losing money on vendor fees

[Sevin0oo0]

What if there was a separate vendor fee scale for items with "crafted by" tag?
Would this help crafters?
non-magical=free, instead of sell value
magical based on its 'trashcan' turn-in point value, not sell value
vendor retains a min. daily fee charge

 

[FrejaSP]

I too wish vendor fee was cheaper but I think only way to do it is to make the each vendor take up some of the house secures so players can't use vendors as extra storage. Maybe let the house owner make the choice for each vendor, the fee we have now or each items on it do use a lockdown and it won't have any vendor fee.
I would love to get rid of my fee and let my vendors use my lockdowns.
A small vendorhouse in a hotspot may be willing to pay the fee but a vendor house away from town can't affort it.
As it is now, we have very few vendors on Siege, we do have 3x vendor fee and less players so it really sucks

 

[Tina Small]

The biggest problem with trying to run a crafter's shop these days isn't really the vendor fees. It's lack of new and returning players entering the game that need the items that a crafter can make and sell. EA even sells the Merchant's Trinkets at their online store to help ease the pain of vendor fees. But until they do something to get more players into the game who don't already have everything they could possibly want, it's all rather pointless.

Edited to add: I thought I'd tack on that any efforts by EA to get more players into the game have to be seen by existing players as being long-term efforts, not some flash-in-the-pan gimmick thaat will fizzle out in a few weeks or months. It can't just be some annual or biannual Return To Britannia type of campaign or some campaign where EA throws a piece of pixel trash at players if they recruit a friend to try out UO.

If it was actually EA that put together or at least paid for the development of the New Player Guide that was announced this week, that and what was done with Covetous level 1 are, in my opinion, hopeful signs that someone on the development team gets it that UO desperately needs some new blood if it's going to survive. But until I see some other things, such as character, guild, and faction search, and some serious tweaking of the Haven NPCs and other aspects of UO's "new player experience," I'm going to remain skeptical about UO's future and sure won't waste my time even thinking about opening up a crafter's shop on any shard. I will continue to the best of my ability to provide one-on-one help to newcomers that I run across. But anything more than that is more than I'm willing to commit to at this point.

 

[Doubleplay]

I am all for eliminating all vendor fees and charging lock down for items that are on the vendors of the homeowner. Objects for sale by other players on contract spaces should count against each player's respective home by some percentage. Players who do not own a home, but place vendors on contract spots should pay the normal vendor fees (if that is possible, not knowing if you can place a vendor if you are not a homeowner).

 

[DarkScripture]

I thought vendor did count the house limit storage.

 

[Sevin0oo0]

I am all for eliminating all vendor fees and charging lock down for items that are on the vendors of the homeowner. Objects for sale by other players on contract spaces should count against each player's respective home by some percentage. Players who do not own a home, but place vendors on contract spots should pay the normal vendor fees .

explained like that, it's cool w/ me. I was just trying to make it easier to get crafted goods into the hands of others. What if, implemented that way, crafted didn't count against lock downs? Gets rid of those pesky storage vendors, might even help the Luna Lag

@TINA Guess i'm a bit different in that I will continue, to the best of my ability, to provide ideas for helping UO in general, not just noobs, even if it's a waste of my time thinking about it. I'll quit when I don't play any more

 

[FrejaSP]

I thought vendor did count the house limit storage.

Players are using vendors for storing of bods in books, before the vendor fee, they was using them for storing crap and setting a high price so noone did buy it.

Reply to Doubleplay: I think it would be to complicated to against each vendor owners respective home but it could be nice that way. I do however believe it should be possible to allow a homeless vendor owner to use the shops lockdowns as many do help newbies with letting them have a vendor.

 

[Minerva Foxglove]

I think vendors should charge when something is sold. That way you could stock more items without losing money. Tina is right , its new players that buy crafted items and most everything else. There are things the devs could do , the new guide was a good first step. But I bet we players could do more for getting and keeping new players tbh. Takes time and effort but if we really wants UO to be here for us in the future , we need to help out in all ways we can think of and let them into our guilds and bring them along to events etc. I dont talk about dumping gold on them, but spend time and share your knowledge. Spend some time in help chat is good too.

 

[FrejaSP]

I think vendors should charge when something is sold. That way you could stock more items without losing money.

That way, you would see vendors used for storing items to spare lockdowns. The items will have insane prices to stop people from buying them.
You can only remove vendor fee on stocked items if they count against the house lockdowns.

 

[Minerva Foxglove]

Bah thats true ofcourse. And using lockdowns would be the end for guild shops like ours..

 

[FrejaSP]

Yes it would be a problem for small shops with alot vendors. Here Doubleplays idea would help, the idea about counting against the lockdowns in the vendor ownsrs house.
Also it is not the vendor shops in hotspots, who have trouble with the fee

 

[Woodsman]

If there was some way to use a shard-wide auction house to help everybody, I'm all for it. Maybe instead a shard-wide vendor listing of some sort, with a means to teleport a buyer to a seller's shop. It would make it easier for people to find stocked vendors, it would hurt the illegal search sites, and it would especially help new players find what they need.

