Development Cycle Archive
Thread: ID#2: Two Changes to Bazaars and Vendors
I support both changes.
Increased bazaar max is good for a) resource and commodities sellers and b) customers who hate buying in small lots.
Cap on vendor items is also great - gives meaning to the management line and master box of the Merchant profession.
Well done!
Bazaar Cap Raise:
I think this is a good idea as regular low quality resources are hard to find in large numbers, and I think a cap of 6k will help that out a lot. I don't believe it should go much higher than that, though.
Vendor Item Limit:
I think 150 is too low. I personally haven't ever reached 150, but I think we have enough item limitation as it is. I think 200 or 300 would be better if you're going to cap it.
Then again the monopoly thought had never occured to me. So while my initial opinion is against yet another item limit, I wouldn't be too terribly opposed. But I do think it should be raised to at least 200.
So...em..... when are you going to let ID's work on our NPC's? I think that would make us Merchant's a lot happier.
Raising Price Cap on Bazaar - Good idea. It will actually make putting something on auction a little more worethwhile. I do however believe the cap should be 10k not 6k.
Cap on vendor - Good Idea, but I would make the limit more like 200 or 250.
I would also like to see a search function or a keyword or something like that to the bazaar instead of having to page through 30 pages of listings for all planets. So if I'm looking for a Decorative vest for instance I don't have to look at all the other crap I don't really care about.
Raising the Bazaar max price to 6k is a good idea. Do it.
However, 150 items on a vendor is way too low. 300 should be the very bare minimum of your vendor item cap discussions. 500 or 600 possibly the most.
With this suggestion you've demonstrated that the DEV's have a VERY limited and unrealistic idea of the normal day to day economic process on the servers.It certainly doesn't do anything for my confidence in the developers.
Why don't you make this a merchant only thing, instead of the "premium sale" icon, make premium sales able to go above 3000?
Thunderheart wrote:The first change has to do with the Bazaar cap. The Bazaar cap is the dividing line between a convenient one stop shopping point for commodities items (commodities are things like food, medicine and other "pedestrian" items) and specialty items sold by crafters and merchants (specialty items are expensive items that are found in crafter shops and merchant tents).
Currently, the credit cap is 3000 and the development team is considering raising the cap to 6000 credits. Are you for or against this change? Why?
I have mixed feelings on this and as a result, I guess I'm inclined to say it's worth trying.
Different professions have different value goods to sell and I can see some still being "locked out" of selling on the bazaar in large part. For example, an Architect will still have problems putting even low end structures (small houses) on the bazaar.
I think this change will encourage more/larger factory crates of some goods. I would prefer to see factory crates categorized in their single item category (for example, crates of stimpacks in "Pharmaceuticals" instead of "Factory Crates") since in places like Theed, Coronet, etc. this category is already hard to wade through.
Along the same lines, increasing the cap will encourage more items in the bazaar. MANY people are perplexed by the 100 items per page and miss the "Next Items" button. Making the button larger, a different color, or maybe even blinking in flourescent orange would help until a better bazaar/vendor interface can be designed. Similarly, saving sort criteria (primary sort by item name, secondary by type for example), column sizing, etc. is needed to sort through an even larger number of potential sales on the bazaar.
Ideally, sorts should work on ALL items in the selected category, not just the first 100 items in the category. It's annoying now trying to make sense of a popular category like mineral resource crates in Theed and with the potential for more people selling via the bazaar, it'll be harder to make sense of it all.
Thunderheart wrote:The second item has to do with Vendors. Currently, there is no limit to how many items can be placed on a vendor. This causes technical issues, encourages monopolies and actually hurts sales in many instances because most players don't "drill down" through all of the vendor pages to find items. We want to solve the technical issues, discourage monopolies and make vendors easier to use. An item limit is going to be placed on vendors and that limit is intended to be placed on 150.
I'm not sure how this change will make vendors "easier to use" unless that's defined by never using them because they aren't stocked with what you're trying to find.
I think this is different for different professions, but let me describe the profession I know best -- Architect. If I sell furniture, I have roughly 75 unique items as a Master Architect. Everyone's taste is different and nobody wants just one chair in their house. If I stock two of everything, I've already hit the 150 item cap. Things like torches, plants, and other items are often purchased in quantities of 5-10 to furnish a medium to large house.
