Merchant Archive

For some time now I've felt that I'm not selling enough to keep up with the costs of my vendors. Our town is booming and my sales are better than they've ever been, and yet as a master merchant, I'm losing money at an alarming rate.

So anyway, I started a new vendor today at around 8am. I had around 20 instruments on it to get it started. Tonight I log on, and after roughly 11 hours, my vendor which started with 5000 credits on it, now has 4677.

Ok at the rate of 10 that my vendor has listed (I've assumed this was an hourly rate but it's not stated so could be anything) I would expect to pay roughly 110 credits in that time. However my Vendor has gouged me for an extra 213 creds. That's a rate of almost 27 creds per hour, which as a master merchant is more expensive than a Medium Naboo House.

Multiply that by a possible 6 vendors and that's a possible 162 creds per hour. 3888 per day, 27216 per week.

No wonder I'm finding it difficult to make ends meet.

I think the concept of the pure merchant will die, if these costs remain as high as they are. I just cant compete.

Hmm, I have never actually tested how much money the vendors take....I always took the rate for granted and assumed it was true. I just keep shoveling money into them as needed. I will try and get some time to log in today and check that out.

Only thing I can think of off the top of my head is that maybe the 10 is per half hour...but that does not explain the other 7 credits.

There are reports that the maintenance rate gets screwy at the time the server is rebooted. There are reports on this about both vendors and harvesters. I've reported it but I haven't heard anythign about it. Further testing that could identify exactly what happens after as server reboot would be very helpful. It is very difficult to do that testing though as you have to be available early in the morning ( on the east coast) to do it.

I don't believe that the rate is supposed to be calculated at less than an hour. Mainly because 5000 creds placed on a vendor shows nearly 21 days of maintanance coverage. Divide 5000 by 21 and you get roughly 240, or 10creds per hour. Which is the rate my vendor displays.

As to this being a server up issue, I don't think that's it either. I live in Australia, GMT +10, so the times i gave before were in the latter half of the server day. My 8am, which is around the time I placed it is about 10 hours after serverdown.

I've noticed that the rates are screwyeach morning...sometimes my vendors report a rate of 1k+ per hour ... I have not however had the feeling that this is anything more than a reporting error. My cash flow doesn'tseem affected.

II'll double post this in the original thread and this one as well:

As a result of my week long test of setting a vendor and a tent to the same maintenance level.

Monday of last week I set I tent and a vendor to 2675 credits.

Approximately 1 week later, give or take an hour the maintenance levels of the vendor and tent were at the following levels:

The NPC, registered vendor which has a listed rate of 10 cr/hr had 35 credits.

The Tent which also has a rate of 10 cr/hr had 1110 credits.

This works out to about 9.3-9.375 for the Tent if I was slightly off on the hourly timing.
This works out to about 15.714-15.65 for the vendor if I was slightly off on the hourly timing.

The previous day I logged in to check to make sure that the vendor had not run out of credits, I selected 'Status' twice in less than two minutes, and during that time, the vendor went from 475 to 350.

There are definitely some HUGE inconsistencies going on with the vendors.

At the rates listed a "10 cr/hr" vendor will last 4.5 days before running out of cash if 'topped up' to a weeks maintenance. This means unless you babysit all of your 6 vendors, you could be looking at 2.5 days of your vendor being non functional because you trust the maintenance rate to be what is listed, or at least grossly accurate.

Across 6 vendors, this is at a minimum of 5544 credits lost each week per merchant per week. Now, while that is not a huge number, it is not insignificant. Also, we lose customers if the vendors fail to operate because they do not have enough maintenance in them.

There may be a variation each hour in what the vendor costs, and that's why you saw the 27 cr/hr average while over a week period I only saw 15.7 cr/hr.

Hope this helps everyone understand what is going on!

--D'Ruk of iD Co.

Are these vendors registered on the map? What'sthe base rate for a vendor on the planetary map, with no reductions? Sorry to play dumb but I don't really pay attention to the cost of my vendors, I just put money in the two armed bandits.

I've heard reports that the price reduction bonuses on structures don't take affect until somebody with that bonus puts money into the structure. For example, if somebody transfers ahouseto me as a 3/4/4/4 merchant, the house will still use maintenance at the normal rate. As soon as I pay maintenance into the house, even a single credit, it uses the reduced rate that I get for structure bonuses.

Perhaps this is a related issue, and things are being reset at server reboot so that the merchant deductions are not being accounted for when maintenance is withdrawn.

Fribble, did you have any items for sale on the vendor you tested?

I'm wondering if stock, or sales of stock also has some sort of tarrif applied.

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Sigarni wrote:

Fribble, did you have any items for sale on the vendor you tested?

I'm wondering if stock, or sales of stock also has some sort of tarrif applied.

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There isn't supposed to be of course and we have had a number of people who have watched their vendords for short periods of time and the rate is constant.. (and correct) this seems to be something that is happening to them periodically but not every hour.

lol --- being an old merchant 27 c/h sound FAB

at one time i was paying 83 c/h!

All my vendors are stocked.

I'm at a loss as to what the root cause, but I would gather from my inspections that there are events assocaited with the vendor from legacy code that are impacting proper operation.

I'm a master merchant. A merchant tent and a planetary listed vendor should run out of credits at the same exact rate (10 cr /hr). Obviously synching the maintenance cycle will be hard, but within an hour should be a reasonable expectation.

Ideas to look into:
things should just run out according to when they were last added to/subtracted to at their properly hourly rate.

- maintenance rates based off of load events instead of a timestamp
- maintenance rates based off of admin inspection instead of a timestamp
- maintenance events based off of building load and maintenance cycles
- maintenance events based off of customer interaction cycles

Anyhoo, hope this helps the appropriate people.

D'Ruk