Give me the right to make weapons withourt being a weaponsmith. Give me the right to us a flamethrower without being a commando, give me the right to heal wounds without being a medic, give me the right to use a camp without being a scout, give me the right to call a level 25 pet without being a Creature Handler. If can't have these rights, then stop trying to take my skills away from me.
at the risk of opening myself up to a lot of merchant hate, I've gotta agree with the thread starter. It's lame that people can get 5 vendors then surrender the skill and keep em, BUT it's been going on for so long and so many people have used this option that it's too late to drastically change things.
I'm no idea man, I don't know what could be an acceptable solution, but pushing for their vendors to go poof just isn't going to happen.
Solution:When you go into your vendor you get the option to withdraw your sales and then you get the option on the stock room to retrieve your items. Remove the "Sale" button. And anyone other than yourself will get an error message that the vendor is unavailable. You can get your stuff out. You can't continue to sell using skills you don't have.
The fact that the devs have continued to let this happen when we have been telling them for weeks that it was going on is a serious slap in the face to anyone who is a merchant.
I am a pure merchant (okay, I craft a few engineering things here and there, but most of what I sell are not things I craft) and I'm not a master merchant but at 4-0-2-4 I'm not a dabbler.
But I support the original poster's position. I also understand why other merchants are concerned about the issue, but I disagree with the community on what the solution should be. Keeping my hiring at 4 is about just that ... keeping my skills in hiring. I set up new shops, I move shops around, I place venders in the homes of partners to help them sell, I use them for a variety of purposes.
If I unlearnedvenders ... I would lose those things currently. My venders, such as they were at that moment, would continue be stuck where they are: I'd be doing no more hiring. If I wanted to move a shop, I'd have to think about releveling the skill. It seems that this is very consistant with other skills, including the Hiring line (ie, if someone has Hiring III and places a vender, then unlearns Hiring to I, should their venders poof even though their venders+ number hasn't changed?)
I fully support the idea that without Business III you shouldn't be able to interact with a vender, but I beg to differ with my fellow merchants that allowing someone to surrender even Novice Merchant somehow makes the rest of us "worthless" ... my skills don't feel worthless to me at all.
At the very least, it's important for the Devs to recognize that this item on the correspondant's "state of the profession" is not a universally held belief ... certainly not universal enough to be IN ALL CAPS AND BOLD!
Carvin Abrok - Propogandist/Rogue (Lowca)
I guess I should point out that trading vendor was considered an EXPLOIT by the Developers. This implies that those without the skill should not have vendors.
I wish that I could use 3 pets at once without being a CH.
It would appear to me that the main argument aganist losing the vendors if you no longer have the Management skill boxes to maintain them is the fear of a sudden and unexpected vanish.
I agree with other merchants in that if you don't have the Management skills to maintain a certain number of vendors, you should not have that number of vendors. I think the example of retaining schematics for items you no longer have the skills to craft is a valid and good example. We do not make vendors, we manage them.
Now to the fear of vanishing. I would agree that a sudden disappearance of vendors because of a new patch would be counter-productive to a number of crafters who are using vendors that they no longer have the skills to maintain. To me the issue is simple and has already been suggested. Turn off all administration functions on the vendor except the removal of items. This means that after the next patch all vendors that are owned by people without the appropriate skills at management would have a maximum life of 30 days for their vendors because all of their sales would expire within the 30 day window and without the ability to relist items, the vendor would be useless after this point. If you also remove the ability to pay maintenance, then the time fram may be even less if, say, the vendor only has 5 days of maintenance in it.
I am also a pure Merchant in the sense that I do not craft anything that I sell. I have arrangements with a significant number of crafters to act as a reseller for them. They don't need to waste their time and skill points with vendors, and I get to sell quality items from a far greater number of profession than I could ever hope to master at once. The core idea behind a player-driver economy is the cooperation between the crafters and the sellers. In RL, you don't go to Proctor and Gamble to buy shampoo, you go to Walmart. Why should SWG be any different when you consider it has professions that map to this RL model? Both companies are multi-billion dollar companies and they each focus on their core competencies - making or selling. In SWG if you want to make you take a crafting profession and if you want to sell you take the business line or Merchant. Why should someone be able to sell without selling skills when I certainly cannot craft without crafting skills?
If you want to have your own personal shop with a single vendor - take Business 3, if you want more than that then spend the skill points to get Merchant. A big majority of my crafting suppliers are very wealthy and happy because of the service I provide to them. Allowing non-merchants to sell with multiple vendors they don't have the skill boxes to manage makes my service available to anyone at any time without using skill points which in turn make the Merchant a disposable class and destroys the player-economy concept.
Thanks.
JediBoggeyb wrote:
My point is this: this far in the game, an economic change such as this would cause chaos. I've at least a dozen friends in various crafting professions that no longer have merchant because, well, they wanted to have some combat skills as well.
Houses, weapons, armor are tradeable. They do not signify a profession by possession and ability to use. They signify a profession by ability to create. Vendors are different, Merchants are the only ones who can createAND use them. It requires a SKILL to use the vendors. If a Commando got Flame Cone II and then dropped the class alltogether, should he still be able to whip out his flame thrower and take out an enemy?
Any chaos created by this change would not affect the economy, it would only affect the individual who is abusing the short-sightedness of the developers. I can't really call it an exploit, can I, since the developers have left it in. I want to...oh I want to call it an exploit, but who can fault people for discovering the best ways to use the rules of a game system to their advantage. To think that they should maintain a SKILL (not a possession) for free cannot possibly be how it was intended.
"Vendors Should NOT Disappear if One is No Longer a Merchant!"
yes they should!!!!