Tailors probably have it the worst of any crafting profession. Not only are there a large number of styles akin to an Architect's furniture selection, but Tailors also have a wide selection of colors.
One argument could be that the Merchant profession gains skills to place additional vendors (up to 6 I believe) and you could therefore have 150 items times your skill level by placing additional vendors in your shop. This will have the side effect of restricting crafter/Merchants with many unique items to one shop with multiple vendors instead of potentially several locations with one vendor at each. This could limit commerce, although I'm not sure how prevalent it is today where people setup shops in different locations.
With Tailors, I would like to see a tool Tailors can place in their shop(s) where the Tailor can configure it with the schematics to enable. Customers could then use the tool to see herself/himself in various attire the Tailor can make, in whatever color, then take an "order schematic" to the Tailor (maybe emailed via the tool?) for the Tailor to make and put on the vendor. Alternatively, a tool that would allow players to change the color, name, and other attributes of a crafted good might help with reducing the complexity of the number of items a Merchant needs to stock.
I'm still not sure how to suggest enforcing a 150 item limit on a furniture seller though. An interesting idea might be to allow all crafting professions to construct an "order tool" containing a list of all the things they can construct with prices that players would then place an order from. There would be a wait time, perhaps days, for the crafter to craft the item and make it available on a vendor, but it would reduce the "instant sale" transactions on vendors.
Another idea I suppose would be to allow customers to break up a factory crate. If the Merchant put up a crate of 10 identical couches, the customer could buy the crate for a certain price, or buy them individually from the crate for a certain price.
Overall, I'm very worried about this change. As a recently retired Architect/Merchant, the only thing that kept me sane while doing it was to stock my vendor(s) sky high so I didn't have to receive /tells or email orders nonstop that prevented me from an occasional adventure with friends. Back when NPC vendors were very buggy, I worked primarily "build to order" and it was painful. I'd hate to see a return to that as it results in burnout.
Before the item limit on vendors is reduced, I would like to see other avenues persued. Furniture, for example, can be experimented but it doesn't do anything. Removing that unused experiementation data for furniture would reduce the data in the database. This is probably true of other items from other professions. Please consider this and all the above before making play even more work.
I like both ideas. The cap on the vendors is cool because like another user said ; it makes having multiple vendors a skill worth having. Plus I hate using one vendor that has EVERYTHING. Its a pain to hit next , etc. I'd rather have a vendor sell one particular item, so that way I can go directly to the person I want.
The raise on bazaar seems good too.
Raise the bazaar cost cap to 6k is not a bad idea, especially seen as how inflation has gone up so much.
As for merchant vendor limits, I am against them. Especially at a number as low as 150. I sell that many many items in a single day, sometimes more. Especially since I carry a wide range of products from three different artisan professions.
A cap of 1000 or perhaps as low as 500 if absolutly necessary, personally you should just leave it alone.
I find it unfortunate though that your systems do not seem to be able to handle objects as well as you folks said you could during pre-beta and all three beta phases. We were told repeatedly that this would be a crafting economy and your systems could handled trillions of items per server with no problem. However, the farther we go on, the more it is found that you actually cant.
The only thing this leads to is punishing successful merchants.
Comment on raising bazaar cap:
This is a good idea. The reason why is that it takes into account an inflationary economy. 3000 credits does not buy as much now as it did when the game was released. So it brings the bazaar in line with game reality.
Comment on vendor cap:
This should not be implemented until after you add a feature that alerts you to a mapped vendor being empty. I do enough running around from one empty vendor to another, and this will just make it worse.
I think it's a good suggestion, 6K sounds about right but i can imagine that up 10k would be alright.
150 item limit on private vendors sounds like it will be a bit little. Maybe 300-500 items? I can imagine that 150 items would fill up space really fast.
The Raise of the cap on the Bazzar is great. 6k means I can sell more products as teasers to get Customers into my store.
The Personal Vendor cap at 150 items is ridiculous. Id suggest a 500 item cap on these. I agree unlimited could be stressful on the consumer and more importantly the database. But 150 items would sell out in minutes, causing me to stock so often it would become annoying.
So in conclusion:
Bazzar Price Cap Raise: Thumbs Up
Vendor Item Cap at 150: Thumbs Down
Vendor Item Cap at 500: Thumbs Up