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vender costs/ what do you think

Gamer_Goblin

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And we expect nothing less, it just feels good to voice our opinion now and then even when we know it really falls on deaf ears.
It's just not a good idea... it only helps people that already have too much gold. The fees for these new player friendly vendors are so low it's negligible. Most of the stuff you all are trying to sell for profit people give away for free at the New Haven bank anyways.
 

Tanivar

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And we expect nothing less, it just feels good to voice our opinion now and then even when we know it really falls on deaf ears.
It's not falling on deaf ears, they hear you, they just see what your really wanting, no vendor fees on billion gold vendor prices.

The Devs are also likely feeling rather insulted you think they'd fall for something so obvious. Writing code takes intelligence, they are not simple minded souls. Give them credit for the brains they have.
 

Yadd of Legends

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It's just not a good idea... it only helps people that already have too much gold. The fees for these new player friendly vendors are so low it's negligible. Most of the stuff you all are trying to sell for profit people give away for free at the New Haven bank anyways.
Just wondering what are new player friendly vendors?
 

OREOGL

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As pointed out before (I think) it's an issue with the gold sink.

If they created more ways for a gold sink it'd probably be less of an issue. But it's pretty much a one trick pony at this point And I don't see it going anywhere anytime soon.

I'm surprised they don't utilize NPC vendors more for this but oh well
 

Gamer_Goblin

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As pointed out before (I think) it's an issue with the gold sink.

If they created more ways for a gold sink it'd probably be less of an issue. But it's pretty much a one trick pony at this point And I don't see it going anywhere anytime soon.

I'm surprised they don't utilize NPC vendors more for this but oh well
Because if they used NPC Vendors it would affect new players. By using Player Vendors they can create an artificial scale by charging a flat percentage. Younger player items (Or New Player Friendly) will be cheaper and have less of a gold sink. Older player items will be more expensive as they are more in need of gold sinks.

It's a fairly simple concept and everyone knows what people are really arguing for here... Not paying for their expensive vendor goods. They're just trying to use new players as an excuse.
 

Tanivar

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Just wondering what are new player friendly vendors?
New Player Friendly Vendors are vendors that have prices new players with moderately skilled up characters can gather the gold to pay within a few hours of play which may be all they can play a week because of job and family time.

Keep in mind that many new players will want to play the game and will start by hunting mongbats and work their way up exploring the game world. There is a lot to this world that old timers ignore that new players likely enjoy, whens the last time you made a new character, and starting with NPC Guildmaster training, went hunting skeletons until you had the skill to hunt something tougher? A New Player will want to do this.

You've likely got mega millions in the bank and paying 10 million for an item is pocket change to you, 10 million takes a lot of hours to gather when each monster may drop a few hundred gold. If a New Player has a life outside the game, he can't spend 16/7 in the game gathering gold and won't want to spend months at a few hours a week gathering gold, he'll go check out another game where what he needs, at his skill, takes less time to get.
 

OREOGL

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Because if they used NPC Vendors it would affect new players. By using Player Vendors they can create an artificial scale by charging a flat percentage. Younger player items (Or New Player Friendly) will be cheaper and have less of a gold sink. Older player items will be more expensive as they are more in need of gold sinks.

It's a fairly simple concept and everyone knows what people are really arguing for here... Not paying for their expensive vendor goods. They're just trying to use new players as an excuse.

I didnt buy into the new player argument either.
 

Arcanis

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Seems to me if you going to take the time (say an hour) to craft and stock items for new ppl knowing those items are going to move slow and chew up profits just for the mats used,
Then it would only make sense to donate an equal amount of newbie helping time and go kill stuff for an hour to raise the funds to offset those costs and not worry about it...after all its about helping the new player not making a profit right???

Example:
Goto Ratman spawn in Ish compassion and farm arrows or

Goto the harpy nest in ish for an hour. you will get about 15k feathers, 30k or so in gems, and a bit of gold.

then fletch arrows & bolts and sell them 15-20 per
@ 15 per ,arrows will fly off the shelf no matter what shard you are on, (make use of those xfer hoarders),
you will make 225,000 on arrows alone.

ave sell price for a blank runebook 1k & 10k for marked ones.

now just put 5 marked runebooks on sale at any one time, for a vendor and price at 10K..
225k in gold will last a long time before vendor fees run out..

rinse and repeat as needed....done

They arent going to change the system..work around it.
 

