Development Cycle Archive
Thread: ID#2: Two Changes to Bazaars and Vendors
Ok, the vendor cap, if set to 150, is WAY too low, especially for tailors.
I have one vendor, with only 2 (1 black, 1 white) of each shirt, pants, skirt, and few odds and ends, and have almost 200 items. With only 150 per vendor, to have a real selection of clothes with multiple colors, I would need more vendors than even a Master Merchant could place.
This is yet another bad idea, in a string of bad ideas.
Well the first idea isn't bad at all. 6K on the bazaar isn't bad, atleast we can sell larger quantities of resources at a time.
The 150 limit on vendors will not work out the way you want it to. First, trying to solve people not hitting the "next items" button is silly. I've missed it once or twice when I was new, but you shouldn't take such drastic measures over something this silly. It's not hurting anyone.
Second, one of the largest problems with vendors is that they are empty, or close to it, when you get out to it. Example, I read on the server board the other day that someone had just restocked a vendor with weapons. So I log on, run out there and it's almost empty again. Limiting vendors to only 150 items will only make thisworse. Popular vendors sell out fast, not just because of name recognition, but quality and pricing.
So now we're gonna have to sift through a bunch of vendors to find the same thing we could normally find on one. Not to mention the amount of time you are forcing the crafters to spend organizing and restocking their vendors.
I think we all just want changes that will make it easier for players all around. This definitely has a big downside to it. Hopefully it's not one of those "well were doing it no matter what" ideas. Is it just because of database problems?
Raising the bazaar cap is a good idea - it allows a slightly higher range of goods to be sold but still keeps the high end stuff in the player vendors where they belong. 
A little iffy on the vendor cap - although I believe it should be capped, 150 items strikes me as too low - that's only what? A page and a half of goods? It should be around two pages or three max.
What I would really like to see (with no knowledge of the technical limitations or reasons involved) is the 30 day sales period removed - if I'm placing something on my vendor to sell, then I want it there until it sells or I decide to take it down. Having to reset stuff for sale on the vendor (even at 30 day intervals) seems unnecessary. I think removing the sales period limitation would be a nice balance to setting an item cap - whatever the cap will be.
Letslook at this in another aspect..
The crafting professions are already tedious, dull, and some what unfun unless you enjoy things like whatching your mines blow someone up ( call me sadistic but I love it).
If you limit the items on vendors you will increase the number of factorys poeple need for item storage the number of houses needed for storage and the amount of poeple needing more and more lots to lay harvesters and hold all these storage bins.
Which isnt a problem initally for SOE because that means sales of more accounts.
It does however mean perfect equation for more burnt out crafters and thereby thining the herd.
Heres why.
We'll use weaponsmith as example.
There is without a doubt in my mind alot of money out there. Dont care who's fault that is but lets face it , it is there so now we must deal with it.
Poeple when buying guns buy 5 or 10 at a time because they dont need to waste their precious time finding someone with the time to repair the gun later down the road, they can just pull out gun # 10 and keep grinding the xp away.
Because of this, for us to have more free time to go out and find valuable resources and what not we need to be able to mass produce alot of guns and put them on the vendors for sale which solves the issue of poeple buying multiple guns at once and us haveing to constantly restock the vendor 4-10 times an hour.
Some might say increase the prices but lets face it, poeple dont want to pay 100k for a republic blaster that isnt krayt, and thats exactly where the prices will go if weaponsmiths are spending all their time constantly restocking the vendors.
I realize the profession is just that they sale things, but lets face it who in their right mind pays 15$ a month to do nothing but log in after a hard days work to listen to poeple complain about a vendor or gun prices or out of stock items. I know I am not paying the monthly fee to cater to poeple, im here to have a good time.
Some might say well why dont you just master merchant or get this and that, and once again why should I ?
Just so I can spend the remainder of what time I have to place more merchants and then have to spend all that time restocking not 1 but now 3 or 5 merchants while in the process of constantly makeing guns? I think not..
I would rather do what my next paragraph suggest will happen, quit crafting completely.
Which is exactly whats going to happen, they already burn out at an alarming rate as it is. Many end up stoping personal orders and say whats on my vendor is all that is available keep checking back for more later.
Why? Because they've become fed up with haveing to constantly run back and forth makeing guns, restocking the vendor, checking the harvestors and all the while dealing with /tell When can I get a krayt flame thrower? What you mean you cant make it now??????? You suck! See my point yet?
I think the vendor limit would be a very bad idea in my personal opinion and the above is why I think that.
Now that doesnt mean I dont think you guys can do that, Im just saying my opinion is that the limit is bad in its current state, maybe you could come up with alternatives for the crafters to have to help alleviate the stress limiting the vendors is going to cause.
Hopefully whatever becomes of this alows the game to finallybecome Starwars andnot StarVendor(tm), I've still got faith in you.
Both ideas are bad because they don't really deal with issues players have. The first issue is that new players don't know where to go to buy stuff. They go to the bazaar because that's what seems obvious. The bazaar seems like the only place to buy stuff when you first start because there are no vendors in any of the starting cities.
