Player-vendor stalls

[Lydium]

This is a subject that has been a bit of a pain recently. I think the fees for the player shops need to be reworked. Allow me to elaborate.

I started off with my first player shop after reaching the required level in retail management and I was so excited to get started. At first the fee seemed fine and the system also (specific fee per 24 hours which increases over time). After all, I remember reading the idea behind the play shops is temporary rentals and not for players to rent 24/7. So far so good.

The more I advanced in the rental fee (I had things to sell and might as well level retail management right?) the more I found myself struggling to make a profit.
Not because I had very little to sell, quite the contrary. I had a healthy supply of fire dust, random scrolls and skill books on the daily, and gems here and there. So stock was not an issue.
The issue was demand. Not in terms of price, because I would verify quite regularly to make sure I was competitive with prices but in terms of player population.

Now fast forward 22 days after my first day renting the stall, and I'm paying a whopping 5,5k (or something like that) per day for rent. I had no choice but to stop renting. While rent was affordable given the current market, I was able to level the skills I wanted, pay the fees required for said leveling and the game felt great. Because I wasn't blocked by a financial requirement that I couldn't keep up with.

Now I also realised that the fees lower in time. ONE day at a time. which means I would have to wait another week or so to be able to rent one without it costing me more then it's worth. Now the cherry on the sundae is that I have no more room. I had stuff I was selling, and now it's flooding my storage and inventory basically leaving me with 10 slots of free space.

All this ends with me currently trying to do certain things that don't require a lot of inventory space which let's face it, doesn't exist in PG lol. So I'm stuck waiting for the fee to go down to rent for another 5 days or so.

Now don't get me wrong, the system isn't bad. In fact, as of today my fee would be 4875 if I rented it and if the player population was high enough, it probably would be worth it but it's not.

Of course if I played 10 hours a day it probably wouldn't be an issue but that's not the case and I don't think it's a great move to base this system solely on players who can play A LOT.

Just my two cents...

[Mikhaila]

I see this discussion from time to time. For better or worse, this is the system, so what I'd suggest is adapting to the system.

-Build up goods, open for a few days, then stay down for a few days.

-Look at what you are selling, and if you aren't moving goods constantly, admit you have some slow sellers. Don't put these on your vendor unless you have extra space, try to fill it with things that are constantly in demand. Random scrolls and Skill books are NOT good sellers. They take a specific need and you are in competition with all the NPC vendors people sell to. Fire dust sells ok, but it's also capped at the price vendors sell it for. You have to have things people want to buy, that's basic shopkeeping. And to pay the rent, you need to sell a lot. (I own comic and game stores for 4 decades. It takes a lot of sales of 3.99 comics to pay 7k in monthly rent.)

What sells good enough that you can keep a shot open al the time? : Cotton!!!, Gems!!, vegetables, wood!, slabs of lower tier metals, milk, cheese, mushrooms, resist potions, speed potions, food, especially odd food. Wool.

What sells slow? Equipment, all but a few books or scrolls, common items found on vendors.


I keep a vendor up all the time. I lose money some days, but generally make money over the 10k I pay per day. But it's also a bit of work to keep the vendor up. The bulk of my items I make or gather specifically to sell on my vendor. Something like wool only goes for 50c, but people buy it multiple stacks at a time. Other things like cheese can sell 100k in a day. Wood, sulfur, saltpeter, iocain practice dust, mushroom suspensions, some gems and metals. Everything I sell is in demand all the time, with enough different things that the rent gets paid one way or another.

If it gets slow, i'll just take the vendor down for a bit, but i've been up constantly now for 8 months.

[Lydium]

I see this discussion from time to time. For better or worse, this is the system, so what I'd suggest is adapting to the system.

-Build up goods, open for a few days, then stay down for a few days.

-Look at what you are selling, and if you aren't moving goods constantly, admit you have some slow sellers. Don't put these on your vendor unless you have extra space, try to fill it with things that are constantly in demand. Random scrolls and Skill books are NOT good sellers. They take a specific need and you are in competition with all the NPC vendors people sell to. Fire dust sells ok, but it's also capped at the price vendors sell it for. You have to have things people want to buy, that's basic shopkeeping. And to pay the rent, you need to sell a lot. (I own comic and game stores for 4 decades. It takes a lot of sales of 3.99 comics to pay 7k in monthly rent.)

What sells good enough that you can keep a shot open al the time? : Cotton!!!, Gems!!, vegetables, wood!, slabs of lower tier metals, milk, cheese, mushrooms, resist potions, speed potions, food, especially odd food. Wool.

What sells slow? Equipment, all but a few books or scrolls, common items found on vendors.


I keep a vendor up all the time. I lose money some days, but generally make money over the 10k I pay per day. But it's also a bit of work to keep the vendor up. The bulk of my items I make or gather specifically to sell on my vendor. Something like wool only goes for 50c, but people buy it multiple stacks at a time. Other things like cheese can sell 100k in a day. Wood, sulfur, saltpeter, iocain practice dust, mushroom suspensions, some gems and metals. Everything I sell is in demand all the time, with enough different things that the rent gets paid one way or another.

If it gets slow, i'll just take the vendor down for a bit, but i've been up constantly now for 8 months.

Thank you for the suggestions and I'll definitely keep them in mind however it is beside the actual point.

Saying "this is the way things are, it is what it is" for me is not a solution and if people remained content to how things are, we would be living in a much different reality then we are now.

I think exploring different options can't hurt. You can make the shops based on tax sales with a base fee yet much smaller. That is but one option off the top of my head.
The whole point of launching a game in development is to get player feedback and adjust accordingly. Now I'm not saying anything should be changed based solely on my opinion but from what I read and the discussions I've had with other players, I don't think anyone actually likes the current system as it is. Some aren't too bothered by it cause they can keep up with the fees but that isn't the case unless your able to play extensively.

