Merchant Archive
Thread: Vendor maint fees. Why are we charged by the price of our items?
I have 3 vendors set up. Two of my vendors are for cheap items. I have one selling food and drinks for around 100 - 500 CPU and another vendor selling spices for 500-1k credits. Both of these vendors are cheap to maintain. about 25 credits a day or less. They have a lot of items on them.
I have a thrid vendor that has higher priced items on it. I Sell factory crates of different items. Prices ranging from 1k to 5k for a crate. I currently have only about 5 crates on this vendor. Max value of about 20k This vendor costs 1k per day to maintain.
ONE THOUSAND CREDITS A DAY???? What were they thinking. This maint fee eats any profit at all that I can make from this vendor. This Vendor costs more then my small house does.
Why is the cost of maintaining a vendor based on the proce of the goods that are being sold? There has to be a better way, Sales tax is the first that comes to mind. Charge a Tax based on item price. When the item is sold, the tax is auto deducted from the sale. With a sales Tax in place, you can still have a maint fee, but it needs to be a standard price on every vendor.
Just because me Vendor/employee is selling the higher priced items, does not mean I am going to pay that vendor/employee more money. I have worked in a department store. The person selling the 20 dollar shirts was paid the same amount as the person selling the 300 dollar necklaces.
You should be using NPC vendors only, they charge only 1 credit per 'tick', 0 if you have Effiency 2 trained.
But that is due to a bug they decided to leave unfixed until they thought of something better, which they sorta did, because you should've read the thread with the 850+ replies first, heh:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=merchant&message.id=5731
Enjoy! 
Because... well, let's put it this way: I have space for 150 items in my medium house. Items on my merchants don't count against that. So if someone wants more storage space, they just put all their stuff on a vendor at ridiculously high prices, and no one will buy the items. If you pay based on what you sell, you can use this exploit. If you pay a flat price no matter what you're charging in your vendor, you can use this exploit.
This isn't to say they've got the numbers right, but generally speaking this method of calculating maintenance makes house storage caps meaningful.
Troglar, there is already a thread started on this topic.
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=merchant&message.id=5731&page=35
It was started by a Dev who asked what we though of vendor maintenance. It's up to over 850 posts. I guess it has to hit some magic secret number before they do anything about it. Maybe 1000. So my suggestion to you is to cut and paste your post into that one as well. And keep posting to that thread.
Maybe when it hits 1000 the dev who orginated it will come back and read through it and maybe possibly make a suggestion to his higher ups that there might be something a bit unfair about the current maintenance rates for bulky vendors.
Xelene wrote:
Because... well, let's put it this way: I have space for 150 items in my medium house. Items on my merchants don't count against that. So if someone wants more storage space, they just put all their stuff on a vendor at ridiculously high prices, and no one will buy the items. If you pay based on what you sell, you can use this exploit. If you pay a flat price no matter what you're charging in your vendor, you can use this exploit.
Xelene from EQ test server long ago?
Anyways, a better fix would be to make it so every tom **edit** and harry can't put up a vendor for minimal skill points. Make vendor #1 with a higher maint appear at novice merchant with more vendors and decreasing maint costs as you gain merchant skill. Balance it so the casual player who is usualy pretty short on points as they level up, wouldn't want to waste them in the merchant tree just to create extra storage space, as the skill point cost and maint for such actions makes it unfeasable. Then just make it so obtaining novice merchant requires artisan xp, instead of merchant xp and you are all set.
As for my thoughts on vendor costs in general, I added my two cents to that other thread already.
Xelene wrote:
Because... well, let's put it this way: I have space for 150 items in my medium house. Items on my merchants don't count against that. So if someone wants more storage space, they just put all their stuff on a vendor at ridiculously high prices, and no one will buy the items. If you pay based on what you sell, you can use this exploit. If you pay a flat price no matter what you're charging in your vendor, you can use this exploit.
Xelene from EQ test server long ago?
Anyways, a better fix would be to make it so every tom **edit** and harry can't put up a vendor for minimal skill points. Make vendor #1 with a higher maint appear at novice merchant with more vendors and decreasing maint costs as you gain merchant skill. Balance it so the casual player who is usualy pretty short on points as they level up, wouldn't want to waste them in the merchant tree just to create extra storage space, as the skill point cost and maint for such actions makes it unfeasable. Then just make it so obtaining novice merchant requires artisan xp, instead of merchant xp and you are all set.
As for my thoughts on vendor costs in general, I added my two cents to that other thread already.