Development Cycle Archive

not a merchant myself but at first glance the 150 cap on vendors seems like a very bad idea. i like going to one vendor chucked full of most everything i need. a low cap means less likely to be fully stocked and having what i need. maybe some limit per item type but not a hard cap.

and while you're at it, could you make empty vendors remove themselves from the planetary map. waste of time.

I like the price raise for the bazaar for sure...

I HATE THE VENDOR CAP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

we DO use vendors for storage AS WE WERE TOLD TO BY THE DEVS!!! this makes that impossible!

Weapon vendors have 400 items on them easily too...this ruins that!!! BAD BAD BAD do NOT PUT IN THE LIMIT!!!!

Raising the Bazaar cap to 6000 is ok. I would like to see it a little lower, maybe 5000.

There is a HUGE reason the Bazaar cap should be left alone...Merchants. There are many merchants who make their business selling things for others, not manufacturing things. I myself have a merchant and sell stimpacks, resources, and artisan components to other people. I don't manufacture anything, I am simply a business man ( and I like it ).

The bazaar is clearly a superior sales mechanism. It is searchable for anything all over the galaxy, and only forces you to travel to a town (instead of a house far away from shuttles). The primary reason that merchants like myself have something to do, is that the bazaar cap forces players to use vendors to sell anything substantial. In fact, short of item storage, this is 90% of the reason for anyone to even own a house. If that is lessened too much, vendors (and most functions like advertising) have no purpose, and become only a non-essential support class.

Right now I see no problem with a cap of 5k or so, but I do have one BIG question: How will the upcoming combat changes effect weapon prices? If it is possible that a lot of weapons (the weaker versions) will be available for under 5k-6k, this could be abig hit to merchants. Masters ( the people who will be able to use the high-end versions of weapons) will be fewer, and 90% of weapons soldmight be sellable on the bazaar. I'm not saying it will be, but it is something to consider nonetheless.

As for the item limits, is that per 150 vendor (6 possible for a total of 800 with merchant), or 150 total for ALL vendors?

If the TOTAL item limit is 150, please make it MUCH more than 150. Most of the weaponsmiths, chefs, and tailors I know are forced to keep HUGE inventories because of the diversity of options available. Ifa weaponsmithputs5 of each gun available up onhis vendor, sells a couple of each of the wide diversity of powerups, and put in a couple of other items like weapon upgrade kits, the weaponsmith is WELL over 150-200. I also point out that the number of weapons is about to double in the upcoming combat changes, making it even harder for weaponsmiths to stock vendors. What about armorsmiths? They have to put 9 items on the vendor for every suit of armor sold, and there are 3 main types of armor that they sell. A total of 150 is not acceptable, although 100 to 150 per vendor probably would be (requires greater merchant skill to sell more items...makes perfect sense).

A 150 item vendor limit is a horrible, horrible idea, and will have the effect of putting most tailors out of business. My business model requires having a *large* stock of items on my vendor in multiple colors and styles. Tailors, it might be noted, are pretty much unique in this regard. I think most professions could grumble, but "get by" with only 150 items. In fact, it's kinda rare that I actually see *any* non-tailor vendors with more than 150. But tailors have a unique business line, with literally thousands of different items and combinations. If a change like this is made, tailors will basically be forced into having vendors with "150 items. Several styles! Any color you want, as long as it's black!" And everything else would have to be custom-only.

If you want a game without tailors, that's your business, but that'll be the end result. Anybody daft enough to remain in the business will be so swamped with orders (since tailor vendors will be merely a fondly-remembered thing of the past, and the population of tailors will be dramatically reduced) that it'll be a wholly "underground" profession, with tailors being more secretive about their true profession than Jedi.

I don't want to do the angry "if you do this, I'll quit!" thing, but....

Speaking without anger or rancor (merely depressed resignation), if something like this is done, I'll almost certainly quit tailoring. And that means I'll almost certainly quit the game all together, because tailoring is what I have had the most fun doing.