Merus

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Seems to me if you going to take the time (say an hour) to craft and stock items for new ppl knowing those items are going to move slow and chew up profits just for the mats used,
Then it would only make sense to donate an equal amount of newbie helping time and go kill stuff for an hour to raise the funds to offset those costs and not worry about it...after all its about helping the new player not making a profit right???

Example:
Goto Ratman spawn in Ish compassion and farm arrows or

Goto the harpy nest in ish for an hour. you will get about 15k feathers, 30k or so in gems, and a bit of gold.

then fletch arrows & bolts and sell them 15-20 per
@ 15 per ,arrows will fly off the shelf no matter what shard you are on, (make use of those xfer hoarders),
you will make 225,000 on arrows alone.

ave sell price for a blank runebook 1k & 10k for marked ones.

now just put 5 marked runebooks on sale at any one time, for a vendor and price at 10K..
225k in gold will last a long time before vendor fees run out..

rinse and repeat as needed....done

They arent going to change the system..work around it.
No offense, but personally I think it is this attitude which has left so many flawed systems in this game... Don't bother fixing something to work better... Just deal with it by using work arounds.
 

OREOGL

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No offense, but personally I think it is this attitude which has left so many flawed systems in this game... Don't bother fixing something to work better... Just deal with it by using work arounds.
There's some merit to this but I wouldn't go as far to say vendor fees are broken.

Using new players as an excuse is a joke.

I mean if you can't afford to pay vendor fees on low end items you probably shouldn't be helping them.

If anyone needs gold to spot a new players vendor fees, I will gladly donate a mil on the shard of your choice.

/end thread
 

Merus

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There's some merit to this but I wouldn't go as far to say vendor fees are broken.

Using new players as an excuse is a joke.

I mean if you can't afford to pay vendor fees on low end items you probably shouldn't be helping them.

If anyone needs gold to spot a new players vendor fees, I will gladly donate a mil on the shard of your choice.

/end thread
A vendor system where the cost to sell any item (high priced or low priced) can exceed the cost of the item for sale = BROKEN.
On a busy shard with abundant supply and demand, those forces generally come into play before the broken system can really take effect... however, on a slow shard that is not the case. Run over to Napa and see how many items you can find for sale on a vendor for >50 million. The OP who is on Napa like me didn't bring up this issue because it is trying to sell high end items without paying vendor fees... none of us on Napa are. Those items don't sell here period. His issue is a legit one...
 

BrianFreud

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I would have to agree that fees are broken, and have been for a long time. Forget about new players, let's just talk about low end items.

On Chessie, if you'd looked 2 years ago, you'd have found around 10 malls with numerous vendors who sold plants of every color and type. Generally the prices were 500 per plant, occasionally up to 1k, with white and black selling around 50k, and the other four 'rare' colors somewhere in-between. Now, you'll find only a handful of vendors who even have any plants on them at all.

First, for those who say to just load up a vendor with gold so it doesn't go broke, you're rather missing the point... Why would someone go to all the effort just to run a vendor at a loss? Take "Joe", who loads his plant vendor up with a good assortment of types and the non-rare colors, each plant priced at 1k per. Even if he's using a garden bed, he still had to spend gold to buy that bed, so regardless of beds or potions, producing that plant had actual costs. He's not making much profit per plant, esp when you consider the time it took him to raise the plant vs what he could have made hunting for that same amount of time.

But this isn't Atlantic, it's Chessie, or any other non-Atlantic shard. It's not every day that someone needs plants for deco, and when they do, they likely want 10 or 20 of the same color and type, not just the 1 or 2 of that particular color and type that Joe stocked. After all, there are what, 40 different types of plants, and 19 different colors, so Joe can't stock all 760 different plants on a single vendor. (And the customer ends up growing or importing really basic cheap items - I have personally transferred hedges and campions for friends who needed more than the shard could grow).

But let's say Joe is enthusiastic about gardening, and wants to make sure that his shard has a good source for decorative plants, regardless of which plant someone is looking for. So Joe decides to try to stock 9 or 10 of every possible plant. He now has a mall with 60 plant vendors. In a given week, he maybe sells 50 plants. It's all win-win, right?

Well, assuming Joe has every vendor filled to the max 125 items (so he can fit all 7,600 or so plants onto 60 vendors), and he's charging only 1,000 gp per plant, even for rare colors, then Joe is paying 807 gp per day per vendor, or 48,420 gp per day for all 60. He's selling 50 plants per week, earning 50k... but spending 338,940 gp per week to run those vendors... and that's without considering the cost of potions or the garden beds.

