Merchant Archive
Thread: Merchant shouldn't be a class...
Instead have a merchant tree within the artisan and the elite crafting profession. I'm sorry but it's not worth the skill credits for a little tent or fancy dressed vendors.
I really want to start an Armorsmith / Master Smuggler business....but guess what Merchant is too danged expensive and I wouldn't be able to have enough vendors for this business.
Hiring other smugglers to slice every single item you craft is a royalPAIN and not even worth the effort, so master smuggler is a must for any serious weaponsmith or armorsmith...leaving me no skill credits for merchant.
jollyemu wrote:
Instead have a merchant tree within the artisan and the elite crafting profession. I'm sorry but it's not worth the skill credits for a little tent or fancy dressed vendors.
I really want to start an Armorsmith / Master Smuggler business....but guess what Merchant is too danged expensive and I wouldn't be able to have enough vendors for this business.
Hiring other smugglers to slice every single item you craft is a royalPAIN and not even worth the effort, so master smuggler is a must for any serious weaponsmith or armorsmith...leaving me no skill credits for merchant.
And the entire reason it works that way to begin with is so you have to rely on others instead of doing everything yourself.
I agree 100% with the vendor fee. I would like to be able to set up community vendors or lend out my vendors where i get a percentage of everything that sells on the vendor. This is my biggest wish for master merchant, that and merchant specific furuniture.
I guess I'd also like to see merchants get more available items to sell as they increase in their skills. This idea has been posted before on the forums as a possible solution to the bazaar/merchant nerf fix. I'd also just like to see material put in that makes getting master merchant actually worth something.
One thing confused me about the initial post: They want to be a Master Armorsmith/Master Smuggler but don't want to have to be a merchant also?
Master A/S and Master Smuggler combined (plus Artisan:BusinessIV) leave 23 skill points and includesa vendor at Business3.
In fact you can be a Master A/S, Master Smuggler and 3001 Merchant for a total of 3 vendors and planetary registration.
Or lose the 3rd vendor and go for Hiring or Efficiency, or use the 5 points to get to Carbine or Rifle 2.....
Anyway, my 20 decicredits on this topic again 
I think the overall point is that the Merchant profession is in about the same state as the farming/mining professions, and should probably be removed and have its skills redistributed through the artisan profession.
I'm a merchant, I love merchant, but unless they fix the tools of the trade, there is no point to requiring the dependencies.
You can see it right now. NO-ONE! Not even my friends want to use my vendors, because it is an inconvenience. You cannot require people to be dependent on someone else and then make it impossible to interact with them.
Its like the situation with armorsmiths and tailors, where armorsmiths require components from tailors. Now, make it impossible to trade components, and you have the exact situation you do with the merchant class.
They must fix the dependencies, or they must scrap the class.
Do people go into other profession forums and post that the profession should be included with novice marksman and such? Why is it everyone that comes in here that wants to have merchant skills without spending the time or skill points to get them has to say how useless the profession is and that they should have it for free.
If the developers had intended people to be able to do everything in the game, they would have given you unlimted skill points. I play a merchant in this game, a pure merchant. I buy and sell items from crafters. I host shops for people. I run a resources business. The developers created a class in merchant whish is an elite class and is every bit as viable as anything else. It can easily be combined with other classes to make someone able to be a crafter/merchant, a combat class/merchant, or in my case, a politician/merchant.
You're argument here shouldn't be in this forum that you should have the merchant skills for free in artisan, it should be with SOE that you want more skill points. There is too much "your class is not important, so give me your skills because I want them" going on here lately. I don't go into the commando forum saying I should be allowed to use a flame dot without the skills, or into the bountyhunter forum saying I should be allowed to eyeshot because that skill is no big deal. I don't because I realise this game is about diversity, Not about people being 100% self sufficient.
If merchant wasas insignificant as people say it is, why would all of the people coming in here saying so even want the skills?
It is an interesting contradiction.
Everyone wants to be completely self supporting in this game in a way that just isn't what was intended by the design team. It is an MMORPG you are required to interact with other people.
The whole point of making you choose where to spend your 250 skill points is so you have to make hard decisions about what skills to take and what professions to master.
You can sell your weapons without slicing them. You can pay for slicing and charge enough to pay for the slicing. You can sell sliced weapons without a vendor. You can certainly sell them with a bulky vendor at Business III and do all the things you want to do.
I'm sorry but I don't agree that the merchant skills should be given to the Artisan profession.
And I wish they had found a way to make miners a real elite class in the game off the survey tree. I think the opportunity for that has passed frankly becaue they would have to gut the ability of the rest of the player base to mine resources to make it work now. But I don't think that Merchants and miners. Some people are both..just as a lot of people are elite crafteres and Merchants. But fundimetally I think merchants should sell things..not produce things.
That doesn't mean your character can't do both, it means to do both you are doing more than one profession.
Slightly off topic....
<rant, mixed with paranoia>
Miner, Farmerand Industrialistwere taken out of the game because they were TOO powerful. They had the potential to wreck the economy. The Miner pulled TOO much out of the ground too fast, same with the Farmer, and the Industrialist wiped out TOO many things from his factory too fast. They say they removed them because noone wanted to be one, or that it "only gave bonuses", or it was "too generic", bull. Several people knew exactly what they were doing when they yanked those classes, and that's why we won't see them back. The majority of the people voting for Miner said, "Take it out, fix it, put it back", then came "Leave it in, and fix it in game", so they yanked it... and it's still gone.
Merchant won't be fixed to the players satisfaction, because then the economy would be TOO dependant on ONE class, us. I'd love to see it happen,but it never will. Sad, but true.
They say they are changing vendors and bazaars to break up monopolies... and that is partly true, the monopoly of the Merchant class on the economy.
</rant, mixed with paranoia>
Thanks for your time.
DocSavag wrote:
It is an interesting contradiction.
Everyone wants to be completely self supporting in this game in a way that just isn't what was intended by the design team. It is an MMORPG you are required to interact with other people.
Arrya wrote:
DocSavag wrote:
It is an interesting contradiction.
Everyone wants to be completely self supporting in this game in a way that just isn't what was intended by the design team. It is an MMORPG you are required to interact with other people.
It definitely is
One of the biggest problems though is that many of these interactions in the game are just not implmented in an effecient way.
Merchant is definitely an example of this where it is just simply a huge pain to have to rely on someone else to sell your goods - its almost mandatory that you have to take merchant skills for this purpose so it becomes a skill sink for people that really could care less about the merchant profession. That or they just surrender their skills after setting up their vendors.
Slicing is another example of this - and in this case, it is probably more intentional - but slicing for a high volume smith is essentially a full time job, and having to deal with this trading of hudreds of pieces of equipment back and forth each week is just a huge hassle. The effeciences of being a smith and a slicer are quite nice, and I am sure many more people would do so if there was an easier way to hire a merchant to sell your goods for you.
Well hand in hand with our request to make people keep merchant skills if they are going to be a merchant is requests to make it easier for people to use us to sell things.