Putting aside all of the other new player aspects of Warcraft and Diablo, their auction systems do a good job of helping new/low level players get up and running pretty fast. If you could harness aspects of that, without doing much harm to vendor shops, I'm all for it.

 

[Sevin0oo0]

do a good job of helping new/low level players get up and running pretty fast.

in regards to that, the faster a new player gets up to speed, the less reliant on crafted items? Arties, or arti level, are common place now and GM made has not kept pace as I see it.
I went into Del tunnel the other day, remembering having to run from single lava lizards while training taming. Now gimme a few dozen at once, easy meat.
Today's armor and weapons compared to the good old days when GM meant something. GM was good, and everyone knows it, THAT's why you don't see gm items anymore, because people don't like to sell nurfed crapola.
As a noob, I'd take GM today, hell ya, when start-up armor is all 18's or less, at least until I can "get up to speed", and get some Real stuff. Crafted today should be that near arti level - and maybe that's what they're trying to do with reforging? which only helps those already going.

 

[MissEcho]

Just reduce the fee. Keep it simple. I have noticed since returning from a 2 1/2 yr absence that the fee seems to have gotten HUGE now so it is really biting into any profit I may make, and puts me off stocking anything worth over a mil or more. Only the 'rich' can afford the vendor fees, and newer players or those without much money find it difficult to sustain the fee, especially when starting up as a merchant or stocking useful items that take a while to sell.

Bod storage on vendors has been going on for years (at least 6-7 yrs if not longer), and as the item is 'not for sale' as no bods have prices they are not incurring fees anyways. It is like having an empty bag or book on the vendor, and basically it is no big deal. If anything make it that a BOD book = 1 lockdown irrespective of how many bods are in the book then people wouldn't need to store this way, and no, I don't do bods it just always felt stupid to me that if the bods were in a book they should take more than one lockdown. You need to store hundreds of the things if you are a serious crafter, and they basically are NO USE to you until you have the large bod or materials to fill them, it was a poor design of the BOD book and it has been 'legal' to store them this way for years, like it or not. Seems to me simpler way to get around the problem would be for the dev team to make the book count as 1 lockdown and then not allow people to put un-priced bods on a vendor at all.

Making vendor items count as Lockdowns, will see the end of all vendoring for me. If useful stuff, that I personally no longer want, or stuff I wish to craft for sale to offer to newbies or non-crafters is counted as a lockdown, then basically it will go in the bin or I won't bother crafting, sometimes things take a while to sell. I can't afford to have a 1000, lockdowns or more taken from my house (8 vendors worth atm, and I used to run 30 fully stocked vendors when I played last time). That is the reason I actually don't mind 'paying' the fee to vend them. Now I rent 'space' so having to pay the house owner for that, plus the vendor fee is sufficient 'payment' for me as a merchant.

People never really used vendors as regular storage by pricing items high so no one would by them. What they 'were' doing was pricing stuff high, and then removing the items each day before the 'price' was used to determine the vendor fee, this was stopped when they added the 'vendor penalty' so that the person was hit with the fee and couldn't circumvent paying it by this action.

Fees are too high, they DO need to be reduced as they are putting people off vendoring and not making it worth the bother. Just reduce the fee, keep it simple.

 

[Woodsman]

Arties, or arti level, are common place now and GM made has not kept pace as I see it.

That is a big problem. I don't know how you fix it without reverting to pre-AOS because you'd have to bring certain monsters/mobs back down the ladder as far as damage/resists.

It is a shame, because until AOS, UO's armor/weapon system were far easier to understand from the point of view of new players.

You don't want to go the other way, like the extreme of Warcraft/Diablo where you reach level 30 so you start searching for level 27-30 gear, etc. etc. While it's helpful for new players somewhat since it's easy to understand the level system, it also just turns things into a spreadsheet game and UO is close enough there as it is.

GM stuff mattering was one of the few things I miss from the early days. Sure, the crafting system has followed somewhat, and maybe with reforging they are trying to put things back in the hands of players, but dang is it hard and expensive on new players.

 

[Sevin0oo0]

that's why I suggested crafted items not count towards storage

 

[TullyMars]

What if there was a separate vendor fee scale for items with "crafted by" tag?
Would this help crafters?
non-magical=free, instead of sell value
magical based on its 'trashcan' turn-in point value, not sell value
vendor retains a min. daily fee charge

I seem to always bring this up when vendor fees are discussed for regular player vendors (don't get me started on commodity vendors at the Magincia bazaar), but the real issue seems to be what people charge.
If you take an item and price it at 499 gold, your vendor fee does not increase...remains 60 gold the base vendor fee. (There is the rare exception where the pre-defined base price of the item is larger than 499 but I won't go into those)
If you put 125 items on your vendor at 499 gold, your vendor fee does not increase...remains 60 gold the base vendor fee
If you charge 500 gold for 1 item on your vendor the total vendor fee increases by 3.
If you charge 999 gold for 1 item on your vendor the total vendor fee increases by 3.
If you charge 1000 gold for 1 item on your vendor the total vendor fee ups by 6 gold.

