Development Cycle Archive
Thread: ID#2: Two Changes to Bazaars and Vendors
I like the idea of raising the cap on the bazaar to $6000. Now people who want to sell something for more than $3k can do so without a vendor and their products are searchable from anywhere in the galaxy.
The idea of limiting vendors to 150 items is likely to cause a riot. I personally think it is a bad idea (from the players perspective of course). One of my vendors is a catch-all vendor. I sell crates of synthetic cloth, Armor upgrade kits, various melee and ranged powerups in addition to anything else I do factory runs of.
Just stocking the vendor with 20 crates of the cloth, AUKs and 3 different kinds of powerups, I'm already at the 100 item mark and only have 5 products in stock. You would be knee-capping the master artisans who actually try to keep a large selection of such items in stock. My other vendor is for all of my novice chef wares and it is already over 3 pages, and I'm not even a master.
One argument that may be put forth is that merchants can just add another vendor to handle more items.
You are then knee-capping the merchants (like myself) who have to balance retaining merchant skills for vendors with the rest of their skills they need to do whatever. In my case, I eventually want to master Armorsmith and Chef, but only want to have at most three vendors to keep track of. Impose the 150 item limit, and I will have to allocate more skill points to obtain the nessecary skills to get the vendors I need which will take away from points intended for the repective master careers.
So, to sum up, Bazaar cap increase: YES! Vendor cap: PLEASE SOE, NO!
no business = 3k, Business 1 = 4k, Business 2 = 5k, etc. Currently Business 1/2 seem to be a waste of time, unless you're proceeding to Business 3 to get a vendor.
okay first before anyone flames me for probably repeating anything, i am at work and have no time to read this entire thread on my break.
now on to business. if that is 150 items total no matter for sale or in stock or in offers, that is nuts. if it is only on the for sale tab then, not a problem. vendors are more useful as storage to me half the time. i cant store all the stuff and have my harvesters running for the stuff i need if i have to have 4 houses to store stuff. if you intend to change the total amount to 150 items, including whats in each tab and inside of things like packs and such you are screwing me so hard that this game will not be worth it anymore.
i see too that this is in developement. this had better not turn into a stealth nerf cause i would loose a lot of stuff.
if you go ahead with this plan you had better work out the technical issues with us storing stuff and having the hardware and database doinga better job before you nerf this.
/rant off
Leana_Txorana wrote:
There are so many empty vendors out there it seems this would be a better way to fix any database problem you are having. I understand a successful business being out of stock but when I visit a shop that has six vendors and they are all empty every time I show up then this cannot be a valid business.
If cutting down on number of empty vendors will solve your database problem, I would try to address it in that manner.
Umm, not sure where you came up with this idea Leana... please explain to me how an EMPTY vendor takes up all this mysterious database space? In 4-year-old-terms so I can understand it, please.
People that have empty vendors could quite possibly be (contrary to your tunnel-visioned-observations) QUITE successful businesses. Would you like to pay Sony $15 a month to sit in your virtual house, never leaving, to keep your 150 item vendor stocked? Forget about real-life issues such as a job (thats what welfare is for, right?), family (you have your customers, who needs family), rest and relaxation (so what if you're incapped). People have lives, they don't get to camp their vendors. And gutting their capacity, no matter how you stack it, won't make it any better at all.
DND_Cas wrote:
Let me ask you a question tho. Why should crafters sell thier own wares? Why can't they sell them to merchants who then sell them to customers?
OK, DND_Cas, heres my proposal...
You spend $15 a month to Sony, so YOU can beMY merchant. YOU can resell my paultry 900 clothing items since thats your six-vendor-limit. Sure I'll give you 10% of my sales. Sounds like fun, right? You DEFINITELY want to spend your entire playing time beingMY merchant.
Oh, I have 900 MORE items for you to sell for me. What? You don't have enough vendor space? Well buy another account so you CAN. After all, you didn't want ME selling MY wares.
Bazaar price cap raise = Good and Bad. The availability of items will increase due to the increased price capbut I think there will also be inflation of lowerend items like "LOCKED CONTAINERS"...grrr.
Vendor item Cap = Good and Bad Also. It may fix some some bugs but will cause people to place more vendors to make up for the item limit therefore higher inflation...am I seeing a pattern here? what are you guys up to.
