Development Cycle Archive
Thread: ID#2: Two Changes to Bazaars and Vendors
vendor cap.. hope this is not gonna happen.. I would hate to wait for my WS to come on everytime I need a new weapon only to /tell him the weapon I want is sold out. Then he can only tell me he has a life too and does not have time to stock the vendor every hour..
We are from many different timezones and if I need to be online to be there when the vendor gets stocked I would have to stay up all night. If theres gonna be a cap then at least make it 1000 or more..
Just my 2 cents..
I'm dividing my reply into two parts because each issue is a seperate question, though I will reference this first suggestion in my second post:
I think changing the bazaar capto 6k is a positive change, up to a point. It will lead to a slight bit of inflation as those who are selling things raise prices because they can, but it will expand the Bazaar from a place for low-quality or low-level goods up to the mid-level market. That is a positive change, and will be very helpful for a lot of non-merchants that have goods to sell, as well as increasing the temptation for crafters to sell better items on the bazaar now that they can be priced at something more like their actual worth.
Thunderheart,
Your reasoning for suggesting this change is flawed in that discouraging monopolies is needed. I think you misunderstand what a monopoly is. A monopoly is a situation where on individual or company controls the entire market share.A situation in which a single company owns all or nearly all of the market for a given type of product or service. This would happen in the case that there is a barrier to entry into the industry that allows the single company to operate without competition. In such an industry structure, the producer will often produce a volume that is less than the amount which would maximize social welfare.
If you think any single person or P.A. has a monopoly or can create a monopoly in this economy, you obviously don't play enough of this game. Perhaps you are referring to a group of weaponsmiths or other crafters selling through one exclusive vendor. Do the dev's want to encourage the mindless wandering from vendor to vendor to attempt to find something that you are looking for? This is my least favorite part of weaponsmithing as it is. I have to search on five or six planets and usually two to three cities on each just to locate a resource that is necessary. If you limit the number of items placed to a number as ridiculously low as 150, you will get rid of the one stop shopping places that most of us love to go to so we don't have to run from place to place. I do not understand why the devs would want to encourage the mindless parts of the game rather than taking the steps necessary to expand the database to accomodate the needs of the gamers.
- Bus 3 = 50
- Bus 4 = 100
- Novice = 150
- Man 1 = 200
- Man 2 = 300
- Man 3 = 400
- Man 4 = 500
- Master = 1,000
An idea for bazaars: Right now there is a big problem with people putting useless items (CDEFs, broken loot, etc.) and tiny amounts of resources (I commonly see 1 Wild Wheat, for instance). To discourage this, I suggest that you up the cost to put something on the bazaar to 100 credits BUT have part or all of that money refunded to the seller when the item sells. That way they will only be penalized if they are trying to sell things that no one wants.
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?
While I can't really see the logic in this, I guess it's not that big a deal, really. It still keeps big-ticket items off the bazaar, but gives non-merchants some more flexibility in sales. I don't really use the bazaar, so I'd probably vote for apathy on this one. If you do, sure. If you don't, sure.
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.
This is easily one of the worst ideas I've ever heard you guys float. As a master weaponsmith, people are constantly asking us to provide virtually any and every weapon we can make. That's a lot of schematics, and a lot of stock to keep. In order to make our lives simpler, most of us just do big runs of everything we know will sell eventually, load it in the vendor, and walk away. This keeps the tell hell to a minimum, as we can usually point people to our vendors when they ask us for something.
This new item cap, however, would hearken back to the olden days of 7-day item listings on our personal vendors, where you only loaded 10 or 15 of each item on the vendor because in another week, some of them would de-list and you'd have to do that work all over again. This time we wouldn't have the 7-day cap, we'd have the 150 item cap. Which is worse? The item cap, easily, as it greatly restricts the variety of items I can stock and forces people to play the vendor shuffle just to find what they are looking for. In other words, it continues to take the enjoyment out of being a master craftsman.
I don't want to get into a rant, but let me just sum it up this way: You guys haven't done the master crafting community a lot of favors in the past 6 months. The 30-day item limit was a God-send, I will not deny. But this would be a dagger in the back that many of us would never recover from. I, for one, would probably give up weaponsmithing altogether simply to avoid the further headache, and I doubt I'm the only crafter who feels this way.
Think about it for a second... there are what, 60 weapon schematics in the game? Let's just use that number because it's round. 150 items times 6 vendors (at Management 4) is 900 items total. That's it, that's all you can carry. 900 divded by 60 is 15. That means to continue to keep the same variety of stock I do now, I can only carry 15 of each type of weapon that I currently stock (hypothetically). That's ONLY if I decide to drop additional skill points into the merchant profession. Fifteen of each? I sell fifteen or twenty of some weapons every day. So here we are again, back being slaves to our vendors if we even want to run a healthy, profitable business. No thanks, I'll just quit selling entirely and make weapons for myself.
Bottom line: bazaar changes, good; vendor changes, "end of line" for a lot of the crafting community.
Bazaar caps at 6K? Why?!?! So we can have CDEF pistols and single units of wind for 6K to work our way through? Raising the cap wold be a good idea IF it was regulated.
nonartisans and novice artisans= 3K
master artisans and novice merchants = 6K
Leveling up merchant can raise it up to 10K.
Why only merchants and not smiths you might ask? The cap is a merchant skill! Something that the merchant learns by using the merchant skills. If a weapon smith wants to sell weapons for 10K on the bazaar, then they can get master merchant as well. It seems only fair that the smiths with merchant should be able to have an advantage in the markets such as the bazaar.
