Merchant Archive
Thread: Merchant Cost
Merchant cost should be per day imho, but if not it should be per item.
The idea of per cost really stinks for me. I sell mostly large houses, heavy harvestersand PA Halls. So I have to pay huge amounts in maintanence fees?????
Your profit margin on items like that should be WAY higher... So in theory fees for storing them, or listing them should be more than what a tailor or chef would have to pay. Makes sense to me...
The only problem I have is that there's no real way of telling exactly what those fees come out to (unless someone can tell me the formula they use), makes it really hard to budget.
No architect have the lowest profit margin in the game. There are people selling small houses on my server for 3k and it takes 3400 resources. For a large house it takes 42k of resources and cost from 80-100k. On the other hand people sell scout blasters (very good ones) for 13k.
See my point on margin. It needs to be per item not per cost. Or even better would be if the merchant had a daily fee. I do not want to pay 1000's of credits daily to sell me items.
Without getting into what profession can or can't make what kind of money (that is a bit off-target for this post... I'm an architect myself, and we don't have NEARLY the margins that, say, a weaponsmith has, but if played right, we CAN make a fair living... just have to avoid caving to pricing pressure)...
Yes, I think the way vendor maintenance cost is handled is a bit off.
However, what you state (original poster) isn't the right way... if you based it on a per item basis, architects would be set, having high priced but fewer items (if they sell deeds.. furniture sales, on the other hand, would go the other way)... but tailors would be hurt. They sella lot of lower-cost items... if you do it based on value, architects are hurt, because they can barely stock 1 deed. 
Really, I think there should be a very minimal stocking fee based on value, OR just a base hourly rate on the vendor, and SALES should be taxed by some percentage... unfortunately, doing something like this would make prices inflate just enough to account for this, making it essentially only hurt buyers... so a mix of the two would be good... a maintenance fee based on value, AND a surcharge on each sale. A more reasonable maintenance fee, and a reasonable surcharge, both of which would become lower as you progressed up the merchant tree.
Right now, unfortunately, EVERY droid and Terminal vendor costs the same, and NPC vendors are bugged and don't seem to increase their fee when items are put onto them... and only 1 merchant skill changes this (efficiency 2). Vendor efficiency should be as it is now at business 3, to allow artisans to try out starting a shop, but required to go into merchant to make it more profitable... Business 4 in the artisan tree should provide a small maintenance cost reduction... basically, vendor maint cost reduction should be a 0 - 100 skill just like many others, which is increased by, say, +5 at business 4, +10 at novice merchant, +10 at efficiency 1, +10 at efficiency 2, +15 at efficiency 3, +20 at efficiency 4, and +30 at master merchant... this alone would make master merchant at least somewhat worthwhile. Add structure maintanence reductions at efficiency 2,3,4, and master.
X-EQholic wrote:
No architect have the lowest profit margin in the game. There are people selling small houses on my server for 3k and it takes 3400 resources. For a large house it takes 42k of resources and cost from 80-100k. On the other hand people sell scout blasters (very good ones) for 13k.
See my point on margin. It needs to be per item not per cost. Or even better would be if the merchant had a daily fee. I do not want to pay 1000's of credits daily to sell me items.
Hmm... Yes. The fact that architects aren't making a decent profit margin has nothing to do with the system though. That's something that needs to be worked out between architects. Items that large should have the biggest profit margins. Think about it... if a merchant sells a blaster worth 1k and marks it up a reasonable 30%, it sells for 1300 (300 profit)... a Merchant selling a house worth 10k marks it up 30% and makes 3,000. The fact that architects are cheating each other doesn't deter from the fact that higher value items should have higher profit margins.
IMO I think architects ruined it for themselves by selling houses cheap that are worth way more. Players are too focused on powergrinding and getting as far up their profession trees as possible, instead of enjoying the game.
I totally agree the profit margin is much higher on a PA hall then almost any item in the game (It should be).
The problem is that in my example ifthe cashier took a percentage ofsale ie 10% there is no longer a profit margin at all for the computer.
Merchant should be able to sell allproducts. I don'thave time to wait for someone to come to me to buy a house, that is why I hire a vendor. Thevendor should be x amount per hour, I do not want to pay high commision.
Blackmugen,
Higher priced items do not necessarily translate to high profit margin. Lets use computers and speakers at Best Buy. A $100 speaker has a 50% margin and a $1000 computer has around 10% margin. Because Best Buy sells more computers and the sale price is higher they make more money off of computers.
But if you made it so the cashier charged per item sold 10% then there is no reason to sell computers at all
This is off topic, but there are many reasons that architect margins are low.
1. You need a master architect to make your PA Hall, so tons of guilds powerleveled an architect. This caused a surplus of architect items when the servers were new.
2. Demand for houses are low, because there is little benefit if you are not an artisan class.
3. All houses are the same, experimenting and using higher resources makes no difference. If your a novice architect or master making a small house it comes out the same.
4. There are tons of architects that thought it would be a fun profession (I assume). This will change shortly since they will not be able to stay in business.
you still have a higher profit margin with a computer than you do a pair of sneakers... even with 50% vs 10%.
$50 vs $100... you still make more, per item, on higher-end goods than you do on lower end ones. Basically architects screwed up. I'm not saying it won't eventually fix itself... but you can't deny that that's what happened.
And to keep it back on topic... lol... maybe items like that (PA halls, Large Houses, Factories, etc.) aren't really suitable for vendors anyway. Perhaps that is why maintenance ends up being so high for those kinds of items. Big items like that should involve a lot of interaction with your customers... same way as when you buy a house in RL.
Anyway, that's just my opinion.
I think the main reason that vendor maintenance cost is tied to price is to prevent people from stocking their vendors with thousands of items and pricing them at 1,000,000. No, no one would ever buy the product at this price (at this current inflation level) and that's the point. The vendor would then become another storage vault.
I've read multiple explanations of the vendor abuse in UO where people did this exact thing. It's exploit prevention more than a balancing design decision.
Cheers,
Kaizen Jonzun
Proprietor of The Drunken Jester
Radiant/Naboo - Keren