The point is depending on how you price your vendored items, the fee could by 0.6% a day, 0.3% a day or even 0.0% a day (+ the 60 base)
Multiply that out by a week and you are at 4.2% a week at most.
That is not outrageous, especially when you are dealing with crafted items which are usually fairly cheap. If it sells out that day, you don't even pay a vendor fee. But when you start throwing out 5 million gold power scrolls and such, and it sits for 1 month, then you get to some real money.

So my suggestion, look at your prices, subtract 1 gold from the price where appropriate, look to group in packs that fit well in the 499 gold range (instead of selling 100 packs of arrows at 1000 gold sell 50 packs of arrows at 499 gold for no vendor fee) and have realistic expectations of sale turn around time...

Then think it could be worse...you could have to pay 5% commission on each buy, 5% commission on each sale, and 5% of the price each week prorated down to the second (aka try a full service buy and sell commodity vendor at the mag bazaar, lol)

 

[Raptor85]

The biggest problem with trying to run a crafter's shop these days isn't really the vendor fees. It's lack of new and returning players entering the game that need the items that a crafter can make and sell. EA even sells the Merchant's Trinkets at their online store to help ease the pain of vendor fees. But until they do something to get more players into the game who don't already have everything they could possibly want, it's all rather pointless.

Not QUITE true, the problem is twofold, the first issue is the items aren't commonly purchased so they sit for long times, this is true for a lot more than just crafter stuff (power scrolls for instance, some can sit for months). Vendor fees kill the ability to leave them on there without leeching all your gold away. The other half of this issue is when people DO want to buy them....they're nowhere to be found since nobody is going to keep things that lose gold stocked.

What would be nice is being able to up-front pay a percentage of the item cost to keep the item listed (like a listing fee i guess for the vendor to sell it for you), then no vendor fees after that, that way there's no "free" storage (if someone wants to grossly overprice something so people won't buy it, it'll cost them a lot of gold to do so), maybe even tier the rate so that newer shops have an easier time (like 5% rate for items under 100k, 10% rate for anything above)....sure for fast selling items and vendor locations that sell so fast they often don't pay fees on many items this will cost more, but this will keep more items stocked total (as there's no reason to not leave things stocked once they're up) and make for a pretty substantial gold sink as well.

 

[Pink Dragoness]

This was the best thread for issue I came across while checking my vendor this morning. In less then 5 minutes I watched two million gold dissapear from my vendor. Im confussed, so does it charge me each day for the items and at the end of the week it will charge for items plus vendor fee? The highest priced item I have on that vendor is one-5 mil, every thing else is less.
So the vendor was at 328 mil, went to 327 then 326, days were at 4 days 23 hours and vendor charge 248,280

 

[wanderer1origin]

That is a big problem. I don't know how you fix it without reverting to pre-AOS because you'd have to bring certain monsters/mobs back down the ladder as far as damage/resists.

It is a shame, because until AOS, UO's armor/weapon system were far easier to understand from the point of view of new players.

You don't want to go the other way, like the extreme of Warcraft/Diablo where you reach level 30 so you start searching for level 27-30 gear, etc. etc. While it's helpful for new players somewhat since it's easy to understand the level system, it also just turns things into a spreadsheet game and UO is close enough there as it is.

GM stuff mattering was one of the few things I miss from the early days. Sure, the crafting system has followed somewhat, and maybe with reforging they are trying to put things back in the hands of players, but dang is it hard and expensive on new players.

if uo had d3's auction house search ability new items and craftables would have a market !!!
lacking in this game, really hurts all but the hardcore hnters and crafters for self only!!!
traded up weapons in d3 based on level and resold was a easy step!
there is no economy left in game !!!!!!!!!!!!!

there is no place to sell anything in this game short of atlantic

if a gloable auction house would revive interest in sell thing to max suit over, em items that in truth have no worth or value, and just sell cause you neighbor sold one for x amount so u want that price also!!!!!!!!!!!!! no long term value one of 10 of a deco item is still deco and not worth prices being put around!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Woodsman]

if uo had d3's auction house search ability new items and craftables would have a market !!!
lacking in this game, really hurts all but the hardcore hnters and crafters for self only!!!

Make a shard-wide "auction" house (more of a listing house or a brokerage), limit of 10 items, only available in say Britain and one or two other cities that the team would like to see more activity in (not Luna). Make it so that you teleport to the actual vendor house when you buy the item.

Would break up the monopoly of sorts that the Luna vendors and the illegal search engines enjoy, would not replace keeping vendors stocked if the buyer had to purchase directly from the vendor.

It's not exactly an auction house when I lay it out all out, but the intention is to give people a chance to compete with others, limit the amount of influence the spammers/search engines have, keep people from listing a lot of crap, and to not replace the interaction between players. A lot of people are opposed to an auction house because if you sold directly through an auction house, it would replace people visiting vendors. My view is to bridge the gap. And those who want to still have specialty shops, they could have their 10 things listed as being related to their shop.

 

[Lord Nabin]

I run tons of vendors. I have never had a problem with the fees and think they are fine how they are.

It is just something you have to balance your pricing out with in order to keep the merchandise flowing. If you are seriously having a problem with the fees then your goods are probably priced to high and sitting on your vendors to long for your own good.


