Merchant Archive
Thread: Revamp proposal, draft 1.. comments please!
Merchant Revamp Proposal (first draft)
Overview
The Merchant profession, which has potential to be the hub of the SWG economy, does not currently fulfill this role in the same way that most classes are able to occupy a distinct niche. Full-time Master Merchants are extremely rare - the vast majority of merchants dabble in the profession to supplement their primary profession by selling its products. As a result, inter-player dependency is greatly reduced, and the Merchant profession is less viable in its own right than most other professions.
The revamped Merchant profession should:
1) Give high-level merchants a unique role in SWG.
2) Provide other players with incentive to work with merchants, rather than become merchants themselves.
3) Make all branches and skills of the Merchant profession provide benefits that directly relate to selling goods.
4) Reduce or eliminate the current proliferation of vendors used as unlimited storage.
5) Make the Merchant class fun, challenging, and rewarding to play.
The Good and the Bad of the Existing Profession
Good
- Highly efficient at selling goods
- Advancement does not involve grinding
Bad
- Little differentiation between high and low level play
- Difficult to buy/resell other players' goods
Salient Details of the Revamp
Skill tree revamp
- High-level merchants should be able to make more money than lower-level merchants.
- All skill boxes on the way up the profession should contribute to this effect.
Vendor revamp
- Producers of goods should be able to easily sell goods through another merchant.
- Vendors should not be usable as "free" storage.
Gameplay
- Merchants should be involved with the high-level process of running a business. In other words, the gameplay should be intellectual, rather than resembling manual labor.
- The interface should streamline the process of buying and selling as much as possible.
- Making money as a merchant should involve some element of investment/risk.
- The amount of investment/risk needed should not be so high as to "gate" relatively new players out of the profession.
Vendor Changes
The most commonly requested solution to the problem of crafters finding it easier to run their own vendors than go through a third-party merchant is to offer "consignment sales" as a vendor feature. Selling via consignment would involve the following steps:
1) The merchant negotiates a deal with a supplier, including:
- Percentage of the sales revenue that goes to the merchant
- Amount of stock that the supplier is to deliver
2) This deal is recorded on the vendor.
3) The supplier drops goods off at the vendor.
- Attempts to drop goods off without having established terms with the merchant will fail.
- Attempts to drop goods off that exceed the pre-agreed limits will fail.
4) The supplied goods are then instantly available for sale.
- No manual stocking/pricing needed by the merchant, as terms have already been negotiated.
- The agreed cut is automatically deposited into the merchant's bank account.
- The remainder of the sale is automatically deposited into the supplier's bank account.
Another major problem with vendors is the current lack of any sort of limit on what can be placed on a vendor - this leads to vendors being used as free storage. The proposed solution to this problem is to place a limit on vendor capacity based on the prices of items.
- Does not penalize sellers of high-quantity/low-price goods (e.g. tailors).
- Prevents storage exploitation by ensuring that items can't be listed for "unbuyable" prices.
- Can be scaled with merchant skill to provide differentiation between skill levels.
Scaling vendor capacity to merchant skill involves creating seven "levels" of vendors that are basically functionally and cosmetically equivalent, but have differing sale/storage limits and maintenance costs.
The following numbers are provided as a rough example of how the varying limits might function in practice, and should not be treated as being indivisible from the basic idea behind the revamp. They are based on the notion that a master merchant will never need to sell more than 70 million credits worth of goods in a single week (of all merchants surveyed, none reported sales higher than 60 million in any given week), and that an artisan with a basic vendor should have a selling capacity basically equivalent (and adding) to that provided by the bazaar.
Values listed indicate the transaction limit, in credits, for each real-time week. (After this limit has been reached for a given week, the vendor will not conduct further sales until the start of the next week; the customer will beadvised of this and told when to come back.) Maintainance on a vendor is 1% of this number (regardless of actual items stocked or sold, providing a merchant with incentive to keep each vendor running at full capacity if possible), and maximum storage capacity at any given time is 2x this number (so that a merchant can sell at full capacity without having to sell every single item out of stock). Again, these are rough examples, but should serve to convey the general idea.
