Merchant Archive

Proposed Changes

• Administration Option for mechant Vendors: This would allow merchants to assign people to the admin on their vendors, may people have alt characters, 2 accounts, and friends that play that partner up with them in business, adding this feature will not allow other players to list items of their own on your vendors, nor remove vendors,but instead allow them to handle minor things like paying maint, and restocking vendors, etc. This option is available on every structure, and should be extended to vendors.


• Group Selection: When you are removing items from sale, and are retreiving items from your vendors you can group select items from your stockroom. However, that is as far as the benefit goes, there is no reason why a merchant should not be allowed to group select items from there inventory to sell them in one shot off the vendor. For example: I have a loot vendor, I stock quite a few loot kits parts, like threads and the like. If I am charging 1000 for each one of those parts, then why can I not select 20 or more in my inventory, all at once, and offer them with the click of one button rather than 20. If I am pricing them all the same then would this not be an added time saving feature for me. Same goes for the stockroom, I should be able to group select items in there and restock my vendors with ease. Every 29 days I am having to take no less than 2 hours to restock my vendors, that is not sound like much to you, but frankly I can think that I would rather be playing the game for those 2 hours.


• ID of Vendors:I would for sure like to have more control over the look of my vendor. I am tired of getting old fat bald, guys, and twilek grannies as my vendors. I sometimes spend up to an hour re-picking vendors to get the right look I want, and I am not alone in this venture. I would like more customization options for my vendors, or, give the Image Designer a much need business boost and allow them to change the look of the vendor. The interface can be the same only the window that normally displays the players image as is, and the proposed changes of the ID, would instead disply the image of the vendor to the vendor owner, and the changes again the ID would make.


• Initialized Crafting Stations: Pretty much every merchant is a crafter, I submit to you that an option you had availble previous in the game and was taken out be re-introduced , but in a fashion that cannot be abused. I propose Initialized personal crafting stations. This would, with the aquisition of any AdvancedMaster Crafting Proffesion, allow the placement of 1 Initilizable personal crafting station. Meaning if your say you takeMaster Architecht, Tailor, Weaponsmith, Armorsmith, etc, that for each Master rank of the appropriate crafitng proffesion you hold, you can initilize one station. When initialized, a station cannot be moved. While in this state up to 100 items as per normal could be added to the station, and only count as 1 to a house limit. This was in place, but as I said was abused and removed. With this systym. Those of us who were using the stations as intended can do so again, with control. the most I think you could accomplish would be 3 stations. Skill points are a rare commodity, if someone want to go through the lengths to master 3 proffesions to get an extra 300 items storage, then let them, I personally hate my crafting materials clogging up my house limits, and would appreciate this very much.


• Signs and Storefronts: First Sign Options should be moved to Advertising where they belong. Second we need a greater amount of selection. Personally I would love the idea of Merchants being given more signs, but also Storefronts. Meaning, the ability to choose a variety of options off the house and tent interface. Such as exterior image changes based on classes: Example, a droid engineer has a medium tat house as his store. As a merchant, with teh advertising tree, he could select the store front to have droid parts, carcasses, and junk piled along the front of his house, and on his step, further maybe there is some mechanical items built into the front of the house. There is SOOOO much you can do and run with this. Exterior signs mounted with an image of droids, weapons, etc. That actually have little lights on them in selectabel colors, that maybe could blink. I would love to walk down a row of businesses all lit up at night and had some neon look to it. After all in Episode 2 when they were on Coruscant that whole business look everywhere caught my eye.


• Store Interiors and Items: Again selectable interiors with different molds if you will for each class, liek a weapon shop would look like a wepoans shop. Furher, NEW furniture and items are needed, Like sales counters, lighting, shelving, Craftable signage that would allow you to type messages on there instead of using bone armour plates. This would add to the Arch tree, or allow possibly a tree of crafting for the merchant. Either way the items are needed.


• ThePlanetary Search: I am not putting this here to open up a new debate. Simply speaking there should be Planetary Search feature in the every major NPC city that would allow players to view and search for items on all registered vendors on the planet. They should see the items there looking for, the stats,an imageand the planetary average cost (the average price based on all listed prices availble for the planet) This would allow and benefit the player by seeing the average price he should expect to pay.Example: with 5 prices of a specific item(lets say a simple shirt)being priced 450, 575, 800, 1000, 925, the average price he would see for those 5 items on the planet would be 750. This would show him the the average price on planet is 750 Credits. This will give him a very clear picture to the buyer, and the merchant that an individual may be charging more or less than the average price. The beauty of this system is that the more items you have the more average and clearer is the price. This will not favor any merchant more or less than the other, and will still give very clear locations on where the items are. There should be in no way a retreival system or remote buying option. This would allow a player to see where the items are in stock, and he can make his desicion where to go from there. This will save the buyer a tonne of time as is, and still give purpose to stores, and supply revenue through impulse buying, shuttle fees, and the like. Further this will draw upon player cities to take responsibility for their own markets. Meaning if a city is not putting th effort into their crafting, then they simply will lose traffic flow. They want to pick ut up, they simply have to offer more to the consumer. I further think that this will set a good gauge for newer crafters to see what the overall prices they should be charging for an item is based off the average.


• Item manipulation: I would love to be able to put more detail into my stores, so I would be most gratefull for the ability to rotate my items no only left and right, but up and down as well. Example: Like being able to tilt would enable someone to take a Krayt Skull and put if flat against the wall.


• Merchants and Crafters in the GCW: I came to the conclusion that crafter/merchants are in the same boat, we are not combat oriented and therefore not much good in the war as is. I put this to some thought and came up with this. I would like to see a faction point purchase option for items. This would allow merchants to craft items from the the CU, liek faction armour, and charge faction points for the items in return. Further merchants should also be able to do what smugglers can do and "contribute to the cause" (master merchants ONLY) meaning the ability to donate credits for faction. Crafters in turn should have a solid benfit, and I feel a cool one. The ability to craft weapons, faction facilities, armor uniforms, foods, etc. And donate those to faction bases for faction points. Examples: Armor smith donates 3 suits of Assault Armour to a faction base, 3 NPC troops now are instanly equiped with the faction armour. Same with Weapons, and such the same way.People who own bases instead of buying anything from the recruiters in faction, now buy in faction the schematics for furiture, uniforms, armor, weapons, and the like. The take them to the appropriate crafter to be made.. So when the crafter gets the schem he looks and sees an FP crafting bonus if he crafts that item. So say for a large turret, a crafter may get 250fp for the crafting of that turret. Again you see where I am going with this. This way anyone can now lend to the cause, and adds greater importance to the over all scope of the war.

This is only some of the ideas I have, as this is getting long, I have more, but this is a good conversation starter.

Cheers

Message Edited by cmcdermid5 on 02-16-2005 01:50 PM