Merchant Costs

I think that merchants should be able to have the costs for their abilities debited from their account in the syndicate vault. As it is the Vault is great for storing money but short of a specific perk, its more or less stuck there. This would give it some usefulness aside from the rather mundane purpose it serves now.

From an RP stand point, when you outfit an adventurer or army you "contact your suppliers" and have the goods transferred from the Merchant warehouse to the character. This is fine, but if the Syndicate already has your money locked in its vault and the Syndicate is the said suppliers, why cant it just deduct it from you balance?

This would also give people good reason to not just have their account have the bare minimum and put the rest in the more easily accessible banks.

I'm all for this since Merchants are constantly busy when they're logged in.  I would also like to see Merchants compensated in RP points for each transaction....yet another incentive to keep playing said Merchant.

1 RP Point per bartered transaction because let's face it, there's no denying you are playing your role as a Merchant if you are bartering.

1 RP Point per bartered transaction because let's face it, there's no denying you are playing your role as a Merchant if you are bartering.

I love the Idea! It really fitts.However I don't think it would ever work for two reasons. Primarily, that would rack up so many RP points so fast it would be astounding. Secondly what would stop two people from bartering back and forth and just spamming up RP points? Eventually it would deteriorate into someone buying 40 herbs at a time has to barter them at once to get those RP instead of putting them in a bag.

If there was some kind of time limit put on it that might make it a little better. Something like you get 1 point for the first transaction in 24 hours. After that there are no additional rewards. However even that is still very much open to abuse.

a fan of everything except the rp point for each transaction... when you start going down that path it can turn into an rp point for each scroll a Herald scribes... each Tome they add to the Library... an rp point for every cabal member that retrieves the standard from a cabal they have a vendetta against... yada yada. I can certainly see where the idea comes from, I just think that would make rp points too readily available... JMO. 

I do think there needs to be a bit of fine tuning on some other things for Merchants... though, I can't really go into it.

An RP point for a transaction... is this some joke? It's bad enough that RP points are handed out to people for something as simple as hunting...

We can't all RP like you, f0xx. Give us a break. You are a GOD!

I'm joking. (Translation for those who might think I'm being an ass)

I say RP points for Merchants to give them incentive to keep playing.  Since they can't PK, whatever they use the RP points on also can't be used in PK.  Also it's "Role Playing" points...what are merchants doing if not role-playing by bartering?

We can't all RP like you, f0xx. Give us a break. You are a GOD!

 

I'm joking. (Translation for those who might think I'm being an ass)

He likes busting peoples balls for the shits and giggles of it. 

I say RP points for Merchants to give them incentive to keep playing.  Since they can't PK, whatever they use the RP points on also can't be used in PK.  Also it's "Role Playing" points...what are merchants doing if not role-playing by bartering?

This is wrong. Why cant we have merchants who KILL for their armor? Not wanting to be active in PK is the merchants personal choice. 

A DK merchant would be interesting I think - feeding his blades and selling his proceeds.

Pretty sure merchants are highly discouraged from PK.  I recall Skwizgarr being demoted after he assassinated someone who attacked him earlier.

And yet we can't have good merchants....

Pretty sure merchants are highly discouraged from PK.  I recall Skwizgarr being demoted after he assassinated someone who attacked him earlier.

WEEEELLLL I find that pretty ridiculous to be fair. They are supposed to be fences for the largest crime organisation in the Lands. 

If you cant protect yo product by means of violence you might as well join Herald

If you cant protect yo product by means of violence you might as well join Herald

In a way, you do.  That's what your "thugs" are for.

Merchants - just as well as Heralds - are allowed to actively pk within REASON. That means, if they have a very good motive for it (e.g. the other guy is trying to kill them). They definitely should not run all over the place and clear their pk range, that WILL lead to a talking to -> demotion -> expulsion from either cabal (Herald/Merchant).

As to the original post, I think Merchants have it WAY too easy right now to make money, we should consider cutting down (again) on what you get for pawning rares. It's not a good thing that a Merchant can make way more money by just pawning rares than selling anything to a player customer. Merchants also need something else to do with their cps. I don't think they need to get it even easier by auto-withdrawing from the cabal vault, if anything they need a bit more of a challenge.

Well I still think that the autowithdraw is a good idea as it doesn't really affect game balance, its more of a quality of life adjustment. However to address that issue why not adjust the gold output from the pawn skill? What was the intent of the skill? From my perspective it could be one of two things.

1. To give merchants a consistent supply of gold in times of a lull in business. This could be caused by lack of funds by the player base or a lack of a player base.

2. To allow merchants to recoup some gold lost by purchasing a rare item that didn't sell or they couldn't keep after logging out.

If those are the motivations behind the skill then I would recommend adjusting the value of pawn to different equation

Pawn Value = item value/ the number of logged in players with level => (item level -10)

down to a static 3,000 gold for rares or 6,000 gold for a unique.

Now most rare items have a rather diminutive value for some reason so we would need a way of adjusting that if reason for the skill is reason number 2. So we could adjust the barter skill to set the value of a bartered item to the amount bartered for (x1000 if bought for CP).

Example: Merchant buys a double plated helmet for 30,000.  (Assuming the item has a level of 30) The value is set at 30,000 for that specific item. When pawned the game would check for the number of players logged in level 20 or greater because that's who the merchant could legally sell the item to. So if there were 6 players on in those constraints the pawn value would be 5,000.

Example 2: Merchant kills kesrick and takes his helmet. The value of said helmet is very low, probably 50 or less.  The equation would likely return a pawn value of less that 10 so the minimum would set in giving the merchant 3,000 gold.

As far as something for Merchants to do with CP I would like to think they could improve the quality of the wares they sell for CP but that could upset game balance. Alternatively their could be a person that exchanges CP for gold but then changing Pawn/barter would be a moot point. But its time for me to go to work so... more on this when I get there.