So for those saying that lower population shards should have vendor owners simply be loading the gold from a minute's hunting - or even from an hour's arrow hunting and crafting - you're missing the point. This theoretical example pretty well describes 4 of those gardening malls that used to run on Chessie. But the math for such a basic staple sucks. Even ignoring setup costs (garden beds, seeds, 1500 gp per vendor deed) and operations costs (time, potions), at 1k per plant, which is already higher than the average 500 gp on most shards, you're still not even breaking even unless you manage to sell 339 plants every single week. In other words, there's a reason noone is running well stocked plant malls anywhere but Atlantic anymore.
 

OREOGL

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A vendor system where the cost to sell any item (high priced or low priced) can exceed the cost of the item for sale = BROKEN.
On a busy shard with abundant supply and demand, those forces generally come into play before the broken system can really take effect... however, on a slow shard that is not the case. Run over to Napa and see how many items you can find for sale on a vendor for >50 million. The OP who is on Napa like me didn't bring up this issue because it is trying to sell high end items without paying vendor fees... none of us on Napa are. Those items don't sell here period. His issue is a legit one...
If anyone has items that are chewing up its price in vendor fees they are doing it wrong...

Sometimes common sense applies.
 

Merus

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If anyone has items that are chewing up its price in vendor fees they are doing it wrong...

Sometimes common sense applies.
Actually you're wrong... On small shards it isn't a function of price... It is a function of time.
 

OREOGL

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I would have to agree that fees are broken, and have been for a long time. Forget about new players, let's just talk about low end items.

On Chessie, if you'd looked 2 years ago, you'd have found around 10 malls with numerous vendors who sold plants of every color and type. Generally the prices were 500 per plant, occasionally up to 1k, with white and black selling around 50k, and the other four 'rare' colors somewhere in-between. Now, you'll find only a handful of vendors who even have any plants on them at all.

First, for those who say to just load up a vendor with gold so it doesn't go broke, you're rather missing the point... Why would someone go to all the effort just to run a vendor at a loss? Take "Joe", who loads his plant vendor up with a good assortment of types and the non-rare colors, each plant priced at 1k per. Even if he's using a garden bed, he still had to spend gold to buy that bed, so regardless of beds or potions, producing that plant had actual costs. He's not making much profit per plant, esp when you consider the time it took him to raise the plant vs what he could have made hunting for that same amount of time.

But this isn't Atlantic, it's Chessie, or any other non-Atlantic shard. It's not every day that someone needs plants for deco, and when they do, they likely want 10 or 20 of the same color and type, not just the 1 or 2 of that particular color and type that Joe stocked. After all, there are what, 40 different types of plants, and 19 different colors, so Joe can't stock all 760 different plants on a single vendor. (And the customer ends up growing or importing really basic cheap items - I have personally transferred hedges and campions for friends who needed more than the shard could grow).

But let's say Joe is enthusiastic about gardening, and wants to make sure that his shard has a good source for decorative plants, regardless of which plant someone is looking for. So Joe decides to try to stock 9 or 10 of every possible plant. He now has a mall with 60 plant vendors. In a given week, he maybe sells 50 plants. It's all win-win, right?

Well, assuming Joe has every vendor filled to the max 125 items (so he can fit all 7,600 or so plants onto 60 vendors), and he's charging only 1,000 gp per plant, even for rare colors, then Joe is paying 807 gp per day per vendor, or 48,420 gp per day for all 60. He's selling 50 plants per week, earning 50k... but spending 338,940 gp per week to run those vendors... and that's without considering the cost of potions or the garden beds.

So for those saying that lower population shards should have vendor owners simply be loading the gold from a minute's hunting - or even from an hour's arrow hunting and crafting - you're missing the point. This theoretical example pretty well describes 4 of those gardening malls that used to run on Chessie. But the math for such a basic staple sucks. Even ignoring setup costs (garden beds, seeds, 1500 gp per vendor deed) and operations costs (time, potions), at 1k per plant, which is already higher than the average 500 gp on most shards, you're still not even breaking even unless you manage to sell 339 plants every single week. In other words, there's a reason noone is running well stocked plant malls anywhere but Atlantic anymore.
You can have 42 vendors.

So if he stocked them full 125 plants at 1k each vendor fees would be 31,500 a day or 220500 a week.

The problem is you took random numbers to fit an argument since the amount of sales is undefined and joe probably isn't stocking 5250 every week. Especially if he's only selling 50...
 