Level 1 vendor: 100k(Business III)
Level 2 vendor: 1 mil(Novice Merchant)
Level 3 vendor: 3 mil(Finance I)
Level 4 vendor: 5 mil(Finance II)
Level 5 vendor: 7 mil(Finance III)
Level 6 vendor: 9 mil(Finance IV)
Level 7 vendor: 10 mil(Master Merchant)
Note that at Business III, an artisan can list 200k worth of goods and sell 100k worth of that per week (compare to being able to list/sell 150k worth of goods on the bazaar). At Master Merchant, with 7 vendors, a merchant can list 140mil worth of goods and sell 70mil.
Skill Tree Changes
As previously stated, the goal behind the skill tree changes is to make every skill box desirable in and of itself, and to make progression in Merchant skills correspond to an increased ability to make money as a merchant.
The largest change in this proposed revamp is removing the Hiring tree entirely, and replacing it with a "Finance" tree. The reason behind this shift is twofold:
1) All skill boxes should provide benefits to the act of selling.
2) Selling capacity should vary with the skill level of the merchant.
See above section for details on revamped vendors. It is suggested that the former Hiring tree benefits be simplifed such that all non-NPC vendors are available to artisans with Business III, and all vendors (including options to equip clothing/weapons/armor on NPC vendors) are available to all Novice Merchants and higher.
Finance:
The Finance tree represents a merchant's ability to manipulate larger amounts of items and credits. Each skill box grants access to a higher "level" of vendor. Higher-level vendors cost more to maintain requiring an element of risk and greater financial investment to use a high level vendor), but can hold and sell more credits worth of items (providing a much higher potential payoff to match the higher investment).
Finance 1: ability to place Level 3 vendors.
Finance 2: ability to place Level 4 vendors.
Finance 3: ability to place Level 5 vendors.
Finance 4: ability to place Level 6 vendors.
(suggested title: Entrepreneur)
Master Merchant: ability to place Level 7 vendors.
Advertising:
The Advertising tree represents a merchant's ability to advertise his business and thereby bring people to it. The current state of the Advertising tree does not provide a breadth of means to do this, and the Advertising III skill box is generally considered the only useful one in the tree. The exact means of revitalizing this skill tree is not important, but suggestions are given below.
Adv 1: Local Listing (registered vendor name appears on Ctrl-M overhead map)
Adv 2: Planetary Listing (registered vendor is searchable from planetary map)
Adv 3: Planetary Advertising (text blurb can be added to entry on planetary map)
Adv 4: Bazaar Advertising (text blurb can appear as "banner ad" on local bazaar)
Note that vendor barking has been removed from this list, since it does not directly pertain to advertising. It is suggested that these abilities be moved to Novice Merchant.
Management:
The Management tree is to remain unchanged. (However, it is suggested that an additional vendor be granted at Master Merchant.)
Efficiency:
The Efficiency tree should steadily increase the merchant's profit margin with each skill box taken. Rather than granting different bonuses at different skill levels (since some bonuses end up being irrelevant to overall profit margins, such as decreased bazaar prices), it is suggested that they be uniformly spread across the skill boxes, similar to the spread of combat bonuses across skill boxes in combat professions.
Efficiency I: -10% vendor maintenance, -5% structure maintenance
Efficiency II: -10% vendor maintenance, -5% structure maintenance
Efficiency III: -10% vendor maintenance, -5% structure maintenance
Efficiency IV: -10% vendor maintenance, -5% structure maintenance
(suggested new title: Negotiator)
Master Merchant: -10% vendor maintenance, -5% structure maintenance
All benefits are cumulative, so a Master Merchant will be able to operate vendors for 50% of their normal price, and structures for 75% of their normal price.
p4Samwise wrote:
I keep having the feeling I left out some important detail that was perfectly obvious in my head. Someone please let me know what that was.
I based the format very loosely on the outline that TH gave the smugglers a while back.
I'm not sure I like the per week credit limit. I would be happier with a total sales allowed to be listed at any one time. The weekly sales seems unecessarily restrictive. I also worry that this system penalizes crafters who make high end expensive to manufacture items (houses for example don't have a high net profit to the crafter but they do cost alot)
I also don't agree with lumping all of the vendor choices and benefits into Business III and novice merchant. I think they should be combined into the management Tree.
You left out the Advertising Droid and the Merchant Tent but I assume they would stay where they are in Ad IV and Eff IV respectively.
DocSavag wrote:
I'm not sure I like the per week credit limit. I would be happier with a total sales allowed to be listed at any one time. The weekly sales seems unecessarily restrictive. I also worry that this system penalizes crafters who make high end expensive to manufacture items (houses for example don't have a high net profit to the crafter but they do cost alot)
The "total sales listed at any one time" thing was my original idea, but I modified it because it's then easy to get around that by logging in more often to restock - hence, the benefit of higher levels ends up being that you don't have to log in as often, rather than that you have a capability to sell more.
