Merchant Archive

Merchant players know full well that the profession as designed is fairly hollow. Many posters here are now observing this as well, pointing out that it takes 63 skill points just so you can play dress up with your vendors, have ad barking and so on.

But what's odd to me is that many people are taking this to be natural and inevitable, that the emptiness of Merchant is some kind of "normal" and "expected" thing. What, just like the emptiness of Squad Leader? Or Ranger? or Politician?

It's a design failure, not a Platonic ideal. If Merchant is a poor compensation for the skill points now, it's because the devs have never paid any attention to it (like many other professions) and its existence in the game today is largely a consequence of the bad launch and management of the game's development since launch--it's an artifact of old ideas about the game's economy and old ideas about socializing playstyles. Like some other professions--hell, in some ways, like the entire way crafting is designed period. So yes, you anti-Merchants are right, some of what's being proposed on vendors is a way to try and throw the profession a crumb of functionality.

But this doesn't mean that one couldn't imagine a viable Merchant profession were there sufficient other changes to the game's economy. If the Merchant was given some of the functionality of the old Miner profession and was granted a far more substantial series of economic bonuses (lowered maintenance, production bonuses on harvesters, crafting efficiency bonuses) across the board and the costs of economic activity as a whole were raised, if Merchants had an extension of the survey tree allowing them to remotely survey the entire galactic resource distribution, if there were useful galactic commodities exchanges (e.g., if the Bazaar was something other than a crappy dumping ground for newbs who think a CDEF is worth something), if Merchants could contract out services in the form of missions--there are a lot of things we could imagine, some of which might not take huge or dramatic changes to the game's economy.

Just like you could imagine a Squad Leader profession that mattered. And so on.

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Let's also not forget this: the present economy as seen through vendors, much praised by some players, isn't really mostly an economy. The vendors everyone is scrambling around to protect exist in aggregate to do two things. First, as storage, either for combatants who are hoarding loot items or second, for major crafters to store huge amounts of top-quality resources and other goods. Second, as a kind of decoration for a home, a personal vanity.

The other thing to remember is this: the massive overglut of all items on most servers is a direct consequence not of vendors, but of the overproductive capacity of crafters. Vendors are a mere symptom of that deeper problem, that a crafter can, if he wants, make enough goods to far outstrip the available demand. It might take some work, and the best-quality items cannot be made in such large amounts (limited use schematics and loot-boosted items were a good idea in this respect) but if the devs really want to get at the heart of the problem, then crafters themselves are a bigger issue than merchants. And if you want merchants eliminated, vendors given to all crafters, and vendor limits kept very very large, you're sort of running away from that big issue.

Atino Xepteed
Maker of Mediocre Weapons
Chilastra