Development Cycle Archive
Thread: ID#2: Two Changes to Bazaars and Vendors
The cruel irony is the the combination of these silly changes will make is much easier for skilless resources miners to get rich and make it harders for committed crafters to run a decent business.
Resources prices will go up becuase of the higher limit making it harder to novices to get started in crating, but will not impact the holo grinders who are just trying to get it done and get out.
Just give up the crafting, sell the big house to hold items and put in harvestors.
Yup... a rich and diverse gaming experience
Darkov wrote:
The monopoly is the player with 12 accounts macroing four at a time and dominating resources, weapon crafting, armor crafting and everything else.
Lol you know what's funny, SOE would not call this exampleperson a monopolizer... Why? It's $180 RL U.S.A. bones a month.
If the cap goes in anything under 300 items at business III, it will create a monopoly ripple effect. Why? You will either beforced to spends skill points on master or to purchase a secondary account. And if you don't? There will be less vendors out there, meaning less choices less options... Heh, now that sounds more like monopolizing the economy to me.
Monoplies in this game Thunderheart? You meant to say SOE wants more of your hard earned cash...
What a scam, how about $15 bucks less a month, hrmm?
*Kettemoor
wayout33 wrote:
The cruel irony is the the combination of these silly changes will make is much easier for skilless resources miners to get rich and make it harders for committed crafters to run a decent business.
Skilless, I don't think so. You try keeping track of the sheer number of resources in game, not to mention the constant shifts. What will sell... What won't sell... All the schematics and what they require. I don't know where you come to the conclusion that being a miner isn't committed (it wouldmake more of a profession then at least 10 in the game right now), I spend 80% of my game time surveying, visitng harvesters, updating the vendor, delivering resources etc...
Resources prices will go up becuase of the higher limit making it harder to novices to get started in crating, but will not impact the holo grinders who are just trying to get it done and get out.
I agree, but nothing will stop holo grinders regardless.
Just give up the crafting, sell the big house to hold items and put in harvestors.
Yup... a rich and diverse gaming experience
Well if it cascades like this, there won't be any gaming experience period...
ssobounty wrote:
Both changes fine. People with 1000's of items on vendors need to make a few new vendors. If their actually selling that much they can afford it. Not to mention it will be a lot easier for the shoppers to find stuff on multiple "specialized" vendors.
First, 99.9999995% of everyone who has a vendor can afford the maintenance on it. It's not a matter of credit cost, it is an issue ofneeding to have a set template if you plan on selling anything because the devs are having a problem with the DB capacity. Many solutions have been expressed in this 81 pages to counter the DB problems, without capping vendors.
Second, is it really that hard to use the sorting options and or click next page ifa category has more then 100 items? A search feature would help immensly, but really it's not that difficult.
To the people that claim that resources are selling 1000 for 3000 (the current bazaar cap):
Where can I find these resources?
All I've recently been able to find are stacks of 600 at most, for 3000. With this change, I'll be able to find stacks of 1200 or 1000, for 6000. Plus, every single tailor item. Bleh.
But, I guess no one cares about crafter or merchant professions, without teh ub3r dodge/melee defense mods.
Increasing the limit on the bazaar is a great idea. However, I'd like to see it at an even 10k credits. More items would be able to be sold on the bazaar and resources, obviously the most sought after bazaar item, can be sold in higher quantities and reduce the number of entries.
Regarding the vendor item limit, I really liked the idea of tying it in to the Merchant tree. The higher level merchant the more items they can place on their vendor. That will make this almost worthless profession much more valuable.
This coming from a Master Merchant 
Why should we (the paying customer) have unreasonable rules and restrictions placed on us due to poor game mechanics?
These changes do not improve any aspect of the game for us (the customer), so why do it?
If they wanted to make auctions on the bazaar250,000 credit limit...
If they wanted to make the quick sale limit 20,000 credits...
If they wanted to put a real search engine in placefor the bazaar...
If they wanted to put a universal search in place for Player Vendors...
Then I could support limiting total items on a vendor.. but I am still not sure that 150 is the right number.
Priority One should be to "Improve" the game play.
Add features that change game mechanics allowing forpositive changes and a reduction of system resources...
Dont take features away, that game economics are dependent on, to achieveSOE goals at the expence of customer satisfaction.
Thanks,
MrWeapon
Sunrunner
Sounds like the government (SOE) trying to regulate the ecconomy (merchants). Oh yah that works just great. When in history does it ever work? It justcreates bigger long term problems.
I have a hard time believing that a monopoly condition can exist. No group could gain control over a all resources, all crafting people, all planets. Basic ecconomics 101, if a group can not control the resources (harvesters), or the production (crafting), which they can not cause anybody can do harvesters and crafting. Then how can a group raise prices, without a noobie crafting whos been harvesting the good resources and get in on the game? Its not possible from what I have seen.
I think the real issue here is server stability. I think the devs have more bugs in this game than they can fix. I think they are picking the proverbial low hanging fruit. They need to take there gimp asses back to the computer and fix bugs and quit playing nerf god. A few classes on coding could not hurt either, everybody and there grandmas got in on more than just a few exploits if they had wanted.
Raising the bazaar cap to the in-game stated cap of 10,000 credits would work fine by me. I'd also recommend capping any initial bid on an auctioned item to 3,000 credits. I would like to sell some better armor and artisan items on the bazaar, but I cannot do so because of that cap of Cr 3.000 in place.
