Development Cycle Archive
Thread: ID#2: Two Changes to Bazaars and Vendors
Bazaar Cap:
Good idea.
Currently I know that people dont want to put things on the bazaar because of the low cap. This also doesnt really take away from the Merchant skill because most Merchants are or IMO should be working out of a player city by now, or at least a player populated area. So buisness flows well in that setting.
Vendor Cap:
Bad Idea.
I am a Master Merchant on Flurry. Until recently I was a Master Architect. When I was an Architect I had easily 300 - 500 items on my Architect products vendor. The items varied from crates of furniture, individual furniture, homes, havesters, and other Architect items. I continually sold everything off that vendor in less than 2 weeks. Problem would be that I would have not been able to list most of my items if the cap was at 150. In turn making less item selection and less amounts of individual items.
I do think that this cap would push people into making Master Merchant to be able to sell more items at a time, so I can see your basis for this thought. Although at 150 you would be capped at 900 items as a master merchant. This would not allow for you to run a full buieness with all the possible markets. As for the monopoly. Why are you given 6 Vendors if you arent supposed to branch out? Also isnt theMerchantskill there for you to run a buisness?Most merchants fizzle out if they spread themselves too thin. Allow them to do this, thinning of the herd persey.
Now that I have dropped Architect I run a pure buy and sell merchant buisness. This is 95% within my guild. Making it possible for people to get a decent price for there wares without having to pursue the Merchant skill. Dont get me wrong I do have a markup, small but it is a markup. I run 6 vendors within my city, all competative prices, 3+ vendorsat anytime are above the 150 proposed cap.
There are enough Merchants out there so if someone is running a monoploy in one city, goto the next. The Merchant skill should be allowed to monopolize because they reached that skill. Some have a very hard time reaching this skill because of the buisness flow, but that is the trade off for having 6 vendors that you can stock to the hilt. I for one did not have any problems reaching this skill because of my buisness tactics within my guild.
Possibly a better solution would be to cap the amount on the vendors at Buisness 3. Then as they go up in the Merchant skill raise the cap on the vendors. Then at Master Merchant allow for the current unlimited vendor items.
I apologise for the long post. This is just something that is very passionate to me. Thank you all for your time. Also thanks to the Devs for asking for input beforea major change.
Bazzar change is good. However with my Master artisan selling power ups I do good to not run out of crates of power ups if i stock 300 crates a day. I think 150 limit is a bit low.
Maybe try a 300 limit first? See how that goes then reevaluate after a bit.
I also agree with limiting the number of items that can be placed on a merchant vendor, but feel that the 150 item limit is too low. Perhaps 300 items would be more reasonable? Depending on what items you are selling, you will quickly hit the 150 item cap if you want to have both sufficient variety and quantity on your vendor to encourage customers to visit. Some of the earlier weaponcrafter posts explain this limitation in more detail. At the same time, I believe that setting a limit will indeed help prevent monopolies and encourage more vendors. Would it be possible to start with a limit of 300 items and see if it has the intended outcome before setting a more severe restriction of 150 items?
Actually i think raising the bazaar cap will "discourage" merchant use and that the cap actually needs to be lowered even more to around 1500 credits.
I agree with limiting the number of items on vendors... 150 is enough.
HOWEVER, please enhance the interface to "repost" items from the stockroom back onto the sales counter... having to do this one at a time is REALLY tedious and a big time wasting event. I would much rather "repost" items from the stockroom at the same prices... if I need to change prices THEN i would do them one item at a time.
thanks,
i havent read all of the replies to this one, but here's my 2 credits on this.
First i personally like the idea of raising the bazaar to 6k credits instead of 3k, it will allow more of the higher items that we can make to be put out there for the public to see and buy.
The vendor item cap...not sure i like it, but it maybe necessary to make it easier for the customers to find things they want, however, many Crafters to save time on the stocking of the vendors, generally keep a minimum of 200-300 items, and only restock every couple days, with a cap of only 150, this is gonna make most of us never be able to leave the crafting station and keep a decently stocked vendor, which in effect leads to more empty registered vendors because we cant keep up with stocking vendors. I have to stock mine nightly just to keep the most popular items in stock as it is, and atm i keep 200 - 350 items on my vendor to help ensure i dont have empty vendors on the map.
However, on the other hand of this, some of us have more then one vendor available to us, which will make things a bit easier for those of us who are used to having more then 150 items at a time stocked, This will just make some of us have to get creative with names for the vendors, and separating items on each vendor to allow for 150 items per vendor, but have more vendors in the shop.
Master artisan / master tailor / soon to be master merchant 4/1/4/4
1) I'm all for raising the cap on the bizzar. The 3000 Credit limit is way to low to sell most items at any type of a profit. I also suggest that you fix auctions. If someone bids the maximum bid off the bat you have to wait 7 days till the auction finishes durring which time you recieve constant tells from people intrested in making a purchase. This is annoying and highly frustrating. Either allow auctions to go over the "instant sale cap" or make the "Accept Bid" option actually function.