I prefer that Uo didn't have an auction house. I like the In game player events called "Auctions" it provides a great way for the player base to engage each other.

Why does EA have to solve and provide everything for us. The whole point is that this is a world where we can build and engage the community at various levels. There is a point where we should be able to come up with our own solutions.

You never have to use a vendor I see whole business models based on spamming what you have for sale in general chat.

A vendor allows you to sell when your not even logged in, Seriously pay the fee its worth it.

 

[Madrid]

Tina nailed it pretty spot on. Lack of new new players is a major issue. I have virtually every item in the game I want on multiple shards and don't spend too much gold these days. Maybe my prices are too high but I also notice I don't sell as many items either which Tina's post described about the lack of new players.

Depite no new players vendor fees are an issue and should be addressed.

FreyaSP nailed it that items on vendors should be attached the storage capacity of house but if a house makes itself available to public for vendor they should be a boost in capacity per vendor perhaps.

Minverna Foxglove nailed it that the fees should be deducted at the time of sale. This is the most important change that can be implemented. I've seen too many shops go under because the reoccuring fees put them out of business.

The problem is I read in a post just this last week by Phoenix Mythic that he wants to look at more ways for gold sinks. That attitude does nothing to help with the issue of vendors so if that's the mindset (albeit a ridiculous one) of the powers that be then I doubt any forward progress can be made regarding vendor issues.

 

[TullyMars]

This was the best thread for issue I came across while checking my vendor this morning. In less then 5 minutes I watched two million gold dissapear from my vendor. Im confussed, so does it charge me each day for the items and at the end of the week it will charge for items plus vendor fee? The highest priced item I have on that vendor is one-5 mil, every thing else is less.
So the vendor was at 328 mil, went to 327 then 326, days were at 4 days 23 hours and vendor charge 248,280
View attachment 9321

I am trying to understand, so bear with me.
It sounds like you have a commodity vendor at the bazaar...a little off topic of the original post but lets see if I can help.
It sounds like you have a weekly vendor fee of 248,280 which means your commodity vendor will pay a fee of 1 gold every 2 seconds.
If all this is correct, the reason you watched 2 million gold dissapear from your vendor so fast, is someone sold you some items which your vendor paid for from its funds.

However you mentioned you have one item on your vendor for 5 million? This suggests you might have a regular vendor (very few commodity vendors have 1 item priced at 5 mill)
If that is the case, you should lose the exact amount of the vendor fee (248,280) once a day....
and unless you pull items off trying to avoid some fees and creating vending penalties on the items that have to be paid when the items are replaced on a vendor.
Otherwise your vendor will not just lose gold especially while you are watching.

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

9 times out of 10 if your shop goes under due to vendor u either were too expensive so no one would buy your stuff or u were trying to sell stuff no one wants.For obv reasons neither way will work.As a vendor its great to be able to keep all varieties of whatever your selling and whatnot looks great on the vendor but those varieties that arent selling? Pull em or make em cheaper!Some stuff just doesnt sell no matter how cheap if no one uses it or its easy to get or whatever thats waste of time stuff that will put u under fast.The other thing being too expensive is obv too if u sell an item and a shop down the road is cheaper Almost everyone will go on down the road an snag the deal.I have been running many vendors successfully for many years now and its mostly from paying close attention to prices and others prices to stay competitive and to what is actually selling-which changes almost daily lol even on the best high end items they go through lulls where no ones buying it.Mostly because as people have said here already theres only so many people out there and most have what they need untill they lose/break an item or make new chars.

 

[Pink Dragoness]

I am trying to understand, so bear with me.
It sounds like you have a commodity vendor at the bazaar...a little off topic of the original post but lets see if I can help.
It sounds like you have a weekly vendor fee of 248,280 which means your commodity vendor will pay a fee of 1 gold every 2 seconds.
If all this is correct, the reason you watched 2 million gold dissapear from your vendor so fast, is someone sold you some items which your vendor paid for from its funds.

However you mentioned you have one item on your vendor for 5 million? This suggests you might have a regular vendor (very few commodity vendors have 1 item priced at 5 mill)
If that is the case, you should lose the exact amount of the vendor fee (248,280) once a day....
and unless you pull items off trying to avoid some fees and creating vending penalties on the items that have to be paid when the items are replaced on a vendor.
Otherwise your vendor will not just lose gold especially while you are watching.

Thanks for your reply Tully, I have no Bazaar vendor, it was just a bazaar event to watch 2 mil go down the drain.
I am understanding what your saying about the charges. My vendor is in Luna, the only thing I can figure out what was happening is the vendor was charging me for gold sitting on it, or there just some kind of bug with the charging. I did pull all my gold off my vendors, leaving them sit under 100 mil. Nothing I dislike more is watching hard work of hours just wash down a drain. After pulling the gold, I watched the vendor do its check and withdraw the next day. It was fine at that time.