Technical issues notwithstanding, the capping of vendors is a slap in the face, especially for non-Merchant Armorsmiths (such as myself). The reasoning of "encourages monopolies" does not withstand the simple principle of "I do not have to buy this product from this crafter if I do not want to".Shop around people, that's the whole premise of the player-driven economy. I personally see no evidence of a monopoly anywhere on the Naritus server - if anyone is charging too much for a product, go somewhere else. Spend a few days' time, taking missions as you go to pay your way, and actually SHOP. Use the search function build into CTRL+P, that's what it's there for. Ask around on the different worlds, see the different player cities and what thier crafters make and how much they charge. A half a week toa week's time is well spent if you end up with compiled information showing you which planet(s) have crafters charging the fairest prices for the best products. Send inquiry e-mails to crafters you don't know and see if they'll reply with a general pricing list to you. As far as large item-count vendors "hurts sales because most players don't "drill down" through all of the vendors pages to find items" I also strongly disagree with on TWO counts. First, the bazaar set up is basically a big vendor, with a requirement to surf the subcategories to find what you want. Second, all vendors share this same basic set up. The statement above tells me that the developers view most players as too lazy to click the tab for whatever it is that they're searching for - if this is correct, cutting the item limit down to 150 won't make it any better.
Body armor, alone amongst *all* other player-crafted products in-game, requires anywhere from3 to 9 items on the bazaar or any vendor to sell ONE suit. Most people buy custom body armor (at least, from me), which means custom colorations, and layering in the cases of ubese and composite body armors. Needless to say, this does NOT lend itself well to factory production.This means we can have a maximum of the equivelant of 3 9-piece sets of body armor on the public bazaar and, with this 150-item limit, roughly 15 total suits. No one buys body armor by the crate with the *rare* exception of guilds with a lot of cash, and most of those have at least one guilded armorsmith who can make thier suits at a much cheaper "sale price" to thier guild buddies. That leaves the stat-shifting shield generators to make actually decent money via sales of factory crates, and those do not happen too terribly often.
If this limit is put into place, especially if said limit *includes* items in my vendor's stockroom, then I hear two messages from the developers. The first message is "you must be a Merchant to have an inventory count worth having as an Armorsmith". The second message is that no consideration is being given to providing additional purely storage-space methods in game for the advanced crafters that need them so badly, which is basically ALL crafters. My gut reaction is "thanks for wasting six months of my time". I should not *ever* have to become a Merchant to function in this game, let alone participate in SWG's central theme of the GCW as anything other than a minor gunsel. My character is not filthy rich, rolling in money nor guild-affiliated, and until this straw was dropped was doing just fine (more or less) on his own accord.
I suspect that this will CREATE monopolies, not eliminate them, in large part because the 150-item cap will(at least for armorsmiths) basically eliminate any non-merchant armorsmith from doing well without the mission-terminal dependancy so strongly reviled by the developers early this past fall. For me to stock ONE of each piece of regular segmented body armor, one of each piece of advanced segmented body armor and one of each mark of shield generator accounts for 105 of those 150 vendor items. This does NOT count for "supplementary" items such as armor repair kits [to fix your battered armor up so you don't have to replace it], armor upgrade kits [in case your favorite smuggler tells you he is out of them] or anything else you're picking up from your local armorsmith's normal, pre-150-count offerings - such as droid batteries, power-ups, assorted tools, electronics ad nauseam. I fail to grasp HOW a well-stocked vendor can create a "monopoly" [defined normally as a near-total domination of a particular business classification in the real world] - Microsmurf is practically a monopoly, AT&T was considered a monopoly, Thales Sandcrawler, Master Artisan & Master Armorsmith is NOT a monopoly in game, nor can he constitute such a threat to the game economy by *any* stretch of the imagination. An aggressive enough crafter's guild could *perhaps* achieve that status, andatleast a handful of PA's have openly posted that such is there intent.Cutting me off at the knees will facilitate the growth of such guilds, not inhibit them.
Flame away fellas - although the devs might interpret this as a flame, so be it.
Azyre wrote:
Just a thought...while reading thru all the pages...most folks who are against the changes are crafters, those who don't care or think its great...are consumers. The consumers, however, don't realize how difficult it is going to be for them to actually get the stuff they want and pretty soon we'll be hearing cries of...you never have your vendor stocked...well...doh.
I feel this is true. If professions only had like 1 or2 things they could make then this isnt a problem. however, crafting professions have like at least 50-100 things they can make, if they want to sell sub-components and stuff. And you have to put at least 10 of whatever youre trying to sell on a vendor, or the people coming after the people that bought some items wont have the oppurtunity to buy that item as youll only be able to stock 1 or 2 of that item. Thats just rediculous.
How about, you get a NEW BETTER DATABASE. PROBLEM SOLVED. instead of forcing people to dabble in Merchant.
I think this also branches from the dropping Merchant skills and retaining them. Theres no other profession where you can do this. How about you fix this so that when someone drops a skill in Merchant, THEY LOSE THAT SKILL, LIKE ALL OTHER PROFESSIONS. of course this causes a slight problem with, what if they have a lot of vendors and lots of valuable items on them, well code it so that the vendor cant stock any more items on them and they are off-limits of customers, the owner will have to move items over to a working vendor that they have skills for.
I mean come on.
(if the devs are even still reading up to this page)
