Merchant Archive

Hello,
I just wanted to discuss how everyone felt about the new cap, please no flames etc etc. If you are going to reply please make it a contstructive post and dont shout needless abuse at someone because you dont agree with them.

Personally Ilike the 150 item cap.

These are what I think people will feel are the cons:
If we can only stock 150 items, this means merchants will need to have more vendors. Hence they wont be able to sell in as many places. To me this discourages competetion, where you may have 5 armoursmiths in one spot, you may now have 2 because the other 3 went back to their home planets to properly stock a vendor. I cant see a cap of 150 items discouraging a monopoly.

150 Items seems a bit low to me, something more realistic would be 300 items. There are huge complaints about vendors not being stocked. So my solution to this would be to prevent anyone dropping 'Management' skills from keeping their vendors, this way we have more active vendors in my opinion although this can easily be argued against. Then with only 150 items it makes stocking a vendor harder as 150 items can easily be sold in one go.

Yet this is why it will be beneficial:
It will add something to the merchant proffession. In that people will have to have multiple vendors to work effectively, the stocking problem can easily be resolved by having 4 vendors, that equals 600 items which is more than enough, you can then have 2 other vendors off on another planet stocking 300 items.
Basically it means if you want to become efficient at selling you have to be merchant! Very simply really.

An obvious problem with this logic though is that people gain master, drop it and still have a possible 900 item limit. If you do not lose your vendor when you drop 'management' skills then this cap of 150 is not going to work at all.

I think it will help stocking problems, at this moment you can have 6 vendors on 6 different planets, not that everyone does. So you need to keep stocking them, if you only have 2 on 3 planets then you are keeping more uptodate on your vendors because of the travel times. For those only stocking 1 vendor, you simply have to become a proper merchant so that you can have more than 1 vendor to effectively sell all your stock. If you think about it, its very logical.

Im sure there are a few other points, all thoughts and ideas are welcome. If anything, I think it will be most beneficial for our merchant class (I was against it till I started typing the pros out and realised how it would help us, so the cons may sound a little personal). I am also a master merchant.

Sharwyn
Kettemoor

I keep my merchant guildmate busy. He has all 6 of his vendors dedicated to stocking my medical supplies and each of our vendors has a stock of well over 400 items each....in the same building.

To cap vendor stock limitsacross the board is an unnecessary regulation on commerce in the game. With a vendor cap at 150, you'd see vendors in high-traffic malls end up empty more often instead of stocked. It further punishes merchants who have invested their time and energy into the profession, rather than cures any type of issue caused by dabbling. Its only benefit lies in allowing SOE to maintain their databases for less work.

I can only see cons

1. I'm a tailor. I need to have 600 items to have decent stock. They don't sell fast. Basically this provision hamstrings tailors but puts little burden on other crafters.


2. No merchant will want to dedicate 4 vendors to selling all my tailor stuff, because it doesn't sell that fast and the stock necessarily needs to be huge. A merchant would rather dedicate each of those vendors to a high-turnover product (i.e. weapons and armor)


3. This forces tailors into becoming high level merchants, but there is no similar burden on other crafting classes.


4. This provision will encourage people to go up management 4 and then drop it to keep 6 vendors, instead of the current system where many people are content with their legitimate business 3 vendor (for which they have kept the skills)


5. This provision will prevent tailors especially from being able to have shops in more than one location because the goods of the same type (i.e. clothing) must be spread out between at least 4 vendors. I can see chefs having a similar problem.

This provision, without exaggeration, will be the death of my business. I will have to close down one, if not both, of my shops. I will be chained to my shop taking custom orders all day. With the dwindling crafter population, I've been able to keep up with the demand for tailoring by doing vendor-only sales because the crafting is quicker and there's no downtime waiting for customers. I can't imagine MORE demands on my time. Plus, with custom orders there is no way I will be able to serve the needs of two planets, as I do now.

The demand for crafted goods is too high on the servers since hologrinding. The supply is too low. Forcing crafters to resort to face-to-face sales by cramping their vendor abilities will lead to crafters quitting, and inefficient disbursement of goods because face-to-face sales take LONGER per sale.

I'm a weaponsmith, one shop at the moment and the second one is proving more and more difficult to get to because I've been expanding my selection of weapons etc.

I now stock every weapon except rocket launchers. Plus I sell powerups, attachments, sliced weapons and vehicles. There are 4 vendors in my main shop... and that shop had at log off last night well over 700 items for sale, and that was AFTER a rush of people bought about 110-125 items.

550+ items on my main weapon vendor, including 200+ pistols that number will soon be 1000+ items as I restock more rifle/carbine types.

88 items on my grenades vendor.

76 items on my sliced vendor (which will soon see a 300 weapon restock)

60 items on my attachments vendor.

Can some of this be consolidated? Maybe. But I'd need all 6 vendors for all of that stock, and then I'd have to restock everyday to make up for sales.

I was starting to enjoy other aspects of the game. The vendor limit cap is a horrible patch to address their lousy database.