Suggestion....how about a darn search function or filter instead???
ok i can deal with these changes but i think a thing that is missing from the game in a BIG way is a "supply chain". by this i mean that a master merchant with vendors on different planets should be able to restock a vendor on a different planet. This could be achived by stocking a vendor near you and then sending that item to the other vendor. Of course there could be a charge for this, either a % of the asking price or a set fee. I think that this is very necessary if you are going to lower the vendor limit. It could take all day running from planet to planet just stocking vendors, espically if the cap is implemented. I also think that master merchants should be able to "sub-lease" vendor space more easily then is currently available. Right now a person has to offer an item and then that item must be purchased and then offered for sale. If the vendor is placed in a city, then the tax implication of this is horrible. I don't think that a admin list is a solution either, for this does not account for the "lease rate" of the vendor. I think that a merchant list would be better served where the owner of the vendor can add people to the list and the people can then offer items for sale, with the owner take a % of the profit, kinda like the sales tax now.
My two cents.
Changes to the bazaar would be wonderful. It's not a really effective tool for anything beyond novice crafter and a ton of looted junk.
I understand that there could be some database issues to prompt the suggestion of these changes. A couple of options to solve that would be to get rid of the noob loot drops (CDEFs, 1 unit of mineral, broken anything) because they take up a ton of space on the bazaar. Any beginning player gets these kinds of weapons when they start so it doesn't make a lot of sense to have them drop. If there aren't a zillion of them on the bazaar it gives Novice Artisans something to craft that they can do something with instead of just grinding for the xp, destroying the items, or being stuck with a ton of near worthless items.
Raising the cap on the bazaar is a wonderful idea because it would allow more advanced crafters a place to sell goods without needing to use precious skill points on merchant. Without a cap, you allow advanced or master crafters a place to sell their goods without using their skill points on a class they probably only use two trees in. The merchant class has a ton of skills related to the bazaar that essentially mean nothing to a crafter that can't sell anything over 3k. Reduced bazaar fees and featured items do nothing for most of the items worth under 3k. The merchant class needs some help, I think that's pretty much a given. Some have stated that they don't feel comfortable entrusting their hard made goods to a merchant to sell for them, and I agree. How about making a merchant skill that allows them to "rent" vendors out--putting the vendor controls in the hands of the crafter--similar to the way you would sell an item. The fees for using the vendor would go to the merchant and the crafter could have an outlet to sell goods without using skill points needed elsewhere and the merchant would have a source of income from it.
A redesign of the bazaar layout is also sorely needed. It is difficult sometimes--especially with resources--to see the full title of the item being sold and there is no way to adjust the windows to accomodate this. Being able to sort between auctions and instant items would also be a great help. Let auctions go as high as they will--they're not effectively used right now because of the current cap. The categories are also very difficult to sort through. Too many things fall under "generic item" and some of the others aren't used at all.
As far as a cap on vendors, I really dislike that idea. A Master Artisan has one vendor available to them to sell their goods. If you want more, you have to take merchant. Some crafters don't have the skill points available to have more than this one, and a limit to the number of items they could list will seriously hurt them. As a Master Architect I have a hard enough time keeping my vendor stocked and I add at least 100 items every single day. I know many other advanced crafting classes have the same problem.
To cut down on database size, do as some have suggested and prevent former merchants from adding more items to the vendors they already have. If they don't have the skill they shouldn't be able to use it anymore. Or if you want to let them continue to do that, you almost have to ditch the merchant class altogether because that is one of their only strengths. When you look at a player vendor they either have a ton of items or hardly any at all. It's likely that they balance out anyway. Increasing house item storage (or at least making them relate to the number of lots used) would also help as it would prevent a vendor from being used as a storage place.
With a little retooling to the bazaar and the Merchant class, a lot of these problems could be solved and there would be a lot of happy players. Make the bazaar AND the Merchant class useful to all players. Right now if you master the merchant class you are going to be limited on what items you can craft and sell personally because of the skill points required. To have a good selection of things to sell they have to be able to make use of master crafting skills. Let them rent vendors that can be controlled by those crafters and they will. There are a ton of "token Merchants" who have the class only to be registered on the map. This could be eliminated--and would make both those "token Merchants" and the real Merchants happy--with just a small amount of restructuring.
k, now that I have had a moment to browse a few pages of this and to see some of what is being proposed I have few thoughts and ideas.
First it looks to me that this is designed not to help the players any. Yeah sure a price cap hike is great. And yeah sure raising the number of items we have on the bazaar would be cool. Great, now if this part of things went live it would help me to sell more of my stuff where people usually look first. But let’s think about this part.
First the dev's want to raise the price cap. 6000 is not enough. I want to buy or sell medium harvesters; they are still worth more than that. Vehicles, same deal. There are items that I want to sell on the bazaar, and a lot of them, way more than 25, that are worth more than 10000. My molecular clamps for one. A crate of muon gold for another. So either I sell 25 crates of shadowpaw, or some other garbage, or I sell 25 crates of muon gold at a reduced price. Same thing for clamps.