The time scale for the limit basically dictates how often the merchant has to log in, at a minimum,to be economically competitive with other merchants who log in more frequently. One week seemed like a good scale because it covers the daily player as well as the weekend player. (A daily scale would be great for people who play an hour or two each day, but would screw the people who play in large chunks over the weekend... this is the same issue that Blizzard ran into with their original implementation of rest state in WoW.)
[EDIT: Since with the consignment system merchants won't actually have to manually stock their vendors, this applies not only to the merchant but to the crafters that they do business with - even if the merchant him/herself can log in every day, odds are that many suppliers will be making weekly deliveries - merchants shouldn't be penalized for doing business with those suppliers.]
As for high-end items like houses, maybe we need more data on the typical profit margins for those items. We should also consider the possibility that if current market prices make them less attractive to sell, those who do sell them will be able to afford to jack up their prices, which brings the market prices back up, et cetera, until equilbrium is reached.
From what I've observed under the current systems, houses don't tend to sell in large numbers anyway, so running up against the credit limit shouldn't end up being that much of an issue.
DocSavag wrote:
I also don't agree with lumping all of the vendor choices and benefits into Business III and novice merchant. I think they should be combined into the management Tree.
Benefits, I agree, should be under the skill boxes (hence the Finance tree). Tying purely cosmetic options to merchant skill boxes, though, goes against the general goal of having all merchant skill boxesfocused on improving viability as a merchant.
My main objection to putting cosmetic options in skill boxesis that it forces role-players to pay a skill point cost for role-playing - a role-player who wants to play a "Novice Merchant" and run a small junkshop with a distinct feelshouldn't have to invest in "Manager"-level vendor abilities in order to drop a single Ithorian vendor or whatever - the extra vendor management skills are a complete waste if he just wants to operate a single vendor. The only precedent in any other profession for requiring a skill box to gain a purely cosmetic effect is the "/sing" command, which is gained at Novice Entertainer - this is why I felt that Novice Merchant would be a good place for all the "hiring" benefits.
Given the credit caps on vendors, having multiple vendors will be a very worthwhile investment in and of itselffor merchants who want to make a lot of money very quickly (and the benefits multiply with those gained from the Finance and Efficiency trees, providing incentives for true entrepreneurs to master the entire tree). There's no need to "overload" the tree with other skills to makeit more appetizing.
DocSavag wrote:
You left out the Advertising Droid and the Merchant Tent but I assume they would stay where they are in Ad IV and Eff IV respectively.
Message Edited by p4Samwise on 06-25-2004 07:41 PM
Obviously, the numbers should be tweaked as more data is gathered - the devs would be in a better position to do that than I. As I said, anything with a number in it was guesstimated, and should not be treated as inseparable from the main thrust of the idea.
Ewach wrote:
There are significant problems with ANY monetary limit on vendor capacity.
I don't believe your model takes into account the relationship of "many crafters -> one merchant".
The data you captured (which was a very small sample size at best) represented mostly "single crafter -> single merchant model".
DocSavag wrote:
The problem I have is what I always have. "Cosmetic" features aren't usless. They are very desirable and thus shouldn't be given away. If the role players want to have vendors they can become merchants and get the management skills required to have the functionality they desire.
I'm not proposing they should get the skills for free - I'm saying that since customizing a vendor's appearance doesn't facilitate high level play, there's no reason not to make it available to low level merchants.
The intent behind the Finance tree is to allow a master merchant to sell all the market can bear - if that turns out to not be the case, the numbers need to be severelytweaked. The fact that only higher level merchants are able to sell at high bandwidth, though, should create more of a demand for merchants from crafters - the crafters could dabble in merchant and sell their own goods, but they'll be able to sell a lot more (with less work on their part) by selling through a high-level merchant that has an established shop with high-level vendors.
DocSavag wrote:
The Finance Tree doesn't give me anything new it gates me and prevents me from selling all the market can bear. I would support a system that prevents low item limits and solved the storage issue and your ideas are getting there but they need tweaking. The pure dollar amount limit (per week even) won't fly with large items in Architect and Armorsmith and suggesting that people can adjust their prices to stock quantity is price fixing.