Merchant Archive

Hi, I come at this entire profession from a different angle. I'm a Master Droid Engineer and will be a Master Architect soon. In other words, I sell high-priced items.

Right now, the vendors charge based upon the value of the items on the vendor. I'm told this translates into 1% of the value as a mainenance fee. This means that one must sell an item within fifty hours before the vendor eats all of the revenue you might have received for it (note: I'm talking total revenue, not profit ... so, in reality, it's even worse).

Games like this need money-sinks, but the currently implementation is really not the way to do it. It penalizes people for selling a large number of items or items that are expensive.

The current implementation's effective time-limit on selling also makes it very hard for people to sell and still make some money.

How about this as an idea:

Allow artisans (who have Business 3) to have one vendor. This vendor would charge 1cr maintenance per item on the vendor and would also apply a 10% sales tax (for loss of a better word) when an item sold.

This would mean that artisans could sell a very wide variety of items off of their personal vendor without suffering a huge penalty for having high-priced items on it.

I'll take this idea even further into the Merchant profession. Lower the "tax" as a Merchant makes their way up the Efficiency tree. Have it go down to (I'm picking numbers out of the air here) 9% for Efficiency 1, 7% for Efficiency 2, 4% for Efficiency 3, 2% for Efficiency 4, and 1% for Master Merchant.

This would allow people to make and sell a wide variety of even expensive items. And, the vendors would still be a money-sink for non-Merchants.

This would also allow the casual player to login, stock their vendor, have some fun, and log out. They wouldn't have to worry about timing, running to town and spending hours selling face-to-face, etc.

Interesting concept, but I disagree in giving ANY more benefits to the Artisan line of vendors.

If you want to sell high ticket items via a vendor, spend points in the Merchant tree, OR, contact your local Merchant and work out a deal. That's what they're there for. This game is all about interdependancy, and not about a single person being able to do everything him or herself.

My, that's spiteful. I propose an entirely different system of how a vendor bills EVERYONE, and you don't want it because it changes things for Artisans.

Keep in mind that I'm not flaming you here, just explaining part of the situation.

Changes to venders are going to run up against the fact that the devs don't want people to use them as storage. If you were only charged 1 credit/day/item to store high ticket items, then nothing stops you from putting stuff up on the vender that you don't want anyone to buy by pricing it really high, so high that no onebuys it.

At that point, you can store extra items above what they want you to for 1 credit per item per day.

The current system is meant to discourage that, by making it too expensive in maintainence to put items up like that. If you go to that kind of system of paying maintainence, I fear they would turn around and put a cap on how many items you can have on your vender -- which might be fine for a high-ticket seller, but I sell consumables (and most of items are priced at 200 credits or so) and need to store them in volume.

I agree with you that the 1% of value per maintainence cycle is way to high, in the same way merchants will tell you that 1 credit per day no matter how much inventory you have (the current state with NPC venders) is too low.

But I don't think framing maintainence as a "sales tax" rather than a "storage tax" is something that the devs are going to see as a good idea, so I would suspect our energy would be better spent coming up with other options (that at least take into account the "your vender is not extra storage" concerns.)

Carvin Abrok - Merchant/Smuggler (Lowca)

Well, that's a good point. Still, right now, you can store tons of goods on your vendor by just setting their prices to 1cr each (not that I do, since I sell from my vendor and don't want it cluttered with junk).

It would be nice to try to figure out some sort of alternative maintenance/tax system that worked to help reduce/eliminate storage use AND that worked well as a vendor.

I'd certainly want to see a system where the artisan has a single vendor that's more (possibly much more) expensive to run than a specialist (Merchant).

Maybe to prevent storage, vendors have listing fees just like the Bazaar, items cost 1cr to maintain, and the tax scales down from 10% (Artisan) to 1% (Master Merchant). Since loading it requires a listing fee, it's less likely to be used as a storage device. And, if the fee is tied to the same fee paid at the Bazaar, Merchants pay much less on it (or, they should).