Merchant Archive
Thread: Egg Throwing debate on Monopolies
Currently, there is no limit to how many items can be placed on a vendor. This causes technical issues, encourages monopolies and actually hurts sales in many instances because most players don't "drill down" through all of the vendor pages to find items. We want to solve the technical issues, discourage monopolies and make vendors easier to use. An item limit is going to be placed on vendors and that limit is intended to be placed on 150."
Monopolies seem to be a bad thing to the dev's. But can they really exist?
I've often been called a monopoly because of my business size. But I just don't fully see it.
I can and have set 'trends' in market pricing of power. By being the largest and oldest, it does allow me to set a baseline price which everyone else uses to gauge their sales price. But let's look at that moreso.
I set my base price. Now everyone looks and says 'oh, epc is selling at that. Well, I guess I as a smaller company need to undercut them to try and get my market share'. So they do undercut me and I'd imagine take some business away. Which is fine with me.
My business model dictates I have plenty of stock and never run out. I price consistant with the actual power you are receiving, not flat rate per resource. Have I run out, sure. Item dropping off vendor to storage or just a very busy day. It happens no matter how well you try to plan.
I also buy out some of my competitors on occasion. Especially when I can sell it for double what they are. Here I can see some monopoly-esque behavior. I have the credits to do so, therebyimpeding some competition. I don't do it for that reason, but really do it because I just need extra backstock at times. I look at them almost no differently than an employee harvesting for me.
However, it's still credits for them and often clears out THEIR overstock. Not that I do this often mind you. But yet, those pesky competitors still won't go away. 
I don't see how I really am a monopoly, though I've been accused of it. There are numerous other power merchants in the galaxy, and I don't see me putting them out of business.
Even if the cap of 150 items is implemented, I've never had more than that on a single vendor. (granted i may be unique in that i really just sell one item) I fear for the weaponsmiths and tailors and armoursmiths who must stock much more to keep even a bare minimum selection.
I don't really see the cap stopping so-called monopolies in any event. Can they even really exist? Anybody can be nearly anything in this game. I've even seen some new power brokers spring up recently.
Does having hundreds of stacks of a good, let you possibly become a monopoly somehow? Sure I could lower my prices to vastly undercut everyone else, but I'd rather foresee them buying all my stock and reselling it, as it do with them on occasion.
Anyways, just something to chew on. I'm interested in hearing your opinions and I offer up my company for analysis, but let's keep this friendly.
Message Edited by DingoBoi on 06-14-2004 04:46 PM
It's a good topic.
First, in my opinion unless you are the only one selling your product, there can't be a monopoly. There are way too many crafters/vendors/cities in the game for that. Sure, you can have more stock, but because you offer a bigger selection, it doesn't make you a monopoly. Which is why I don't see at all how limiting items on a vendor will discourage monopolies. The way I see it, SoE just wants everyone to be able to offer the same amount of items, they don't care much about well stocked vendors, and mostly they just want to put everyone at the same level, whether the merchants work a lot to keep a well stocked vendor or not. It seems that it will discourage merchants to do their best, which is sad. Shouldn't a merchant who works a lot on his vendor have more 'popularity' than someone who will just throw in 150 average items? Does monopoly means good reputation and large selection? Or do they just want to prevent people from stocking every item they can make and force people to go visit different vendors for everything?
I just think it's pretty sad because it will ruin the fun of most of the merchants who love their profession and pride themselves in having a good stock - it will be mostly impossible for any merchant who can't log on three times a day to restock to keep a good selection, and totally impossible for tailors to do so.
Sure, you can have more stock, but because you offer a bigger selection, it doesn't make you a monopoly.
agreed. I have tons of stock.. up to 60 million units of power at a given time. I pride myself on being reliable and well stocked. That has earned me my reputation. Am I the cheapest? No. But if you want to save yoruself time hunting for those deals, you'll come see me. I have the stock at a 'fair' price (and yes, even though I am the biggest, people still sell higher than me.. makes me wonder if the sell anythign at all when everyone KNOWS they can get it cheaper from me. I've seen vendors up to 4cpu when i normally sell between 2-3cpu.