Hold on you say, just split the crate. Yeah now I sell 5 clamps at a time in crates worth 6000. Price goes up, more inflation. Why? Cause I just wasted my time cutting crates. And now people look at the price and go, eww, 5 only in a crate? And what do they do? They look elsewhere.
Now I am only using the profession I know. I am sure that there are a lot of others out there that would have the same kind of problems. Also one crate takes 5 of the spots that I would normally be able to fit one crate into. That’s actually only 25 crates of 5 being sold (= 125 units) instead of 25 crates of 25 (=625 units). The amount of stuff I can sell is reduced if I was to cuts crates to get what they are worth out of it.
Together with the vendor change you are screwed. Sooner or later you will have more items being stored than you can sell, and when your house, inventory, backpack, storage house, harvesters, and every other nook and cranny is filled where are you going to put the stuff waiting to be sold, used or otherwise waiting to move through the chain or crafting? And if all your lots are being used to have houses to store stuff, where are you going to place your harvesters?
I am a master merchant. Thank God for the vendors with no limits to storage. And yes, they do sell stuff too. But they also make for excellent storage bins. After all the chest in my house, and the bookshelves can’t really hold things so where else am I to put stuff. It is apparent to me that a lot of the stuff I have been keeping because I hope to one day sell it might be a bit much, but some of us are packrats. Now obviously I should do something with this stuff, but just destroying it is a waste, especially when its something I crafted.
If there were a way for this junk to go out of the game that is worth more than the measly amounts junk dealers pay for JUNK, then I would gladly sell it to NPCs. Why not make a NPC buyer. Let us haggle price with them. Let them rip us off once in a while. If you need stuff to go out of the database because of glut, have the empire confiscate the goods. Or have a way for us to sell it to NPCs. Make us feel that GRINDING was worth it. That shadowpaw still haunts me.
You created this situation by forcing us to GRIND our way through certain XP boxes but you forgot to create a DRAIN on the things that we were going to use to GRIND our way to the top. So it is time for you to create a DRAIN. Literally. And don’t give me decay. Decay is to slow, and a rotten excuse for poor planning. Think about it. Create NPCs that buy from us. This allows us to get rid of GRIND items, oh and practice mode is nice but some of us have stuff from before practice mode. And some of us really thought that shadowpaw would sell. 
Create events that cause us to loose those items. Create something that allows us to grind and you don’t have to worry that it will cause database glut and gives us a little cash.
Now if you put limits on the vendor you are going to force me to destroy stuff and not just that shadowpaw I created on my GRIND through spices. I will end up having to find someone selling the exact meat that I have to get enough to use in my spices so that I won’t have to destroy them or guess what? I can’t get any so I guess I will have to destroy it. So now instead of having the resources I need, I will forever be without something and some products just won’t get made. I already destroy resources of less then 10 in units because of this.
In this situation, limiting the items allowed on the vendor, you now bring up a few questions. 1 is this just on the sales tab? 2 does it include items offered? 3 does it include items in the stockroom? 4 does it count a back pack as one item or does everything in it count towards that total?
If it’s yes to 1 then the rest don’t matter. If it is yes to 2, where the heck is your brain? Maybe lost in that place some items went on our vendors a while back. If it is yes to 2 and 3 you’re causing us problems with storage. And if it everything counts including item contents you have just broke the game. I use a method of storage that includes using packs to organize materials. One for floral, minerals, chemicals, hide, meats, eggs, etc.
This idea even if only the sell tab counts makes me very uneasy. This seems to be a move because you are concerned about database size, if your database cant handle the situation then could not a hardware solution be a help along side any software solution? I don’t have a clue as to how this system works on your end, but couldn’t more processor power, hard drive space and RAM do anything to help? I know that more hardware might not be a solution but then there are alternatives. Give your database an outlet; give us NPC buyers and other ways to loose stuff.
I wish I had more time to write. But I really would rather play the game than rant anymore. I just hope that the rearranging of these forums and the new communication process means that big changes like this will be really well thought out not for the benefit of you company but for the gamers and their enjoyment of the game.
I havent read all the responses, I got part way down page 1 and decided I'd just like to offer my comments and leave them at that.
Raising the credit limit on bazaar - No real feelings but I doubt it will have the effect you want.
Limiting vendors to 150 items.. Is this per vendor? so that higher level merchants can get more items out for sale? If its total, like offers placed on vendors count against the bazaar limit etc, then it truely sucks.
