Development Cycle Archive

This is funny!

"this would force me to just make one color.As it is with vendor bugs over time i have lost about 400-1000 items wether disapeared or just never got email or paid for them."

Lost about 400-1000 items? Thats quite a range man. I'm between the ages of 10 and 90. This thread has somewhere between 15 and 10,000 pages. You didn't get any of those items back when SOE fixed the vendors disappearing items? I doubt it cause I got every single item back...stuff I put on close to launch that I forgot about I got back!! Oh well...

And I still don't get why everyone wants to have the vendor caps increased. Most of you guys have vendors that are empty! I pay access charges to get into half your freakin' house and the vendors have 3 overpriced items on them LOL!! Lame.

I am so sick of this thread.

I like the cap raise on the bazaar but for the vendor? 150 items is way to low. 300 maybe? 400?

The one thinkI WOULD love to see is multi page sorting support. When sort the page by object type I want to see ALL of that object at the top of the screen, not just the one's from page one. As it stands now the vendors stock in a linear manner. If I stock 20 shoes on the vendor and 10 fit on page one but the other 10 slide over to page two, when I sort for shoes to show up at the top of my vendor on page one, only the shoes ON page one show at the top. To see the rest of the shoes on my vendor I have to go to the other page.

blech =/

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I read this post last night and it has been bugging me ever since. Therefore I'm going to rant and add another reply to this very long thread.

Cut down on Monopolys agood idea, limiting vendor spacebad way to do it. Before a monopoly can exist there must be some form of barrier to entry preventing other business from operating. People can enter and start any type of business they want so the barriers, if there even are any, are not natural they are artificial (read created by the mechanics of SGW not the players). I operate out of Tatooine and there are three major regional clusters, one around the krayt dragon area, one around wayfar and one in the Bestine / Anchorhead region, plus one town way out in the boondocks that no one goes to. Within these regions there are monopolies simply because it is difficult to travel half way across a world to visit a vendor that may or may not have what you are looking for. I know I check all my competitors weekly and it's a pain in the ass. If you want to discourage monopolies the SWG must encourage competition. The best way to allow vendors to compete is to allow customers to see what is for sale, where it is at and how much it costs, easily, conveniently and from anywhere on the planet all over the planet. That will eliminate monoplies. Not limiting vendor size. If you limit vendor sizeone will do this.

It willencourage monopoly behavior and the prices for goods is going to increase. I will use my business as an example. I have looked all over tatooine for the last two weeks for water. No one, and I mean NO ONE sells water, so I set up my harvesters and presto water for sell, cost 10cpu. Well a bit of time goes by and other people realizethey can make water for less than what I'm selling it for so they start harvesting water and now water is down to about 3cpu. Which I think is fair. They did this by not dumping their current invetory but by adding to it. What happens if there is a limit on vendor size? You have to limit what you sell and in a limited marketthere is moredemand for a good than what is supplied and the price will rise. In my business say my competers decided to sell water (and vendor limits were imposed at 150items)to do this they would have todrop something else say, copper. Well I would just go and sell copper for 10cpu, why because the only people who are selling resources just stopped doing it and I could. It wouldn't matter that 5000m away someone else might be selling copper, people want to buy what they need in the area they operate in. This holds true for any business. If you sell weapons or houses or armor or anything and maintain a stocked vendor then the limits for you to choose between selling all of your products and one or two. If you only sell one or two things where before you sold 20 to 30 who is going to sell the stuff they you no longer can sell and at what price? Two weaponsmiths with unlimited vendor space creating ranged weapons are in competition. Two weaponsmiths with limited vendor space specializing in three weapons each can charge any price they want because if they have half a brain between them one will make T21, laser rifles and rebublic blasters the other gaffie sticks, flame throwers and vibroknife. They can charge any price they want because no one is in compitition and if you are the unlucky soul who needs a carbine, well your out of luck, maybe one of them will be kind enough to custom make you one, for a price of course.