 

[Raptor85]

9 times out of 10 if your shop goes under due to vendor u either were too expensive so no one would buy your stuff or u were trying to sell stuff no one wants.For obv reasons neither way will work.As a vendor its great to be able to keep all varieties of whatever your selling and whatnot looks great on the vendor but those varieties that arent selling? Pull em or make em cheaper!Some stuff just doesnt sell no matter how cheap if no one uses it or its easy to get or whatever thats waste of time stuff that will put u under fast.The other thing being too expensive is obv too if u sell an item and a shop down the road is cheaper Almost everyone will go on down the road an snag the deal.I have been running many vendors successfully for many years now and its mostly from paying close attention to prices and others prices to stay competitive and to what is actually selling-which changes almost daily lol even on the best high end items they go through lulls where no ones buying it.Mostly because as people have said here already theres only so many people out there and most have what they need untill they lose/break an item or make new chars.

The problem is if you go under a certain price point it costs you more to sell them then just trash them, when it's things that people need but not all that often it would be NICE to leave them on the vendor so that when people are looking for them they can just shop and find them, but this isn't the case. Unless you have billions of gold backing you and you sell things in a quantity as to where you no longer care about losing near 50% of your incoming gold to vendor fees (I don't have that many hours in my day...) you'll drive your vendors bankrupt very quickly. I'm NOT going to mark down stuff like the 120 scrolls to super low prices simply to avoid vendor fees, I already sell them relatively cheap and even at that they're barely worth selling. People only buy that stuff as they need it. Another issue with that is for things like crafted and imbued armor, it's not replaced often so doesn't sell quickly, what was left on my vendors I, in the end, trashed, as before I had it selling AT COST (AKA I make no profit...and actually go into the red due to vendor fees) just because I wanted to get rid of it, as I was only making a few sales a month. (and often I heard complaints shortly after one sold that nobody sold decent armor, as the fees are so expensive I was losing significant amounts of gold if I stocked more than 1 at a time due to how slowly they sell)

And that's the kicker there, I CANT fill a vendor with suits of mid-range armor for people to buy easily because at the rate which it sells I can barely price it above cost and at that I lose all profit on vendor fees. So people buying can't find anyone selling because those of us who could...don't anymore. This makes new people without a guild especially have a hard time.

 

[FrejaSP]

Yes and if it is bad on normal shards, no wonder most of our vendors are gone, vendor fee are 3x normal shard on Siege

 

[Assia Penryn]

I wouldn't mind if the fees were scaled a bit with the lower end pricing having a lower upkeep. I think it would help shards see more specialty vendors like furniture, plants, etc. Those vendors are real specific and traffic to them sometimes is sporadic.

I primarily sell high-end and don't have a problem with the fees, but then again I price my items to move and account for the upkeep in my profit calculation. I would rather sell something for 500k less and have it gone in a day or two than have it sit for weeks.

 

[Sauteed Onion]

Hmmm, vendor fees, commodity vendors.. hmm.. perhaps it's the lack of various types of "vendor" that could be both it's problem and saving grace. Hear me out! I'm not super smart or anything, but I think we've got a good thing going here with this topic, and certain cases where people really are loosing out on stinkin vendor fees trying sell homemade stuff for other people's homes and personal use.

Like the commodity brokers in New Magincia. That is kinda on the right track I think. Perhaps a bit odd lookin, you know a bunch of guyst just standing around in a big open area.. that looks.. not so pretty, with signs all over the place.. or whatever. Ok here's my idea for specialized goods vendors. Make if first off, covered buildings. Like, take for instance a building in the city of Britain. Or several buildings in different parts. There's east and west brit, so let's say 2 buildings which could hold 10 "brokers" each. Instead of a bunch of signs and "plots" just have a book, or like a cash register on a shelf there for each vendor spot, so 1 it just looks better, and 2 hopefully seems more natural. The player wishing to set up their specialized broker there interacts with the cash register or ledger or whatever and the gump pops up. Ok, the player chooses right when the vendor is set up that they are "setting up" how much in gold that vendor will transact. Like let's say there is a maximum of 1 million gold that vendor will sell stuff up to. and there can be increments, you like, 5,000 gold, 20,000 gold, 80,000 gold, and on up to like 1 million. The player pays upfront for this vendor. It should be a specialized vendor that sells like player made furniture and crafting tools and such. Not what a typical vendor carries, mind you say in Luna or Yew Gate; examples being high priced swords and "phatty lewtz" yo. So the player can put up their wares, and that broker can keep selling their wares til it's reached the amount the player paid an upfront charge for.

