Merchant Houses with Coin...

[Flint]

I went to Salarr's in 'Nak and bartered with an agent there.  After reaching what I thought was a satisfactory offer, I hit 'barter' and the agent told me he was out of coin because his senior agent came and picked it all up, and to try back tomorrow.  I tried back for a whole week and got nothing.  I can understand the independent merchants not having a lot of coin on them, but the Merchant Houses?  There's nothing more frustrating for a merchant player than to barter with another merchant(NPC), just to find out at the end, they don't have the coin anyway.  Maybe every few days or even once a week(IC time), reload the independent merchants with a couple hundred coins, and the House merchants with at least half a grand or more.  There are more people(NPCs) doing business with them than just us PCs.  Besides, the merchant House agents aren't as easy to barter with as the independents are, so it'ld make sense that they'ld have a lot more coin.

[Marauder Moe]

On the other hand... Salarr shops are there to SELL Salarr-made things, not to buy your crap you hauled down from Tuluk.  The Great Merchant Houses make their own merchandise for the most part and it makes sense that their shopkeepers aren't always prepared to support YOUR independant merchanting business.

But yes, its annoying.

[Bestatte]

It's true that the shops are there to sell you stuff, and buying is a convenience for the PCs. BUt it's not just a convenience. There are supposedly virtual people who come in and buy stuff too, aren't there? And doesn't it make sense that some of those things PCs sell, are purchased by virtual NPCs at various times?

This is another reason why I really think the shops should empty their inventory of random items at random times of the day or week...and replenish their funds at those times.

[Flint]

That sounds like a good idea.  The merchants could be 'sold out' of a few items, but in return, have a decent amount of 'sid on them to make a few purchases.  I like it.

[sarahjc]

I don't know, I kinda think it's OK that the shopkeepers run out of funds. I mean there should come a point where they realize that they have bought too much for they day. Also it makes things a bit harder for the uber hunters who go out and spam kill, then walking back the city and sell all the raw materials over and over again to the only shop they know.

I like to think of the PC world as a percentage of the VNPC world. If that Merchant does not have enough coin to offer a PC for an item, then you could just right well assume that he has been purchasing way too much today and hasn't sold enough.

However, It's a bit unrealistic that he tries to hash out a deal with you first, and then says he doesn't have the money. That I find annoying and rather jarring because I know it's a coded mistake and I can't really work around it in an IC fashion.

[My 2 sids]

It's true that the shops are there to sell you stuff, and buying is a convenience for the PCs. BUt it's not just a convenience. There are supposedly virtual people who come in and buy stuff too, aren't there? And doesn't it make sense that some of those things PCs sell, are purchased by virtual NPCs at various times?

Sarahjc, I think one of the points was that NPC shops don't just represent the merchants.  We don't have the luxury of selling items to NPCs or VNPCs, so the ability for NPC shops to purchase items represents all people (npcs and vnpcs) purchasing items.  The alternitives would be few:  not allowing any selling execpt to other PCs, codeing new NPC commoners who would buy items from PCs (if said PC ever found a willing NPC), or having Imms directly put money into PC's bank account that represents earning for that week.  

Because NPC shops buying items is more of an OOC thing, I'm willing to take playability over realism.

[Flint]

I'm not asking that the merchants/merchant houses be able to buy everything all the time, but at least let them have coin during various days of an IC week.  The houses/merchants make money off of what they purchase anyway, and that's part of the trick of being a merchant.  Finding a shop that sells X for 1200 'sid, but only buys it for 500 'sid.  The shop would still make a good amount of  'sid, so it makes sense that they have enough coin on them to take advantage of a deal like that.  I think that's pretty real right there.  Also though, you'ld have to make sure you put a limit on how much of X they are willing to buy, or perhaps, the more they buy of X from you, the lower the price they pay.  Supply and demand.

[crymerci]

Did you attempt to sell to any PCs?

[Anonymous]

I'm not trying to look for an advantage for spam hunters.  Like I mentioned earlier, perhaps put a limit on how many of X a merchant or merchant house will purchase during a given IC week or even month.  Or if no limit, then they'll pay less for each X they buy.  And yes, I have tried selling to other PCs.  Let me just give an example, House Salarr sells X for 500 'sid, I barter with them til they offer me 200 'sid for X, that's more than double they're asking price when THEY sell X.  So  it definitely makes sense for them to buy.  Now, if I try to sell them X again and again, instead of getting 200, each time after I should get offered less and less for each X.  200 the first time, maybe 180 the second, 150 the third, 100 the fourth and so on.  And again, if you're bartering with a merchant/agent, make it so that when you finally decide to 'buy' that they actually HAVE the amount of 'sid you two agreed on.

[sarahjc]

Did you attempt to sell to any PCs?

Exactly, The NPC shops are all the shops available to the pc population, if you look at room descriptions there are VNPC shops all over the place we just can't use them. I basically just think of the Player Characters and the rooms available to them as a slice of what the world is.

I'll explain it this way..

