Development Cycle Archive

i always thought the idea of having multiple vendors was so you could open 'chain' stores on a planet or throughout the galaxy, not to have 5 of the same vendor in your house in one location.

Two perfect ideas!

150 cap on vendors? This is the worst idea I have heard yet. I play a merchant and the class is already almost worthless, now you want to limit me to a lousy 150 items per vendor? I pride myself on offering my customers a fine selection.. now I am going to be brought down to the lowest common denominator.. bah! What is considered playing a merchant successfully after this change.. the ability to babysit your vendors and restock from the fleet of houses I wil have to buy to hold my stock?

We all going to be using CDEF's next because some people can't get past that either?

As a master merchant I sure as heck better be able to have AT LEAST 500 ITEMS each on my vendors after this change or you will have successfully destroyed my business.

If you are going to make this limit, I sure hope my bank space gets upped to about 3500 items so I have someplace to put all my extra stuff.

Problems and Suggestions for more use out of NPC Cities and Player cities including Vendors and Bazaar issues:

-Many players complain of NPC and Player cities being underpopulated or referred to as "GhostTowns". The problem will become worse as player cities begin to take up space and spread the population of the server further apart..

Now I was strolling through the fine City of Bestine one day and I noticed there are many empty buildings and Apartment like complexes that are unused.

Apartments in NPC Cities:

I thought why not use these buildings and apartments for player residences and shops??

-Many players could pay a standard "Rent Fee"(Similar to Maintenace costs on Houses) to own a small apartment in a NPC city, or use one of the buildings to run a shop.

The shop fees may be the highest Rent fees due to merchants selling their wares and making massive amounts of money. This will help the economy as well, because merchants and crafters tend to make the most money in the game it will creat a money sink for the merchants.

-Also a merchant will definitely pay the high maintenance fees on the shop because that shop will build a reputation to players throughout the galaxy of what that store sells and will continue to bring back customers to that shop and that city.

-Now the item storage in these apartments compared to houses would be significantly less(maybe 25-50 item max rather than the 250 item max on a house)same with shops.

But this way players could live in the NPC cities which would help populate these cities.

For the players that want a higher item storage limit or dont want to live in a NPC city they can own a house as its currently set up.

This will also fix the problem of mass housing around the limits of NPC cities. Causing less problems of Missions Spawning on top of houses and unable to complete. Less houses out there will free up space for missions to spawn properly

-Also When NPC cities can no longer accomodate players for residences. Players can move to other cities for apartments which would help populate many other cities on all the other planets.

-Now I know myself and many others would much rather enjoy having a small apartment residence or shop in a NPC city than to have a house out in the middle of nowhere which can be difficult to get to or not worth the time and hard to find.

Now if a player decides they no longer want to live at this residence or own this shop. They can put the property up for sale on the messageboard or just abandon it allowing another player to then take up residence..

This will allow players to build a reputation for a shop in a city and also allow players to become even more sociable by all sharing a common living situation in a city.

This would promote players to socialize and get to know there neighbors and shop owners which will build a reputation of the city and its shop owners and residents throughout the galaxy..

Merchant Kiosks:

-Also since there are not many buildings to accomodate shops for alot of different merchants. Merchants could use Kiosk like merchant vendors to place on the streets of the city's. Similar to generating a vehicle once, placed cant be moved around but can be picked up to sell in another city or street.

This would also promote players to visit cities on a regular basis to check out what merchants have for sale in the streets.

If the cities are to full with to many merchants, these merchants can pick up there Kiosks and move to another NPC city. Again Promoting population throughout the cities in the galaxy.

PVP and NPC Cities:

-Currently the Guild Halls in the Cities are absolutely useless. You could allow a Players guild to have control of A City, through PVP Guild Faction Battles on the Battle Fields throughout the planets(which promotes the use of Battlefields and PVP conflicts).

That way Guilds can fight over that city they have always wanted to have control over.Maybe on a monthly basis or as the battles are fought and won. This way the Guild halls in the NPC cities are actually used for Guild meetings, which also populates the cities again..

-By making the NPC Cities more active and functional to Players it creates a much better Social Interactive Atmosphere and fills the population of the cities to how they should be. Sprawling Metropolis's.

Player Cities:

-By the function of NPC Cities to players it weeds out the production of Unnecessary Player made cities. When the population of NPC Cities reaches its max, its primetime for a Player city to arise to accomodate the players that cant live in the NPC Cities.

