Merchant Archive
Thread: After a few weeks at Master Merchant..some ranting
You know what's unrealistic about being a Merchant? Everything.
Can't do a bloody thing with my credits. My ingenius ideas for marketing myself are imitated, diluted, and finally rendered impotent by morons with a CDEF on their vendor and not enough money to pay for the next level of Merchant or whatever skill they need to train.
I can't kick their butts with my l33t merchant skills. I can't control my market, I can't increase my advertsing budget to force them out of my market. I can't hire goons to go rearrange their storefronts.
People with no skills or caring are ruining the whole market by having cruddy unstocked vendors, deceptive practices, and idiotic miss-spelled macros. Who wants to go to yet another store with nothing for sale?
I spend pretty much every bit of my playtime overcoming an incredibly slow and badly designed sales interface. I stock, I restock , I split resources, I manually raise and lower prices...I sit down after dinner and rarely get out of the store before 11pm. Add to this at least once a night some moron comes in, and then runs out to tell his buddies that my vendors are empty because he doesnt' hit the refresh button or has his filters set up wrong. Or another braintrust will come in..look at my 6 full vendors and then tell me that I have nothing to sell (I sell just about everything mind you..)
The worst is the guy who says (always loudly) that he doesn't buy from merchants who yell in the starport, because theyare macro'ers and their stores are always a disappointment. I don't have the tools to do anything more than macro-scream in the starport thanks to the merchant skill tree..and the map isnt' cutting it.
If Merchant is purely a role-playing class...then let's buy it with imaginary skill points. If its supposed to be an effective part of the game then lets SEE some of it!
I wouldnt' be anything else in the Star Wars milleu...fly a starship? Check. Make money and perhaps be rich? Check. Have people kiss your buttox 'cause your wallets' fat? Check...call Lando tell him I want to do lunch!
What class is JABBA? I want to be able to hire PC and NPC goons..I want to be able to 'control' my market by spending my credits wisely. These aren't such outlandish things to ask. How do I become a 'crime boss?' Perhaps I'm asking too much that my experience be as rewarding as any other player...
If I have enough scratch I should be able to go head-to-head against another merchant and win control of my market..if only for the time it takes him to set his vendors back up somewhere else..
Rant over..back to counting my credits.
"I can't increase my advertsing budget to force them out of my market. I can't hire goons to go rearrange their storefronts"
No you cant, because that would be greifing.....
The problem with _some_ merchants is they automatically expect the skill boxes to make their stuff sell, with little to no actually inteligence behind how they play 'merchant' (I'm not suggesting you are one of these but some of your requests sure sound like it)
Granted Merchant skills costs skill points but its not like Merchant xp is hard to get
Get Business II - place vendor, wait, get Novice Merchant -place vendor, wait, get Managment 1 -place vendor wait, get Managment 2 -place vendor, wait, get managment 3 -place vendor, wait, get managment 4 -place vendor, wait, pickup additional skills as desired
So it is understandable why Merchant skills seem to be worth less than other elite professions skills (bugs notwithstanding) its not really a question of working for your xp, its just a case of waiting for it.
Having said that you can be just as effective a Merchant with no Merchant skills (or even anything from the Business line) as long as you have your head screwed on and are prepared to put the work in - I think this is what annoys the Merchants who want the game to automatically grant more success to those with Merchant skills to those without (in that those with higher combat skills are granted more success in combat)
ASHRID wrote:
"I can't increase my advertsing budget to force them out of my market. I can't hire goons to go rearrange their storefronts"
No you cant, because that would be greifing.....
The problem with _some_ merchants is they automatically expect the skill boxes to make their stuff sell, with little to no actually inteligence behind how they play 'merchant' (I'm not suggesting you are one of these but some of your requests sure sound like it)
Granted Merchant skills costs skill points but its not like Merchant xp is hard to get
Get Business II - place vendor, wait, get Novice Merchant -place vendor, wait, get Managment 1 -place vendor wait, get Managment 2 -place vendor, wait, get managment 3 -place vendor, wait, get managment 4 -place vendor, wait, pickup additional skills as desired
So it is understandable why Merchant skills seem to be worth less than other elite professions skills (bugs notwithstanding) its not really a question of working for your xp, its just a case of waiting for it.
Having said that you can be just as effective a Merchant with no Merchant skills (or even anything from the Business line) as long as you have your head screwed on and are prepared to put the work in - I think this is what annoys the Merchants who want the game to automatically grant more success to those with Merchant skills to those without (in that those with higher combat skills are granted more success in combat)
I think you're missing the point here. While I agree that there are some people that expect Merchant skill boxes to automatically grant them more success as Merchants, some of us (and if I understand his post, Csin will agree with this) do feel that our skill boxes should at least give us a competitive advantage over less skilled Merchants and certainly over non-Merchants with vendors. Currently, once you've got Ad III, you're as good a Merchant as you'll ever be. Efficiency line? Useless. Hiring? Nice from an RP perspective, but broken and ultimately useless. Management? Useful for anyone who wants more than one shop, but not really for anyone else. Master Merchant? Completely useless. Our skill boxes should give us tools to make the mechanics of running a business easier, more efficient and more effective, but they currently don't.
