Development Cycle Archive

• Bazaar cap doesn't affect me. I'll leave it to the rest of the community to discuss. Personally, the higher the better. Smart players will sell their product cheaper.


• Currently, my vendor is stocked with at least 1000k+ units of resources and the list will definately grow. It's not possible for me to split the items into smaller pieces with the limit in place. This will definately hurt my business especially with small time buyers. You can argue that supply and demand will keep the product flowing. It's not as simple as that. From my experience, you can go a few days maybe even a week without anyone buying from your vendor. And the next person might clean up your inventory.

My suggestions:

• Currently, vendors are categorized by theirproducts i.e resource, medical supplies etc. Why not increase the capa bitand also use the categorization to set the vendor cap even higher? For example, a clothing vendor will have a higher cap than say a tools vendor. Toprevent exploit, you can only sellproducts on the proper vendor. i.e armor or armor vendor, weapons on weapon vendoretc.

Other players suggestions that I like:

• I like this idea better than mine. The cap is based on the merchant tree skill level.Skill allocationsand vendor cap to be discussed further.

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Milarella wrote:

"...and only armoursmiths create armour. why is it that every artisan can have vendors and everyone can sell if there is a merchant profession?"

Actually, there's armor, weapons, clothing, food, and structures in the artisan profession. That's all the artisan profession is - a gateway into several crafting-related professions. If you get rid of vendors in business, you destroy the business line. Not everyone wants to go all the way in a craft. Some people want to tinker around with personal harvestors, but don't want to be an architecht. Do architechts scream about it?

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now having said all that i talk about it from a very extreme viewpoint because just the other night some of my merchant skills started paying off. but i still feel that the devs should pay a little more attention to this area cause i have been a master merchant for months, and only because i have stuff that has been stored over the last few months being for sale, have i had any success in selling anything. had to get rid of some of it some how, so i am having a sale.

A vendor limit is idiotic when you consider the number of unique items some of the crafting professions can make. Tailors, for example, have 243 unique schematics. Many will put 2-3 copies of each item on their vendors for easy consumption by their customers. It's not unusual to see a Tailor vendor with several hundred items on it. Capping vendors at 150 would be catastrophic.

Just a note, if you limit the amount of items on a vendor by skill, ie the less skilled you are, the less you can have, you will force the basic merchants to effectively shoot themselves in the foot, because I will almost never return to a vendor if it has nothing in it, in fact, I'm still looking for decent ones. But to force a novice merchant to update all that more often than another, would be detrimental to a business that is just getting started. The way it is, with different amounts of vendors allowed is handy.

I am not a merchant, though I think I will be joining the ranks at some stage, a limit imposed could be useful, but perhaps there is a better way of going about it, and I leave that sort of decision to the ones who know more than I.

As for a higher limit on the bazaar, I'm all for it.

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Thunderheart wrote:

(SNIP)

The second item has to do with Vendors. Currently, there is no limit to how many items can be placed on a vendor. This causes technical issues, encourages monopolies and actually hurts sales in many instances because most players don't "drill down" through all of the vendor pages to find items. We want to solve the technical issues, discourage monopolies and make vendors easier to use. An item limit is going to be placed on vendors and that limit is intended to be placed on 150.

(SNIP)

NOOO! A 150-item cap is WAY too low, at the very least. Technical issues I can't comment on, because I don't understand the devs end of the vendor. Encouragement of monopolies, I'm not sure how you mean, but I haven't observed any problems, both as an unknown Master Architect, and as a complete non-crafter. As for people not 'drilling down' I agree, but there's a general consensus that if the vendor interface didn't suck, it wouldnt' be such an issue. Plus once you learn how to use it, it's no longer an issue. Just sometimes get a /tell asking me to restock torches or some chair that's made its way to page 3. With a cap, they'll have the same experience, only the item really just won't be there. As a consumer now on a different server, my biggest trouble is finding stuff in stock *anyplace*. I canvassed every vendor on Tattoine that was listed as a weapon vendor on the planetary map, the other day. Took a great deal of time. Looking for a good T21. There were only 3 vendors that actually carried a master-crafted T21. And half the vendors were empty. If you take those three vendors that sell quality products and cap them at 150, I can't imagine them carrying low-margin items at all. I paid 37K for a T21 that probably cost a few hundred credits to produce. If I could make that, why would I risk going out of stock on those, to carry scout blasters for novice marksmen? The 25-item cap on the bazaar already limits what items you'll find there for just that reason. As an architect, I got very decent margin on torches and plants, and I sold enough of them daily over the bazaar to convince me to stop putting anything else up. My shop vendor had to keep over 300 items in stock just to keep a handful of each item availible, because although I didn't sell anything out of it frequently, peopletended tobuy a lot of furniture at once. People who purchased the four chairs of a particular style that I had on there, would often email or /tell me a requestfor a few more.

P.S. You're nearly impossible to quote, TH. Had to manually edit out a ton of HTML that normal users aren't allowed to contain.

Sorry about that, not sure what happened with the posts.

In closing, unless you allow players to view real-time inventories of player merchants from afar (on the same planet) then your sysem will fail by design. The big PA vendors will sell sell sell and folks who are independant will fail. Let me ask you how is one to make money in this game? By looting? I kill tons of NPC's and 200 credits is a huge reward. Loot? I have not found loot on anything in a month. SO I am reduced to mining and selling on the bazaar. Thanks for the 6k limit, now get rid of it.

95 pages.

/hang head