Now, some people may be like well, that's a vendor fee, but I think the problem people are having from the gist of what I'm reading is let's say they're trying to sell a boat load of sewing kits and crafted chairs or something like that.. and they put each of them up on a house vendor that charges a daily fee, every day.. and it may be 7 weeks before somebody comes by and decides, hey I can use some exceptional sewings, and why not a chair to sit in whilst I use these sewing kits.. that'll be nice. So over that 7 weeks, they don't make the daily fee back for that sale of 2 items.. a sewing kit and a chair. But with the method I've put out there, if they paid like 20,000 gold upfront for a long term vendor, to handle 1 million gold worth of items that vendor will handle (keep in mind it is very specific in what it CAN and CANNOT handle, examples being exceptional crafting tools, or furniture items, forges, etc...) then the person that paid upfront the 20k can afford to sale an item once every 7 weeks or hell even longer in a lot of cases. But with this in mind, these can be put up in every city, easily, and covered in buldings and look WAY better than the commodity brokers in New Magincia. I mean, I've gone by some of those brokers and they're sitting in a throne, with a wooden fence all around them, in the middle of a patch of dirt. It just looks tacky. not to mention they handle a lot of stuff.. and it's all jumbled together looking too. I think there is a lot of potential in the commodity broker system, but it's so on the verge of just bein one of them things that got put in that's just one of them things that ya know.. got put in and didn't get seen through. I'd stab a monkey to have a nifty looking vendor area in a town that sold furniture or cooking appliances like forks and plates. (Which would be awesome if they gave a good duration buff for when you eat food with em.) Just my 2 meows.

 

[Sevin0oo0]

The problem is if you go under a certain price point it costs you more to sell them then just trash them, when it's things that people need but not all that often it would be NICE to leave them on the vendor so that when people are looking for them they can just shop and find them, but this isn't the case.

slight change from my opening post - for items with "crafted by" tag, or exceptional...
non-magical=free
magical/imbued/reforged/enhanced/etc based on its 'trashcan' turn-in point value, [perhaps 50gp @pt]
vendor retains the min. daily fee charge(60gp I think) + the normal current charges for other items.
Who cares if you're selling 50gp tools and getting a free vendor fee?
Vendor owners - Would you stock more GM made items, if there were lower associated fees with those specific items?

Thread wasn't about lowering fees in general, or what it costs someone to sell an expensive item. (if you're selling 500k items, vendor fee is just fine)
It's about Crafted items only. The ones with your Name on them, or exceptional. It's about making crafted items more available to all.

 

[TullyMars]

slight change from my opening post - for items with "crafted by" tag, or exceptional...
non-magical=free
magical/imbued/reforged/enhanced/etc based on its 'trashcan' turn-in point value, [perhaps 50gp @pt]
vendor retains the min. daily fee charge(60gp I think) + the normal current charges for other items.
Who cares if you're selling 50gp tools and getting a free vendor fee?
Vendor owners - Would you stock more GM made items, if there were lower associated fees with those specific items?

Thread wasn't about lowering fees in general, or what it costs someone to sell an expensive item. (if you're selling 500k items, vendor fee is just fine)
It's about Crafted items only. The ones with your Name on them, or exceptional. It's about making crafted items more available to all.

Inre exceptional non-magical items...
OK, so are we talking just raising the cutoff?
The base 60 gold a day for the vendor seems to be acceptable.
Right now you pay no extra vendor fee on 50gp tools.
You pay no extra vendor fee if you charge 499 gold for each item on a fully stocked vendor.
So the problem seems to be the 499 gold price is below cost of most items due to inflation?
No one wants to stock their vendor with 125 gm exceptional made furniture for 499 gold a piece.
So what is the price point we are talking about? 999? 4999? 9999?

I am ok with that, but I think it kind of a temp bandaid.
It might allow me to stock certain vendors a bit more.
I could stock up my masonry vendor with some of the higher cost colored granite items.
I could fill up a vendor with some barbed leather pieces that I people could shop for their "perfect imbuing blank" (Right now if you make a barbed leather tunic using 12 pieces of barbed leather and only charged 499 gold, people might be tempter to buy your armor and send it to their salvage bag or scissors right away for cheap barbed leather)
But honestly I think it would only effect a few good merchants who are good people at heart anyhow and already try to provide such services.
But I am all for helping those types of vendors.

 

[NuSair]

I run tons of vendors. I have never had a problem with the fees and think they are fine how they are.

It is just something you have to balance your pricing out with in order to keep the merchandise flowing. If you are seriously having a problem with the fees then your goods are probably priced to high and sitting on your vendors to long for your own good.

I prefer that Uo didn't have an auction house. I like the In game player events called "Auctions" it provides a great way for the player base to engage each other.

Why does EA have to solve and provide everything for us. The whole point is that this is a world where we can build and engage the community at various levels. There is a point where we should be able to come up with our own solutions.

You never have to use a vendor I see whole business models based on spamming what you have for sale in general chat.

A vendor allows you to sell when your not even logged in, Seriously pay the fee its worth it.

It's amazing how people have such a narrow view of this. They only look at things how they concern them in the game and only things they deal with. This isn't about selling rares or selling of high priced artifacts so that your vendor fees are 100,000 or more (and there are still ways around it).

This thread started because of a comment I made in another thread, about how my wife and I for years ran things like masonry and carpentry vendors that basically broke even or cost us money. And it was wasn't worth the time or effort to put into getting the raw materials, especially when it cost us money to run it (in the end, we were charging 100-500 gold, in essence selling things at a loss).

 

[Tjalle]

Yes and if it is bad on normal shards, no wonder most of our vendors are gone, vendor fee are 3x normal shard on Siege

Freja, they changed that a few years ago.
We now pay the same vendor fees on Siege as they do on prodo.

 

[Sevin0oo0]

OK, so are we talking just raising the cutoff?

