Development Cycle Archive
Thread: ID#2: Two Changes to Bazaars and Vendors
I can't afford to have 2 vendors, because I'm trying to follow the follycron and eventually open up my FS slot. Even if I weren't doing that, Master Droid engineers pretty much have to be Master Artisans, which leaves little room for combat skills. As it is, my character, BamitJim is pretty much a wimp. Anyone who reads my column on swg.warcry.com, Wookiee Walkabout, knows that I'm pretty much at the mercy of wandering nunas.
I could live with a limit of 300 items on vendors. I agree strongly that there needs to be a limit on them.
I am very aware of the issues involved for SOE. Every item contributes to the lag you see when you walk into your house and I'm losing customers because sometimes it takes 10 minutes from the time you walk into my shop until the vendor actually shows that it has inventory items on it. This is a problem that can be addressed with additional hardware as well as by limiting the number of items allowed. Since this is also the most expensive game on the market, I think we have a right to expect that SOE does what it takes to fix these problems. We've certainly all been more than patient.
Along with lots of other people, I think that the propose 6k limit on the bazaar is too low. I think 10k is far more reasonable.
I also think that allowing vendors to be hooked into the bazaar system, perhaps through Merchant profession skills would make for a far more competitive marketplace as well as adding significant value to the merchant profession which now costs far too much for far too little.
/rant
BamitJim of Kettemoor, visit BamitJim's House of Droids in New Hope, Naboo
Bazaar cap- I'm somewhat agnostic on this, but I think if this does increase we should get bazaar terminals in player cities. Let people do one stop shopping instead of having to run to a non-PC city.
Vendor item cap - Bad juju in my opinion. I've seen countless more empty vendors than I have that were so full you had to click next. And even on the ones that did have that many items, you can almost always thin out the list by category. As a weaponsmith this would be annoying because I can't store sliced weapons in crates, so I can't keep a supply on hand and just add them when needed, I'm dependant on my slicer's online time. For a tailor... I can't even imagine it. Tons of clothing schematics,tons of colors. I anticipate that if this limit went in I'd see vendors stocked primarily with trench coats, camo pants, and dancer clothing. Either that, or everything in black. I'm quite certain that this would limit the tailor business far more than people who don't "drill down" to see the next page. I know I've passed up many items because I liked the style, but not the color. On top of that, people can just select pants, shirts, cloaks etc. to see a much more manageable number of items at once.
In short, I don't really think having a vendor cap of 150 would actually help the populace at large. Especially since the 'next' problem could be remedied by making it more apparent in the UI instead. Maybe 300-500 would be okay, but as I'm not a tailor myself it would be hard to say.
One of the coolest thing this game has to offer is the complex crafting system, but it's a system that already takes a lot of time and energy. I don't really see how making it more time consuming, or forcing people to take merchant in place of 'adventure' classes will help anyone.
Raise the baazar limit..good..better selection of lower priced items
Vendor cap of 150..NOT good.
I'm a Master Architect / Master Artisan / Master Merchant,and Trained in Taylor..with a cap of 150 on vendors there is no way i could stock more that 2-3 of any given item,not and have a good inventory spread..Heh just torchs and streetlights would take up one vendor..
That's my thoughts
Ertik
New Aldera,Talus,Lowca
Improves bazaar traffic to cities
Adds more value to artisan-crafted items
Increase variety of bazaar sales items
Vendor item limit - no
Increases replenishment time and frequency of empty vendors
Hurts sales and traffic to vendors
Offers less variety to customers
Merchant profession becomes more unappealing due to the ineffectiveness of vendors and the amount of time spent micromanaging them
Please do not expect players to pay $15-16/month and expect them to live with your tech workarounds. Better planning, design and QA testing would have prevented these technical issues, but you are constantly changing the rules of the game, which will endear you less and less with potential new gamers and your long-time customers. Improve your hardware, improve your database design, and improve your testing methodology. Perhaps it will improve your relationship with your paying customers.
As to the issue with monopolies, there is no rule or law in this game that states "there shalt be no monopolies" -- though I have yet to find a monopoly.
As for the issue with hurting sales because players aren't able to "drill down" to find the item they wish to purchase, perhaps improving the vendor/bazaar GUI will address this problem. A big flashing "next page" button is just the beginning of my list of suggestions.
Akeni Ewa
EWA SURVEYS High Quality Resources
Kettemoor
Naboo @ 1180, 3747
Anchorhead @ 276, -5820
www.ewasurveys.com
Raising bazaar cap: Good idea but will cause more grief to an already suffering economy. Currently, resources are being sold from 100-500 for 3k, raising the cap will cause the greedy folks out there to start charging 6k per 100-500 units. Again, a wonderfull idea since it would help out non artisan/merchants but it will be abused and cause more economical problems.
