Development Cycle Archive
Thread: ID#2: Two Changes to Bazaars and Vendors
Eola wrote:
DND_Cas wrote:
I agree with both in essence.
2. This would make the merchant class useful (which is presumably what its there for). What I disagree with is doing it in one patch you need to give people time to migrate thier skills to match what they need or auto migrate them for them (although I guess this would annoy the merchants who spent the time getting the class the normal way).
'Nerfing the ability of merchants to overstock because they're going to be away from the game for RL reasons, and making it so they have to restock everyday just to reduce the amount of time their vendor will be out of certain items will make the merchant class useful.'
Please explain this to me, like I was a two year old. I stock 900+ items on my 4 vendors, and I need to add another 100-200 items tonights (pistols & grenades). Thischange will handicap my reliability as a weaponsmith that always stocks everything he can (except Rocket Launchers). It will be worse for Tailors, Armorsmiths, and Chefs/Smugglers/Doctors, other crafts with larger varieties of products and/or that experience large bulk sales of various lot sizes.
Your a weaponsmith not a retailer - if you want to be both pick up merchant skills to cover this. I said I agreed with the "idea" not the actual numbers, which as pointed out is negociable, so if it turns out to be too low it can be changed.
No other profession gets this. As a fencer or an entertainer I don't get to dabble in the chef or carbineer proffesions for free. I honestly think, in part, they are redressing an inbalence here. God knows I don't want to upset crafters cause they make all the stuff and we don't need to lose them because the game will be unbalenced - but the point remains that being a crafter != retailer. Two completely seperate skill trees imo.
As I said tho I have sympathy for you guys and you should be given time to convert yourselves so your don't waste all your hard work or get the conversion for free.
Rogue1970 wrote:
Allow us todesignate crates to pull identical items for individual sale from, on the vendors.
A crate of 10 powerups takes up one slot of inventory(not 10) -you sell one andthe vendor conventiently takes it from the crate and hands it to the customer.
Imagine a tailor with a crate of each type shirt in each of the popular colors - Imagine the happy customers who can choose from an organizedvariety of each item rather than a minimal selection as it is now...
What do you think?
I think you've never played a Tailor before.
Crates don't work for Tailors in this case.
Tailor Customization (coloring) comes ***AFTER*** the "create prototype" and "create manufacturing schematic" step. Unless you want to completely remove colors on clothes, bad idea. Non-customized clothes are GRAY. Ever see the PBS show "Lathe Of Heaven"? They got around "racism" by making everyone GRAY. Grand idea.
Increasing the credit cap on bazaar items is not a good idea. There is already far too much stuff on the bazaar and there is no way to filter or search apart from the broad categories. Also, someNPC player cities are already overcrowded to the point where they are unplayable. Increasing the bazaar credit cap will just encourage players to head to these already overcrowded areas.
If the bazaar needs to be changed then the 2 obvious changes are:
1) make it properly searchable.
2) Implement player city bazaars and increase the credit cap on those only. That will encourage people to go out of the overcrowded NPC cities and into the player cities.
Capping player vendors is another bad idea. A tailor already has more than 250 schematics, not including the colour variations they can make. Unless of course the idea is to force crafters to take the merchant tree, or force crafters to rely on another player to sell their goods, which is a great idea if you want to kill crafting in SWG. Instead of capping vendors, how about you look into fixing the database? Since you were forced to remove the newbie melons, it's obvious that the DB is not up to scratch.
Padre
Good question.
p4Samwise wrote:
I've asked that question many times before, always to thundering silence. I suspect the answer is no.
PadreBook wrote:
A related question: who among the Development staff actually play primarily elite crafting professions on live servers? I should ask are there any?
I heard one of them plays a merchant, but I haven't heard of any that does a crafting profession.
We wouldn't have the stupid practice grinding if they did.
I bet they all play combat classes.
What many crafters fear, with good reason, is that bazaar will take over much of the traffic that is now happening through private vendors. Merchants, that by definition, wants to lure people away from bazaar to their private vendors are also in trouble. The general public are of course happy (see the "scientific" poll), since it is undobtedly more convinient to find most of what you need in 1 spot. Yet, I fail to see how this improves the game in any way for anyone. Crafters and especially merchants will be hurt by these changes, for what purpose?
If you want the bazaar to be more useful: Remove the auction cap! Make it a place for the auctions that now happen on the trade boards.
If you want the bazaar to be more efficient: Add more search filters.
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Vendor limit encouraging monopolies? There are two things that encourage monopolies in this game. 1 - a closed economy, meaning you can corner a marketif you have enough credits to cover the worth of available items (which in some cases is possible because of the small size of some markets). 2 - influx of desired items is much less than demand(making #1 much more possible). I fail to see how the current vendor limit encorage monopolies more than the above.
The only thing this will cause is making the game less fun to play. Either you have to:
a) spend more skill points in merchant limiting what else you can do in the game. No chance you will be able to have some decent combat skills and at the same time master an elite artisan profession and have enough of vendor/vendor space.
b) having to restock more often and we all know how fun that is.
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Some suggestions for devs:
1) Limit database size: Let us merge crates to larger than today (or make every crate with 50 items). This would increase the number of items both in storage and on vendor/bazaar. People would prefer buying powerups etc in 50 item crates anyway.
2) Easier vendor browsing: List identical items as one (show how many).
3) Easier vendor browsing: More and better categories. Split resources down into copper, steel etc. Always list items in crates in tehir correct category and not under factory crates (crates of powerups under powerups).
DND_Cas wrote:
Eola wrote:
DND_Cas wrote:
I agree with both in essence.