It would 'kinda' be like raising the cutoff, for certain items. haven't had coffee yet, sop here goes...

To make code work easier, and easier to understand, I'll first add a call to Change the "VDP" price amounts to reflect a multiplier of the Point amount that would be received, had the object been dropped in the trash. (VDP is outdated anyways). Multiplier amount can always be adjusted later to reflect the economy.

fee pricing examples...
free 0-499gp
Player crafted - Non magical, non-enhanced - Free (iron-val/reg-barb/plain-frost/etc)
Player crafted - Enhanced - Fee based on the suggested VDP price
Player crafted - Magical/imbued/reforged - Fee based on the suggested VDP price
Not Player Crafted - normal fee pricing

It helps get your crafted item, and more items, in the hands of the people that NEED it, or to the people that can afford it and want it.

 

[Sevin0oo0]

They only look at things how they concern them in the game and only things they deal with.

This thread started because of a comment I made in another thread, about how my wife and I for years ran things like masonry and carpentry vendors that basically broke even or cost us money.

That is exactly why this thread started - If I had remembered it was you, I would of led with a Quote

While it's natural for people to want things in a self-serving way, and it's not for me to judge. I look at this in the aspects of what could I get fow All my stuff in a RMT? Both accounts and gold used to be worth Far more than current. (someone quoted 10cents a million, a Dev quoted $30 per 100gp in the wee early days).
It'll never go back to that, but, I feel if people worked to restore some of that, it will help everybody, including themselves. That's the engine that drives UO.
Putting the game ahead of self, everybody wins, existing and new players alike.

 

[Raptor85]

A cutoff doesn't make sense either, sure that covers some items on some shards but what about moderately high priced items like in my examples (midrange suits of armor and power scrolls, talking about 250k average per). Frankly you don't make much profit on those as it is, it's a lot of time, effor, and resources involved in both, but also neither are terribly fast sellers so even leaving just a single one on the vendor can easily chew you down to the "not worth it" point.

I'm having this problem myself now that i deactivated my own crafter account, i'm finding it nearly impossible to get decent armor pieces or backup suits as the only ones you dont take a loss stocking are the blanks to be imbued on so nobody carrys anything else, so I've been on both sides of this equation, I know WHY people aren't stocking them but at the same time there's lots of things I need that people won't vendor, you have to ask for in chat, as they eat too much gold.

A LOT of us would be willing to actually pay a HIGHER percentage to vendor fees if it were a "one time" deal, effectively paying more on the fast sellers so that we can afford to even stock the slow ones. I would GLADLY put up 10-20% of the item cost as vendor fees if it meant i could stock a full vendor of them and not have to worry about either going bankrupt of checking daily if the one item on the vendor sold yet or not...so I can put another one up. It would probably in the end actually pull more gold out of the system than it does now if it were done this way too as a lot of the items that would be being put up for sale right now are 100% sold thorugh the forums and general chat paying no fees at all. On top of that when people log in they could actuallly go and shop at vendors again and see things other than books labeled "for xxx item ICQ #"

The vendor fees system hasn't made sense in a long time, the last major revisions of it were based around the assumption that most things sell pretty quickly, as was the case for even slow sellers back pre-ML....but our population is a hell of a lot smaller now and there's far fewer new players so you lose a far larger percentage of the item cost in vendor fees than you used to.

 

[Sevin0oo0]

what about moderately high priced items like in my examples (midrange suits of armor and power scrolls, talking about 250k average per).

of course power scrolls aren't player crafted - this is only for player crafted items - some PVP suits I hear can run into the millions. I'm suggesting If You Crafted it, then the fee is based on the suggested VDP price. If you didn't create the item, or just modified some loot, or other game spawn, normal fee.

 

[Raptor85]

of course power scrolls aren't player crafted - this is only for player crafted items - some PVP suits I hear can run into the millions. I'm suggesting If You Crafted it, then the fee is based on the suggested VDP price. If you didn't create the item, or just modified some loot, or other game spawn, normal fee.

but that doesn't make much sense, that makes imbued stuff incredibly profitable but keeps other stuff that would be nice to be vendored, like the shame/wrong loot etc still essentially "unvendorable", this still makes it competely not worth stocking a LOT of items on vendors.

 

[Sevin0oo0]

that makes imbued stuff incredibly profitable.

profit, and availability. It would not hurt my feelings if the fee for all items were based on a VDP amount.

 

[FrejaSP]

Freja, they changed that a few years ago.
We now pay the same vendor fees on Siege as they do on prodo.

Ups you right. Then I understand the complains from normal shards because vendor fee is insane when trying to sell expensive items.

 

[Flutter]

I think that at this point anyone who plays enough to keep a vendor stocked should be paid by the vendor.
It's a lot of work to keep a vendor stocked.
I guess they can't do that though, people would just throw a bunch of trash on there to make a coin. But then again... it would cause an increase in vendors and in return a greater shopping experience for players.
Hmm.

 

[weins201]

If your vendor isn't making money its very simple.

You are charging an amount no one will pay or selling an item no one wants!!! Get with it and fix yourself the system doesn't need any tweaking YOU do!! :gun: It would be like selling a BEEF BURGER in India.

