Development Cycle Archive

Put me down as another person who thinks the vendor limits are too low. Tailoring would be devastated by this.

I like the idea of making it part of the merchant skill tree. More merchant skills you get more items on your vendor. God knows, there's so little utility to merchant as it is.

in SWGexists player-based economy is such a absurd statement as SWG is a RPG!

and both changes work against this statements, too!

most of the replies here and , i think, all of the DEVs see the Merchant as a helper-profession for crafters.

please take a few minutes and see Merchant single for itself, if u want a player-based economy. think about who of the european went to china to bring spices back in the past.

me as a merchant travel around the hole galaxy, buy wares where they are produced and sell them where they are needed. this are the abilities player cities (!)gave to me, thats player-based economy and most of all, thats RPG ! to get in contact with other peoplenot with an automat like the bazar.

this is way eventually to create a price structure within the game. the prices in the bazarare crud. like 1 unit ore for 3000 crds (lol) or 1 holo for 3000 crds in an auction (rofllol; unbelieveable, but i have seen it).

sure with a 6k crds cap someone could sell a small house in the bazar, as said above. but why doesnt he sell it to a merchant, even if he has to sell it for this dumping price. but no, horrible! he has to speak to someone else. has to do RP in a RPG. fulsome!

yes, of course, what i will say next is revolutionary and manyrealy wont understand what i mean, but:

if there are such problems with the databases on the server, that you have to discuss changes like bazar cap and vendor cap, why dont you close the bazars on established servers. at least for instant selling. rise up the auctions to unlimit, so that players will make their RP ingame and not as it is in forums. and let the merchants do their job. make this profession more interesting and dont ride roughshod over them.

Just an update: There is a lot of great feedback here. Thanks for everyones input.

Some of the resolutions:

• The cap is going to go to 6K.


• The items per vendor will be raised, but it will be tied to the merchant tree.

There are still a few things being looked at by the team, but the changeslook to be sound.Many different elements were looked at. As soon as a Design Doc is produced, Ill post it here. This would be a publish 7 item so it might be a week or two before the design doc is ready.

---

Thunderheart wrote:

• The items per vendor will be raised, but it will be tied to the merchant tree.

---

Wouldn't it be more correct to say "the items per vendor will be capped, but not capped as low as originally stated"?

Your above statement is about as straight forward as telling an employeed your going to be cutting their pay by 50%, then telling them you are giving them a raise when you only cut it by 25%.

As of right now - Thursday, 22 January 2004 - there is NO limit on the number of items per vendor. So no matter how you look it, or try to paint a rosy picture, the items per vendor are being LOWERED!

TH -

Thank you for your response. I'm sure the design document will explain all, but in particular I think we all want to know

1. What is going to happen to vendors owned by non-merchants? Again, I must reiterate that it seems unfair that legitimate merchants are going to lose some vendor capacity in part because these former-merchants are clogging up the database with items on vendors which should no longer exist, because the players no longer have the skills for these vendors.


2. Will vendors limits be tied to level of the merchant at vendor creation, or automatically update with the skill progression (or skill dropping) of the vendor owner? It seems to bea hard burden on players to recreate vendors at every level, and the potential for abuse is enormous if there are no automatic updates (see #4).


3. Even if automatic updating is implemented, will current(pre-patch) vendors need to be recreated in order to gain the higher level merchant limit?


4. If vendors must be recreated in order to gain the higher-level item limits, will there be safeguards against exploitation? (i.e. Joe gains master merchant, Joe puts down 6 vendors and then drops merchant skills. Under the current system Joe keeps his vendors. Will Joe also keep the increased limit on his vendors?)

---

Thunderheart wrote:

• The cap is going to go to 6K.


• The items per vendor will be raised, but it will be tied to the merchant tree.

---

---

Thunderheart wrote:

Just an update: There is a lot of great feedback here. Thanks for everyones input.

Some of the resolutions:

• The cap is going to go to 6K.


• The items per vendor will be raised, but it will be tied to the merchant tree.

There are still a few things being looked at by the team, but the changeslook to be sound.Many different elements were looked at. As soon as a Design Doc is produced, Ill post it here. This would be a publish 7 item so it might be a week or two before the design doc is ready.

---

Did anyone even look at the concerns fo the tailors or were they completely ignored? This forces all tailors to take one of two models: custom orders only or a hybrid tailor/merchant. Many long-time tailors have said that this would be the last straw and they would quite. Quite frankly, there are not enough of us real tailors around right now. Most are just hologrinders who grind their way to master and then drop it and have no idea of how to put together nice looking clothes even if they wanted to make them for other people.

---

Gyopi wrote:

Did anyone even look at the concerns fo the tailors or were they completely ignored? This forces all tailors to take one of two models: custom orders only or a hybrid tailor/merchant. Many long-time tailors have said that this would be the last straw and they would quite.

---

---

But of course that's not your only 2 options. You could, as an alternative, follow a real world model where you are the manufacturer and you sell to a distributer (a master merchant) who then handles the sales and marketing. This also probably falls more in line with what they originally envisioned with the merchant class, imo.

---

TH-

I understand that the Devs want to encourage crafters to sell their wares through merchants, but this plan is going to seriously backfire if they place unreasonable caps on the merchant vendors. Not everyone is going to want to be a merchant, so I think it is safe to say that there will always be more crafters than merchants. If crafters are forced to sell through merchants, then merchants will undoubtably be selling wares for multiple crafters. With unfair limits, merchants are simply not going to be able to handle this. This is not good for the economy if merchants cannot keep up with the demands for goods because of these limits. Please don't make the merchant class even more tedious than it already is by forcing merchants to watch their vendors 24-7 so that they don't sell out. Empty vendors make angry customers.

If caps are inevitable please at least take into account professions that depend on variety for their success. Don't make the customers run around to every shop in the galaxy to buy their goods because their favorite merchant can only stock pants when they wanted to pick out a whole outfit.

Also, the merchants have not been given any tools for facilitating their business with suppliers. Most of us merchants like to sell items on consigment if we do not have the capitol to buy the crafters goods. When the item sells, we give the crafters their percentage of the sale. The Email system is atrocious for accomplishing this. If they want merchants to be the primary salepeople then they need to make it easier for us to keep track of sales. Why can't we have an automatic sysem that credits our supplier their percentage upon sale? Sorting through hundreds of Emails to find specific sales is not efficient. We need tools to easily track who bought what and for how much. The Email system is awful.

Siekierah

OK, on the raise in price allowed on the bazaar, but you also have to take this into account:

Some of us use vendors for storage on occasion, because I can't put more that 150 items in my Small house. (I bet I have 150 items in my living room at home) And why can't I put more than 150 items in my Medium house, but 250 items in my large house?

A house is a house is a house, how about a house uses 2 lots, unless you increase the footpint more... like real houses take up 1 lot, regardless of stories.

I should be able to make my house a rat's nest storing all my droid parts, materials, etc.

If that isn't granted, maybe a storage container that can hold more than 50 items that counts as 1 item in my house. Like a bookshelf can hold tons of books, where each book is a deed, or a shelf can hold lots of containers where containers are the resource containers.