What about the vendorswho don't have 150 items in the vendor now, well this doesn't affect them does it? If you have 3 things for sell you are able to compete but only for the next 147 items after that well you are going to have to stop selling something to make room in your store for the new thing. Add a new vendor, sure to a point but there are only so many vendors you can have when your limit is reached that's it. The only way for limits to be affective is for them to be high enough that it doesn't affect the supply of any comoditiy, and really what is the point of limits when they don't affect the market. Fix the database not vendor limits.

Opening up the bazaar prices is an interesting idea, what I want to know is does SWG expect teh bazaar system or the player vendor system to be the primary economic force in the galaxy? If you are trying to encourage a bazaar system then raise the prices by all means. If you are trying to encourge vendors then you are hurting the people you are trying to help. If you are only interested in your database problems and not how the game is played flip a coin and go from there. If you want both...ahh then go back to monopolies and make bazaar terminals able to acces vendor terminals.

To allow a free market it must be easy to enter for the seller and it must be open so people have a choice in buying. Without either of these two things there will always be problems, right now neither works, it is not easy to enter the markets...it takes a significant outlay of money and time to become a master weaponsmith, armorsmith, droid engineer, ect, ect,ect. (that's not wrong but it does hurt competition) and it is not easy for buyers to find what they want fromvendors.

My two cents, vendor limits very bad idea, bazaar cap raised good or bad depending on what is intended.

A 6k baazar cap if fair!

Getting a 100k baazar would drive all merchants to drop their skills and not be merchants. Also would start to see overpriced items in baazar..

My 2 cents

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xRavX wrote:

This is funny!

"this would force me to just make one color.As it is with vendor bugs over time i have lost about 400-1000 items wether disapeared or just never got email or paid for them."

Lost about 400-1000 items? Thats quite a range man. I'm between the ages of 10 and 90. This thread has somewhere between 15 and 10,000 pages.

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The last several months has been filled withcountless bugs in the vendors, email system, housing/inventory storage, etc. There is no inventory reporting, no financial reporting, no reporting at all.... How can we possibly get any more specific when we can only guesstimate?

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xRavX wrote:

And I still don't get why everyone wants to have the vendor caps increased. Most of you guys have vendors that are empty! I pay access charges to get into half your freakin' house and the vendors have 3 overpriced items on them LOL!! Lame.

I am so sick of this thread.

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I believe if you were to visit the shops of those who are posting the loudest on this thread, you'd note that we have full shops. Our point is that it's ridiculous to punish those of use who run succesful business and kept full vendors by handicapping our ability to stock items.

If you DON'T like empty vendors, then you shouldn't want the limit reduced. This is in effect trying to 'reduce' good merchants to the same 'level' as bad merchants.

I do have to note it's an innovative approach to handling the player economy, make a change that is a direct attack to those characters that sell the most goods and are therefore supporting the most customers (in most cases). Outstanding! Makes me just shiver with glee at the prospect of the combat system changes.

Also: THmade a note about increasing the number of weapon types and having novice/master versions of weapons. This will quickly put WS's into even closer company with tailors and armorsmiths and architects in terms of hosed vendors.

I don't have much of an opinion about the bazaar changes....other than, if you are going to make these changes, you need to improve the functionality of the bazaars in general so that people can find EXACTLY what they are looking for. Take resources for example. Make the resource categories mimic the survey tool categories. This way, when you are looking for specific items, you can easily find them! Also, why 6k for items...why not a nice round number like 10k. Also...allow player cities to place general bazaar terminals in their towns for their younger crafters to have a place to sell from.

