Development Cycle Archive
Thread: ID#2: Two Changes to Bazaars and Vendors
THIS should have been placed on the merchant or artisan boards and you would see a completely different picture.
Why not simply eliminate the Merchant profession and shortcut all this nonsense? That's the direction we're going in. Let's make every character equal and not pay any attention to the time and effort Merchants and Artisans put into making their stores unique.
Raising the bazaar cap will eliminate the bottom rung of Merchants completely, making it impossible to compete with the bazaar. When I started as a Merchant I sold mouse-droids, spices, and crafting units in my store, and it was hard going against the simplicity of the bazaar, only a good location saved me. Today I sell millions of credits in resources, stims, spices, armor, weapons and more every day, but even my business would be impacted by a change in this cap both on the buying side and the selling side.
Limiting Vendor items will nullify all the work I and other merchants have done to create a place where the vendors are always full of the appropriate items, forcing us to spend even more time wrestling daily with the laggy and clumsy vendor interface. My store has been open since the first week of Live, but if I have to put any more WORK into it I would have to quit. Anyfurther time investment would surely impact my career and family life.
I know this won't get read so far down in the pages, but it's unfair to backstab the Merchant community this way.
a few other structures.
I agree that a limit needs to be placed on vendors. For people that are just getting into that game and for folks that have been around a while but where not "first to market" it is VERY challanging to get business from the
people that master there professions in the first month. Many merchants have simply given up. With this change people will have to check a few locations to find what the want and the "little guy" will be back in business.
Blackjack Nova
www.swgrebels.com
As far as the bizarre, I think you should raise it to 10k.
I like the raise of price cap on bazaar and I also like the cap on vendors.
There are individuals who have several accounts and are power gamers in artisan skills and have huge Mall like stores. They take advantage of more lotsbecause oftheirmultiple accounts andcan produce unlimited supply of whatever they are selling. They suck up all the revenue because they are a one stop shop for practically the entire server. This is bad for other artisans who are trying to make a living.
Now my question is: Is this cap of 150 per vendor or per account?
On the vendor item limits, this is a Bad Idea(tm).
I have a shop, you are welcome to come by and look anytime you like. Waypoint's in my signature. There are 4 vendors in there. At any time, at least two of those vendors have over 200 items each on them. Right now, one of my vendors has over 400 items on it, I think. Or it did not long ago. At times I've had as many as 500 items on it.
I sell a *lot* of low-cost, high volume items. Things like armor repair tools, weapon repair tools, armor upgrade kits, weapon powerups, and so on. Many of these items aren't really saleable by the crate. For example, I'm going to be selling survey tools starting in the next few days. That'll add a few hundred items to the vendor right there.
I do a factory run of several hundred of some item, extract them from the crates and put them on the vendor. This is a time-consuming, monotonous task, because the vendor interface frankly sucks. Even if it were possible to do mass-stock operations more effectively (like putting in a crate and a price and having the vendor extract the items and self-stock), I would not want this item cap put in, and here's why:
Storage limits. Simply put, I don't have enough room in my house AS IT IS. I'm not going to keep crates of stock around just to load it into the vendor every few days (thereby increasing my workload), because I don't have enough room for all the stuff I need to use to craft as it is. I had to put down a small house as a warehouse, sacrificing a lot I could use for harvesting.
Also, I don't want to waste the time restocking in small increments all the time. That's just asinine, and it increases the workload of merchants. I prefer to get my stocking out of the way and let all my customers see a full, well-stocked vendor when they come by. It gives them a sense of confidence and I don't have to fiddle with the vendors all the bloody time to keep my shop in good order.
Also, the justification for this is very bad. It sounds like the dev team feels that people aren't using the vendor interface properly, so they want to limit how much can be displayed by that interface. I'm a professional software developer myself, and when a situation like this occurs, it's usually time to re-examine the interface design. As I said, the vendor interface is terrible. It's not intutive, doing mass operations is very difficult, searches are impossible, the browsing is slow and clumsy, I could go on but you get the idea.
Solution? Don't limit vendors to 150 items, as that doesn't fix the problem and just hacks off the merchants and others who use them, and it won't make the people too stupid to use the vendor interface properly any smarter. The solution is to properly enhance the design of the vendor interface to allow for more intuitive use.
In all seriousness, if a change of this nature goes through, I will close my shop, drop Merchant, and only sell armor, and that only in direct sales. I have no need in my limited playtime in this game to do *additional* work that is at this time not necessary, and that is essentially what this comes down to.