The way I see it, SoE just wants everyone to be able to offer the same amount of items, they don't care much about well stocked vendors, and mostly they just want to put everyone at the same level
I agree. those who can be reliable and well stocked should be allowed to. Reliable merchants are good for the game and player retention. It prevents the frustration of visiting empty vendors. So if you find a 'good vendor', you nor the merchant should be penalized by stock restrictions (i know this really doesn't affect me personally, but i know it will many crafter types)
I just think it's pretty sad because it will ruin the fun of most of the merchants who love their profession and pride themselves in having a good stock
nailed it right there. I love being a merchant. and whether it's merchant alone like myself, or a crafter merchant hybrid, i can only see this hurting (possibly scaling storage as merchant level increases might help)
I honestly don't think a crafter in any profession can totally supply an entire server with wares. It just isn't feasible
Our WOOK friend might be able to chime in here. On Eclipse, we had a weaponsmith named Stry'ker. By most estimates, I'd say he had the closest to a monopoly. He was an extremely succesful WS. With the profits from his success, he was able to offer unlimited mining contracts at inflated prices, so essentially, all independent miners sold to him for the highest profit. What that meant for other weaponsmiths was that they were virtually unable to buy minerals from independent miners because they just couldn't afford it. I remember lots of talk on our server about it, although since I'm not a crafter I didn't pay too much attention, though I did reap the profits because almost all of those miners bought power from me.
So unless the other WS's mined their own or had friends who could, they were pretty much SOL. Again, this is an extremely rare circumstance, but it is notable for what happened. If our WOOK friend could add, I'd be obliged. I don't come from the crafter background, so I really didn't understand the total impact of it to crafters. I'm just going by memory of posts I read.
*note: stry'ker stored his minerals on a vendor and due to either negligence or a bug (bug likely-again i wasn't there) 4 BILLION credits worth of resources vanished and csr's refused to replace.. he quit after that. That was his estimate of value, not mine. But it also gives you insight into how much business he did... and this was 6 months or so ago taht he had accumlated all this) EPC ourselves are anticipating reaching 1 billion in sales about xmas.
In theory that would close of the regional marked for other players. With 6 vendors that would mean the player could dominate 6 "regions", say the NPC cities with starports on one planet. Maybe a guild of 100 craters could gain a virtual monopoly on thair chosen product, or at least dominate the spice trade server wide.
But theory is one thing, and reality is often very different. In this case, the PC cities would remain open to "local crafters". But no mater how small the profit margin of the monopoly was someone would always under cut.
If some merchant had "The best" product in the galaxies of some type, and sold it for a price so low that if other even tried to match it they would take a loss. And had the product available in quantities large enough to supply the entire galaxies. Even then the travel cost for customer (both time and credits) to get to one of the 6 location the merchant was selling in, would open the market up for resellers. No, unless they give us unlimited number of vendors we cannot have monopolies.
However if someone achieved this and sell a product so good and so cheep that no one can compete, then the customers have the best for the lowest price and how is that a bad thing.
My guess is that SoE wands a "free market echonomy" where there are loads of independent crafters all selling a few select products they are specialised in and all making slightly different variants when they are over lapping. Instead of as it is not where we have a select few majored dealers who make everything in the best quality, and then have a host of crafters struggling to make competitive products ate competitive prices.
The idiotic thing is, that a monopoly is the "ultimate achievement" for a merchant. Other professions are allowed to pursue this, such as soloing the toughest mob's in the game.
Further more "the giants" in the market are the ones who invest loads of time and effort and who have done so for a long time. They are the ones that make sure that the "odd" items are produced and are available to the few customers who needs them.
What merchant will carry cheep DH18 pistols for novice marksmen, if they can only have a limited number of items for sell. Wound the "high volume" items that sell fast be not be the only found on vendors?
I was only referring to that post in another topic to show that they weren't claiming that vendor poaching or vendors as storage were the reasons for the proposed item limit. And really, I think an item limit will suck, not just for merchants like dingoboi who are mainly merchants, but also for merchants that are just merchants to sell the items they craft. I bet the reason behind it is more about the 'technical issues' than anything else. And they just threw in the monopolies bit so it sounded better. lol. because I don't know about you guys, but if I am looking for something, and see a good vendor, I will 'drill' it to the bottom searching.
The problem isn't that true monopolies will exist, that is very unlikely with the similarity of the products produced and the fact that there is no system of locking others out of making your product (patents etc) the problem is the fact that it is hard for new crafters to enter the market.
