Skill Mod Details

General Overview

Hiring skill allows a player to begin placing vendors. As the hiring skill mod increases, the player is allowed to have more types of vendors and greater customization features for them.

What happens if hiring/vendor item skills are given up?

If you sacrifice your merchant skills which grant you the ability to place and operate vendors you will be unable to place any new items up for sale until you have the skill to operate the number of vendors you retain. So if you are a Master Merchant and have 12 vendors and you drop your Master skill you must surrender 2 vendors before you will be able to put any items up for sale on ANY of your vendors. The vendor will continue to sell your items to customers during this time, you simply won't be able to put items up for sale until you have either retrained the skills you gave up or removed vendors to get back to the number you have the skill to operate.

Creating a Vendor

Creating a vendor is done by going to a house terminal and selecting Create Vendor in the radial option. You will prompted and given choices as to which type of vendor to create. Vendors can be named after this selection from the prompt that follows. The vendor will be placed in your inventory. The vendor may be dropped from inventory via the drop radial over the object, at any place inside the structure however it cannot be picked up and moved again after it has been placed. If you mess this up you will have to remove the vendor and create a new one). You can rotate the vendor's position in one of two ways. The rotate menu item on the radial menu for the vendor will rotate the vendor 90 degrees each time. The /rotate command will allow you to rotate the vendor free form any amount you desire.

To obtain vendor functions and place items a vendor must be initialized. To do this you must choose "Initialize Vendor" from the radial menu. This links the vendor into the vendor database system and sets it up for business. Vendors require a maintenance fee to continue to operate. This fee is 15 credits every hour. If maintenance fees are not paid then the vendor will gradually begin to 'decay' from a score of 100 percent and once it hits zero it will dissapear along with any item that may be on it. Vendors decay at a rate of 1% of their score for every 60min (maintenance cycle). The player can repair a vendor by the pay maintenance radial on the vendor. Each point of decay costs 30 additional credits added to the maintenance charge for that turn in order to repair it. Vendor decay does not occur until the vendor has been initialized. Once a vendor has been initialized, it's name will appear on the overhead map, viewable by any passerby.

Any item for sale, in the stockroom, or waiting to be purchased (offers) or picked up will be deleted when you remove the vendor.

Types of vendors and Options

• Business 3: Bulky (terminal)

• Business 4: RoboDroid (droid)

• Novice merchant grants you two new vendor types. The two new vendor types are Standard which looks surprisingly like a bazaar terminal, and Random NPC. The NPC vendor will look like any of the player creatable races. You are not given a choice at this level. The race, gender and appearance of the vendor will be random. To get a specific type you will have to create and destroy them until you find something you are happy with. Other than appearance the vendors all operate the same.

• Hiring I: Each level of hiring gives you new options for controlling the appearance of your vendors. Hiring I grants you the right to select a specific race from the available player races (Bothan, Human, Mon Cal, Rodian, Trandoshan, Twi'lek, Wookiee and Zabrek) as well as grant you the ability to place a new terminal called Small which looks like the banking terminal and a new droid the EG-6 Power Droid.

• Hiring II: Gives you the droid WED Treadwell, plus the NPC races of Aqualish, Bith,Devaronian, Gran, Ishi Tib,Ithorian, Nikto,Quarren,Sullustan, and Weequay.

• Hiring III: Give you the terminal called Fancy which looks like the ticket terminals.

• Hiring IV: Gives you a terminal called slim which looks like the standard mission terminal and the droid 21-B Surgical Droid. In addition you can now give items and clothing to most of your NPC vendors (Ithorians can't wear any of the clothes in the game because of their shape). When you give the clothing to the vendor it will wear it, replacing the clothes it is wearing at the time. Once you give an item or clothing to the vendor you cannot retrieve it.

• Master Merchant: Protocol Droid (C3PO type)

USING A VENDOR

To use a vendor, one has to click on the "Use Vendor" which will bring up the vendor interface below:

Vendor Interface

For Sale:

The default screen is the For Sale screen. This will list all the items you have for sale on your vendor. The first thing you will notice is that there is nothing listed (even if You have previously listed things for sale) don't panic. The vendor interface doesn't load the items by default to increase speed. Hit refresh or change the category and it will come right up. The second thing you will probably notice is that at the top left are four zones (Galaxy,Planet, Region, Vendor ) selecting one of these allows you to see items not only on the vendor you are currently accessing but any of your vendors in the galaxy depending on the zone you pick. This defaults to the regional view and all vendors in the immediate area that belong to you will be shown. This can be very confusing when stocking or retrieving items or handling offers. Be careful that you have the vendor on the right zone before performing. Do not fear, your customers only see the items on the vendor they are looking at. You are the only one who has access to the other zones. At the bottom right is a button named "Sell an Item" click it and it will bring up a dialog with your inventory shown on the right side. You may pick something from your inventory. Put in a price and optionally a description and click the "Sell Item" button. The item will go up for sale on your vendor. Items placed for sale are on sale for 30 days. After 30 days they are removed from the for sale section and placed in your stock room. You must retrieve them or put them back up for sale within 30 days or they will be deleted by the vendor.