-Which will also fix the problem of mass Player city production and will continue to populate the NPC cities and Player cities as the Player Population Fluxuates.

Politician:

an Addition to the politician profession related to NPC Cities. You could allow a Politician that is apart of a certain guild in control of the city currently. NPC City Expanding rights to allow the NPC cities to expand for same more buildings or apartment Residences for Players up to a certain Cap Level. But which would allow Politicians more vesatility and again continue to populate the NPC cities and Player cities as the server population Fluxuates..

Also thought it would be good if Architects could make Shop Structures Merchants could use which look like shops inside and can have glass cases for example to showcase the merchants items they are selling

All in All this would help populate the NPC and Player Cities and would immerse the players in a much more interactive experience in Star Wars galaxies..

Bazaar cap: Sounds fine to me

Merchant cap: Are you kidding? Does ANYONE at SOE have the _slightest_ clue about the game you're supposedly upkeeping and improving? My vote says you don't, or you wouldn't even suggest this garbage. Here's the most useful, productive concept I can come up with to help you out:

Fire _EVERYONE_ associated with SWG in any way, and hire a new staff with a clue.

While I'm at it:

Indene, do I sense someone who has dropped their merchant skills and has merchants operating? I think I do.

As for your examples, they're not that well thought out. Here's an intelligent one to offset yours...

Can you callthe Rancor you tamed yourself and placed in your very own datapad after dropping your CH skills?

Same concept. You want to keep the benefit of the skill after dropping it. News for you... It doesn't work for any other profession in the game. Sure, if you drop Architect, you keep your house... but you can't make a new one, and architect is about making the houses, not placing them.

Re: My previous post, that should be "vendors operating" not "merchants operating"

Bah, forum doesn't even have an edit button, how can we expect anything from the game?

Raid the bazaar prices...I see no real problem with this. But if you implement a vendor item cap, the SWG economy will die instantly. I know for one I am not going to go and restock my vendor every hour and I certainly am not willing to master merchant or even the vendor tree in order to be able to sell a decent amount of items that will not sell out in 45minutes. As someone said above people do have real life jobs and if you implement the cap you will destroy businesses on every server. Do not even mention asking some merchant to place vendors for you. I have had friends try this and mutliple times people have absconded with over 10 million in medical buffs and supplies, this also happened to me. I think honestly if you do this I will simply quit selling anything at all and just make personal buffs and other players can fend for themselves. Stop swinging the nerf bat so violently on use some problem solving skills to sort this out. Add a logging system that lets CSR know of people abusing vendors......warn them to fix it and if they don't raise the maintenance costs....that was the idea anyway right?? The more items on the vendor, the more they cost to run.......why not go down that road and use a multiplier for Vendors with large amounts on them. It seriously cannot be that difficult that you just place a hard cap on vendor items.....that has no use at all apart from destroying businesses of people who can only afford 1 vendor and who are not addicted enough to have multiple accounts for that specific purpose. If you do implement this mega nerf, there will be massive repurcussions in all server economies and inevitibly force even more people out of the trading system. Soon everyone not already on Dathomir doing Rancor missions, will be joined by every master on every server because that is easier and faster than making money. Not to mention what it will do for people trying to master merchant and people like architects who make and can sell well over 50 different items. So they can stock 3 of each item if they are lucky?!? I know of no shop like that in the real world......please use your brains and not your nerf bat. I know it is easier to nerf than fix, but this is beginning to get ridiculous at a fastening pace.

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BabyRancor wrote:

Regarding the price cap - I don't think it will make me use the bazaar any more than I do. A search feature would be a much better addition. Currently I only use it to find things like disks and other generic items.

Regarding the item limits - I think I understand the point about monopolies (not that the term is exactly correct in this context). Correct me if I'm wrong but you are concerned with too many vendors being one-stop shops and thus newer crafters don't have the opportunity to sell their goods as customers know they can always travel to a particular shop to find what they want. If this is the case - I do not see it happening in-game. I find a lot of empty vendors even with an unlimited cap, and even if my favourite smith was sold out under the new system - I'd probably send them an order by email anyway rather than travel from city to city looking.

The only way I see item limits working is to code some kind of automatic stocking system. For example - a weaponsmith makes a crate of Scout Blasters and places the crate in the "stockroom". The vendor then checks the serial number against the current listing and draws one blasterfrom the crate if it cannot find that serial number listed. At specific times the vendor rechecks the listing and re-stocks any serial number that is in the stockroom but not in the listing.