Csin,
I think you are dead on that having your boxes should give you a competitive advantage. I think that the lack of tools to move people to our shops is clear.
I spend a great deal of my time at the starports, Ihave had to make 3 - 5 mocros, so I can at least have something diffrent to say. One of the things I sell is pet food. I always get tells "Do you have any on you for sale right now" I always respond, "No, that is why I have a shop"
The lack of mounts, cars, trains, poertals, teleporters, or other means of pinpoint traval make it very hard to convince people to leave the town, and go to a shop 900m away.
I do not know what the solution is, I personaly want to see master merchants have the ability to have a vendor "pet" So it follows them around, and they can stand in the city, starport, cantina, medcenter, or anywhere, and have a vendor. When they are done, they store it, and it sits in the datapad or pack, WITHOUT ALL THE STUFF IN IT BECOMING MISSING. This should only, ONly, ONLY, be a master merchant thing. You can only have one, and as soon as your AFK flag goes on, it stores itself.
I understand the issues, and a agree to a point (in that the skills should be more wortwhile) I just object to the premise that having Merchant skills automatically garners more success.
Since this is a player economy you cannot force people to buy from'preferred suppliers' (read: Merchant) nor can you either give the buyer a discount or the seller a bonus if certain skills exist without leaving the system expolitable. You _can_ give sellers more selling options and better ways to advertise but those functions are already in the Merchant tree (its just that they dont work well/at all)
I'll be the first to say that the abilities gained from Merchant skills are not worth the skill points. I wont go as far to say that they arent worth the xp because, as I have already illustrated, you dont really work for the xp (just wait for it), I do however consider the Business line of Artisan worse than any Merchant line because the abilities gained at I,II& IV are as bad if not worse than any Merchant skill, the difference however is thatI had to actually work to earn the xp (and had I gone to Master Artisan with no intention of also becoming a Merchant I would be even more annoyed by this)
What I'd like to see are some tools for managing vendors and inventory. Things like being able to handle my stockroom remotely, a better interface for the "Use Vendor" screen and the ability to shift stock between my vendors without having to do all the travelling.
I think I'm a pretty successful Merchant as it is. I gross over a million credits in sales a week, and keep all of my vendors well-stocked. I earned my success, so I have no reason to ask for any further success to be handed to me on a platter. I'd just like to not have to spend most of my online time coddling my vendors. They should work for me, not me for them.
ASHRID wrote:
No you cant, because that would be greifing.....
The problem with _some_ merchants is they automatically expect the skill boxes to make their stuff sell, with little to no actually inteligence behind how they play 'merchant' (I'm not suggesting you are one of these but some of your requests sure sound like it)
Even mentioning me in the same breath as these people makes my blood boil. I literally spend hours marketing, cutting deals, stocking and arranging. I send mass emails to my buyers, I locate rarities, I support my suppliers (sometimes going as far as buying large harvesters and fusions for miners who have earned my trust).
I earned my 'Master' before we in this forumwere 100 percent sure how Merchant exp was even gained..I put up my vendors and then worked frantically to get people to look at them, and I still do. I NET about aquarter-million (not gross) a day, and I've continued to re-invest in my suppliers, my stock, and my store. My store is a Large CorOne house decorated to the 'nines' designed to attract customers, and amuse the curious. I have five high-end crafting stations installed in one whole wing for crafters to come and use without straying far from my resource vendor.
In short..I work my Merchant butt off.I should be rewarded with tools to make my job easier, or at least to affect my business environment. I shouldn't have to play on the same field as the little leaguers.
(Oh..btw..i was really tired when I wrote the first post..so pardon me if it rambles a bit)
I find advertising 3 quite usefull...I dont usually stock my vendor with housing, I have furniture on it...but up untill two days ago, I was the only global advertised vendor on dantooine, ahazi, and had been for a week or two heh...I've got my name on the listing so anyone can wisper me and ask if I can make somthing, and its a 6km walk, so they are probably gonna do that first anyways X.x
sil
Csin wrote:
I NET about aquarter-million (not gross) a day
And you are complaining???? Doesn't sound to me like that guy with the CDEF on the bazaar is having much of an impact. There are plenty of problems with the merchant profession, but you seem to have overcome them admirably.
So what exactly is your complaint? That merchant isn't a PvP class? If you want to cause problems for other merchants, join a faction, earn faction points and start setting up minefields around your competitors' shops. Of course, you might want to expect the same.
My problem is that the CDEF guy is macro-ing in the starport and diluting my efforts. When you have 4 million credits invested in speculative resources you tend to take percentage-losses pretty seriously.