Vendor limits: Personally Ithink we should lose our vendors if they're empty for more then 2 days, but that's not going to happen and it's just me being frustrated with visting 20+ empty vendors a day..... Anyways, I think a vendor cap is a bad idea because there are those people out there that keep a good stock of items that are constantly moving. If you limit you will have more empty vendors and frustrated people.
Lastly, my two cents here....There needs to be some sort of minimum on the # of units of resource sold in the bazaar. Currently, you will find pages upon pages of meat, bone, hide, etc. in stacks of less then 20. This is not a usable amount (to the majority) and it just takes up a ton of space on the bazaar.
Nyema
maybe if the categories that have items in them were more specific and/or if only categories that are stocked with items for sale show up when browsing the vendor people would be able or more willing to see all products available on a vendor... just a thought
Eutock wrote:
Raising the bazaar price cap is a very good idea, one that I doubt few if any players would object to.
But the 150 vendor item limit seems very low. There are two issues at work here:
- When the sale time on vendors was increased from 7 to 30 days, this gave merchants an incentive to stock more items. This was beneficial to the galactic economy because buyers would have a greater chance of finding their needed goods on vendors.
- There is a problem with vendors being used as storage. It is not uncommon to see vendors with many items at prices of "99999999". I doubt that vendors were intended to be used as extra storage, and I can see how this can cause stability issues.
Recommendation: This may be a little confusing at first, and I apologize if it has been suggested already. My idea isto have a sliding price cap on vendors. What this means is that the more items stocked in a vendor, the lower the maximum price that goods can be listed at. An example of a sliding price cap would be as follows (don't pay attention to the exact numbers, I just quickly made them up, but they demonstrate the concept):
- 1-10 items listed = 10,000,000 credit price cap (per item)
- 11-25 items listed = 5,000,000 price cap
- 26-50 items listed = 2,000,000
- 51-100 = 500,000
- 101-200 = 100,000
- 201+ = 25,000
This would allow vendors to legitimately stock their vendors in a reasonable manner, and create a large disincentive to use vendors for mass storage, since it would be too easy for someone to just buy your stored goods. The sliding cap could also be tied in some way to the Merchant profession.
A sliding cap would give rise to high-price specialty vendors (which couldstock only a few expensive items) and the bulk commondity vendors (i.e. the "WalMart" vendor), which would stock many items at low prices.
You must be a real casual DE to believe this! So tell me, when you have that 50k probot with everything and accidentally put item 202 on the vendor are you gonna whine when I buy it for 25K? Of course you are.
Price caps...? I pay to play a economy with price caps? Get real.
Fivo Asia
Master Artisan - Master Architect - Master Merchant
Tempest - Dantooine - SiN City
The only possible reason for limiting the number of items on a vendor is to control database size. Forget about "helping" merchants - limiting us to 150 items will destroy us. As a Master Artisan and Master Architect (not to mention working toward Master BE), that's less than one of every item I can possibly make. More than one vendor? No, I have no Merchant skills, and even if I did, and I put up an extra two or three vendors (at additional cost of course), we're still talking about less than 2 or 3 of every item I can possibly make.
There is no such thing as someone having a monopoly in this game. That is a poor excuse for this misguided action. Someone please explain how this excuse makes any sense.
Vendors aren't easy to use? Our sales are hurt because players don't "drill down" through the vendor? Again, poor, poor excuse. The tree on the left of the vendor window functions just fine. When I go to buy resources, I use the tree. When I go to buy weapons, I do the same. This is hard?
Finally, given the track record of breaking things that work, what will happen when someone with 500 items on a vendor logs on after the change? Will the items appear in his house? Nope! They won't fit in the house either (which of course brings up the ludicrous situation of how all small and medium houses hold the same number of items). I am willing to bet cash money that the forums will be flooded by people who lose hundreds of items the day this change goes into effect.
-Zahnna
I'm a Master Merchant, Master Weaponsmith, and Master Artisan.
I like the idea of raising the cap on the bazaar to 6000 credits. I'd like to be able to sellmore valuable items in the bazaar.
A 150 item cap on vendors is a bad, bad idea. I can't see what would be acomplished by having fast-selling vendors run out of merchandise. The seller loses and the customer loses, too.
Another problem is that some professions need a lot of items on their vendors. Weapnsmiths often carry a lot of different weapons.Tailors make the same items in different colors. Armor vendors need many spaces because it takes 8 or so pieces of armor to make up a full suit. Not being able to display all the products that the customers wantto see is a losing situation for both the seller and the buyer.