In one stroke, this change will eliminate ANY incentive I have (I speak for no one else, but I imagine there's a few who share my feelings on this matter) to run a shop, because I'm not interested in spending more time stocking and checking my vendors. I'd rather spend my time crafting or getting some friends together to get away from the bloody shop once in awhile. Vendors are supposed to be a feature that helps both merchants and customers. Don't give us a disincentive to use them.
- Originally Posted on the Scylla Board -
It has been stated time and time again that they want us to have well rounded characters correct? (This one might actually be true, but I don't have a sarcastic example like I will for my other points.)
And they hate dabblers correct? (TH's huge postings about the new CH changes before they went into effect, stated they wanted to make it a non-dabbler profession, and change it to remove the more powerful abilities involved with only doing one tree of a skill, yet they are making you do only one tree of a skill in merchant if you want to be able to have enough vendors for all your wares.)
And they want us to be able to pick our own path to play the game we like correct? (Again proven by the Holo-Craze, and again now if this goes through will be proven by the fact that if you want to play a partial artisan class - YOU ARE WRONG - you need to play a total merchant class. Hope you didn't want to be a master artisan, weaponsmith, any fighting type at all, because by this point you will need to put more points into merchant to keep your customers happy.)
Sorry this is an asinine idea. If the devs can truly not see the continued error of their ways with the direction they are leading this game then they are seriously going to start alienating, not only the combat classes which have been thrown to the winds with exploits, lack of balancing and various other issues, but when you start cutting off the nose to spite the face of the artisans who want to be able to sell their wares but not have to be a full out merchant... well you are just being dumb. Simple as that.
1) good move, no more than 6k though or you start dipping into the merchants worth.
2) Exellent move!!!! This will FORCE all those merchants who sell armor and power-ups to sell in crates and backpacks SAVING THEIR CUSTOMERS A TON OF TIME.
There is nothing worse than heading out to buy a matching suit of composite and having to scroll through a ton of mismatched odds and ends, or looking to buy a crate of power-ups only to see 600 singles.
This will hurt Tailors and Weaponsmithsthough, i've never been to a master tailors/WS vendor and did not see 100+ items for sale.
sorry im not reading though 9 pages but...
Make the bazaars and vendors have a SEARCH box for items... so if im looking on the bazaar for a Wood Staff... i want to be able to search the mess for it... or even better example. A disk in the Generic Items, theres so much junk in there it would take forever to find what you want in there. Search box search box search box! yay!
I'm all for raising the cap on the bazaar, as long as it doesn't get too high. It might even get rid of some of the underpriced goods.
150 item cap on vendors is way too low, possibly by a factor of 10. I know of vendors that can sell 100-200 items in a 24hr period. I'd propose something like a lower cap for lowly merchants, say 200 items, then increase this by 50-100 every level of efficiency they gain.
I like the idea of raising the cap for the bazaar to 6k, but I would take it one step further and tie it to premium auctions. I don't think the little star by the auction is very useful. I never take that into consideration when I am looking through the bazaar. I usually sort by name to find what I want, then buy itif the price is right. If someone spends the skill points to be able to place a premium auction, then they should be able to utilize a higher cap. If you want to raise the general cap to 6k, then allow people who can place premium auctions a cap of 10k. 
The problem of players not 'drilling down' through the additional pages could be fixed if the sorts took all of the items on the vendor into consideration, instead of just sorting what is oneach page.
I think 150 items may be too low for a vendor. I have never had 150 items on a vendor, but I can see where that could happen in the future. 300 seems better, though I am sure other shop owners probably have more than that.
a truely sad possibility.
I do not agree with this imposed cap on vendors. And here is why:
I use my vendors for multiple uses, I currenlty have 1 for resources, 1 for miners, and 1 for general stuff. The one for miners I try to maintain at around 200-300 miners and the one for general stuff like houses vehicles, etc. it typically stays around 200 items. Now I sell around 30-50 items a day from those 2 vendors and this would force me to add a 3rd vendor that people would have to check also, sure I could do it maybe make one vendor for hvy miners and the other vendor for medium miners but that is unfair as it is basically limiting my easy sell ability of vendor, plus for global advertising I now have to pay for both vendors as I do not want to make somebody think I only sell medium miners or only sell hvy miners because that is the name of the vendor who is on the global listing.