Development Cycle Archive
Thread: ID#2: Two Changes to Bazaars and Vendors
Bazaar Cap
I'm not sure how i feel about raising the cap on Bazaar prices. While it would make it convenient to sell some of the mid level used items someone may not need anymore, it will probably hurt some of the professions who deal in lower priced items.
Wouldn't raising the cap have the result of more items being sold on the bazaar, thus adding to the "technical issues" you are trying to fix?
Vendor Limits
Personally,I feel thatvendor limitsis a Bad Thing all around. If one of the reasons they are looking to do this is to break monopolies they are way off the mark. About the only way to loosen the hold the long standing crafters have is to increase the spawns of essential resources.
For example, on Gorath there hasnt been any ostrine carbonate ore in something like 4 months. This means that any new weaponsmiths cant make advanced power handlers, and so they cant compete with the established smiths who still have it stashed away. I'm sure the same is true with other professions as well.
If they are doing this for technical reasons I believe they would solve a lot of their problems by fixing the merchant profession so that people can't place their vendors and then drop the merchant skills. This would probably reduce the current number of vendors very significantly, thus reducing the "technical issues".
Rationally, the economy of Star Wars Galaxies was created and intended to be a player driven market. There are no NPC sellers so the economy is based on the value players put on the goods and services available. Theprice is determined by the worth of the credit, which is based on the price of harvesting materials and the payout of missions. I think that trying to adjust the bazaar limit will only hurt the people who have built successful business for themselves. The bazaar is useful to people who are just starting out, to get basic supplies and begin their path to their own business. Players purchase goods from vendor's shops because they expect pesonal service and much higher quality goods. It's the difference between shopping at Wal-Mart and shopping at Macy's. In this respect, I think raising the limit on baazar listing prices would be harmful to those who have worked hard to establish a profitable shop. I think that it also acknowledges and dismisses the real problem which is that the value of the credit is dropping rapidly. When SWG went live the market stablized within a few weeks at a reasonable 3 credits/unit for materials, setting a universal standard for pricing. Now a unit of material sells for 5 credits and up. Therein lies the reason for the incredibly high priced items being sold on vendors.
With respect to the proposed limit of 150 items per vendor please consider this: There are 47 unique clothing items in SWG. If I make a shirt, I usually make pants, shoes, gloves and assorted accessories to also list. I am also working on the Architect profession with it's mass of furniture, houses, installations and now city structures and decorations. I believe a limit IS reasonable but 150 is far too low. I think if the concern is consumers being able to find the item they're seeking then the UI should be adjusted to make items easier to find. There are some eroneous categories in the tree as well as categories with misleading names. For example, there's a category for listing buildings but there's also a category for deeds and so far as I know a building cannot be listed at all. Under clothing there is a sub cateogory "misc" which now only contains skirts and waist wraps.Previously the categorization of items was adjusted to make items "easier to find" but since the category tree was not cleaned up at the same time it has resulted in more confusion. It might be better to polish things up and see how that works before making a huge change that will affect so many negatively with relatively little gain for those it is proposed to help.
BaiSueran wrote:
Rationally, the economy of Star Wars Galaxies was created and intended to be a player driven market. There are no NPC sellers so the economy is based on the value players put on the goods and services available. Theprice is determined by the worth of the credit, which is based on the price of harvesting materials and the payout of missions. I think that trying to adjust the bazaar limit will only hurt the people who have built successful business for themselves. The bazaar is useful to people who are just starting out, to get basic supplies and begin their path to their own business. Players purchase goods from vendor's shops because they expect pesonal service and much higher quality goods. It's the difference between shopping at Wal-Mart and shopping at Macy's. In this respect, I think raising the limit on baazar listing prices would be harmful to those who have worked hard to establish a profitable shop. I think that it also acknowledges and dismisses the real problem which is that the value of the credit is dropping rapidly. When SWG went live the market stablized within a few weeks at a reasonable 3 credits/unit for materials, setting a universal standard for pricing. Now a unit of material sells for 5 credits and up. Therein lies the reason for the incredibly high priced items being sold on vendors.