The other thing that would help with this is enabling after-production modification of colours on armour and clothing. Currently tailors and armoursmiths must stock all kinds of the popular colours on the same item (composite armour pieces let's say). If colouring kits (such as the ones for droids except permanent) were available those professions could stock one generic model and colour it to the taste of the customer following purchase.

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Good idea My friend but that would mean actually doing something more than adding one line of code.......that could be a whole other module *gasp* Maybe even two. SOE want quick nerfs....I mean "fixes", not actual development solutions..... I cannot believe this is happening, I am just glad I am not a merchant. If this goes live I will defintely be selling my wares out and giving it up for good. That will be bad for the server but will give me peace of mind knowing that I do not have to restock my vendor every 30 minutes due to SOE nerfs.

They added color for armor (composite only) for a short time and only then because they destroyed everyone custom armor...then made it a big deal about fixing it.....This is a trend that is showing up everywhere in this game and this "fix" for vendor monopolies (someone has been watching Microsoft in court too much I think) is just another nerf.

If a weaponsmith gets a lot of customers it is because he is a good weaponsmith, same with armorsmiths, doctors and so forth. If I want to buy from one person and not a noob armorsmith who will probably wreck my 5 Krayt scales in making one piece of armor, that should be my decision, if that weaponsmith wants to sell 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 on his vendor he shouldbe able to, with an highly increased rent as it were. The technical issues are what we pay SOE $15.00 a month for and so far the game is worse than it was in Beta.

/cry at the state of the game

nearly 90 pages saying no, and i bet they still do it

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Paaz wrote:

The Vendor:

150 items is a little low... I think 250 is good for a fully stocked inventory. I think this is a change that needs to happen to help the merchant class. Merchants can get multiple vendors and spread their stock over these vendors. If you are a weaponsmith and you can't make do with one vendor hire a merchant to sell for you. This is how the economy should run... players needing players. I LOVE IT! Merchants can have the Wall-Mart going and players and artisans will be better served in the long run. (Maybe I can get Jawas to make it for less)

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What I find intensely amusing about this (at this point, having passed through the five stages and realized that TH and the Dev team are ignoring us and this thread beyond cherry-picking a single post that made a suggestion that jibed with what they want to do anyway) is that this is the same person who will scream when the ripple effect goes in.

Variety is good, lack of variety is bad. This change will kill Tailors, period. No merchant is going to want to tie up his entire vendor line and all of his time stocking Tailor goods. Tailors will either go Merchant themselves or go home. I love this assumption that every merchant is just dying to spend his time stocking 50-100 items every day for just one player.

Ah well, I wonder how many more crafters will be driven into retirement by .this. change.

What the bazaar is really lacking is a courier system. With shuttles flying around the galaxy all the time it seems daft that you can't get things delivered from other planets or even other cities. I suggest you could get a delivery on an item, with a cost and a time delay to the Bazaar where you ordered it.

Inter-City could be say 5% the cost of the item, as the shuttles seem to come around every 10 minutes, make the items delivered in 20 minutes. For inter-planetary sales, say 10% item cost per planetary hop required for delivery - 1 Hour per planetary hop delivery time.

For example I buy something on Dathomir for 2000 Creds. It takes 2 hours to be delivered, I pay 400 Credits delivery fee ?

Something like this? It would really open up the bazaar !

~Smokemare

"Dev's gathered together, sitting back in their lazy chairs, browsing this tread and going" .

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NJ62 wrote:
What bears repeating is that the vendor limit will penalize those merchants who "play by the rules" while nothing has been discussed which would take away vendors from those players who have given up all merchanting skills. The fact is that a lot of stress on the database is from vendors that should not legitimately exist anymore. It seems unfair to target all vendors in order to relieve stress on the database rather than first targeting vendors that are retained by players that have dropped all merchant skills, vendors which should not even exist.

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/applaud

I'm not entirely against the idea of tying the number of items allowed on a vendor to the merchant skill, but if it's going to be done that way, merchant needs to be FIXED first. It's absolutely stupid that someone can gain the skill, place between 2 and 7 vendors, then drop it and keep them all. No wonder merchant isn't a "desirable profession". Show me one other profession where you can gain a skill then turn around and drop it, retaining the abilities granted. I wish I could do that with Tailor!! Think of all the skill points I could take back and use on something else if I could drop it now and keep all those schematics.

As for Indene's argument....that's convoluted logic so not even worth debating the point, see above statements.