Development Cycle Archive

The trade boards auctions stuff in the mil range, why not have the instant sale cap price the same and have the auction price items on the bazaarwith no cap, just like the trade forum.

Ooooh, what about the bandwidth the bazaar consumes downloading item? Well, simple, make the bazaars WELL coded, dur! that means only download information when a player selects refresh rather than on every click of a new item type. Add filters so players can search for stuff specific stuff, add more specificitem types, if i'm looking for stims, make a tab for stims rather than all types medical stuff for example, that for one would decrease bandwidth ten fold.

In short, make the bazaar functional rather than, well, just crap.

Suggestion:

Remove the price cap on all bazaar auctions.

Allow anyone to have one bazaar auction.

Increase the cost of bazaar auctions.

Allow only smugglers to list illegal stuff like sliced items or spices.

Let the NPC vendors host vendor auctions.

Let folks with vendor certification to add one bazaarauction for every vendor they have.

This is an idea i've tossed around to several of my guild mates for a very long time. I've seen many posts where the dev's are looking to lighten the load for items on the main database servers. Hence the limits on houses, inventory, etc.

My idea is this:

Add another building, only avaliable to player cities. Call it a warehouse, cold storage, or whatever you want to call it. The sole purpose of this place is to store all your items you don't want floating around in your house / bank / inventory.

Now the big difference between this place and your regular storage is huge. You could give people unlimited space to store things, or at least a very large amount of space. You could charge them a maintenance fee based on how many items they have stored etc. The most important thing about this alternate storage is that everything in there isn't readily avaliable. Lets say i have a 100k stack of resources in cold storage that i want to pull out. Well i go to the proper building and put in a request for that item to be retrieved. It takes time to find things in such a large place so i have to wait, say 5mins, for it to be avaliable to me. Then i receive a email message that its ready, and i go pick it up.

The beauty of this whole idea is that the dev's can create a single database (or database cluster) solely for item storage. People like me who have thousands of resources in storage houses everywhere would suddenly have one place to put it all. The need to lot swap between servers would diminish, and all those items could be removed for the core databases and put elsewhere. Faster core database, and less lag. Happier players.

There's several options to this, but i think it would really be worth a look into. I've posted this here in the test server forum in hopes that i get some well thought out responses. Usually when i post ideas and such in the main forums it gets buried with nonsense.

I don't understand much about databases but the thing above might actually be a very good idea. Right now it's a crime to place your stuff - storage space in houses is very limited, and if vendors were to be abolished too - where would I keep all my stuff?

Thewt

Just a comment on the good points brought up regarding incresed storage and server costs. The real world price of data storage is not high at all. It's the manipulation and transmission of data that's expensive. So the cold storage idea is good but 5 minutes is not a reasonable response time. Maybe 24 hours could work.

Another on monopolies. Monopolies are a natural occurance of a free market. Worse things can happen by trying to get rid of them. Improving competition through communication and minor restrictions is the way to go. For example creating the ability for the Merchant class to sell items for others for a FIXED rate increases communication of sale items, specialization of classes and allows restriction of insufficient or excessive profits by changing the rate.

Another idea is CREDIT for merchants. Credit allows competition by not requiring merchants to amass capital before being able to provide stock for sale. There are players in the game now selling unsecured bonds and more.

Finally Communication is paramount in a larger economy. Non-communication results in frustration and gross inificiencies. With tens of thousands of players on each server cluster interacting in an economy of sorts it is a larger economy. The bazaar is slow, sloppy, inefficient and the 6000 credit cap is just fine for newer players. Theydon't need to seesomeone selling a really nice piece of armor for 100,000 credits and they're starting the game with 500. But merchants who want to sell to merchants, resource specialists, quality specialists, found item sellersandothers have no way to communicate their desires INSIDE THE GAME other than shouting at Coronet. A multi-level Bazaar is needed with access to levels tied to experience of some sort. Of coursegross changes to the Bazaar should not be made all at once, but have a plan and make small changes according to the plan as players move into and change the plan.

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Tobit0 wrote:

The trade boards auctions stuff in the mil range, why not have the instant sale cap price the same and have the auction price items on the bazaarwith no cap, just like the trade forum.

Ooooh, what about the bandwidth the bazaar consumes downloading item? Well, simple, make the bazaars WELL coded, dur! that means only download information when a player selects refresh rather than on every click of a new item type. Add filters so players can search for stuff specific stuff, add more specificitem types, if i'm looking for stims, make a tab for stims rather than all types medical stuff for example, that for one would decrease bandwidth ten fold.

In short, make the bazaar functional rather than, well, just crap.

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I totally agree with this here.

I think that auctions would be more functional if there was no cap on them, how often do you really see an auction and then if it is worth it just bought out at 6k and have to wait for the time to end to get it anyways, and would like to be able to search just more specifically. <sp>

no cap on auctions.

add consignment ability to merchants.

only smugglers can sell spice on bazaar.

remove empty vendors from global map.

perhaps set up a city that has a bazaar that has a higher cap - but not near a starport. it will get people out of coronet/theed and spread out the population.

I like the increase to the max bazaar price, it would put more valuable products available for casual players and make it easier to search for specific items (using the global search).

I like the cap on the player vendors but think 150 would be too low UNLESS you would stack like items together on the vendor. For example, a vendor selling individual powerups (vs. crates) should be able to list them as 1 item, and allow the buyer to choose how many they buy. This also works for weapons/armor, etc... that were made in a crate and placed on a vendor as individual items.