Article: Player-City Dependency on Merchants

Player-City Dependency on Merchants

By Utsanomiko

This is actually a pretty straight-forward combination of two ideas, so I assume it's already been thought up and mentioned.

Anyway, after spending a month as Master Armorsmith with my 'Mr. Fridge' vending machine vendor, I decided to start dabbling in Merchant once I set up shop in a more autonomous and tightly-knit player city. I came across 2 issues which I had already been aware of, but had yet to experience them this directly untill now:

1) THERE IS NO SYSTEM IN BUSINESS/MERCHANT THAT ALLOWS NON-MERCHANTS TO EFFECTIVELY USE MERCHANTS TO SELL THEIR ITEMS.
Face it, right now the Merchant profession is only useful for selling your own stuff, and in order to be *just* a Merchant or help people sell their stuff you have to go out on a couple limbs. You either have to accept offers at 80% list price (or more) and sell them for little profit (if at all), or find people who trust you enough to offer you their items for free and then trust you to send them the money when it sells. Right now my store has at least a quarter million worth of armor in its vendor. As a single person who is both an Armorsmith and Merchant, I naturally don't have any middleman issues with trust, convenience, or profit. But neither current option facilititates player interraction because they force either the Merchant or the Non-Merchant to take a huge risk.

If I were just an Armorsmith, I wouldn't trust a Merchant to keep even 60k worth of merchandise and expect them to not simply either forget about paying me or quit the game without giving my stuff back. If I were just a Merchant, I wouldn't buy the Merchandise for 55k just for the chance of making 5000 credits if it sells. Merchant depends entirely on a player's other skills to even function. Other than the rare "hey, I got some good leather for you, can I offer it to your vendor for 5k?" (which only happens with friends in my city that I'd normally just go meet up with and trade normally), the only person who uses my Merchant skills is myself. Suppose the only people Armorsmiths made suits for was themselves? How many people actually master and keep Musician as merely an 'extra' profession to deal with their fatigue and not rely on full-time Entertainers? Regardless of those, the point is that Merchant COULD be used as an effective stand-alone profession to facilitiate the sale of goods (whether your own or other people's), it just doesn't right now. So now it's just an extra thing to dabble in like newbies with novice Entertainer and Medic.

2) PLAYER-CITIES DO NOT HAVE ANY SORT OF BAZAAR.
Unless you dabble in Business or Merchant, the only way you can sell items you either craft or just loot are the static-city bazaars (unless you've managed to develop some kind of actual buddy-buddy relationship with a merchant, you weirdo ;P ). So especially after the inclusion of player garages, people who live in tightly-knit player cities can hunt, heal, entertain, harvest, craft, and do all sorts of things in and around their city. They can provide for and rely on their city and don't really ever have to leave... Unless they want to sell something. Now like I said above, they cannot do this effectively with Merchants. Merchants can do business within their city by simpy putting their wares on their vendor, but the locals' only convenient or useful option is to drive to a static city and put their item on the bazaar. Natually, it's a pretty big break in community self-sufficiency if you have to go out of town just for non-Businessman to sell and buy eachother's wares. One solution I've heard is to add player city bazaars to towns just like mission terminals, but to be able to do your *galactic* bazaar shopping from a player city would take away too much from the usefulness of static cities than the devs probably want (add in Player starports and you'd never need to enter stactic cities again).

SOLUTION: GIVE MERCHANTS OR BUSINESSMAN THE OPTION TO CREATE VENDORS TO EITHER FUNCTION AS PERSONAL VENDORS OR NEW 'PLAYER BAZAARS'.

Let's say once I got Novice Merchant and create my store's vendor as a Personal Vendor (the current type of vendor), I then create another one as a Player Bazaar, and place it in another building I own or have admin to. The Player Bazaar functions exactly like a static city bazaar except in a few major regards:

-The money players affront for sales and auctions goes to the Merchant. This allows the Merchant to earn money from the transaction of other players' auctions by simply providing the service of a Player Bazaar in the city. Acutally, money should likely go to both the city and Merchant, so that the city benefits and the Merchant doesn't get completely free sevices (more excuse to use a Personal Vendor for his own use rather than a money-making bazaar). Taxes should also apply.

-In order to keep usefullness of staic city bazaars, Player Bazaars only operate and are viewable locally. Nobody can just sit in Coronet and buy up all your gemstone, and neither can you browse for or sell wares in the rest of the galaxy without actually going to a static city.

-Their is either no price limit, or it is a magnitude higher. The items on it still count towards your 25 item bazaar limit, however. This is a compromise between making them more beneficial to non-Merchants than static bazaars but not a better choice for full-time crafters than a Personal Vendor.

-Because Player Bazaars themselves can generate money (unlike Personal Vendors), they should require significanly more maitenance. A Player Bazaar that only gets a couple transactions every other day should not be making ends meet. A Merchant should have to serriously generate interest in an active player city in order to make money (much like they have to now with their own wares on Vendors). A fairly busy city with resource collectors, non-merchant crafters, adventurers with loot, and occasional visitors should generate quite a bit of revenue with this much-needed city service even if the Merchant doesn't sell anything themself.

-An email should go out to inform everyone with items on the Player Bazaar when it is low on maintenance. A Merchant is expected to be reliable, and when his bazaar is days away from closing up, people better be notified and given a chance to pull out. If a Merchant wasn't working hard enough to keep his Bazaar from dropping to this point, he's certainly going to have to haul some weight around to make sure he can keep customers afterwards! In other words, Merchants can't just stick a Player Bazaar up and expect people to use it even if it's been forgotten.

The benefit of Player Bazaars to Merchants is it would allow them to make money and do business with people with their Merchant skills and not just by becoming a dedicated crafter or loot-hunter, and can work with players in conveinient and profitable ways. Non-Merchants noticably benefit from the means to sell their stuff to their player city without having to take their business out to static cities, and they get to interract and depend on Merchants reliably without having to get the profession themselves. Players Cities would get the long-needed benefit of commerce available for not only the non-Merchant residents, but visitors as well. Busy cities, even if small, could genetate noteworthy money and attention that directly reflects how busy they are, without having to turn into a 'Merchant town' or housing a massive population.

I think it's certainly a better option than simply nerfing full-time Crafter/Merchant players or copying and taking away a beneficial need for static cities. Now we just need Politicians to be able to place Apartment Buildings and City Bulletin Boards...