Merchant Archive

After 9 pages, I thought I'd start a new thread. You probably won't look, but here's another response.

Summary:

1. Maintenance based on the value of items for sale is inherently unfair, and disconnected from the reality of a working economy. (Especially at the rates you've proposed.)

2. There would be no "need formore money sinks" if not for earlier exploits such as the Baz Nitch missions and other issues. Why will you punish the Merchants for this? Why don't you talk about the resource duping and have you punished those you've gotten rich because of it?

3. Merchants would gladly pay a percentage of SALES as a tax, and have said so repeatedly for weeks.

\rant on\

4. The formula utilizing 45 minutes as a timer gives the developers one more way to manipulate popular sentiment. If after all our pleas they give us a change from x/1000 per 45 minutes to x/800 per 45 minutes, and we're still not appeased, they can immediately say, "We feel your pain, and WILL GO THE EXTRA MILE with all the code drudgery involved and make it x/800 per 60 minutes!" We will feel comforted and taken care of, and they will have had to change one number to do it and stop us whining. It would be far more work for them to actually fix a basis of the economy, and include a tax on items sold. They don't want to work on the merchant class is seems. Evidence to this? Note the Vass post on the TC boards wherein he mentioned on Aug. 25 that "wow, resource splitting on vendors is a problem??" (I paraphrased).

\rant off\

No more gory details, no more long drawn-out discussions of economics, game theory (political, not computer games), or management practices. I'm just going to wait and see if the Merchant class will be considered an important, viable part of SWG or not.