Merchant Archive
Thread: ok now my idea for renting vendors...
Message Edited by Ani_cul on 01-11-2005 07:47 AM
This is true, but those merchants who want to run their business without renting out a vendor will get no business at all, so long as there are merchants who are willing to do so. We are actually talking about a somewhat-unlimited resource here when you consider alt accounts (this is the merchant equivalent of the guild buff-bot). One person in a guild could get an alt account to master merchant, and then provide an entire mall-worth of vendors. 6-12 people get the advantage of merchant skills without taking a single point of merchant, and without any live merchant reaping the benefit.
DocSavag wrote:
I absolutly don't support the use of merchant vendors without the skill to do so in any form. This idea and many others that have been floated will just lead to merchant mule accounts that never have to log on or only have to log on a few days a year to pay maintenance.
Which already exist and will continue to exist no matter what happens to Merchant.They alreadylog in every 30 days to relist and /tip
The merchant is supposed to be providing services to suppliers and customers. I support systems that work within the currently existing frameworks of crafters selling their merchandise to merchants via the vendor and the vendor putting those items up for sale.
Thats whatI think as well, but firgured with so many posting ideas on how to fix usI would throw down mine.
That system needs to be tweaked and streamlined so that in a few clicks you can add a shipment of merchandise and in a few more clicks by the merchant you can add the whole shipment to the vendor.
It is a few clicks, and it seems (go and read em all) this is the biggest complaint. 5 clicks to list a offered item for sell, that's not much.
I restock my2-4 of 11 vendors withina evening, before it even runs out of time I pull it myself. And have several items which bear descriptions.
{And I die laughing whenI see the post ofI just dont have time to stock with my 8 accounts, reallyI do every time}
There needs to be support for consignment relationsihps.
Noone has offered up a viable solution for this. Appearently the offer to vendor, accept, set for sell, sell, track, give money..is just to tedious for so many. I honestly have thought for the past almost 2 yrs this was how we played merchant..
As a Merchant what else should I be doing with my time? sitting in cantina? spamming in starport?
But renting out vendors will damage the merchant profession. No one will be willing to pay for our services if they can do it for themselves.
You can't place without paying Fee, and the owner still has right to purge. There is limits on how much people can set for sell.
And because it costs us NO effort they will not be willing to pay us for the service. And they won't have to since they can just get an account and supply merchant mule services to multiple people at no time cost to themselves.
Once again, already there and will always be there, thank you EQ for introduing the Mule Accounts in Bazaar.
There are merchant who earned the title without entry fees paid by friends who just went in to click a vendor
There are people who have the title from doing such things
There will always be those who see merchant skills as a waste, and only a secondary account skill
This won't change no matter what changes in game.
We are an economy of greed, not of trust.
Go read the profession forums, see what items cost and what they sell for
We are human
While I cannot stop people from doing all the work and getting no fee for it I don't have to support things that make it easier for people to use the merchant profession as a mule. I won't as long as I have the privliedge of posting on these forums.
And
JTGAlpha wrote:
Well, first I disagree with renting vendors for the health of the profession, not personal ones. I think it devalues what we do. People don't need middlemen like us in this game, and I think that further eliminates US. It reduces us to drive-thru, no-contact, afk-merchanting. In short, it makes us BORING. We're a robot, ahighly funcitonal NPC.
Secondly, I think that you're giving too much away here, that's US. If they do this, why EVER ask a merchant to sell anything for you? They don't need us, they need our vendor. What we SHOULD be good at is being many places and getting YOUR goods out THERE. Any vendor makes anyone good at selling stuff when they're not online. We need to be good at getting more stuff sold faster to more people for better profit. We need functionality that BRINGS IN business and REACHES OUT to customers. Bring In. Reach Out. We should get more and better terminals (like how about a want-ads terminal? an events terminal? ). What we shouldn't be doing is giving away the only thing we do, currently, which is handle vendors.
Thirdly, I think you'll kill the bazaar system, which I'm not wholely sure is a bad thing.
Fourthly I hope by NO limit you mean, "the same limit as a merchant's vendor." I disagree with that. I think that's what distinguishes bazaar vendors from OUR vendors.
Fifth, I agree with ditching the auction function...it's useless. Especially on the bazaar with the 6k cap.
I do like the idea of a consignment system, as a couple people have proposed in this thread. Doesn't let players directly sell items without the direct involvment of the merchants, and leaves merchants in firm control of the actual selling/etc.
JTGAlpha wrote:
It would hurt merchants because no one would need merchants for anything but vendor monkey's. They'll never need to talk with us, deal with us, set foot in our shops, nothing. Because the weaponsmiths, armorsmiths, and loot hookers who didn't want to bother with a vendor will just drop their stuff off on the PCity bazaar. And everyone will shop on them because they don't have to go tent hopping. The NPC bazaar is limited for a reason. It's REALLLY convenient, and if it didn't have a balancing limit, no one would ever need us. This idea would have the unintended consequence of totally making us an AFK drive through profession.
as opposed to now where we sell what? Our own stuff. I personally think giving everyone access to a vendor takes away some from the merchant. But the vendor does nothing if it doesnt sell. Enter the Merchant. How many items do you not get to sell because you're not on at the same time as someone else, because every prominent crafter has merchant already, or because you arent savvy enough to earn the trust of some crafter to sell their wares. So I will just master a crafting prof and sell that. Well I wanted to be a merchant, not an armorsmith. So I can resell someone elses wares by buying low and selling for more. This is real popular with a lot of crafters, and even if it was you have to have capital to make those purchases.
The biggest thing this profession has lacked is slef sutainability. Most crafters get merchant to sell their stuff either on the same toon or on an alt. Most Merchants pick up a craft so they have something to sell. Where is the Merchant who wants to sell but doesn want to craft, few and far between I am guessing. I have been a master merchant for over a year now and gone through a few crafting profs and basically merchant equates to setting up a vendor, dressing my vendor, setting the ad barking on my vendor, adding my vendor to the planetary map, stocking the vendor and of course placing a merchant tent.
IMO there needs to be more incentive for crafters to not be merchant, so that the merchant can be truly that, a merchant. That is what vendors do in real life, I dont mean coke machines either (although that is a small example), I mean sales people and companies that move suppliers products. There needs to be the interdependency between the profs, but not the need to have both to succeed as either a crafter or merchant, because one shouldnt equal the other. The simple fact is you cant just be a merchant in this game, only after you have earned enough capital to buy and resell is when you can do that, and there is no way to do that in merchant without adding another prof.