We want to solve the technical issues, discourage monopolies and make vendors easier to use.
The technical issues, I can't comment on, since I have no knowledge of these. But surely only 150 items is overkill.
"Discourage monoplies" sounds like you are doing your best to intentionally give the most successful merchants a hard time. There's something horrifying about the idea that a game company has decided to penalize those who are the most successful at businsess in order to favor those who are less successful. It reminds me of those tales of Customer Service reps who used to snatch large stacks of resources away from honest players on the grounds that they were "hoarding". A game company has no business punishing people for being successful, if they earned their success through hard work and did not use bugs, exploits, or scams.
Regarding making vendors easier to use - It's true that somenewbies are ignorant and don't realize that there are more pages to view, but let the owner of the vendor be the judge of how sophisticated their clients are. The clients of some vendors will gladly page through several pages to find that special item they're looking for. A merchant who sells mostly to newbies will have the good sense to adjust to only one page.Let the vendor owner make their owndecision of how many pages is best for their own clients.
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.
So the desires of the players are being completely ignored? Why bother having In Development forums then?
There will be one less weaponsmith in the game if the Devs choose to implement the vendor change.
I agree with your first suggestion as it will make things beneficial to place spices, small amounts of crated meds and the like for sale. Please make the description easier/more visible though. It is one way to advertise at starports.
The second suggestion is not so good. If you can, a vendor cap based on the novice artisan elite professions. Each type should have a cap. Tailors and Armorsmiths should have the highest, followed by chefs, weaponsmiths, architects and droid engineers.The artisan tree should be next. Everyone else should follow. Thats four tiers with the biggest hit being in the 3rd and 4th tier.
Just to throw out some numbers1100 for tier 1, 800 for tier2, 300 for tier 3 and 150 for tier 4.
Every one starts with 150 items base.
Tier 3 gets +150 for novice artisan.
Tier2 profession :Adding +100 on the lvl 2 skill trees boxesand+100 for master.
Tier 1 profession: Adding +150 on the lvl 2 skill tree boxes and +200 for master.
There should be caps but be reasonable.
For me, a smuggler, I should not have the ability to sell 600 crates of muon,let alone waste the resources to do it, lol.
You have to look at how the resources will be affected by this though. If folks will make only enough that they can sell on their vendor, malls might pop up where tailors and armorsmiths will rent space in houses and tents to sell items on their vendors. Sounds like a whole new profession.
Last rant, what ever you do, and I believe you need to cap the amounts, be reasonable. 150 is not reasonable, neither is 1100 for everyone.
Changes to the Bazaar... YES 6k to low, 10k still low, 15k would be ok... for Fixed price items.
If its an Auction take the cap off all together.. the current cap of 3000 is a joke.
Oh if you really want to make an improvement put a real search engine on the bazaarOR at least let the user resize the collum width so we can see what the resource really is.
If the Limit was raised to 15k then 80% of things that sit on player vendors could be moved to the Bazaar.... Why do you think that some things sit on player vendors for months not moving? Because no one knows its there... no real search engine for player vendors.
A straight across cap of 150 Items on a Vendor.... NO WAY, No, No, No....
How can I make this any clearerread my lips Nnnnn Oooooo.
If your a Master Crafter of any kind 150 item limit is a good reason to not to be one. Now if you took raised the cap on the Bazaar to 15k and uncapped Auctions Completely. Then you could reduce the item vendor count to 150 for non master crafters and 300 for master crafters. If you wanted to add additional bonuses for being a merchant... thats up to you.
PS. If your Data Base is getting to be a problem... Instead of penalizing your customers who are paying you every month, by trying to force unrealistic limits and caps.... Maybe you should look at some of the game mechanics that are causing the problems...
1. Resource Spawn that requires mass stocking of resources for months at a time
2 No real search engine for the Bazaar or Player vendors
Please remember; improvements not restrictions are the key to customer service and customer retention. If the change is going to make 30 - 40% of your customer base unhappy... that's 40% of your customer base thats looking for a new game to play.In other words,that is 30 - 40% of your revenue base that is looking for something better. How much of those 30 - 40% are your long term customer base?
What do you think your competition is trying to do??? Think they are intrested in 30 -40% of your customer base?
MrWeapon M Rifleman - Sunrunner
Spykee M Doctor - Sunrunner
drwoobie wrote:
So, to sum up, Bazaar cap increase: YES! Vendor cap: PLEASE SOE, NO!
In addition, I was walking out to my car last night after posting and this thought occured to me:
150 item cap. hrm. That's a page and a half at the current 100 items per page. If you are going to cap us, at least give us two full pages of items.