The NPC Salarr head merchant comes in and drops off a large bag of coins to the NPC Merchant in the Salarr shop. The NPC head of the house says, OK, this is your coin for the month.. I wanna see a profit at month end, not stock.  

So the Salarr NPC Merchant stands there, taking in goods and selling other goods out to VNPC's and PC's. Eventually he gets to a point where the shelves are full and he is out of coins. So he starts to turn people away from selling things to him until he has more room on the shelves and can hold some more stock. Why does this not make sense? I would think that he would cut I off before he is out of coin just incase something really eye catching comes in.

I mean you can say just as easily that Vnpc's are being turned away all the same and they have to go find VNPC's to sell to. What is the big deal, PC's have overstocked the Merchant, so now he can't afford to take in your stuff. You can go to other shops to sell your things and you can go to any # of PC's to sell them.

I say suck it up and go try to find some PC interaction.  The only thing I would change is perhaps when you try to barter and the NPC merchant is out of coins they should not take your offer and then tell you no. Instead they should say something like.. "I'm all stocked up right now, no thanks.. Try back in a week."

[crymerci]

Well, if the NPCs don't have any money, that means that they have bought more stock allover than they have sold, and that's not a profitable state of affairs.  You might say their supply is so healthy, that there is no longer any demand.

[Anonymous]

First off, the merchant houses are permanent.  Like a pawn shop.  What pawn shop owner ONLY wants to see a huge coin profit, while trying to totally eliminate their stock, or not looking out for good buys?  The houses should be run like RL pawn shops.  Shrewd bartering, not buying a slew of one item, but buying the occasional and rare item that comes in, or the common item that sells well, keeping a decent amount of stock in their inventory as well as coin.  There needs to be a balance there, just like in a pawn shop.  A good amount of inventory at all times and a good amount of coin as well.  Constant in-flow and out-flow.  NOT looking for total elimination of inventory at month's end.  I'm not trying to sell a bulk of items to the same merchant/house, I'm trying to sell rare items on occasion to these houses and merchants, and they should have the coin to take advantage of those situations more often than after reboot on saturdays.  Besides, not all of us can play on Saturday after reboot.

[sarahjc]

But the problem lies there not in the Merchant, but all the sellers, clearly, there are more people selling then purchasing. SO maybe it's that the Merchant needs to be more selective and turn away more people?

[Flare]

Sell it all to a PC you make more coin from them then you do the NPC merchants.

[crymerci]

Merchant Houses do not operate pawn shops.

They are there to sell their own goods.  They offer a limited amount of trade-ins as a courtesy.

[Twilight]

If you know how shops actually work, I think you would agree its a pretty good system.  But I'm not going to detail how it works.  Just trust me  

As for Salarr and other merchant houses buying things, I view things differently from what I see posted on the board on this issue.  The Merchant Houses really run very close to monopolies on things.  They get this from charters, but they also have to control the small merchants that would pop up, especially when you try to put in place monopoly pricing.  Sure, you can beat them all down, but new ones will pop up.  Technology levels aren't really that high, so its easy for someone to take up making stuff that competes with yours and then you have them pesky nomads and such that are a real pain to go beat down.

So instead you maintain your monopoly by focusing on remaining the largest clearinghouse that sells goods for direct consumption.  You get the templarate to issue merchant licenses, which is good for them too, so you don't have that much competetion selling direct to the populace, and you can probably get information on who they are if they become a nuisance.  

You buy some of your stock from independents, for several reasons.  First, if they aren't selling direct for consumption, you can keep your monopoly, ie high, prices.  Second, as they become dependent on you to take their goods, they are more dependent on you.  Third, you are controlling the -overall- supply offered for direct consumption, which is the key to monopoly pricing really, by channelling in any potential competitors to your supply chain before final sale.  You make high profits on what you do sell.  You don't really care if you have to buy a bit of junk you might not sell.  This is about retaining control of supply.

The current model does that very well.  Most crafted stuff seems to go through the Merchant Houses.  Its expensive to get a license, and even when you do get one, because of the vast supply the Houses offer, and the fact that everyone is used to going to them, most people -do- go to them.

Maintaining a monopoly, with monopoly prices, on goods with a relatively low tech level that are fairly easily made, is a bit more tricky than just having a charter.

[Angela Christine]

Some shops appear to load with no coins at all, so they only have money after someone buys something.  There isn't anything wrong in that per se, but if the goods they have to sell are so expensive that people rarely buy anything (for example if they sell, say, bows for twice the price of any other shop in the known world) then they never have any money.  No PC wants to spend money on over-priced goods there, so the shopkeeper is unable to do buisness at all.  If you _really_ want to sell that merchant something, then you will first have to buy products from him, perhaps products that you can then re-sell to another merchant.  You won't make as much money that way, but sometimes it is the only way to get rid of a valuable item no one can afford to buy.


AC

[Delirium]

I almost like it that way. I consider it more of a trading 'goods for goods' type deal.. except due to code, you can't get around the 'sid exchange. So you want to give them one thing - and you haggle to exchange it for another thing. Though I do admit in some cases it's hard to have it make sense.