With respect to the proposed limit of 150 items per vendor please consider this: There are 47 unique clothing items in SWG. If I make a shirt, I usually make pants, shoes, gloves and assorted accessories to also list. I am also working on the Architect profession with it's mass of furniture, houses, installations and now city structures and decorations. I believe a limit IS reasonable but 150 is far too low. I think if the concern is consumers being able to find the item they're seeking then the UI should be adjusted to make items easier to find. There are some eroneous categories in the tree as well as categories with misleading names. For example, there's a category for listing buildings but there's also a category for deeds and so far as I know a building cannot be listed at all. Under clothing there is a sub cateogory "misc" which now only contains skirts and waist wraps.Previously the categorization of items was adjusted to make items "easier to find" but since the category tree was not cleaned up at the same time it has resulted in more confusion. It might be better to polish things up and see how that works before making a huge change that will affect so many negatively with relatively little gain for those it is proposed to help.
i said before... i feel that the limit is reasonable, but that merchants should be able to gain more space either through paying more money or advancing in the merchant skill tree. its bare as is, so why not add a few perks?
The 150 item cap on vendors is really too low. I don't disagree with an item cap, but it should be comparable to production. If I can make 1000 items on a schematic, then it makes it awfully hard to sell them 150 at a time.
Another fundamental aspect about vendors is the ability they give you to sell to a large population when you are offline. I can hold more than 150 items in my inventory, backpack and bank vault, (160 total inventory space there i believe) and stand around and sell things in town, thus moving more volume. At that rate you might as well only allow vendors to be active when the owner is online. (It just seems like the monopoly concern has to do with volume on the vendors, which I admittedly don't quite understand how it hurts the economy.) It seems laws of supply and demand should work. If there really are large demands on vendors for them to be stacked with 1000s of items, then the demand is requiring that, so why hinder the ability to supply? I would stack as many items as I possibly could on my vendor, just so I'm not having to deal with it as much. It shouldn't be work. 150 sounds like work. Ive sold over 150 items an hour on the bazaar to a specific customer base that knows what I sell. I can get the same results on a vendor easy. It's just more work i have to go through at 150 items a pop.
At any rate, it's not proportional to the number of items one can make and it defeats the purpose of being able to sell when you're offline and still move decent volume.
Raising the limit on the bazaar is a good idea. How about making it even more useful by requiring a minimum quantity of resources before someone can list them on the bazaar, or giving us search/filtering options for the resources and weapons/armor so we can limit what we see to minimum quantities and specific types of resources. Nothing more painful than searching the entire galaxy for a specific hide or chemical and having to sift through a crapton of 1-10 unit auctions of crap resources that i wish i could filter out.
Lowering the Vendor cap to 150 is a ridiculously bad idea. Like most armorsmiths, I have a hard time keeping my vendor stocked as it is - limiting me to being able to at most sell only 15 suits on one vendor would mean i'd have to spend most of my time stocking vendors. Why punish those who can keep their vendors stocked or who actually enjoy crafting and selling that much? Empty vendors = bad customer experience = no return customer = more tells/emails requesting custom orders for those persistent enough to stick with a given merchant= reduced time actually crafting because of the time spent in tells and stocking/maintaining vendors.
If you want to eliminate monopolies, you should make experimentation skill tapes drop more often and give more people an opportunity to max out their experimentation skill through such tapes or addlong drawn out crafting quests that give people additional "knowledge" to experiment more(I sure wish in real life I could get a roll of tape I could attach to my shirt that would give me additional skills...)
The only people I've seen with close to what you could call a monopoly on any crafting profession are those the desire and time to craft in mass quantity AND provide good customer service...those with the extra experimentation have an extra advantage by being able to offer the same goods as any other master at a higher quality.