2. This would make the merchant class useful (which is presumably what its there for). What I disagree with is doing it in one patch you need to give people time to migrate thier skills to match what they need or auto migrate them for them (although I guess this would annoy the merchants who spent the time getting the class the normal way).
'Nerfing the ability of merchants to overstock because they're going to be away from the game for RL reasons, and making it so they have to restock everyday just to reduce the amount of time their vendor will be out of certain items will make the merchant class useful.'
Please explain this to me, like I was a two year old. I stock 900+ items on my 4 vendors, and I need to add another 100-200 items tonights (pistols & grenades). Thischange will handicap my reliability as a weaponsmith that always stocks everything he can (except Rocket Launchers). It will be worse for Tailors, Armorsmiths, and Chefs/Smugglers/Doctors, other crafts with larger varieties of products and/or that experience large bulk sales of various lot sizes.
Your a weaponsmith not a retailer - if you want to be both pick up merchant skills to cover this. I said I agreed with the "idea" not the actual numbers, which as pointed out is negociable, so if it turns out to be too low it can be changed.
No other profession gets this. As a fencer or an entertainer I don't get to dabble in the chef or carbineer proffesions for free. I honestly think, in part, they are redressing an inbalence here. God knows I don't want to upset crafters cause they make all the stuff and we don't need to lose them because the game will be unbalenced - but the point remains that being a crafter != retailer. Two completely seperate skill trees imo.
As I said tho I have sympathy for you guys and you should be given time to convert yourselves so your don't waste all your hard work or get the conversion for free.
When someone says they have four vendors, they do have merchant skills. Plus the weaponsmith was speaking about specific amounts of items that he stocks, in order to pull in customers. I don't see anyone, who is not a craftsman, coming up with any specific numbers (relating to schematics, colors, variations on a theme) to specify why this terribly low cap is sufficient. As a matter of fact, I'm not sure why any combat-skilled person would even post on this thread to advocate a cap on vendors. You will only be hurting yourselves, by limiting what the craftsmen can offer to you.
The only consistent way to deal with this issue, is to make sure that only merchants with current training have more than one vendor. To allow people to drop skills in merchant, but still allow them to have the vendors, is an error on the part of Sony, not on the part of the merchants who still maintain those skills. Why are we all being punished for an exploit like this? If there is a cap implemented, but the exploit remains, then I will simply drop my merchant skills, keeping all of my vendors, and use those skill points elsewhere. It is obvious that Sony wants us to play the game that way.
Bazaar cap : Good idea.
Vendor cap : not the right solution. there are a lot of vendors with 30 a 40 items.
If you put a cap in it like 150, a lot of people will stock it to the cap, (hey we are allowed150 items, why not stock it for 150 items.)
dunno. but 150 items per vendor ain't that much, how is a3xcrafting(Tailer/armor/artisan) merchant gonna make a choice?
put a helmet, windpower deed, shoesand a swoop in one vendor?
great shop!
Hi,
to solve the item-problem it would be just necessary to remove those vendors from players who untrained Merchant.
Read ya.
I'm sorry to say I disagree with both changes.
1 - Raising the bazaar cap:
Currently, the items sold on the bazaar are 'trivial' and they should remain so. Increasing the cap will mean vendors becoming less valuable. Business III for the first vendor is a very reasonable cost to be able to sell non-trivial items. I understand that on some servers where inflation has kicked in 'big time', this means very little is available on the bazaar. Guess what? That's good - it's a sign of the economy tilting towards vendors - an actual maturing economy!
2 - Limits on vendor items:
This will bea problem for two reasons.
First of all, it forces all crafters who actually want to make a living from their craft into taking Merchant just to maintain stock. My character is a weaponsmith, and he's not planning on taking over the galaxy - one shop, nicely stocked with good quality items. Problem is, one vendor won't be enough for all the good quality items I can make - and I only have one crafting profession. So under the proposed change, I must take merchant and place multiple vendors in a single location. That just doesn't sound right.
Secondly, this proposal kills the casual player that SOE were so keen to advertise would not be at a disadvantage within SWG. Personally, I play every day, but for those who can only play at weekends this would make vendors untennable, as the amount of items they can produce in a weekend far exceeds the amount they could place and they would be unable to stock during the week. The same would be true of a player who takes a week's holiday. Even a day's connection problems with your ISP could result in your vendor being out of stock for it, and as people keep reiterating in this thread:
There is nothing more frustrating than going to a vendor who is out of stock!
If it's the fault of the player, that's fine - they soon lose customers - but if it's inherent in the game system (as it would be if you capped the item limit), then that frustration is going to be shared by everyone, even if your supplier of choice is spending every evening sitting in their shop crafting items and re-stocking vendors!
If any of my points are unclear, I'm happy to elaborate.
Hat.
I do like the thought of raising the cost cap of the bazaar.
I like better the idea of adding vendors in player cities to the bazaar. So you can still only sell expencive items from vendors and purchasers will still have to go to the vendor to retreave the item, but it will be easier to find those items.
Edward
Tyrst wrote:
I also like the cap on the Vendors. If you are playing a weaponsmith you should be crafting and stocking your store not out running missions and making free money. I have to work for my money so should you.
Again, please refrain from commentary if you have no idea what you're talking about. Most dedicated crafters spend all of their time crafting and stocking. But some of us also need to go to work in Real Life and Sleep and Eat so we don't have that ability to log onto the game 5 or 6 times a day to restock items as they sell out.
I don't run missions (what would be the point exactly, making weapons is more profitable), I spend 60% of my time crafting, 30% of my time dealing with customers and/or suppliers (power mainly), and 10% of my time moving my harvesters around. My few combat skills (carbines -> Novice carbineer) are only ever used when I need to clear out an aggro mob from my shop, or kill a lair so I can place a harvester.