Last edited:

Yadd of Legends

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New Player Friendly Vendors are vendors that have prices new players with moderately skilled up characters can gather the gold to pay within a few hours of play which may be all they can play a week because of job and family time.

Keep in mind that many new players will want to play the game and will start by hunting mongbats and work their way up exploring the game world. There is a lot to this world that old timers ignore that new players likely enjoy, whens the last time you made a new character, and starting with NPC Guildmaster training, went hunting skeletons until you had the skill to hunt something tougher? A New Player will want to do this.

You've likely got mega millions in the bank and paying 10 million for an item is pocket change to you, 10 million takes a lot of hours to gather when each monster may drop a few hundred gold. If a New Player has a life outside the game, he can't spend 16/7 in the game gathering gold and won't want to spend months at a few hours a week gathering gold, he'll go check out another game where what he needs, at his skill, takes less time to get.
Btw, many of continue to relive the new player experience by starting characters from scratch on new shards, so it applies to us too
 

OREOGL

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That might hold true on an active shard... It doesn't really apply on the small shards.
Now you're just being ridiculous.

Supply and demand applied to every shard.
 

Merus

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Now you're just being ridiculous.

Supply and demand applied to every shard.
But for small shards the demand is so small and sporadic that it really messed with the idea that you can lower the price until it meets the customers willingness to pay. That is because most of the time, there isn't a customer. Consider to runebooks... Priced at 500 gold and 2000 gold... Both will just sit there... Both will probably end up costing the vendor more in fees than the item is for sale for... Simply because there isn't a consistent demand for runebooks...
 

OREOGL

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But for small shards the demand is so small and sporadic that it really messed with the idea that you can lower the price until it meets the customers willingness to pay. That is because most of the time, there isn't a customer. Consider to runebooks... Priced at 500 gold and 2000 gold... Both will just sit there... Both will probably end up costing the vendor more in fees than the item is for sale for... Simply because there isn't a consistent demand for runebooks...

Let me help you out. If you have an item at 500 gold it's going to take about 8 days to pay its cost in vendor fees. If you are not selling said item in 8 days you probably should stop trying if the trend is no one is buying.

It doesn't really matter if it is sporadic or not....
 

BrianFreud

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You can have 42 vendors.

So if he stocked them full 125 plants at 1k each vendor fees would be 31,500 a day or 220500 a week.

The problem is you took random numbers to fit an argument since the amount of sales is undefined and joe probably isn't stocking 5250 every week. Especially if he's only selling 50...
The vendor limit per house only maxes at 42 for a customizable 18x18. You can go as many as 72 for a castle.

Amount of sales = 50 quantity = 50,000 gp. Pretty well defined.

As for fees, according to stratics, the formula for fees per vendor per day is 3 x (20 + (([total cost of vendored items]-500)/500)). 3 x (20 + 120000/500) = 780 gp, not 31,500 gp. Even UO's not crazy enough to charge just over 25% in fees every day.

The numbers actually were all as accurate as possible; your numbers just don't make sense. :p

Also, this:
Price is directly related to time
...is meaningless.

What matters is the profit, not the price of an item. The above arguments that you can load enough gold in to keep a vendor functioning, even considering fees, all ignore this. If I have costs of X to produce something, and post it up for sale at price Y, and the system is charging me a combined total of Z in fees between posting and sale, then Y - (X + Z) should be greater than zero - ie, a profit. Where time comes in as a factor is in determining the size of Z. The point is, Z is likely much greater on any other shard other than Atlantic. If I'm having to add additional gold to the vendor to keep it running, and I am also selling items, then I'm running the vendor at a loss. Sure, we may have a few people who run vendors at a loss to provide newbies with gear, but expecting an entire shard to run vendors that way is both missing the point, and a recipie for the devastated shard economies that exist everywhere now except, perhaps, on Atlantic.
 

BrianFreud

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Let me help you out. If you have an item at 500 gold it's going to take about 8 days to pay its cost in vendor fees. If you are not selling said item in 8 days you probably should stop trying if the trend is no one is buying.

It doesn't really matter if it is sporadic or not....
Hence why it's difficult or impossible to find most goods on most shards.
 

Merus

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Let me help you out. If you have an item at 500 gold it's going to take about 8 days to pay its cost in vendor fees. If you are not selling said item in 8 days you probably should stop trying if the trend is no one is buying.