This is not caused by having large amounts of product on a vender, having a well stocked vendercarrying a good variety of items doesn't cause a problem in and of itself. The problem is with experienced rich crafters being able to produce such large amounts ofgoods, of such high quality that there is little demand for the slightly lower quality goods of a new master crafter. I believe this to be the problem for the reasons given below:
First too much of each resourcecan be mined, because of lot-swaps there are more harvesters than should be available in the world.
A combination of lot-swaps, venders used for storage and factories used for storage means that many of the long standing crafters are able to keep huge stocks of the best resources for a long time. Whether they mine these resources themselves or buy them is not relevant. If storage was more limited then crafters would have to decide how much of a particular resource they wanted to keep compared to what else they want in storage.
If Crafters have a huge supply of the best materials then these crafters can churn out huge amounts of product and because they have so much can sell it at a lower price. With a limit on the amount of resources,looted components and manufactured components they could keep at any one time there would be a limit on the amount of that top quality product they could produce.If they couldn't produce so many items forsale they would need to increase the price to stop their venders from being bought out too quickly and only the richest / most competitive players would buy from them.
This would mean that there would be a demand for cheaper items from the players who couldn't afford / are unwilling to buy at the higher price. This demand could be met by the newer masters who could make slightly lower quality product, because they don't have as many experimentation points, can't afford the latest and best resources etc.
This limited supply would also then make a market for the lower quality goods of non-master crafters, there would be a demand for products which couldn't be met by the masters so the non-masters could sell the non-master products at again a lower, but still fair (to them)price.
This would also benefit merchants, if individual crafters couldn't produce enough stock to keep their venders from selling out then people would start looking for vendors that were well stocked, as merchants could buy produce from multiple crafters they would be able to have enough stock on their venders to avoid selling out. This would therefore encourage crafters to sell wholesale to merchants and not just take the profession up themselves in order to sell their products.
In Summary; If the limits that the Devs set on storage and lot usage were actually adhered to and controlled it would benefit the crafting / merchant community as a whole and make being a less-than-ultra master / non-master viable.
I should also add that I hope they avoid doing this until they fix the vendor interface for putting items up for sale. Right now it takes an exorbitant amount of time to stock a vendor. This has been brought up many times in this forum but it is absurd how difficult it is to restock a vendor.
You have to do it one crate at a time because if you want to do it quickly, you need tobe able to fit all 10-25-50 items in your inventory so you can easily put them all up for sale. Then, if you have 200 items you want to sell for the same price you are able to highlight all 200 items and sell them all together, right? No you can't, you have to click each one individually and put each one up for sale individually.
With the way things are currently set up, I would rather take one night a week and stock 1000 items then stock 150 items every night just because it is such a hassle. This kind of digresses from the discussion of monopolies, but if they fixed the vendor interface so that it only took 30 seconds to put 25 identical items up for sale, then this may not be such a problem
Message Edited by LordOfFatness on 06-01-2004 12:50 PM
Monopolies cannot exist in a free market society. One of my biggest objections to upsetting the apple cart and limiting who can have vendors is because it will CREATE the potential for them, it will do squat to keep them from happening.
Once again - not planning for success has painted devs into a corner. If you are a merchant and WANT a large store - lots of clientele, everyone knowing where your shop is and shopping or at least browsing often means ummm - you succeeded. It's the same problem a few months out where people start accumulating wealth. If that's your goal - you succeeded and no matter what devs do, that's going to happen if that is a player's goal.
Frustrating player's natural goals is a no win scenario - ain't gonna happen, players always find a way. Money makes money, it does it in RL and it does it in virtual life if you have two brain cells to rub together and any business sense at all.
New players will ALWAYS have to play catchup till they hit that magic bubble of working capital - that's presuming they 'get it' in the first place and have the potential to be successful on a business angle. It IS quite possible to train up and become successful with a late start, you just have to work a little harder and play a little smarter.
I agree to an extend that it's hard for new crafters to start making business. I know that I personally don't do it because I can't compete with the crafters who have been gathering resources for months. That being said, everyone can't afford the best and there is always a niche for lower quality cheaper items IMO.
Now... All this is good, but I don't see how nerfingthe max amount of items onvendorswould fix it. If anything all it will do is make people order more itemsfrom the crafters, but they won't necessarily go see new ones.
Greets ...
Nice discussion, but I think it might server to get back to some basics and lay down the foundation for which you guys are speaking about.
Monopolies ...
It appears that many of you are thinking 100% = Monopoly, but that is not the case, and the Dev's areworried more about "Monopoly Power" then the actual Monopolies themselves.
