Development Cycle Archive
Thread: ID#2: Two Changes to Bazaars and Vendors
I am completely opposed to both ideas. The combination of raising the bazaar cap to 6000 and limiting the number of items on vendors will severely hurt many player run businesses like mine. I am a Master Tailor that worked very hard to get there and establish a successful shop. I am not poor nor am I rolling in money, but I do a fairly steady business and 90 percent of my income comes from my vendors. I have two vendors currently and keep a good size stock on them at all times (around 400 items). I receive many words of praise from my customers about this. This is a fast-food society, RL and in-game. The majority of people do not want to have to email and custom order clothing, they want to be able to run to a vendor, finding exactly what they are looking for in the colors they desire, and buy it right then and there. With the number of items available to a Master Tailor along with the countless color combinations, maintaining any sort of a decent stock of in-demand items in the most popular colors would be impossible. Not only that, but with the bazaar cap doubled to 6000, there will be an influx of higher end items on the bazaar that people used to have to go to vendors for, and with the limit of only 25 items on the bazaar there is no way people can have any kind of healthy competition. Those that are online all the time and can constantly restock maybe will do ok, but the rest of us will in no way be able to keep up. Vendor sales will drop drastically, and prices are sure to follow as the competition becomes tougher and tougher. As for the monopoly issue that was raised as the reason for adding a vendor cap, with all due respect that's the biggest crock of you-know-what I've ever heard. Anyone can carve a nitch for themselves by making a good reputation, having fair but profitable prices, and having well stocked vendors. (ask any customer how much they HATE running all the way to shop only to find the vendors empty). I did not start playing in beta, I came into the game later and had to compete against all the other already established Masters, and I did just fine by employing good business strategy, now I am told that doing so is some sort of monopoly?
This is a huge mistake in a game where there are already numerous problems that are not attended to and ignored. Doing this will completely unbalance the game economy, which is one of the few things that is working just fine....like a capitalistic society's economy should.
Thunderheart wrote:
i dont know that your still reading all these negative responses, but hopefully youve gotten the gist that people really dont want a 150 cap
I do.
You may have missed it, but it's looking like there will be an incremental cap based on the merchant skill.
But it will be higher then 150 right? and when does the fact that you wanted to do somthing determine it is the right thing to do? Isn't it obvious that a good % of everybody here does not like the ideal of the 150 cap? I dont mind a cap, but 150 is WAY to low.
Thunderheart wrote:
i dont know that your still reading all these negative responses, but hopefully youve gotten the gist that people really dont want a 150 cap
I do.
You may have missed it, but it's looking like there will be an incremental cap based on the merchant skill.
I know you said you're still working on the numbers, but I think it's safe to say that if the max for a Master Merchant is anything less than 1000 a number of us will be a little bummed. 
That being said, I think an incremental cap is a good idea.
In my mind, the changes to the bazaar is terrible- but i guess it doesnt affect me, as im not a crafter, just my guild mates
However, why now make the changes to the vendors, and then add skill to merchants in one of their lines to give additional item spaces on vendors- so a master merchant could have maybe 300 items on a vendor instead of 150.
Thunderheart wrote:
i dont know that your still reading all these negative responses, but hopefully youve gotten the gist that people really dont want a 150 cap
I do.You may have missed it, but it's looking like there will be an incremental cap based on the merchant skill.
Apparently he does not get it...
There are barely enough skill points to allow a crafter to have one decent vendor, be able to master an elite crafting profession, and be able to actually do some fighting.
I'm all for 'Merchants being useful', but these changes just seem to penalize all non-merchant crafters.
Let me take a stab at the 'cause' for this change. On some servers, there are vendors with thousands of items which is causing a DB problem of some sort, so whoever is looking at the DB hueristics came up with this 'feature', correct? BTW, this is almost the worst way to develop software for consumers, but you've probably heard that by now (look up user-centered design in the field of computer science, please).
Now let me propose a practical solution. Set a high, but fixed, cap on vendors. I personally suggest 500 to 1000 items. Merchant still gets additional vendors, players without merchant can't stack up loads upon loads of items in a merchant, it's a win-win.
In in all honesty, can we get some bugs fixed instead of this 'hey let's work on these issues no one but us has a real problem with'? I'm actually a little worried a Dev may go 'implement' these merchant caps and then introduce more bugs into the game (and you can't blame me, this has been happening since launch).
Chianti wrote:
Thunderheart wrote:
i dont know that your still reading all these negative responses, but hopefully youve gotten the gist that people really dont want a 150 cap
I do.
You may have missed it, but it's looking like there will be an incremental cap based on the merchant skill.
TH, this won't help dude.
People want time to play the game ASIDE from having to babysit their crafting character. All you'll accomplish by doing this al making them devote even more skill points to their crafting professions meaning less to have a combat capable template as well... for other content.
Either way, expect this change to destroy the crafting business entirely.
*is... notal. I've had an exceptionally hard time spelling on the forums today
I think the weather in nyc is starting to affect me
Thunderheart wrote:
i dont know that your still reading all these negative responses, but hopefully youve gotten the gist that people really dont want a 150 cap
I do.You may have missed it, but it's looking like there will be an incremental cap based on the merchant skill.
Since merchants CANNOT operate vendors for other people, that means that to be a crafter you will have to be a high-level/master merchant (and hence no skills left to participate in the so-called 'content' of this game), which most people do NOT want to do. The merchant forum is primarily people that want to do that so that is your choir, if you actually polled all crafting professions and even other types of retailers you would get and even clearer picture.
A related question: who among the Development staff actually play primarily elite crafting professions on live servers? I should ask are there any?
Padre
I probably missed it on one of the 68 other pages of this thread.
Thunderheart wrote:
You may have missed it, but it's looking like there will be an incremental cap based on the merchant skill.
Slightly Off Topic:
DwrBudr wrote:
I constantly have problems with the bazaar. The next items button never works for me, it never really shows a clear page of new items, no matter how many times I flip pages.
This is the way the bazaar is coded. They have the option of coding it so that it will query the bazaar once and then your 'next page' item will work and not show duplications, but things will be immediately outdated because of the other 1000 people who are looking at the bazaar and buying/selling things the same time you are.
Right now, the 'list' of items on the bazaar constantly changes, so each time you do click 'next page' it gets that list again. Because it is changing so much all the time it is hard to know which items you have seen already. They could add some code that makes a list, compares the list-youve-seen-already with the new-items-list and doesn't show anything you've already seen. I doubt they did that and I doubt they will do that.
I am not sure what the original 'sort' order of items on the bazaar is. What I think should happen though is when you click a column to sort on, it should requery with that sort order instead of just sorting the items that have been returned already (not 100% sure that happens but looks liek what it is)
So that's why you see the same items on the first 5 pages of your bazaar listing.
Raising the cap on the bazaar is ok. The world will still survive.
Capping vendors is also ok. People will have to stock their vendors daily... OR make friends with a Merchant who can take stock and spend hours organizing and restocking vendors. I'm in a fairly small guild. We have 1 Master Merchant who's in charge of handling all of our guild sales. She manages 6 vendors on two planets fine. Our weaponsmith makes weapons, leaves them in the guild hall so the Merchant can pick them up and put them on a vendor. Same with our Architect and same with my spice. That's the Merchant's job. It gives incentive to make friends and make people go to Master Merchant.