Development Cycle Archive
Thread: ID#2: Two Changes to Bazaars and Vendors
Monopoly's?
Are you kidding me?
The reason certain vendors are rewarded with business and get higher prices is because these players do great work for your game. I don't go buying from Joe blow artisan newbie screwball because of the following.
1) He doesn't stockpile good resources.
2) Most are grinding merchant or some artisan profession for Jedi
3) They haven't earned a reputation from being in business
4) Most have no idea how to craft quality goods.
I know for a fact Tempest has many diverse vendors of all sorts and your declaration of a monopoly (1 vendor doing all the business) is not correct at ALL.
Also monopoly implies many things about the business practices of the vendors in this game not at all fair to those I have met. All of them encourage and train new players in crafting and most have gone to great lengthes with sites like enactive.org/swg to provide detailed information of resources spawning. Most have created crafting grinding macros to assist holocron folks and others looking to master the profession. This is NUTS! Implying a monopoly at all at least on Tempest angers me and I am not a crafter.
Increasing the baazar prices won't do anything for the baazar. Its junk. Every newbie in the game knows its junk by the third day of playing. You'll allow some more items to be listed but bottom line is no one goes to these anymore since it is entirely not worth the effort of searching through crap to find good items. Just go to a known vendor and/or player city and you will find what you need.
I have stockpiles of resources. I am not selling 1k blocks for 3k, nor will I be selling 2k blocks for 6k. Unless I can starting selling 10k blocks of resources at 30k I won't use a city vendor. I will simply use your boards to move those items.
The limit on items is grossly unfair to good artisans who supply your game with equipment. Nerfing them only further kills this game. I suggest rewarding them with free holocrons every month for keeping a vendor stocked and open. **edit**, they deserve it. I would suffer greatly with these changes. More tells more emails, more begging with people. Screw that. Leave vendors and merchants alone.
Good Lord this thread increased quickly!
Anyways, my take...
Bazaar Cap: I think 6k is fine. Maybe 10k. But I would restrict certain items. i.e. furniture, small houses etc.
Vendor Cap: no opinionas I'm not a merchant.
Aditionally, why not have implement one of the following:
- Allow player vendors to be "hooked" into the bazaar
- Implement an advertising section so player vendors can advertise their store waypoints, etc.)
150 items is nowhere near enough space on vendors and it will damage the Merchant class in the long run. This would prevent people from actually being able to run a buisness and have a large variety of items to chose from. Imagine if Walmart only stocked 150 items per store.
If the 150limit goes live people will dropmerchant at a record pace.
This will actually hurt the small merchant vendors more. The people with the monopoly's will just get more people in the PA's to take up merchant to stockpile their stuff. If anything the vendors should be limited to around 4 pages worth of stuff. 500 would be a much more reasonable cap.
What you all should do is go through the servers and delete all the vendors that are 100% empty. Once you do that then there should be more space on the Commodore 64 that is holding the vendors database. Limiting total items on vendors is a very bad idea. The trend with the game right now is the devs are taking away constantly and not giving anything. If this continues then people are going to continue leaving the game in droves. How about upgrading the database and hardware before nerfing the players?
Neutral on changing the vendor amount cap to 150. I have only one vendor that has never approached this amount so as yet it would not affect me. Both sides have good reasons for doing it or not, but overall if it makes vendors work better and the servers run smoother it is probably a good thing.
Business III gives you a 50 Item Limit
Business IV gives you +50
Master Artisan gives +100
Novice Merchant gives +100
then, throughout the merchant skill tree you +50 for each skill box(16 boxes * 50 = 800)
Master Merchant adds + 200
So a Master Merchant/Artisan gets 1300
That will cut down the amount of items on vendors for the small time business people, but not hurt the major salespeople.
This also adds more value to the merchant skillboxes.
Ofcourse the numbers are examples, but 150 is definatly too low for most full-time merchants.
Speaking as a tailor, a 150 item limit on vendors would be rather small given I need to stock a selection of clothing in various colors, and accessories like shoes, gloves, jewelry, etc., to match. (It would be a pain to have to restock daily or not have the merchandise my clientele wants.)
