Merchant Archive

This post is a personal one, in response to what happened to my Best friend, Alid, Architect and fireworks craftsman on Bria.

We went into business together, first in the resource market. We would range all over COrellia and Talus, looking for the best concentrations of the best reources we could find. After some time, we used the profits from selling our resources to open shops for ourselves. I followed the armorsmith merchant line, he followed the architecht. We both made Master Artisan on the same day, and i pulled out a bottle of Starshine suprise and we got drunk in his house, and went outside and shot some vrelts for celebration.

After a time, Alid realized that there was no mass manufacturer of Quality Fireworks in the galaxy that we could find. Alid was happy. He had found his purpose. He made fireworks by the truckload, factory crate after factory crate, but ONLY of the best quality he could make. He INSISTED on only selling those he could make with 8 or 9 charges; he wouldnt sell those with 7 or less. He also made houses and medium harvesters on the side. At first i though that a fireworks merchant wouldnt make a lot of cash, and told him so, but he persissted, despite slow sales.

Then one day about a month and a half ago, 3 different people came along and bought over 75 thousand credits worth of fireworks crates in one day. Alid was Estatic! His plan was coming togeher., Sales continued to be strong. He and I opened a second shop together in Halfwayfar, an "Alidco Factory outlet Also Selling Mawgco Armor". Sales were good.

Then real life kicked in For Alid. His real life job took a lot more time over the last 3 weeks, so he was not able to play nearly as much as he had. I had administrator rights to all of our shared instalations and houses, and kept up the maintenance and power; he would pay me back when we were online at the same time. He was just needing to take a break for work, something even Holocron and Q-3po need to do from time to time.

Unfortunately, you cannot give admin rights to another person for your vendor. And this past week Alid was unable to sign on at all for various reasons. He simply had no time. ANd during this time, everything on all 3 of his vendors came down auction unsuccesfull. And it happened 20 minutes after he was last on. This was 4 days ago. He was able to sign on this morning, and he discovered that everything he ahd been selling, EVERYTHING, was lost to the 72 hour stockroom. large houses, a dozen medium mineral harvesters, over 3 dozen crates of all types of fireworks, hundreds of thousands of credits worth of goods simplay gone. 3 months of work destroyed. he has nothing left except for 2 small corellian houses.

20,000 credits worth of goods left. 500,000 credits worth gone. FROM THE PRIVACY OF HIS OWN HOME. Alid is understandably angry and hurt and P. Off. And he cant go through rebuilding his business from nothing again. Alid is still going to play, but his career as the premier fireworks maker on Bria is over. He emailed me in game this morning, and his plans are to sell off all his infrustructure, and he is going walk-about. I dont know where. I know i'll see him again at some point.

If you see him, say hi. And thank him for his work. All he wanted to do was provide quality goods to people, and help them celebrate in this amazing, fantastic world we all inhabit. Unfortunately, poorly thought out game mechanics robbed him of everything he had worked for.

The 7 day limit on vendor sales must go. If not that, then the absolutely rediculous Stockroom destruction after 72 hours MUST be removed. It makes no logical ingame sense, and makes the Casual player a victim. I understand they dont want us using the Vendors as storage, but there must be, MUST BE, another way. A charachters livelyhood has been destroyed. My friends dreams in this game have been taken from him. But I will never forget what he tried to do, and I will always respect him for that.

Mawg Marmont

Armorsmith

Bria

I remember the dev's once said that this game can be played by the casual player. That is a horrible and dirty lie, you can play casually but you will lose everything and the whole game will just turn to **edit** for you. The merchant is terribly crippled profession, and your friends example further proves this.

Not flaming, just stating what I personally do. If I know I will not be on for a bit, I check the time on all of my items. Any item with 1 day remaining, I take the time to withdraw the sale and repost it so I know it won't come down unsuccessful while I'm gone. Yes, it is tedious and there should be a better way to handle it, but, it is our responsibility to manage our vendors successfully.

i agree that it is our responsibility to manage our vendors. But why should we be punished with the total destruction of all our goods simply because we cannot log on for 72 hours? Lock the vendor...stop further sales, dump the inventory in front of the vendor on the floor of your shop...anything but destroying legitimately posted goods. make us pay a fine to get those goods back, anything but taking away from us our rightful property. put a 200 item limit on each vendor, or 100 or 50. something please. Just dont take away a players in game livelyhood and business just because his real life interefered with his gaming time. SOE, Lucas Arts, Holocron, Q-3po, everyone responsible for creating this game has repeatedly said that casual gamers are welcome, and are in fact THE PREFERED MARKET for this game. Hence the reason it is not a level based loot fest such as EQ. The whole idea was to being on starwars fans and gamers who may not have played a MMORPG before. I shouldnt have to play every single day to ensure that my vendors wont suddenly eat my goods. I have 2 shops on 2 different planets, as did alid. We post things on our vendor as we make them, and when depleted stocks need refilling. We dont for example only stock every sunday at 7pm, for example. I have 276 items over three vendors, and by now i have about 35 to 40 items come down every single day. I shouldnt have to sit for 3 hours total in order to sort through my vendors and pull down sales that are about to expire. If i did that, along with harvester runs, i would never craft anything. Because I do have a real life and a girlfriend and a job and friends outside of game.

I am a casual gamer, and this "FEATURE" currently punishes me for that. And it certainly punished Alid.

Mawg Marmont

Armorsmith

Bria

Actually, I think yer on to something there. Like in real life, you could close shop and everything would be fine. Of course it might be insanely expensive, but it's do-able. If we could maybe have a function to "preserve vendor" and pay maybe double maintnence to temporarily freeze it if we are gone for 2 weeks or so....

You do have to play every day, that is a fact. First off, there are so many bugs that can destroy everything you worked for if you are not there to catch them. Like a house that goes from 17 days maintenance to 73 % degraded after a patch.

Vendors need admin rights too. At least to pay the maintenance. The person does not have to be able to stock or anything else but pay maintenance...yes. And, please stop DUMPING all my inventory in my private vendor in my private shop every blasted 6 days grrrr. What a pain in the rear. First all the email spam, then having to remember what was being charged and standing there, wasting yet more time, while I resell the same darn stock.

You don't need to remember how much you charged. Just hit the 'details' box for things in the stockroom, and it'll bring up a window with your old price and description. Makes it a bit less tedious when you find an item you don't remember the value for.

On a simular note. My email was so clogged with unsuccessful auctions that it took over 30 sec to delete one. It was also taking upto a minute to post items back up for sale. What is funny is that the zone crashed as I got near being done and when I got back on I was able to put my items back on at a record speed. Now to figure out how to force a crash.

I know its a bit late now, BUT, if anyone finds themselves in a similiar situation, a possible work around would be, if you KNOW someone, like out of game, on your server and trust them, you could ask them to log in under your screen name and have them go pay your maintence real quick. I grant you you'd have to trust the person, and not everyone groups with their roomate and PnP friends and drinking buddies like I do. But it's a possible solution. I realize it doesn't make what happened any less of a shame. It's just a suggestion for anyone who runs up against a similiar problem.