[rnix]

You go to a pawn shop in certain locations thinking you can pawn off some stuff you shold be able to sell it. Its a huge super house one of the richest in the town you'd think that they have a few coins to sell off.

I mean there are places in the 'rinth that be strictly selling and they don't have enough coins for what your lookin' to sell so it can get frustrating but you need to find the right people or the ones running the shops to sell the expensive stuff to:)

[Vettrock]

Some shops appear to load with no coins at all, so they only have money after someone buys something.  There isn't anything wrong in that per se, but if the goods they have to sell are so expensive that people rarely buy anything (for example if they sell, say, bows for twice the price of any other shop in the known world) then they never have any money.  No PC wants to spend money on over-priced goods there, so the shopkeeper is unable to do buisness at all.  If you _really_ want to sell that merchant something, then you will first have to buy products from him, perhaps products that you can then re-sell to another merchant.  You won't make as much money that way, but sometimes it is the only way to get rid of a valuable item no one can afford to buy.


AC

I know one shop that never has enough coins for some of the items I try to sell.  You can sell it for less if you just want to get rid of it, and get as much as you can for it.   so if you do offer wigit.  And  he says he'll pay 800 coins for it, but then says he doesn't have the money, you can do offer wigit 700. offer wigit 600 until he has enough coins to buy it.  I mean even 300 coins is better than none right?
Also I think an immortal posted one time that if a shop always appears to be out of money you can go ahead and use the typo command, and if that is the case they may up the amount of coins that the shopkeeper loads with.

[Halaster]

Merchant Houses do not operate pawn shops.

They are there to sell their own goods.  They offer a limited amount of trade-ins as a courtesy.

You are not exactly right.

Yes, they are there to sell their own goods primarily.  But they're not just offering trade-ins as a courtesy.  They can make money off buying things and then selling it again.  Real life businesses do that all the time.  An economy works off buying AND selling, not just selling.

To say a merchant house wouldn't buy goods simply means that the person doesn't understand what a merchant house is.

I agree, merchants may run out of money too soon, sometimes.  These days we have longer uptimes that we used to, and we're still working on ways to accomidate that (i.e. money replenishing, goods being removed, etc).

[Pantoufle]

While there are many NPCs who consistently never have money to buy your wares, there are countless NPCs that do. It's been a long time since I've done the whole merchant buy/sell tactics, but I'm willing to bet if I had a decent haggle skill and spent the time to experiment with different items, I could make a fortune in a relatively short time. If you look hard enough, you can find items within the same city that if you buy in one store, you can go and sell for 5-10 more coins in another. If you do that with 5 items that's a potential 25-50 coins you've just made for doing, essentially, nothing. Though that's not a lot of money, it's still amazing you can turns a few coins just for walking down the street and back again. Give it a try, man, you'd be surprised what's out there. Even if you only make 50 coins off that one little venture, there are plenty of places to do the buy/sell routine with and before you know it 50 has become 5,000.

[Bestatte]

First of all, it doesn't matter how good your haggle skill is, or which shop you go to. If the "max_payout" for an object exceeds the "max_availability" of NPC merchants, they will -never- give you what they offer to give you.

Some shops will not ever give anyone more than 125 sids for any given item, even if that item is worth 20 times more. I've had no trouble selling stuff to this one guy - 3 things combined worth 200 sids. Yet when I try to sell him something he offers me 150 sids for, he conveniently has no money. Every single time, no matter what time of the week it is or how soon after game reset.

As for typoing it - feel free to go ahead, but don't be surprised if you get a "send" like I did telling me to stop making those kinds of typos. Merchants run out of coins, that's all there is to it, and typoing/wishing/bugging isn't gonna change it. At least, that's been my experience of late. What was surprising to me, was experiencing the lack of funds by a particular merchant who has never run out of funds before. And so I wished up asking if it was a bug so I'd know if I should bug it or not - and got told - rather abruptly - to cease and desist.

Oh well. It happens. But just be aware that typoing a lack of funds in a merchant NPC might result in a scolding rather than "thanks for bringing it to our notice, but in this case it's intentional."

[Incognito]

I am pretty sure I know the Salarr shop referred to, in the initial post, and also pretty sure I know what sort of item was trying to be sold to the shop.

Without going into specifics, I'll try and explain why that particular shop has perennial problems.....

1) Very few folks buy items from that shop, i.e. the shopkeeper usually only has the sids it loaded with on reboot.
2) Folks try and sell items to that shop, which are very highly-priced. As a result, the shopkeeper buys a few items with the sids it has, and then promptly runs out of sids.

In my opinion, because very few folks actually buy things from that shopkeeper, Salarr should instruct that particular shopkeeper to not buy any goods too, until the shopkeeper manages to actually start showing good profits on sales.

(Its not fair to other players, if one PC visits that shop with a few choice items every sunday after reboot, and bankrupts the poor shopkeeper till the next reboot!)

[Twilight]

From my experience it is impossible to bankrupt a shopkeeper until reboot a week later.  Maybe the way different merchants are set is different, but for the merchants I tend to use that statement is a complete fallacy.