Up the bazaar ... good idea.
Limit to 150 is a bit low even for an arch. The economy is player based .. let the players sell their items A cap like this only forcescrafters/merchants to spend more hours stocking vendors to max daily or deciding that enough is enough and playin a combat profession.
When all the crafters are too poor and ticked off to craft anymore so they all go to melee, who will make the weapons and armor and clothes and food then?
Whynot fix the merch skills that are being "misused". If the vendors are loading down the database, why not make it so that anyone who actually HAS a vendor, must have the merch skills to go with it? Half the people with vendors nowadays have 0 merch skills any longer since they surrendered them.
Aiya
Master Architect, Artisan, Merchant
Valcyn
As an Architect, Merchant andrep for the crafters in my guild,I really like the idea of raising the cap in the bazaar. many agree with me when I say that the cap should be raised to at least 10k if not more. those selling structures and high amounts of resources are hindered by such a low cap.
-Tsovo, Master Architect, Master Merchant ~Kauri~
Seriously - I remember when an artisan with survey 4 could set the resolution to their tool at maximum, as befitting their skill, then dropping all survey and keeping the tool's resolution beyond what their skill allowed. This got fixed fairly promptly.
HOWEVER - people training up Management in Merchant kept their dropped vendors and untrained the skills and kept the vendors - beyond what their skill now allowed. This has been here for months now.
Why?
You solve that issue -purge all invalid vendors -and I reckon this problem will pretty much rectified. It is the packhorses being used by people who are deliberately exploiting this and using vendors as unlimited space pack mules that should be looked at and these people punished, not the real crafters.
Well the price rice for the bazzar wouldn't be necessary if the bazzars 10,000 credit upper limit for auvtions had ever worked.
As for the vendor limit that is just dumb. I play a character on sunrunner that is a master artisan and a master architect. That combination allows me to make a considerable number of items which by this new limit means i might be able to have one of each on it.
This proposed vendor limitI suspect has more to do with game development issues than concern for players finding items. I usually have around 400 to 500 items on my vendor and I've never had anyone say they couldn't find what they are looking for.
If this limit comes in it will make it almost impossible for architects to carry a realistic stock level without having to constantly restock the vendors
Draznar wrote:
I want to expand on my idea to tie vendor item limits to Merchant Skill. I think that the limit should be as followed:
- Bus 3 = 50
- Bus 4 = 100
- Novice = 150
- Man 1 = 200
- Man 2 = 300
- Man 3 = 400
- Man 4 = 500
- Master = 1,000
This is an idea I like too. I shared the idea with theLead Designer and he likes this idea too.
The thing here is to implement it right away means that as a merchant goes up in level, it wouldnt automatically upgrade in numbers. If you gained a new merchant skill box which unlocked more slots, you would have to create a new vendor. We'd be able to add an automatic check and upgrade in the future, but it wouldnt be for a long time.
Even still, I think its a great idea to add this ability in. I dont know what the max numbers would be yet though Ill ask.
This is potentially a horrible idea. For one non merchant crafting professions would become severely limited in what they can sell. We already have a cap on the bazaar vendor. Why are we going to have a cap on a Vendor that we create and manage in our own home(s). This will kill many crafting profs like Tailor and Chef who have potentially hundreds of different items to make. And Tailor has hundreds of color combinations per item. This is going to suck if implemented. Currently as M. Artisan also working on Tailor and Merchant I have 4 Vendors that have nearly 250 items on each. Once I master Merchant I will be giving that up to head towards BE to combine with Tailor. I know a bug exists that lets you keep the Vendors even though you don't have the skill to own that many anymore; however, I will be dropping my Vendors and consolodating them as I surrender my merchant skills and I may end up keeping Novice Merchant so I can keep 2 vendors active. According to this chart I could only have 300 items total on both vendors. I nearly meet that total on 1 vendor now. This will suck A$$.