OK, you are a master merchant. What do you sell? Is it something similar to what is on the bazaar, something like very large lots of items, with a large price tag, but you don't have a large variety of items to begin with? Or are you a tailor, with a very large selection of goods, many of which are in different colors? Selling power resources would be straightforward with a cap, just increase the lot size and sell for a higher price. Architects can be selling a wide variety of items: Furniture, harvesters, factories, houses, city player items, many of which come in a variety of sizes and flavors. Artisans can sell components, but even in a factory crate, that isn't a lot of money. Chefs and Tailors have a wide variety of items. Medics don't have as much variety in the type of item they sell, but each batch of stim or health pack has different stats.

Depending on what you are selling, a cap will either devastate your business, or not make much difference at all. It boils down to how much you are charging per item on your vendor. If you are charging 100,000 to 500,000 per item, then a 150 item cap probably isn't going to affect you. If you can only get 1,000 to 5,000 per item, then of course it will affect you. Perhaps the limit should not be on the number of items, but on the price of the items. Maybe we should have a limit of 50,000 credits of merchandise that can be on a vendor at one time. That would certainly cut down on the number of items.

And I keep hearing that all we have to do is put in more vendors, which is rather ludicrous. If players can't learn to use filters and "next page" buttons, why would they be bothered to click on four different vendors in the same room, any of whom could be carrying the item they are looking for?

Ok,
I have been reading other posts and those who replied, and I am going back to thinking that the 150 cap is a bad idea. Tailors really would suffer badly and weaponsmiths too.

If it is due to their database system then my proposal would be to remove the vendors people have kept from giving merchant up, that would instantly help any issue with a database problem.

If they did do this I still think that a cap of a sort would be a good idea in principal as it would create more meaning to merchant. The only trouble is an ideal cap would be about 400-500 items, yet a cap this size is only effectively punsihing tailors and weaponsmiths and medics with their large stock.

Sharwyn

Master Tailor and armorsmith so I think it sucks!

I have a few ideas.

1) Make it so that if you have mutiple items that are the same serial number, that only one is listed. All others are in the stockroom. When the listed item gets sold, one from the stockroom with the same serial number gets rotated to the list at the same price. This keeps the total number of items listed low while ensuring that we can have adequate stock.

2) This kills 2 birds with one stone. If a vendor sells out, then that vendor gets de-listed from the planetary map. It keeps players from traveling all the way accross the planet only to find out out of stock (this really makes me angry). When the merchant restocks the vendor, he would have to re-list the vendor on the map (this would ensure that somebody didn't just get to advertising 3, list the vendor and drop it)

Ideas?

Those are some good ideas nuggett although I think the code for that would be pretty tough. Considering they cant even remove the code that makes vendors turn to face the wall when a customer runs in, I am not holding my breath. Sorry for the synical response. Plus as a master tailor it would not help me much since I have over 400 unique items on my vendor at any given time.

Ok, I thought of a few more.

for the talors at least. Raising the cap on the bazzar would mean that you can sell your stuff there. I know it's only 25 auctions at one time but that would be a possible solution. I know that with a higher cap on the bazzar, I will probably move my entire line of BH droids and battery crates there as it would provide a larger customer base for these items.

Yes, I agree it will be the death of the tailor business. In the huge post started by TH I had actually counted the number of schematics that a tailor has. I had figured out that say I wanted to make 10 of every piece of clothing/jewelry I could for variety and put them for sale, it would take 16 vendors to hold all those items with the 150 item cap. Now some people are going to say "but you don't sell half of those styles of clothes." Well you're right but what about the other half. Say I just don't make half of it and only make the most popular half of my schematics. That still leave me at needing 8 vendors to have a decent variety of each one. It's simply not going to happen if that's the case. The 150 item limit will be the death of the popular merchant/tailors.

There is little to no reason for me to go to town to sell items on the bazaar. I live in a player city and run a very seccessful shop and have no need for bazzaar sales. Plus being that my character is an artisan only he is scared of kreetles and trips to the city are rarely done

I have to say the galaxy will probably be one tailor short if they follow through with this.

just gonna repost my comments from the original thread i think this might work as a solution and indeed kill a few birds in one go

now as for vendor item limits, this is an excellent opportunity for you to add some use to the merchant class by making the vendor item limit based on the skill trees.....perhaps you could try a similar thing to what you did with creature handler and make the limits for vendors spread out over the trees so for example level one in any tree gets you +20 item capacity on any vendor, level 2 in any tree gets you another +20 items on any vendor which upon level four in all trees you would be able to put 320 items on any vendor and if you take master you can put 500 items on any vendor.

feel free to jiggle around the numbers a bit but you get the idea this would be an excellent way to make the merchant class worth getting rather than the situation you have at the moment where people get management 4 dump a load of vendors and give up the skills, this way they can still put down vendors but if they give up the skills they are limited to a very few items you could i guess make the base 50 items or something starting in business tree and make it 80 upon novice merchant and then go from there this would make a level four merchant in all trees able to put 400 items on every vendor and a master 500.

at the moment you have the same position as a CH where people were abusing that class well merchants are in the same boat and the solution you came up with for CH seems to have worked out well in terms of balancing things and i think it could work for merchants as well

thanks for reading