 

[Sevin0oo0]

You are charging an amount no one will pay or selling an item no one wants!!! Get with it and fix yourself the system doesn't need any tweaking YOU do!!

youmadbro?
You're probably right, crafting is pretty much dead, why bother? GM is worthless anyways. No One needs GM made stuff, let's just scrap the whole thing. A Newbie can make their own way, who cares if it's hard, let's Make them start on Siege, to get a real taste of the game. Besides, if you're selling plain crafted items, it's probably at a loss, so it's You that should pay for the privilege of doing so, just fair.

Anyways, I neither sell, nor buy GM items, so I am unaffected either way. If I make someone something, it's my personal time, and I do it for free. Just any dead limb falling off UO, meh. Y'all can do what you want. good luck with that. *Abandons thread*

 

[TullyMars]

youmadbro?
You're probably right, crafting is pretty much dead, why bother? GM is worthless anyways. No One needs GM made stuff, let's just scrap the whole thing. A Newbie can make their own way, who cares if it's hard, let's Make them start on Siege, to get a real taste of the game. Besides, if you're selling plain crafted items, it's probably at a loss, so it's You that should pay for the privilege of doing so, just fair.

Anyways, I neither sell, nor buy GM items, so I am unaffected either way. If I make someone something, it's my personal time, and I do it for free. Just any dead limb falling off UO, meh. Y'all can do what you want. good luck with that. *Abandons thread*

Bah, don't abandon the thread.
I am one of those that started in this thread thinking "bah the vendor fee is fine" and you got me thinking about it.
People are missing the point as so many vendor fee threads started discussing the low end items but were quickly found out to be totally about the millions on some high end luna vendor.

Now thinking out of the box here...
Imagine being able to donate to a vendor you like without having to buy or without having to find the vendor owner.
I did something similiar with my fruit bowl vendor.
I put on over 100 fruit bowls at zero price and one statue for 10k engraved with "UWF Feed And Seed Fruit Bowl Sponsor - March 2011"
I thought it was clever and one of my guildmates did too and bought the statue.
Now 10k is nothing, it wasn't about the money, it was about the recognition of time and effort and service and validation.
It (the statue) sold in 8 days (I did not broadcast it, just put up the vendor to see if anyone would notice and if anyone would join in) so I paid an extra 480 gold for the item (above the 480 gold base paid for just having a vendor)
I kept it going from the 10k for about 100 some odd days until I went shopping at someone else's vendor and saw my fruit bowls (my tag) being sold for 1000 gold each...recalled home and saw the free fruit bowls all bought.

Now the home grown system, is clever but limited and if there were some game mechanics to help the system that would be neat.
So what do you think, would you donate to a good vendor if you had the ability?
I have been known on occasion to drop off items or checks into the mailbox of a good vendor store, if I think a vendor will sell them...and there mailbox seems secure from the public.

 

[Sevin0oo0]

Bah, don't abandon the thread.
People are missing the point as so many vendor fee threads started discussing the low end items but were quickly found out to be totally about the millions on some high end luna vendor.

Thank you. I take meds for that *24/7 buzz* so I'm not going anywhere. UO is in our blood, blood is family, and blood doesn't run.
I'm the same one that vendored a Crimson few weeks ago for 30k, so making gold from vendors is just not an issue for me, the bulk of what I sell is imbuing resources, enabling others so they can craft more items. Chants, "Oh Great and Powerful OZ, tell us how meager craftsmen can market mundane items at a profit."
*resumes place in thread*

 

[Sevin0oo0]

would you donate to a good vendor if you had the ability?

If it wasn't a lot of trouble to reach. Problem is abuse. some would take the free or reduced value items and smelt or resell them.
I have a character on Izumo, pretty new, has 30-40k maybe. I'd Gladly buy GM armor, if I didn't have to hunt for hours

 

[Lord Nabin]

It's amazing how people have such a narrow view of this. They only look at things how they concern them in the game and only things they deal with. This isn't about selling rares or selling of high priced artifacts so that your vendor fees are 100,000 or more (and there are still ways around it).

This thread started because of a comment I made in another thread, about how my wife and I for years ran things like masonry and carpentry vendors that basically broke even or cost us money. And it was wasn't worth the time or effort to put into getting the raw materials, especially when it cost us money to run it (in the end, we were charging 100-500 gold, in essence selling things at a loss).

Silly - I don't sell rares on vendors and tons of high end artifacts.

Most of what is on my vendors are normal deco Items, deeds, resources, toos, Repair deeds, recalls, potions Duhh the normal stuff.

Instead of staying "It's amazing how people have such a narrow view of this." Try saying " I tend to assume a lot and very often stick my foot in my mouth because I really have no idea what I am talking about"



That all being said. I still like ya a lot and like yours posts often enough.

 

[Sevin0oo0]

so... should a VDP based fee be used for any player created/modified item? (provided vdp is updated to year 2012)

 

[Raptor85]

so... should a VDP based fee be used for any player created/modified item? (provided vdp is updated to year 2012)

no because that barely covers half the issue, and the VDP is so low vendor fees may as well just be turned off in that case.