the Miner gets Exp instead. THEN, the Master Merchants can buy from the Material Exchange. With 200+ players usually on 24/7 it seems, IMO that these services are outrageously over priced and increasingly harder to get. After paying 30k in repairs on 2 30k items really made me step back and look at the situation more closely. And a quote of 300k for Saddlebags was the last straw. Master Merch's are well served not doing such Lowbie Tasks. Let them make all the money they want from 20 mil Ships and Diamond Chests, but limit the price gouging on needed repairs. Like I said, Let the Masters Do MASTER Luxury Work and let other Civs do the hard supply and demand work. Just a thought. :)
Well the problem with this idea is that chests, and ships even moreso, require ALOT of material, and not being able to mine/lumberjack/etc the mats yourself and having to buy them from the exchange would make building a ship or chest even more expensive, and therefore drive the price up even more. However, having a journeyman guild that disallows joining the master guild is just crazy talk. Why not be able to get the basics and the more advanced stuff at the same time? I mean, in the 'traditional' apprentice/journeyman/master setup, the master has to go through all of the lower level drudgery to be able to learn how to become a master. Just because a master can work on the more difficult tasks of his profession doesn't mean that he can't perform the more basic tasks, even better than less experienced merchants.
Anyway, I guess I'm saying leave it as it is, although merchant fumbles are a total pain in the ass, nothing like alloying for diamond and fumbling and ending up with 5000kg of turquoise or something.
--Hair