It doesn't really matter if it is sporadic or not....
And there you have the WHOLE point of the OP. Some folks on slow shards would like to be able to put those types of items... The ones that no one but new players really buy off vendors... so that if/when a new player happens to start or return on one of those shards there are at least a few to be found... Without actually losing money to the vendor fee system.

Why couldn't the vendor fees cap out at 90% or 95% of the actual cost of the item? Put a runebook out for sale for 1000 gold, the vendor stops charging a fee for that item once the fees reach 900 gold? Put an item out for 175 million, the vendor stops charging a fee after 157.5 million.
 

OREOGL

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The vendor limit per house only maxes at 42 for a customizable 18x18. You can go as many as 72 for a castle.

Amount of sales = 50 quantity = 50,000 gp. Pretty well defined.

As for fees, according to stratics, the formula for fees per vendor per day is 3 x (20 + (([total cost of vendored items]-500)/500)). 3 x (20 + 120000/500) = 780 gp, not 31,500 gp. Even UO's not crazy enough to charge just over 25% in fees every day.

The numbers actually were all as accurate as possible; your numbers just don't make sense. :p

Also, this:

...is meaningless.

What matters is the profit, not the price of an item. The above arguments that you can load enough gold in to keep a vendor functioning, even considering fees, all ignore this. If I have costs of X to produce something, and post it up for sale at price Y, and the system is charging me a combined total of Z in fees between posting and sale, then Y - (X + Z) should be greater than zero - ie, a profit. Where time comes in as a factor is in determining the size of Z. The point is, Z is likely much greater on any other shard other than Atlantic. If I'm having to add additional gold to the vendor to keep it running, and I am also selling items, then I'm running the vendor at a loss. Sure, we may have a few people who run vendors at a loss to provide newbies with gear, but expecting an entire shard to run vendors that way is both missing the point, and a recipie for the devastated shard economies that exist everywhere now except, perhaps, on Atlantic.

Fees are 60 + (item/500)*3

Or 60 plus 3 gold per every 500 gold

So 1k for 125 items = )125,000/500) *3 = 750

50 is not defined for joe because you picked it...you don't know how many joe will be selling.

As far as castles, they are not majority of vendor houses but I digress. It doesn't really matter if it's 42 or 72.
 

OREOGL

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Hence why it's difficult or impossible to find most goods on most shards.
Man if you sell a 20m item it's going to take 120k a day in fees and 167 days to break even in fees.

You're basing an argument on unrealistic numbers.
 

Captn Norrington

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@OREOGL @brianfreud2 Just so you guys know, the vendor limit on customizable houses is not 42, my Luna house is 16x14 (I think) and it has 66 available vendor spots, I use all of them.
 

Tanivar

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Run over to Napa and see how many items you can find for sale on a vendor for >50 million. The OP who is on Napa like me didn't bring up this issue because it is trying to sell high end items without paying vendor fees... none of us on Napa are. Those items don't sell here period.
You'd think this would click with most people but apparently not. *sighs....*

You need to charge Napa prices on Napa, not Atlantic prices. People are rarely going to pay Atlantic prices for items on Napa, the items in question are not worth as much on Napa. If you want to get Atlantic prices for your items then go play on Atlantic and sell your items there where people are willing to pay those prices and your items won't sit forever unsold. On Napa, charge what people are willing to pay and your items will sell before vendor fees even start to be a problem. Vendor fee problem solved, if reality sinks in past the greed.
 

OREOGL

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And there you have the WHOLE point of the OP. Some folks on slow shards would like to be able to put those types of items... The ones that no one but new players really buy off vendors... so that if/when a new player happens to start or return on one of those shards there are at least a few to be found... Without actually losing money to the vendor fee system.

Why couldn't the vendor fees cap out at 90% or 95% of the actual cost of the item? Put a runebook out for sale for 1000 gold, the vendor stops charging a fee for that item once the fees reach 900 gold? Put an item out for 175 million, the vendor stops charging a fee after 157.5 million.

All I read here is that you want to idiot proof this because people don't want to take time to do basic math.
 

BrianFreud

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Fees are 60 + (item/500)*3

Or 60 plus 3 gold per every 500 gold

So 1k for 125 items = )125,000/500) *3 = 750

50 is not defined for joe because you picked it...you don't know how many joe will be selling.
As for fees, thanks, that's pretty much exactly what I have now said twice over. You originally claimed otherwise:
...fees would be 31,500 a day or 220500 a week.
As for 50, yes, this is a theoretical example case. He could be selling none, 50, or 200; the point remains the same. He NEEDS to sell 339 plants just to break even. Focusing instead on quibbling about how many theoretical plants a theoretical player sold in a theoretical mall is simply missing the point.
 