[Citan]

We just don't have enough room for every player to have a permanent stall. Right now we're at a relatively low population ebb (player population has raised and lowered over the course of development many times... mostly unpredictably), but even at this relatively quiet point in time, we have over 1000 active players each week... and something like 200 vendor stalls. So that just doesn't scale. The fees are intended to force you to give up your stall for a while each month, or else pay a huge fee. I want people to be able to rent a stall for at least a week each month, even when populations go back up.

I'm open to other suggestions here, but I don't think the fee structure is the problem; it's a solution to a different problem, so to speak.

[Mikhaila]

Saying "this is the way things are, it is what it is" for me is not a solution and if people remained content to how things are, we would be living in a much different reality then we are now.

It's not a solution for you? It certainly is. You just may not like it You can approach it differently, sell better stuff, learn more about what sells and what doesn't sell. There is a solution that makes vendors work, several of them. But having a vendor full of slow moving items just doesn't work.

The suggestion of small fee plus tax on sold items won't work. Everyone will now want a vendor, and there isn't room. There would be no cost, no downside, now to having a vendor because the cost is low. The area will fill up and then everyone will be complaining they can't get a spot. We'd have a full house with most vendors not really having anything anyone wants to buy.

Worse, we'd see most people just use it for storage. Put stuff on your vendor, set the price high, and gain a bunch of cheap storage space. That's one of the reasons for the higher cost, so people don't use vendors just for storage.

Frankly, there are some dead easy things to sell on a vendor and make money. People have putting cotton at 100 each or higher. And yet no one has any for sale. Gems nearly doubled in cost lately. There are other items that are constantly selling out.

Or have a stall a few days a month. Niph put up her stall yesterday, announced it would be up for 3 days, and had stacks of stuff for sale, mostly rubywalls and gems. I spent over 200k in the first couple of minutes because she had stuff i needed. Minimal cost and she'll put it up again next month.

I mostly sell cheese. Not many people doing the work to make the best cheese and have extra to sell. I sold 100k yesterday, and a 120k today. Because i sell that much, the 10k a day is something I can live with.

PG actually has an economy. Money and goods move around constantly. It's one of the few working economies I've seen in RPG's. Constant need for basic goods and raw materials. Constant demand for high end goods. So vending is a bit different as well. You have to find and sell items people want.

[Celerity]

There's 2 sides to the vendor stalls. One side is the end game players who can make enough money to cover their vendor costs for a week, not even counting the dancing buff to reduce the cost, in about half an hour, so the cost is meaningless to them. This is most of what you see in the A section and honestly most of the vendors there are just rip offs or used for storage. Occasionally you'll get some decently priced phlog or something, but mostly they don't even have the stalls to sell things since 10k a day is so cheap for them. If the price is too low to hire the stalls then this is what most of the vendors will become.

The other side of the vendors is the noobs who struggle to afford the rent. The problem is that new players don't know what sells and what doesn't and they also don't have much room to figure it out because the vendor costs are comparatively high to them. They also just don't get as much space on the shop and can't even farm some of the most highly demanded items like the highest tier of phlog or cheese so they end up seeing them as a waste. Mikhaila is spot on with their list of what's demanded and about recipes not being in demand. I would only add stuff like glowy yellow crystals, vervadium and high level phlog to the list, alongside basically anything with a profitable work order like trophy skins and fire magic reagents.

I think the price is honestly fine, even as a noob you can definitely hire the shop for at least 10 days a month and even if you didn't sell a single thing the whole time you wouldn't be set too far back. The biggest problem however is just that the player population is fairly low at the moment so demand for a lot of things is quite low too. Almost the entire casino vendor section is empty and there's still a few empty stalls in serbule too so the price could potentially be lowered but I think it's better to keep it where it is and just hope the player population picks up a bit.

I played during the steam release when the player population actually felt too high and I think there was so much demand it was rarer for my shop to make less than 6 figures than it was for it to make 6 figures in a day. I didn't keep it open everyday though and in fact still don't. I basically only open it when I've gathered enough things worth selling, then usually open it for 3-4 days and make about 200k from it.

[Lydium]

I have to admit that you guys have a point in the sense that lowering the fee would make it so everyone would have one and probably end up using it for storage which would actually be worst for the economy in the end, not to mention the fact that there is limited space. Point taken.

Of course knowing the system works the way it does this time around I'll be able to prepare accordingly and adjust that's for sure. I'll keep in mind your suggestions for in demand items.

We just don't have enough room for every player to have a permanent stall. Right now we're at a relatively low population ebb (player population has raised and lowered over the course of development many times... mostly unpredictably), but even at this relatively quiet point in time, we have over 1000 active players each week... and something like 200 vendor stalls. So that just doesn't scale. The fees are intended to force you to give up your stall for a while each month, or else pay a huge fee. I want people to be able to rent a stall for at least a week each month, even when populations go back up.

I'm open to other suggestions here, but I don't think the fee structure is the problem; it's a solution to a different problem, so to speak.

Going on what you said Citan, maybe the issue lies elsewhere and the fee structure isn't the issue. All I know at the moment is, I'm in a situation where I can't really play until the shop lowers in fees so I can clear some space. Which is a bit frustrating. For example, at the moment I'm in the process of increasing favor with Makara and to do that, I need some space to stock gear, otherwise I'm making round trips every 15 minutes which is where I got discouraged.

I really feel however mid-game is rough in terms of generating revenue with the high costs of the skills to level and trying to keep mats/gear to level favor/skills. It's very difficult to balance and I'm not even leveling many skills at the moment because of that. Mainly fire/AH and transmutation.