What I'd *really* like to see is some hint that there's something being done on your side about "technical issues" with the database. From all I understand about SWG (granted, from the outside looking in) and all I understand about Oracle (which is considerable), there's no way SWG's requirements should be putting this apparent huge strain on a properly designed and maintained Oracle database. Things like a 150 item limit seem designed more to protect the jobs of incompetent Oracle consultants than to address underlying problems.

2 more ideas that I think vendors need are the following.

1) If a vendor has more than one item with the same serial number listed. Only list one and keep the rest in the stockroom. When the listed item sells, automatically move the next one in the stockroom to the list at the same price.

2) when a vendor is empty, unlist it from the world map. It would be the merchant's job to refill it and re-list it.

Here's my 2 credits on this:

Raising the max price on the Bazaar to 6000c is excellent!

Caping vendors at 150 items is bad! I'm a master architect and the majority of what I sell is furniture. If you go to any of my furniture vendors, they typically have about 300-400 items on them at any given time. I do this because I hate to store all that furniture in backpacks in houses. I have to have this many items on my vendor to avoid having to treck between my two main vendors (corellia and Lok) if someone wants 3 chairs and there is only 2 on the vendor. Also, droping the number of things you can keep on a vendor will cause greater database problems because it will force people to keep stock in backpack in their house instead of for sale on the vendor. If I remember the melon controversy correctly, it was more taxing on the database to have stuff store in houses than it was to store them in the bank or on a vendor. In short 150 items is too low, but arount 300-400 would be servicable.

OR how 'bout this idea. I'm a master merchant and tend to use a couple of my vendors as NPCs in my player cities (ie, a bartender, a message board, etc). Could we cap the amount you can have across all vendors and base it on how many vendors you qualify for? For example: you would be able to have 150 vendor sales per vendor you're allowed, so a novice merchant would qualify for 2 and would be allowed to have a total of 300 items for sale at one time (regardles of what vendor they were spread over, one could have 10 items on it and the other 290). A master merchant can have 6 total vendors, so he/she would be allowed to have a total of 900 items for sale across all vendors. You could even apply this cap to bazaar sales...anyone could have up to 25 bazaar sales, but someone with the ability to place vendors would be able to list more sales based on the total number of items they are allowed to have on their vendors (and bazaar sales would count against that number).

Zannon

An emphatic NO to BOTH proposals!!!

I'm a tailor and a merchant. Raisling the 3K cap on the bazaar further mitigates the merchant profession. The only line in merchant that is really worth anything is the efficiency line. By raising the bazaar cap you are effectivly make vendor even more non-essential to this game. I woudn't even need a vendor anymore if the bazaar limit was 6K. I could just sell everything on the bazaar.

150 items?

I reiterate, I am a tailor. I like to have a nice selection of stuff on my vendor for people to peruse. I won't be able to put 50% of my product on my vendor if the limit is set so low. Plus, if you do decide to lower the bar, what's going to happen to all the stuff over the limit I have on my vendor now.

Nope. I disagree on both points.

If you want to do anything with vendros, fix the freakin search functions. The "All" category displays items in a non-intelligible format.

Instead of limiting how many item can be placed but a search filed in both on vendors and the bazaar.

I have no real opinion on the Bazaar cap.

I do strongly dislike the item cap on Vendors. It seems to me that all this will do is increase the pre-eminence of those power-players who can afford to spend all of their time in-game managing their vendors stock. If the intent of this limit is to stop such players that can spend the time to run off 1000s of items and loading up their vendors, unfortunately, they will be in-game often enough to be able to top up their vendors constantly anyway. I believe this change would adversely effect the casual crafter who has taken long enough to master their chosen profession, has finally managed to buy some factories and is trying to make some credits in the off-line market (one of the things that makes SWGs crafting implementation so attractive in the first instance) - to require the constant and tiresome burden of continually restocking your vendor is another time-sink that casual players could do without.