BrianFreud

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@OREOGL @brianfreud2 Just so you guys know, the vendor limit on customizable houses is not 42, my Luna house is 16x14 (I think) and it has 66 available vendor spots, I use all of them.
Hehe, thanks, I thought I remembered seeing 60 as a limit on one of my customs, but went with the # from uoguide. :D (Maybe +20% also applies to vendor count?)
 

OREOGL

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As for fees, thanks, that's pretty much exactly what I have now said twice over. You originally claimed otherwise:


As for 50, yes, this is a theoretical example case. He could be selling none, 50, or 200; the point remains the same. He NEEDS to sell 339 plants just to break even. Focusing instead on quibbling about how many theoretical plants a theoretical player sold in a theoretical mall is simply missing the point.

Yes I did let's continue the mAth:

750*42 vendors = 31,500 gold a day
Or 220,500 a week.....
 

OREOGL

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As for fees, thanks, that's pretty much exactly what I have now said twice over. You originally claimed otherwise:


As for 50, yes, this is a theoretical example case. He could be selling none, 50, or 200; the point remains the same. He NEEDS to sell 339 plants just to break even. Focusing instead on quibbling about how many theoretical plants a theoretical player sold in a theoretical mall is simply missing the point.

To address the second point you threw in theoretical numbers to fit N unrealistic scenario. Show me anyone selling this many plants The given price and i will pay you 100m
 

Merus

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All I read here is that you want to idiot proof this because people don't want to take time to do basic math.
It has nothing to do with idiot proof. You think someone who puts up the 175 million item is going to let it sit there through 157 million in fees? Not hardly. Where supply and demand work (mostly just ATL) those forces will still trump any vendor fee system. What my proposal would do is put in a fail safe for very low demand items. No one is going to be willing to take a for sure profit of 2 million for an item they can sell for 5 right now just to put it on a vendor for 20 and let it sit for 6 months. But on slow shards you might start to see some lower end newbie stuff because we are willing to stock runebooks for 1000 gold if we know we would never have to lose money to let it sit there for 6 months.
 

MalagAste

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I would have to agree that fees are broken, and have been for a long time. Forget about new players, let's just talk about low end items.

On Chessie, if you'd looked 2 years ago, you'd have found around 10 malls with numerous vendors who sold plants of every color and type. Generally the prices were 500 per plant, occasionally up to 1k, with white and black selling around 50k, and the other four 'rare' colors somewhere in-between. Now, you'll find only a handful of vendors who even have any plants on them at all.

First, for those who say to just load up a vendor with gold so it doesn't go broke, you're rather missing the point... Why would someone go to all the effort just to run a vendor at a loss? Take "Joe", who loads his plant vendor up with a good assortment of types and the non-rare colors, each plant priced at 1k per. Even if he's using a garden bed, he still had to spend gold to buy that bed, so regardless of beds or potions, producing that plant had actual costs. He's not making much profit per plant, esp when you consider the time it took him to raise the plant vs what he could have made hunting for that same amount of time.

But this isn't Atlantic, it's Chessie, or any other non-Atlantic shard. It's not every day that someone needs plants for deco, and when they do, they likely want 10 or 20 of the same color and type, not just the 1 or 2 of that particular color and type that Joe stocked. After all, there are what, 40 different types of plants, and 19 different colors, so Joe can't stock all 760 different plants on a single vendor. (And the customer ends up growing or importing really basic cheap items - I have personally transferred hedges and campions for friends who needed more than the shard could grow).

But let's say Joe is enthusiastic about gardening, and wants to make sure that his shard has a good source for decorative plants, regardless of which plant someone is looking for. So Joe decides to try to stock 9 or 10 of every possible plant. He now has a mall with 60 plant vendors. In a given week, he maybe sells 50 plants. It's all win-win, right?

Well, assuming Joe has every vendor filled to the max 125 items (so he can fit all 7,600 or so plants onto 60 vendors), and he's charging only 1,000 gp per plant, even for rare colors, then Joe is paying 807 gp per day per vendor, or 48,420 gp per day for all 60. He's selling 50 plants per week, earning 50k... but spending 338,940 gp per week to run those vendors... and that's without considering the cost of potions or the garden beds.