LohKey wrote:
I'm not a merchant but I have a vendor filled with back packs of things I have collected over months of playing. Things like 50+ mining deeds that I lend out to guild members, 200+ items of furniture that I decorate peoples houses with, 16 sets of composite that I have bought for new guild members or to sell when I get low on funds. Rancor loot, over 40 containers of minerals most filled to 100k or more for when I open up my mineral shop (I want to stockpile 100 million worth of minerals and than open a store) and I have many more things on my vendor than I need and use and would other wise have no space for. So I am going to have to say that it's a bad idea to limit the personal vendor item count.
I don't want to sound rude, but it's people like you who use the vendors to get extra storage that seem to be a big part of the reason that the vendors of actual merchants are under seige now. Please reconsider using a vendor for private storage since vendor abuses like this are hurting your fellow players who are trying to run actual shops.
I know it may be hard for you to care since it's our problem, but it will be your problem too when it becomes increasingly hard to find high level gear because the merchants can't restock their shops every single day.
6k on bazzar is a good idea long overdue.
limits on vendors is good idea as it will make merchant class more important. However I think a limit of 150 is too low a better number would be 250.
Raising bazaar limit will lead to an incredible increase in volume of items that get listed on the bazaar which will increase the demand on the database far more than than cutting out the few people on each server that actually have more than 150 items on their vendor.
I am against the increased limit on the bazaar because it will mean that much more crap I have to scroll through to find something I'm actually looking for. (we are using the metric system in this game right? why isn't it going to be 5k or 10k).
I wish there was some sort of criteria for selling on bazaar so that we don't see hundreds of display panels or decoder housings this would help right?
As a weaponsmith I have 63 weapons for sale including artisan items I sell like weapon powerups, repair tools etc. I have about 100 individual items I sell, I should have less than 1 of each available? This seems unreasonable. (or are you really just acknowledging that a great number of the weapons I can craft have to useful purpose and should not be offered for sale anyway) What if someone pursues 2 crafting professions as they enjoy the crafting side of the game, this person is at a severe disadvantage under the proposed changes right?
neinnunb wrote:
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.
You do know that the 'mall' stores as you call them are stores owned by one individual but have vendors that belong to many different players? Crafting professions take a LOT of time and I don't think there's anyone with enough time to run the harvesters he'd need to craft for every single profession in the game.
I don't know of any of the malls that's been all that succesful either, certainly none that are 'one stop shops for practically the entire server'
How about the vendor item being a skill in the merchant tree... so normal is 150, then at a tier two in merchant you get +25 items... tier 3 +25 items... tier 4 +50 items... master +50
So thats 300 items for a master merchant.
Other than that 6k bazaar seems nice.
Could we get some sort of indicator on the map of how much inventory a private vendor has? Im sick of traveling 4500m to get to a vendor named "BULK HIGH QUALITY RESOURCES" to get to a vendor with 500 steel and a broken datapad on it.
On the map it could just say "Vendor Name (103)" meaning there are 103 items on it. At least that way we wont waste the trip for empty vendors.
1. Raise Bazaar limit to 10k.
2. Cap vendors at 300 items. Do not increase number of vendors one can own.
3. List # of items for sale beside each vendor on planetary advertising.
4. Get a better database, upgrade your servers. 
To put it bluntly, doubling the cap to 6000cr will not do it. Merchants who don't have good vendor placement by cities or who are supported by a sizeable PA are forced to hawk their wares at the current laughable cap (3000cr), and thus usually understating the value of the item to simply make some credits.
My opinion on the cap: Cap it at 10,000cr. This is more reasonable, and you'd find the more experienced merchants and craftsmen bringing their wares back to the bazaar - most notably the armorsmiths and weaponsmiths - who drive the combat portion of the game. Also, we'd see more quality power-ups in factory crates instead of singles.
A suggestion on the vendor limit: Instead of putting a limit to the vendors, insert a newhelp topic in the Holocron (CTRL+H)that will force it to pop up the next time a player views a player vendor with more than one page with Holocron instructions on how to use multiple-page vendors. The game already does this for professions. Take for example Bounty Hunter: When you make the long transition from taking easy bounties and move to taking hard bounties, the Holocron pops up when you take your first hard mission and gives you an idea of what to expect.This would work, developers, and would keep our player vendors stocked.
By limiting the number of items on a player vendor, you'll be cutting the legs out from under a casual merchant. They can't get online every day and craft-restock. So, if you want to keep atleast this aspect of the gamecasual player-friendly, don't cap the vendors. Just remind players about multiple pages on player vendors.