I do not like the proposed vendor cap. I trained up some of merchant to be able to place NPC vendors because every single robot vendor I tried was broken! I only have the one vendor and it's really all I need. I typically load it up to 100 items, but occasionally will have the stock to push it to 200 or so. This is as a harvester craftingarchitect though. I plan on branching out into furniture and will then need more items on a vendor. Sales are often impulse buys...people come in for one items (harvesters) and see other items on your vendor and purchase....because they are there. If I have to run a separate furniture vendor...or one for each line of furniture, I may never make a sale. I also do not wish to place my furniture items on the bazaar because then no one will look at my harvesters, houses, etc.

Tailors, resource vendors and medical vendors are going to get highly nerfed by this. They will never be able to have a store identity because they can't keep their full product line on their vendor(s). Will it change the size of the database to have these items dispersed on different vendors...I think. In fact, the bazaars will become more overworked and actually slow down. This happened in beta where bazaars were inoperable for days at a time.

You don't elaborate on the "technical issues" of having an overstocked vendor. And what exactly do you consider an overstocked vendor? If that number is only 150...there is something dreadfully wrong.

Please figure out some other way to do this without hurting the player base!

Perhaps a 150 item limitatbusiness IVbut the number needs to increase as a player goes up the
merchant skill tree. A well-stocked vendor isn't a monopoly; it's a sign that the merchant understands
the concept of supply and demand. It's pretty annoying to travel to several planets trying to find
an item only to find nothing but empty vendors.

Don't allow people to continue using their vendors after they have surrendered their merchant skills. If
someone has a vendor placed they shouldn't be able to surrender that skill level until they remove the
vendor or they shouldn't be able to continue to stock the vendor after they've surrendered their skills. If
a creature handler surrenders his/her skills he/she can no longer call pets over level 10, it should be
the same with merchant skills and vendors. If your goal is to decrease the number of items stored in the
vendor database this would also accomplish that.

Implement a system where a merchant can allow people to sell their items on his/her vendors for a
commission. This would allow people who don't want to train merchant skills to sell their items on a vendor
and it will make the merchant profession a viable one.

Allow merchants to have auctions on vendors. This would allow people who aren't in the artisan
professions a venue where they can sell items that would be priced well above the bazaar price cap. I
think that some auction houses would spring up to handle this area and hopefully the spam sale
announcements at starports would decrease as well with this option.

All of these ideas are a recap of the ideas that have been posted by various individuals on the merchant
profession board. It might behoove the development team to read through some of those posts and see if
they can come up with solutions that will be beneficial for the player community as a whole.

Finally, I'm a pure merchant. The items that are on my vendors (with the exception of the bulk resources)
are crafted by other people; I sell their items and get a commission for the sales. I do all of the
stocking, advertising, traveling,and market research for them, which is something I enjoy doing but they don't want to do. If you limit the number of items I can put on a vendor to 150 you're limiting the number of items
those people can sell as well.

all the merchants will drop all their skills anywya if teh 150 cap is instituted

you need minimum 1000, some of us have over 6000 items

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Aristarchus52 wrote:
That's an interesting take on the statement hairy one, you seem to be implying that TH does not know that Artisan Business 3 and Business 4 grant vendor rights...

I'd believe that too, it is certainly a viable hypothesis, but I really lean towards the theory that "Doc Savage" wants *only merchants to be able to own a vendor of any kind*, which I find a rather excessive, punitive and unecessary nerf to quite a few of us crafters.

I don't follow the merchant forum, not being one and not planning to be one. It does seem a bit mean that merchants would point at artisans and say "take away their rights". No, I guess that's how most nerfs start...

But if only the merchant profession can have a vendor, I guess I'll sell on the bazaar and go back to spamming starports. That was so much fun for everyone...

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Umm? Do me a favor? Go read the Merchant forums before you imply that the Merchant class called for a nerf. We didn't. We have asked that the Merchant specific vendors (6 vendors, fully customizable) which are granted by merchant abilities be taken away when people drop the vendors skill. Right now someone can go up to Master Merchant, drop 6 vendors, surrender the skill .. and keep them.

I don't think I've heard doc suggest taking the others away, I'd have jumped at him if he had