Merchant Archive

OK, I will try to make this as constructive as possible, but considering my frustration, that may be a stretch.

I've recently acquire all of the prerequisites to train in Master Merchant, but I just can't bring myself to do it. Let's examine exactly what you get with each skill

Hiring I - IV: This gives you a greater variety of vendors. After Hiring II, if my memory serves, the upgrades are minimal, with only 1 or 2 additional vendory types being available at each skill tree. Does this help your sales? Absolutely not. What does it do? It allows you to create an "atmosphere" of sorts, with your shop, giving you some freedom to be different. Is it worth it? In my opinion, no, it is not. While I do enjoy having a wookiee vendor to hold wookiee clothing, I don't believe it's worth the skill points to get.

Advertising I - IV: This one really gets me going. First off, as we all know, when the server reboots, non of the settings save. This is unacceptable. I, as a "near" master merchant still lose business to the tailor shop located 100 meters from me because that merchant can get up in the morning and reset the planetary map settings and I do not have that ability. This is where RL issues affect what is supposed to be an "in-game" skill. If these things do not save when the server boots, then they are not operational 70% of the day....more importantly, it's the same 70% of the day that I am NOT online. I don't need these things when I AM online, because people can simply search for my title and ask for a waypoint to my shop. By the way, you guys can say what you want but Istill believe that the Advertising IV description stated that you could hire an NPC in town to advertise your store after the game was released and was changed without notification to reduced fees for the planetary map. (efficiency skill maybe?)

Management I - IV: OK, this one is simple. Each skill gives you an additional vendor. Do you need more than one vendor? No you do not. Of course, it's nice to have more than one vendor, if, say for example, you could drop another vendor in a house of which you are an administrator. You could then run a few vendors in different planets for global commerce. However, I find that if I crafted nonstop for the 4 to 5 hours per day that I get to play, I still end up with low inventory. The traffic is that high because of word of mouth alone. News of quality goods travels very fast in this game. If your stuff is good, and you treat your customers well, they will travel to you.

Efficiency I - IV: Again, this is a fairly simply skillset. Basically, you get decreased fees for vendors, bazaar, and your structures. Everybody has different uses for the bazaar, but as for me, I don't use it at all any more to sell things. I do custom orders, and have very little time remaining to stock my own vendors, much less make a trip to town and stock the bazaar. The 20 creds never really hurt my pocketbook in the first place. For vendors, well...they are very expensive to maintain considering the custom orders that I do and the amount they cost. I put 13k creds in my vendor maintenance pool just last night, and will have to put more in tonight if the orders are not picked up. This is insane, but, the sad part is, the madness is not reduced significantly by the Efficiency skillset. You have to ask yourself if it's worth the 14 skill points to reduce this fee by such a small amount. For me, I believe the answer is no, it is not. One additional sale per day will make up for the additional fees I would have to pay if I were to drop the efficiency skill.It is unfortunate that this skill does not save any more than it does. So your large harvester now has a maintenance rate of 37 instead of 45. Is the 17% decrease in fees worth keeping your skills locked up in this tree? This is the difference between paying 2500 per day instead of 3000 on a harvester. I understand that as time goes on, you stand to save a lot of money as a whole, however, day to day, 500 creds is nothing.

So the question remains.....Do I waste my apprenticeship xp (which is getting harder to find) on Master Merchant today, or look for other areas to dump my skill points and put my custom orders onone big uglybulky vendor?

Well, I'm four boxes away from Merchant, and I'm going to Master it. If I feel it's a waste of my skill points and I don't enjoy having the title, I can always surrender it and do missions to regain the money lost from training in it. It's all up to you. I'm having fun just having a shop set up with a different vendor for different item types. But, then again, it's all up to you again. And yeah, I do kinda wish they would bring back Word of Mouth (Advertising IV). If you have the strategy guide, look under Merchant for the skill trees. You'll find that it says:

Advertising IV: Word of Mouth - At this skill level the merchant can hire NPC's in cities to advertise their wares and vendors.

Cost: 40,000 Merchant Experience

2 Skill Points

Skill Mods: None

Commands Granted

None

This, of course, isn't in the game now. It could have led to a great deal of spam in the cities, but it also could be very controlled. I'm not sure how long they intended to let the NPC stay in town and how often they would let it bark advertisements, ect.

Yeah I'm master, all you get is a stinking protocol droid and reduced fees.

They really need to buff this up, give us some perks.

I've gotten plenty of extra ap. points training Merchant skills since I got Master.

Yo may find that the Master Title will attract request for training. You will probably get back the apprentice xp just from that.

Understand that it's not only the apprenticeship points that concern me. The point that I'm trying to make here is that I've come this far, hoping for SOMETHING in at least one of the skill boxes to make it worth my while. If the broken skills were fixed, that'd be one thing, but as it stands I could accomplish the same thing I'm doing now with one big bulky vendor, although it would be a little more expensive to maintain. This would save me over 60 skill points total, in which I could pick up a marksman skill and have the ability to defend myself, or even a 3rd artisan trade...although I wouldn't be able to master it. For example, I could get weapon experimentation and ranged weapons, and have the ability to make high quality rifles/carbines/pistols.

As it stands now, I'm going to hold out until we hear from the Devs on the correspondent report concerning our profession. I'm not going to threaten to leave the game if it's not what I want to see, I'll just drop the skill altogether.

I think it depends if you like investing in the future.

My strong guess is that the Master Merchant is going to be needed to place certain buildings in player cities, and that our entire skill tree will be dramatically revised when player cities come in. That's why I think the devs aren't saying anything about Merchants right now, and why they're not fixing or adding value to the profession.

Now I'm also guessing that when they make this change, they may make Merchant XP harder to earn. I'm strongly hoping, though, that anyone with Merchant skill boxes will keep those boxes even if the skills inside of them change utterly. Stripping away all of your accumulated Merchant XP just because they change the profession would be pretty absurd.

So maybe you want to be a Master Merchant now on the guess that someday (maybe not too long from now) you'll be able to provide unique services strongly in demand.

But I could be wrong, and Master Merchant might continue to suck as badly as it does now for the indefinite future.