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Zarathustra wrote:

TH, is it possible to make a different type of change to vendors? What I've always thought of vendors for were for higher end merchants...the type of people that would buy/craft by the crate in factories. Is it feasable to only have one "display" item like you would see in a store looking at the display models of say vcr's, and then having a stock of those to sell based on the quantity of identical seriel numbers? This way instead of say having 300 items on a vendor, and having 12 items displayed, 12 crates in your stockroom that the vendor pulls the items from? And just ammend the display on vendors to show the quantity in stock.

This seems like the logical way to save space in the database and put things to a more practical use.

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Bravo Zarathustra!!!!

This post nails a good solution on the head. My biggest problem with the 150 cap was either storing the supply thathasn't beenposted to the vendor yet or not offering my products in smaller quantities.

I currently try to offer medicines in Singles and Crates in the sizes of 5, 10, 25, and 50 units to satisfy my different types of customers. I would run a batch of 1000 and put out 10 Singles, 10 Crates of 5, 9 crates of 10, 4 crates of 25 and 15 crates of 50. That's 48 items on my vendor for Health Wound packs. Now take the next step and realize that I've got Action, Constitution, Quickness, Strength, and Stamina to go, not to mention Stim B, Stim D, Blind Stims, Stun Stims, Intimidate Stims, Dizzy Stims.

Let the factories create the items in a single crate of up to 1000 (Inventory size of 10-20 items so as to not make it any different than it is today)and allow me as a merchant to place that crate on the vendor (Vendor size of 1 item as to reduce the database size by 10-20 fold). Then when a customer wants to purchase some of this product, the vendors asks for how many would the customer like to purchase (1-1000) and the item(s) is dispensed to the customer's inventory. This could also be useful for resource splitting. Only buy as much or as little of a resource as you would like to buy.

This should solve the database issue that has got to be the root cause of this discussion in the first place and it is a solution to most craters who need more than 150 items for stocking purposes. The only persons that I see this hurting is the armorsmiths who are selling their items in bags or the person using their vendor for storage.

You could even do this on the Bazaar. Set a base price either per item or per unit. This would allow 100k+ of a resource to be put up on the Bazaar and be sold instead of spamming the starports. It would more importantly remove the multiple entries of 1k units for 3k credits that you see over and over again. This would make the bazaar useful again and would assist with the database issues.

My bread and butter is items that cost 3k to 13k. If you take these people out of my shop because they can buy the 3k to 6k items on the bazaar it will most likly ruin my business and or increase my overhead. Why give this much power to everyone? This makes my business tree worthless as I dont want to make arch in any of the professions. I provide alot of the little odds and ends that the masters dont bother with, if just anyone can list them on the bazaar why would anyone go to a vendor for items less then archi items (harvs/master furniture and so on). The answer is they wont. The 3k cap is fine imo, if people want to sell items that cost more let them spend the skill points or befriend a merchant. Make the points I spent count for something.

I oppose the first idea and hope the second idea is reconsidered.

1) Raising the bazaar max price marginalizes the value of player vendors. If the idea is to make player-owned vendors the primary means of selling, then allowing the non-player bazaar to get more traffic is not the way to do it.

(On a side note, please require that someone has at least 5 resources in order to sell them on the bazaar. It will cut down on all of the jerks who find 1 unit of steel and then put it up for sale at 3000 credits. It clogs the server and preys on newbie mistakes. Neither one is needed, and nobody is buying 1 unit of any resource whatsoever.)

2) Limiting player vendors is okay, but 150 seems like too few. I could be wrong, but my sense is that this will just cause more busy work for crafters if they have to update popular vendors more often. Consider a higher limit.

Bazaarprice cap at 6000 credits: GREAT!

Vendor itemcap at 150 items: Not so great. As a tailor that would leave me absolutely no room for variety. That is unless I wanted to make one vendor for red clothes and another vendor for blue clothes and another one for black clothes etc.

As is tailors have 234 items of clothing they can make. That's not adding in any possible new schematics. Say I wanted to make 10 of everything I could make so I could have some variety in colors then put them on vendors. I would have to have 16 vendors up to handle that. Even at Master Merchant I can't have 16 vendors up . . .