2) This change does not bode well for the community at all. It's hard enough to find a vendor with a stock of what I happen to be looking for at the moment. If you limit how many items normal vendors can store your going to create 2 problems sellers won't be able to keep their vendors stocked, and buyers won't be able to find what they are looking for. This is going to lead to more retailers being harassed by their patrons (commonly refered to as /tell hell). The only ones who would benefit from this change ARE the monopolies. Those people who have the means and resources to constantly keep their vendors stocked even after they sell out in 2 hours from the last restocking.
Change to
Bazaar price cap: Excellent!
Items per vendor: Ok
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.
Maybe fixing the technical issues with your database instead of screwing the crafter/merchants up would be a better idea, the other things you are stating as a problem is BS mate.
Thunderheart wrote:
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?
There are a few ways to look at it. It depends on what time in the game the bazaar was supposed to represent. At the beginning of the game, having 30,000 was a merchant's common cash-on-hand amount. I'm increasingly moving towards always trying to have 3,000,000 on-hand, now. By that logic, the bazaar should be moved to 300,000. The typical bazaar has goods that run from 1.5 cpu to 8 cpu. Generally, most things run from 3 to 6 cpu. I prefer to buy in units of 10,000. So, moving to 100,000 would make it possible post 10 cpu items with a 10,000 units and leave some room for economic inflation for another six months. This would be about par for inflation.
Currently, there is no limit to how many items can be placed on a vendor. This causes technical issues,
This one I grant you. Vendor/bazaar stability has been an on-going problem.
encourages monopolies
Explain this one to me, please. I want to make sure you are using the correct word. A monopoly is a lock on a sector of the market that prevents any form of competition. I am unaware of any method of using vendors to prevent anyone else from producing or selling one or more forms of goods.
and actually hurts sales in many instances because most players don't "drill down" through all of the vendor pages to find items.
This is a fault of the poor UI design and not the number of items. The columns cannot be resized, the partitions cannot be individually resized, and the columns displayed (other than description and price) are not relevant to the sale. The greatest problem is the filters are very weakly designed. The choice in filters is weak compared to the common set of items. For instance, mineral resources should be further divided into copper, steel, iron, etc. Finally, I can vouch that 150 items for vendors is way too few. I would rather see 400, if any limit. Some of us actually want to provide a positive service by having a large selection of goods available.
Here are some issues that really need to be fixed:
* If an auction has reached the cap, it is won and removed from the bazaar. Prevents several forms of abuse, not to mention cleans up a lot of bazaar offers that no longer need to be there.
* The bazaar limit does not count towards offer limit on vendors. I cannot use the bazaar without fear of being unable to offer items.
* Placing an item on the bazaar should not clear out the description.
* Ability to CTRL-LEFT-CLICK multiple items to post for sale with the same price and description.
* Withdrawing the sale item to the stock room should only occur if the person is out of space. It provides a user fault because it does not explicitly state that stock rooms delete items within a short period of time; therefore, use of the stockroom is merely extra work.
* People need to be able to sell groups of items without being called an exploiter by placing the items in bags. Either fix it so bags work correctly or alter the bazaar so that items can be grouped.
* Vendors that do not contain stock for at the end of the day or do not sell a item seven days are automatically removed from the planetary map.
It boils down to "why are there so many items?" People need to be able to sell in useful amounts, but inflation also means for useful prices. The cap needs to be seriously raised.
Bel, the mostly sane..
I like the idea of increasing the credit limit on the bazaar but would be interested in one additional change that has come up numerous times: a player could post his entire stack of say 100k corn and set the price at 3 credits per unit and someone could use the bazaar and buy 10k of the corn or all or the corn. A player shopping would not be limited by stack size and trying to buy 10-15 lots of the item in order to get the stack they desire.
I also understand that this is would be a major code change where the 3000 to 6000 change is a fairly quick code change.
Maybe ask players what they think of a way to sell any or all of a stack at once.
The change to the bazaar cap is good IMO, but there are alot of valid points about the bazaar in general in this thread.
As far as the vendor cap thinggoes I have to agree that the 150 cap limit is too low. I don't buy the monopoly idea, and I wholeheartedly agree that there are way too many empty vendors as it is.
Having said that I think I have a solution, (although it would have to be coded). Code it so that vendors can dispense things from factory crates one at a time. The crafter could place a factory crate of 50 somethings on a vendor for 500,000 and the buyer could either pay 500,000 for the whole crate or 10,000 for one of them. You would also want it so if the buy spent 250,000 they would get a crateof 25. This IMO would make life alot easier for crafters and merchants while reducing the overall amount of items in your database.
Another idea I have on this same topic is some form of galactic yellow pages;
It takes me up to 30 minutes and 2000k for the round trip to go see my favorite weapons vendor, frequently that trip is made in vain because he is out of stock of the item I need. I would pay a fee, to be able to look at a vendor from a distance.
Say I am on Naboo and I am looking for a set of Vibroknuckes, my favorite vendor is on Rori. I step up to my handy merchant terminal and pay 100k to access Rori, I scroll down the listed vendors and select the one I want and get a list of what is currently in stock on that vendor. Now it would be nice if I could go ahead and purchase the item and travel to Rori to get it just like the bazaar but if not it would still be worth it to me just to know the item is there and if I hurry I can get it.
It seems to me that this system would create a money sink, help little known crafters get known and decrease downtime.
Khaziglu
Novice Doctor
Kettemoor