So … don't be so literal and remember, in RL Monopoly power exists where a group of Manufacturer's/Vendors control 70% of the market share (some states define it as 60%-65%). I would venture to say the Dev's believe Monopoly Power exists when there is even a smaller percentage owned by a person or group. But for argument sake you have to at least stick with a 70% number.
Monopolies can happen in MMO Economies ...
The reality is that Styker had "Monopoly Powers" ... Styker had a huge effect on the Economy of Eclipse ... and for the most part it was a bad effect. If you want more detail go look up my post titled: "The Resource Crash of 2004" (or something darned close to that) where I detail the crash that was coming and why.
It's sufficient to say that monopolies can exist. I don't know how Large's business has been going lately, but in the past it could be argued that the "Eclipse Power Corporation" had "Monopoly Powers" in our economy. Without getting into details, pricing on power basically doubled/tripled once that 'corporation' was formed and for no other reason that market collusion between the vendors. That IS and WAS monopoly power.
Whether the doubling/tripling of power prices hurt the economy or was warranted is NOT the subject matter here ... just the mere fact they were able to accomplish it in fairly short order is what proves monopolies can exist.
Vendor Items can influence monopolies …
The *easier* it is to store items to sell, the easier it is to create a monopoly. The simple fact that you can load up a SINGLE vendor with enough stuff to service 70% of any given market re-enforces this. This the Dev's see as a potential problem and rightly so.
Going back to Styker, I would venture to say there were times when 70% or more of certain resource sales went through one of his vendors. That was Monopoly in Action.
If Vendors storage were greatly reduced it would have taken much more effort for Styker to do what he did ... he could have found ways around it with lot swaps and what not, but the reality is, the system "encourages" monopoly behavior in it's current state. When one person can have such a profound impact on a virtual economy, regulation needs to step in.
Free Economies are NEVER free from regulation ... it's the regulations that keep those economies working well (or poorly from excessive regulation).
Next Reality: Vendor Items will be restricted ... but no big deal ...
The Dev's were going to set it to 150 ... but then they realized this would be a disservice. Last time I checked the threads they had stated 150-1,500 based upon how many skill boxes you had in merchant (1,500 being master merchant). The only folks that would be severely hampered by that would be tailors.
Barring tailors, 90% of all vendors I have visited have less then 500 items on them, so unless the Dev's are going to do a 150-300 item limit, the change will not really affect most vendors.
I personally have a storage vendor that keeps 300-400 items in it at any given time. I also currently have 4 sales vendors that generally hold 400-500 items in them and currently sell 130 weapons per day, on average, from all my vendors. I am sure 130 weapons per day is not monopoly like on this server, but I could be if I so choose.
You can be a monopoly ... if you want to ...
Currently I can produce approximately 3k-4k weapons per day if I kick it into high gear. What's more, I have enough resources, (except for a small handful) to produce probably 250k weapons.
If I wanted to be a monopoly, I would simple crank it up for about 10 days or so to get a good 30k or more of weapons at my finger tips ... load up each of my vendors with 5k to 10k weapons, at a greatly reduced prices (t21's at 10k, VK's at 2k, etc, etc) , then pay some folks to advertise for me.
It would not take but 3-4 weeks before I had monopoly powers in the weapons market.
That is an over simplistic scenario and it would be harder then I state, but the point is this:
Because I can store unlimited items on my vendor I could (or a group of people could) fairly easily gain monopoly powers in a particular market space.
Conclusion …
I think Merchant needs a revamp … I think the system that TH described is a good one … I think 1,500 (barring tailors) is to high, more like 500 would help keep potential monopolies in check.
I spend good skill points on my vendors limiting my game use so I have no problem using one of my vendors as storage … I paid good points for that privilege and intend to use it.
But I see limiting the vendors as a good thing over all … and taking them off the planetary as they empty … and removing them from folks that drop merchant :-)
Of course there are a lot of merchants out there that just got either busIII or Novice Merchant ... well, those guys are going to be crying the blues, and rightly so. They get unlimited storage at the expense of 9 points for a bulky or 20 for 2 NPC's. Get ready to get dropped down to probably 75 for the bulky and 150 for the novice (which would be 300 ... 2 vendors * 150 each).
And I think that is just fine ... considering I am 2 boxes away from Master Merchant I got no sympathy :-)