The other button there beside the "Sell an Item" button is for withdrawing sales. Click on any sales item listed and click withdraw. The item will be placed in your stockroom. The Details button will show you all the particulars about the current item you have highlighted.

Offers:

The offers tab will show you any items that have been offered for sale by visitors to your vendor. You can double click on the item to see details about it. Click "Buy" to purchase the item and have it put into your stockroom or "Reject" to send an email telling the buyer that you are not interested in purchasing the item. The seller should have 7 days to retrieve the item before it is deleted. No email is generated on an offer. You must check your offers manually to see if you have any. If you are online when the offer is made you will see a system message. No other notification is sent. Items purchased from this tab should go to the stockroom where they can be retrieved or put up for sale.

Stockroom:

The stockroom holds items purchased through the offers screen, and items withdrawn from sale (either by your manually or expired by the 30 day timer) The stockroom has a 30 day timer. Anything in the stockroom beyond 30 days is subject to deletion. Be very careful about storing items in your stockroom.

Caution: Be careful when deleting a vendor. You canot withdraw items into the stockroom and delete the vendor and still retain those items. Any item for sale, in the stockroom, or waiting to be purchased (offers) or picked up will be deleted when you remove the vendor.

Anything in the stockroom on any of your vendors can be put up for sale on the vendor it is on. You cannot use the stockroom to transfer items from one vendor to another or to retrieve items from vendors other than the one you are using. Sometimes you are allowed to withdraw items from a vendor that is physically close to the vendor you are operating from, but this does not work all of the time. The best rule is that you must go to the vendor where the item is actually held in order to retrieve it.

Important Facts when managing Vendors

• Vendors who go too long without being used will get deleted from the game. The only events that constitute use are placing a new item for sale on the vendor, or a customer buying an item from the vendor.
• If a vendor is “un-used” for a period of time, it becomes in danger of getting deleted. When this happens, the player will be sent an email warning. If the vendor continues to be unused after this warning, the vendor gets deleted. The only events that constitute use are placing a new item for sale or a customer purchasing an item.
• If a vendor WITH ITEMS FOR SALE goes un-accessed for 100 days it will become endangered. If the vendor WITH ITEMS goes another 100 days, it will be removed.
• If a vendor WITHOUT ITEMS FOR SALE goes un-accessed for 14 days it will become endangered. If the vendor WITHOUT ITEMS goes another 14 days, it will be removed.

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Advertisement I.

Gives you the ability to select from a list of adbarks. These are canned phrases relating to specific categories of items (weapons, clothing, etc) that the vendor will announce to people when they come near. Only the NPC's can adbark the droids and terminals are silent. This option appears under the Vendor Control menu.

Advertising II:

Gives you the ability to create a custom message to adbark,including setting emotes and voice tones. These custom messages cannot currently use the user variables like %TT to customize the response, we believe this is a bug but have no confirmation at this time. This option appears as a part of the "Ad Barking" menu.

Advertising III: Allows you to place your vendor on the Global Map for an additional fee (6 credits per hour). This will allow people to see your vendor in the category you select by looking on the CTRL V map. You can only have one category per vendor, but you can re-register once per day and change the category. The option to "Register Vendor" on the planetary map appears in the Vendor Control menu.

Advertising IV: Gives you a 20% discount on the cost of your global advertising. Advertising IV also gives you the ability to operate a Merchant Barker Droid. The barker droid can be purchased from a Droid Engineer and will allow you to put in a message of 128 characters which it will announce every 60 seconds as long as someone is nearby. It will also give people a waypoint that you input if they select him and request it.

Vendors that are empty will no longer be visible on the overhead map (Ctrl-V).

Galaxy-wide Vendor Search

Bazaar terminals include the ability to search all player vendors for items.

The purpose of vendor search function is to allow vendor owned items to be searched from anywhere in the galaxy. This includes the following functions:

• Each vendor owner can decide whether to allow his or her vendors to be searchable in the market. There is an option for vendor owners to turn on/off the search option on his or her vendor. The vendor owner will be able to find current search option settings for each of his or her vendor(s)

• When a vendor owner turns on the search option, a player should be able to go to any bazaar and list all items owned by this vendor

• When a vendor owner turns off the search option, the vendor is no longer listed in the galaxy-wide network search. With this search option turned off, vendor owners have the ability to conduct private auctions. Players will need to physically go to the vendor and click "Use Vendor" to list items from this vendor.

Vendor Status

Players have to go to their vendors and enable this search option. This option is set to yes by default. For vendor owners to check if the search option is on or off do the following:

• Select the Vendor you wish to turn search on/off for

• From the radial menu choose "Vendor Control" Once you have selected "Vendor Control" then choose "Status"

• A pop-up window will show if the search option is on or off

Experience:

Each person who visits your vendor and views the contents will grant you 50 xp. The limitation to this is that an individual cannot generate Merchant XP for you more often than once every 10 minutes. After a while the vendor will disappear from the world if no one is near it and return when someone shows up. During these times it will not generate XP, however as soon as it is loaded again by someone coming into the room it will calculate the XP it has missed and grant that XP to you all at one time.

Formulas