This would allow goods to be sold by those more specialized in their field on the bazaar, while keeping the people with junk capped at the 3K mark.
It would be easily implemented since the programming for item caps is already in game.
As for caps on the vendors...150 is a bit low. I seldom see more than 300. That might be a good number to cap at. As I buyer, I don't want to browse more than 3 pages on a vendor. If they have more goods than that, then they can get Merchant skills, get more vendors, and sell more on the bazaar.
Limit? Eh, maybe. What I'd like to see is a search feature that lets you specify regions, prices, certain stats, types, creator, and/or keywords.
And please please do NOT limit our vendor space. That would be horribly unfair. Having a 150 item limit (or an even higher one) would be fine for many crafting professions, but it would ensure that every tailor wanting to keep their own shops would also need to be a high level merchant and use all our precious vendors only on our tailoring business. That's just wrong on so many levels. Tailors have more schematics than any other profession, and we're hoping to get even more once it's our turn for dev attention. But we have to stock items in at least 3-4 different colors to be considered to have a good selection. On my main vendor right now, I have 300+ items, and I'm still not quite happy with the range of selection it offers. Many of the best tailor shops offer 500+ items. If an experienced clothing customer visits a shop with only 150 items, they tend to think it's a relatively poor selection and never bother to return.
I currently have several vendors of different types, I'm only one vendor away from the maxium merchant number of vendors. Forcing me to rearrange my tailor shop into 2-3 extra vendors would cripple the entire rest of my merchant business.
Tailors (and merchants) seem low priority classes to the devs, but please don't ruin our shops by doing this.
Put in an edit button...
As I was trying to explain the problems with the price cap on bazaar sales before inopportunely posting a half-finished post.
Problem with the change to the bazaar price cap
1. It will further empty player cities (and they are empty, I've visited many, only a few players around...compare to Bestine, Coronet, Moenia, Kaadara). The only reason to go to a player city is ....
a. quick transportation using a shuttle to get nearer a POI (but not off-planet!!!!)
b. You live there and need to store some stuff in your house
c. You're looking for a shop to buy something.
You're killing item c. With the higher cap you've ensured that consumables, like powerups, food, medecine, can all be found in the bazaar. The only thing left on vendors will be the durable goods like houses, vehicles, weapons, and armor. These vendors don't generate enough foot traffic to keep theplayer cities populated. Also, these items don't generate enough traffic to make it worthwhile to even have a vendor, much less a merchant tent for many players. Is the real problem that there are too many vendors? Fix that by making vendors merchant-only and limit how many a merchant can have.
I have no problem raising bazaar caps.
I have a definate problem limiting the number of items I can list on my vendors.
I have 6 vendors - and all but one of them is always maintained with a min of 250 items each. This isn't storage - this is stock so folks that visit my shop have a very good chance of going away happy with what they want.
It doesn't sit there either, after the initial 30 day cycle ended - I had fewer than 100 items total that had to be relisted out of somewhere between 1500 and 2500 (didn't actually tally it) that were on there at the time. This isn't to mention all the stocking I've done in those 30 days.
Did I mention my store is rather busy?
As a bio/tailor - not only do I have the tailoring problem of a wide selection of styles and colors - but also multiply that by all the various bonuses.
Drilling down thru the pages IS a problem - tons of customers don't know how to sort by catagory, but the biggest problem isn't the customers - it's the halfarsed way the bazaar sorts. Intuition would tell me an alphabetical sort should be just that - on the vendor - not just the page. Sorting would be a lot more useful if things actually went into the right categories - wookiee gear and skirts come to mind, but I'm sure there are a ton of others. Again, a bazaar - not a customer problem.
Given the pet fiasco today (i.e., I pulled every pet I had for sale because I have zero way of knowing if it's valid or not) this isn't helping my mood at all regarding being a shopkeeper - which, make no mistake about it - is the ONLY reason I play a MMOG.
I'm sorry for the database woes - but frankly - YOU designed the system, and going back and cutting the legs off functionality is the wrong way to address the issue.
Could I adapt - maybe. Will I want to - not sure yet, this morning I'm leaning more and more towards not.
I also haven't forgotten that house item caps were TEMPORARY - yeah, well - I smelled that one when it was said. Does anyone remember the TEMPORARY status of that? Sorry, I don't trust that word - memories seem to be short.
YOU designed this as a playerdriven system, you are just going to have to support that basic core design element. One of the key facets of that is people being able to list for sale/buy what they need - when they need it. If you discourage shops from offering goods - that cascades to every corner of the game in a player driven economy. How many noncrafters will continue to subscribe if they can't find the basic necessary elements (weapon, armor, tools, structures, clothing, droids, meds) to play? It's not just the crafter/shopkeeper that might walk away if the irritation factor of keeping things instock raises too high, it's all the players that depend on those crafter/shopkeepers for basic necessary gameplay elements.
If this goes thru my shop will suffer. You'd have to double the number of vendors available for me to retain the same service and functionality my store currently has. This is not necessarily an invalid option - but you've cut the heart out of my business if I can't offer the range I currently do.
Another example of trying to fix yalls seriously borked database by jacking with something that works.
Limiting vendors to 150 items each is ridiculous for ANY product line where the Merchant is trying to use the powerful "always in stock" type of selling point.
Instead of trying to bandaid the problemsthat whoever created/manages the database created by not putting some thought into the economics of the game (just like when yall proposed limiting factories to 100 items each tho' many, many end-products require multiples of a single component) might be time to add another hamster or three to the database's power wheel.