If its per vendor then its possible it has some merits. It will however be the end of my carreer as a weaponsmith who sells items.
You want to close monopolies? or are you just trying to ensure that the few who are in demand due to the quality of the work they offer and the reliability that they offer for sales can't sell as much as they have been and thus force customers to have to go elsewhere and buy 2nd best?
When vendors cost 1/100th of the listed prices I barely got over the 150 item limit, due to the fact I didnt use the 'bug' and keep an NPC vendor at 1cr per hour, I paid my 20kish per day and listed what I needed to.
These days I have from 500-900 items on my vendor because my customers demand that sort of quantity and my play time means I need to stock in that quantity. If I can't keep this many items on my vendor I need to play more often to keep it stocked as well as I do (and thus I can't play the character I use to 'hide' from other people who keep me in constant spam with tells)..
I was the first master weaponsmith on my server, ive concentrated on melee since day one and ive got the resouces to keep my weapons rolling out in quantity at reasonble prices with the schedule I can maintain the stocks at. I'm in demand through reputation and quality, not through hobsons choice.
By all means put some -realistic- limit on vendors (250?). Make it per vendor not per player. Make vendors vanish when people hand back theskill or make their limit 0 items.
I dont want to increase my prices and I dont want to have to stock my vendor with substandard levels of stock repeatedly. I don't mind the in game solution of having to take some of the merchant class instead of just being rank 4 (well master artisan) in artisan buisness tree. I dont really want to change my current skill mix because being a crafter I already give up so much more of the game than those who dont craft can understand.
Do you need to have a limit that can help your database stop from terminal bloat? yes you do.
Do we need to have a limit that allows us to run a buisness as a buisness or should we be limited to an arbitry level that really doesnt reflect very well on a buisness? no, a thousand times no.
As for 'monopolies' being limited in this way, how would soe/verant like it if the govt decided that 200 people was the most you could have on any server? and that you could only have 20 servers per title (eq/swg etc) (yes there are some very different restrictions on the game that we dont have in real life to quite the same level which makes this slightly off track, but it relates).
Currently I can provide myself with all the weapons I or my guild will ever need. I can earn more money doing missions on dantooine in a night than I do on my vendor half the time (I bring in a million credits or so profit a week at the prices I now charge and I keep the items moving but I can go out with my wife and duo 100k+ each a night with her and my alt) So what if I stop selling weapons?
To reiterate my position but in simple terms and no waffle
Raise the limit to 6k on bazaar? - Sure go for it, lets try it out. (but raise the limit of number of sales from 25 to 50 mabey as well)
Try to stop database bloat by limiting sales on vendors? - Yes, 250 items per vendor (not per player) This will encourage people to take the merchant class to actually -be- merchants (I know I will take some to do my buisness).
Make vendors -require- the skill needed to drop it in order to list sales on it. (also try to make it so that vendors do in fact disappear, if someone surrenders the skill needed to drop it).
The vendor cap however would annoy me, and the other player malls around me. Most of us have a large number of vendors in our malls already (averaging 2-3 per vendor, min 5 vendors) and have issues keeping enough stocked.
I currently have to run to get resources up, keep a field of harvesters running, and create the items to stock my 5 vendors. I did that so there would be less "drill down" as you put it.
As it stands all vendors at these malls already specialize (Installations, Meds, Weapons, Food, Armor, et al.) to maximize their items. Forcing us to master even more of the merchant tree, or in my case run out of vendors to split onto, would be an extreme hardship.
Monopolies only happen when people are *denied* a choice. No one is stopping anyone from shopping anywhere else, or (the owners) from moving their vendors for that matter.
What you really have is a small core of people who work pretty darn hard at having the highest quality products in-stock. That is something to be said in itself for these malls. Junction, the city I helped build, prides itself on being a merchant zone. We had the first Large Vendor location near Coronet, Corellia (Eclipse). When Aanyah and Nurofen put their mall in the whole area just went flat-out merchant. Coronet Mall, Hero's Weapons, Timea's Mall, Damage Inc., PikeMart, Redhammer's Emporium, these are the nearby names. Monopolies? Hardly. We are competition with each other for business.
We do share one thing in common though: We stock our vendors so users have readily available gear. We (Redhammer's) started Junction to get more new players out of Coronet (and it's inherent lag) and into the common area. We put up mission terminals of various types, a bank, and are laying down a Cantina, Hospital, and Cloning facility soon in our "Company Town." Why would you want to limit that? We've built a "Player Community" based on merchant ideals.
Please do not shred our ability to do that.