Allow vendors to be placed in pre-existing cities. Merchants should have the ability to 'rent' space from the city for a limited time to place thier vendors. A lot of the non-opening doors in the city would be perfect for renting out shop space. If you were worried about effects to player cities then you could always put a monetary
Once new players get acclimated to buying stuff from vendors instead of the bazaar they will visit player towns to do more shopping.
The second issue players have is finding the right vendor who sells the item they are looking for. Instead of capping how many items a player can put in a vendor they should limit what vendors are allowed to sell. When placing a vendor you should have to choose a vendor that's right for selling your particular item. If you want to sell weapons you hire a weapons dealer, if you want to sell resources you hire a resource dealer. It should say right in the name of the vendor what he sells too.This will keep things organized and people will have an easier time finding what they need.
In addition, that sort of unfairly targets those of us who sell less expensive and thus lower profit items. I have to sell 10 or 20 times as many items as a weaponsmith or an architect, for example, to make the same profit. So hypothetically speaking, an architect could maybe stock 10 million in items in that 150 items, where a tailor could maybe stock 500K.
- J
Bazaar - I like the increase. I still think it would be nice for the Merchant profession ONLY to have an even higher cap at some skill level. Premium sale is not very useful.
Vendor - 150 is fine with me, I rarely can get above 70 or so items on my vendor because they sell out too fast. As long as we could have multiple vendors in one spot with 150 items I think it would be fine. Lets make sure it doesn't end up as 150 items per region.
Raising the limit for items sold on the Bazaar - fine with me.
Setting a vendor limit to 150 items - game breaker.
The people the vendor cap is going to hurt the most are armorsmiths and powerup vendors. People are very particular about powerups and what they will and won't buy. And, certain merchants make a name for themselves selling powerups. I am one of those people. When I do a run of powerups, I run the maximum I can, or 1000 items. This equals 100 crates of powerups. Now, considering I stock, on average, 6-8 different types of powerups, that's 600-800 crates if I have them all stocked.
Now, realistically, I probably only have between 300-500 items on my powerups vendor at a time, because they sell fast. That being said, dropping the item limit down to 150 would kill me. I'd have to have at least 2, and probably 3 vendors just for powerups. That's not including the master artisan components vendor I usually have stocked with a couple hundred crates of components. You're going to make me put up four or five vendors where I now have 2. Not a good idea, in my view. Makes things more tedious.
The only way this wouldn't be a game breaker is if you changed the crate size of powerups from 10 to 25, or heck even 50. 50 would be good, because most people tend to buy 5-10 crates anyway. This would help your database issues, too, as therewould befewer items in the vendors and people wouldn't have to have as many crates in their inventories. Less items to track has to be a good thing.
raising the cap to 6k also is kinda useless with the 20 item offer max, you need to seperate vendor offers from bazaar sales. and cant repeat this one enough add player city bazaars
This 150 cap is suggested to reduce monopolies? in the end it will hurt all sales and those whom have monopolies will still retain some sort of lead. if its a server issue 300 items is much kinder.
Also since people are stocking so much stuff you really must bump up storage in houses. For examplei'm a middle level droid producer (about 100 seekers every day) and i use up 2 small houses and my bank storage easily. + some additional storage in my pa hall (what i can fit on top of the decorations). create some special storage boxes for component and resources.
Im sorry, but I think the 150 item limit is a TERRIBLE idea - at 9 items per suit of armour (usually) thats only about 15 suits, and i'll sell those out within about 6 - 24 hours of placing them - unfortunately I can't play 24 hours a day to ensure my customers get the items they want (in addition, it would eliminate any hope of providing multiple colours of armour on the vendor) and as such, it would cause more customer annoyance than any worries over any 'monopolies.'
IF this is the reason why vendors have been lagging so much recently, then all I can say is that you should investigate your hardware specifications, as limiting something as basic as customer choice is only a bad thing for the game.
The bazaar top limit should be increased a bit - 5k for a round figure, or the proposed 6k just to double it
The vendor item limit isa good idea too, it would give a bit more value to the Merchant profession, which it is sadly lacking - make the stockroom and main sale list a shared 200-item store, though?
I don't know how setting a limit on vendors will help players, it might force a lot of people into more merchant skills though. Never had a problem with List All and browse through 4 or 5 pages.
But for my opinion.
Raising the bazar cap is good... the market has changed to the point where it does need to be higher for the bazar to remain useful..
However, I think a flat vendor item cap is a bad idea. Perhaps a growing cap, determined by merchant skill....
50 items at the bus. 3 vendor, 100 items at novice merchant, and perhaps +10 or +25 at each level of management.
Most crafters won't be bothered by this, but some, especialy tailors, will be hit hard. 150 items barely covers the list of items a tailor can make, and then throw in even 1-2 colors of each item? People will also see alot of empty vendors, because the merchant's stock is sitting in a back room, because they couldn't put enough of it on the vendor to keep up with sales.