So for those saying that lower population shards should have vendor owners simply be loading the gold from a minute's hunting - or even from an hour's arrow hunting and crafting - you're missing the point. This theoretical example pretty well describes 4 of those gardening malls that used to run on Chessie. But the math for such a basic staple sucks. Even ignoring setup costs (garden beds, seeds, 1500 gp per vendor deed) and operations costs (time, potions), at 1k per plant, which is already higher than the average 500 gp on most shards, you're still not even breaking even unless you manage to sell 339 plants every single week. In other words, there's a reason noone is running well stocked plant malls anywhere but Atlantic anymore.

Most folk quit selling plants because you made more profit for a long time selling the bi-product of plant dyes. However after everyone got over that phase then plants aren't really around that much because Garden beds came out and everyone could grow their own rather easily... Now it's come down to no one does that quest save the really hard core and getting the black and whites to make the dye colors that are "popular" is difficult and tedious. So few care anymore. Some still plant things in Magincia for the name... but that only appeals to a precious few. Though now that you can pretty much plant it and forget it for the time it is a bit nicer.

Lets not forget the other thing... most decorators have their own set of plants and most folk don't deco they don't even build anything more than a cube or something on their barren plot let alone decorate that plot.... You don't need to deco something you only put up for a few days while you clean out some IDOC and move on... but what do I know?

Most folk are more interested in making billions to sell gold for cash they don't care about anything else.
 

OREOGL

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It has nothing to do with idiot proof. You think someone who puts up the 175 million item is going to let it sit there through 157 million in fees? Not hardly. Where supply and demand work (mostly just ATL) those forces will still trump any vendor fee system. What my proposal would do is put in a fail safe for very low demand items. No one is going to be willing to take a for sure profit of 2 million for an item they can sell for 5 right now just to put it on a vendor for 20 and let it sit for 6 months. But on slow shards you might start to see some lower end newbie stuff because we are willing to stock runebooks for 1000 gold if we know we would never have to lose money to let it sit there for 6 months.
Look man I get your point, no one wants to take a chance on paying more in vendor fees than the item is worth.

All I'm saying it's not likely anyone is going to let a 175m item sit for 150 days to accrue 157m in vendor fees.
 

BrianFreud

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So you changed the number of vendors, and got a different total per week. Congrats - you've just proven that math works. :p Unfortunately, it didn't do anything to address my point. Your mall has 42 vendors each stocking 6 to 7 of each plant, while mine had 60 vendors stocking 9 to 10 of each. In your case, the customer who was looking for 10 to 20 plants all the same type isn't able to buy them, and your vendor owner still needs to sell 221 plants each week to break even.

As for showing you any mall that currently is stocking good numbers of all plants, as far as I know, none still exist. There USED to be some on Chessie and on the Japanese shards, but for the reasons described here, they're pretty well all shut down. (Just a side note, most of the Japanese ones I'd known about did operate as malls within castles.)

Goods cost roughly the same amount to produce, regardless of shard. On any shard other than Atlantic, there's both fewer sellers and fewer buyers. There's less competition, which should drive prices up, but there's fewer customers, so prices should go down. You've ignored this - you're suggesting that, if a given good won't sell within a week, there's no point in putting it on a vendor at all. The only reason for this is vendor fees.

You suggest that all that is required is lower prices on non-Atlantic shards, and goods will sell. This too ignores a basic consideration - namely, that there is a saturation point beyond which, goods will only sell sparingly, once most folks already have sufficient amount of that good, and have no need to buy more. On most smaller shards, this pretty well applies to everything save for the most expensive of artifacts, armor, and rares.

(Last, and an often ignored consideration, is that we pay fees per item, not per item type. This encourages people to sparsely stock, only 1 or 2 of any item, rather than 8 or 10 of that item.)

What we WANT is for people to be able to set up vendors, fill them up, and have a decent marketplace in which goods are normally available and competatively priced on any shard. What we HAVE is that on any shard other than Atlantic, it's difficult to find many basic resources and items, as noone is stocking them for sale, and simultaneously all those higher end items simply go to Atlantic, where they sell *faster*, thus incurring fewer fees between posting and sale, thus a higher profit for the seller. This all means that Atlantic has a functional economy, but nowhere else does.
 

OREOGL

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So you changed the number of vendors, and got a different total per week. Congrats - you've just proven that math works. :p Unfortunately, it didn't do anything to address my point. Your mall has 42 vendors each stocking 6 to 7 of each plant, while mine had 60 vendors stocking 9 to 10 of each. In your case, the customer who was looking for 10 to 20 plants all the same type isn't able to buy them, and your vendor owner still needs to sell 221 plants each week to break even.

As for showing you any mall that currently is stocking good numbers of all plants, as far as I know, none still exist. There USED to be some on Chessie and on the Japanese shards, but for the reasons described here, they're pretty well all shut down. (Just a side note, most of the Japanese ones I'd known about did operate as malls within castles.)

Goods cost roughly the same amount to produce, regardless of shard. On any shard other than Atlantic, there's both fewer sellers and fewer buyers. There's less competition, which should drive prices up, but there's fewer customers, so prices should go down. You've ignored this - you're suggesting that, if a given good won't sell within a week, there's no point in putting it on a vendor at all. The only reason for this is vendor fees.

You suggest that all that is required is lower prices on non-Atlantic shards, and goods will sell. This too ignores a basic consideration - namely, that there is a saturation point beyond which, goods will only sell sparingly, once most folks already have sufficient amount of that good, and have no need to buy more. On most smaller shards, this pretty well applies to everything save for the most expensive of artifacts, armor, and rares.

(Last, and an often ignored consideration, is that we pay fees per item, not per item type. This encourages people to sparsely stock, only 1 or 2 of any item, rather than 8 or 10 of that item.)

What we WANT is for people to be able to set up vendors, fill them up, and have a decent marketplace in which goods are normally available and competatively priced on any shard. What we HAVE is that on any shard other than Atlantic, it's difficult to find many basic resources and items, as noone is stocking them for sale, and simultaneously all those higher end items simply go to Atlantic, where they sell *faster*, thus incurring fewer fees between posting and sale, thus a higher profit for the seller. This all means that Atlantic has a functional economy, but nowhere else does.
Yeah I did it to show your math was not only wrong, albeit the numbers are insignificant, they were low and unlikely to hold the argument that people are going broke whe selling low end items.

I did not suggest all you had to do is lower the price. I stated price is directly related to time and all shards work Around supply and demand.

If things aren't selling why would they keep it stocked if they paid fees or not?
 

BrianFreud

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Yeah I did it to show your math was not only wrong, albeit the numbers are insignificant, they were low and unlikely to hold the argument that people are going broke whe selling low end items.

I did not suggest all you had to do is lower the price. I stated price is directly related to time and all shards work Around supply and demand.

If things aren't selling why would they keep it stocked if they paid fees or not?
Price only relates to time when you're dealing with items which have non-negligible costs. For items with negligible costs, there is not the ongoing demand such that, on most shards, there is ANY supply. The sole reason for this is fees. If someone can spend an afternoon setting up a mall, stocking it with the low end nessessities, then pretty much forget about it other than to restock every few weeks, then at least those items do start to have a supply. But noone will do this when the fees almost certainly guarantee them a loss. Thus no supply, regardless of intermittent demand. As you said - "If things aren't selling why would they keep it stocked if they paid fees or not?"... and you then wonder why many shards have essentially nothing for sale?
 

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Look man I get your point, no one wants to take a chance on paying more in vendor fees than the item is worth.

All I'm saying it's not likely anyone is going to let a 175m item sit for 150 days to accrue 157m in vendor fees.
You're right they won't. It is possible to fix the vendor system without removing the gold sink or allowing players to artificially inflate prices (any more than they already do). Removing fees for individual items less than a certain amount would work or capping fees for all items at a certain percentage of the sale price would also work. Personally I understand the flat fee, but I don't like that option as well because I see a little more opportunity for abuse.
 

OREOGL

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Price only relates to time when you're dealing with items which have non-negligible costs. For items with negligible costs, there is not the ongoing demand such that, on most shards, there is ANY supply. The sole reason for this is fees. If someone can spend an afternoon setting up a mall, stocking it with the low end nessessities, then pretty much forget about it other than to restock every few weeks, then at least those items do start to have a supply. But noone will do this when the fees almost certainly guarantee them a loss. Thus no supply, regardless of intermittent demand. As you said - "If things aren't selling why would they keep it stocked if they paid fees or not?"... and you then wonder why many shards have essentially nothing for sale?

That is arguable. I think the only reason theyre not being stocked, isn't the loss, but the "profits" are negligible.


In my own case, I would stock these items loss or not for the off chance someone needed one and would view the rest of the items i had for sale.
Which worked sometimes.

I did not stock these for profit,
 

Keith of Sonoma

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I have many items that would sell, but I don't put them on vendors because of vendor fees. It takes too long to sell them on my (non ATL) shard off of a vendor. I do have decent luck selling items in general chat though.
 
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