Development Cycle Archive
Thread: ID#2: Two Changes to Bazaars and Vendors
1)
Currently, the credit cap is 3000 and the development team is considering raising the cap to 6000 credits. Are you for or against this change? Why?
I agree with this change, it will help guys with no artisan or merchant skills to sell things.
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2)
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.
I think this idea is a terrible one, a 150 item cap on venders is not a good thing. I usually have 200 - 300 items on my vendor due to the great diversity of foods and drinks available, plus I have spices on there. Limiting me to 150 items will take more of my time away from hunting durini (been nerfed to hell and back I cant solo anything else) and i'll be forced to spend time restocking my vendor all the bloody time. If you guys are gonna make a Cap on venders you might want to to come up with a realistic number, for me it would be maybe 400 items but nothing less.
(also, I know why dont I group up with people and do better missions, I like to hunt solo from time to time. Take that away from me and I find a new game)
Thunderheart wrote:Currently, the credit cap is 3000 and the development team is considering raising the cap to 6000 credits.
I am for this, because of inflation's toll on the value of goods. Though, I'm a bit anxious as to 6k being too high as it may allow certain goods on the bazaar. Personally, a higher cap make life easier for me to move out small quantities of leftover resources.
Please, please, please, impose this cap. It actually prevents people from hoarding resources for production later on and should help even out the community.
Thunderheart wrote:An item limit is going to be placed on vendors and that limit is intended to be placed on 150.
I am fine with you raising the bazaar amount - just be sure to compensate the merchant profession in some manner.
As for capping vendors at 150 items - that is total BS. Nerfs like that will kill this game, and cause many to cancel. Your supposed rationale for such a cap (unlimited vendorscause monopolies, and hurts sales) is totally incorrect. First, I know about as much as anyone can know about monopolies... and an unlimited vendor does not assist a monopolist in any manner, if anything the opposite is true. The little guy would be more harmed by a cap where the big time vendor can just get others to set up more vendors for him or her.
Also if unlimited vendors hurt sales, how could it also help a monopolist? Unless you think a monopolist gains a monopoly by not selling items? Yourrationales are internally inconsistent. Also, if it is really hurting sales, don't you think players themselves would do something about it - like not list over 100 items on the vendors? Perhaps you could just change the Vendor interface so this isn't so much of a problem (for example make it so that it doesn't take 5 minutes to change pages on the bazaars and vendors..)
But I guess that would require compentent coding and/or hardware improvements on your end - so I could see why you wouldn't want to do that (or are unable to...)
If you do limit vendors as you say you will- 150 is certainly not high enough. It should be around 400 or so. Also, merchants should get more vendors. Finally, you do realize that this limit will disproportionately affect certain crafters more than others. For example tailors who have many possible permutations of items/colors, and weaponsmiths who have a variety of weapons in demand.
These changes in concert will also cause many to detrain merchant and sell solely on the bazaars. So you should be expecting your bazaars to get about 10 times the number of listings as they currently have... I am sure you probably didn't think of that, but given how sluggish the bazaar system is now, this could essentially crash it....
The bazaar cap being raised is good and bad. It's good because there has of course been inflation since the games release and 3000 credits is quite a small ammount of money. It's bad because it's likely to cause farthur inflation of specific items such as resources. The average price per unit of resource is 3 credits per unit of average quality stuff. I can almost garentee it would raise if the cap was raised. But I feel the good outways the bad in this situation.
As to the vendors. Putting in a cap would probably help with issues as you suggest (and I'm all for helping vendors.. lately it's taken 2-3 times as long to do anything on a vendor then normal. Last night it was taking me more then a minute a pop to place items on sale on one of my vendors.. my ping at the time was 50 and I had no packet-loss what so ever).
However, 150 items is somewhat low. You must consider Tailors in this. Tailors can make more then 200 different pieces of clothing, not considering Artisan clothing. Most good tailors try to keep at LEAST 2 of every item in different color combinations on there vendors at all times.. thats roughly 425 items.
Most tailors also already have several vendors. I for instance have 3 vendors in my shop. One for each line of clothing (although I make some adjustments, like all jackets and gloves are in my 'gear' vendor [field wear items]). I'm not even a master. I'm 3/3/2/2 and one of my vendors is already past the 150 items mark. The other two have 70-120 odd articles of clothing on them.
You must also consider that by setting the mark at 150, you are virtually FORCING all tailors to spend a lot of points in Merchant. Granted I'm already a master, but I know many people who simply don't have the points left over to master Merchant as well as Tailor. The same goes for weaponsmiths (especially after all the new weapons come into the game as part of the 'combat overhaul'.)
I think a cap of 200 would be much better. It's not that much higher and that way you aren't forcing tailors to spend a great deal of extra skill points on merchant if they choose not to.
As a Buyer right now,
Raising the Prices on the Bazzar is a Good idea. That way people will use them more, Since you can't buy much at all in the 3k range.
Vendors; I feel there should be a limit, but, feel that it should be at least around the 300 Range. Most Vendors I know have a hard time keeping items on them. So if you set the limit that low I feel that the Vendors will just empty quicker and that players will just be even more annoyed trying to buy Items.
Raising Bazaar $ Limit: Good idea.
Lowering Vendor Item Limit: Bad.
My Master Artisan sells lower priced, high volume consumables (power ups, tools, repair kits, etc...). I will be very dissapointed with a 150 limit cap.
Alternate solution: Tie item limits to Merchant skills (200 per skill box, 800 max). Throw a bone to Merchants! AND PLEASEGET YOUR DB PROBLEMS FIXED! I'm sorry, but if vendor sales are hurting because people are too lazy to click the "view next page" button, then stick a floating backpack next to the vendor named "don't forget to click on next page you moron".
I like the idea of raising the bazzar cap to 6k and I don't think that will hurt anyone.
Limiting the vendors to 150 items is not a good idea. Let private vendors put up as many items as they want. The more selection the better.
I have a feeling they'll go through this thread and do a simple "head count" of responses.
"Hmm, the merchants and tailors seem to think this will destroy their profession. But, hey, the Bounty Hunters, Commandos, and Creature Handlers all seem OK with it! Looks like a green light to me!"
(Come to think of it, that looks more or less like the method used for most decisions around here....)
Limiting the number of items on a vendor....this is not the way to discourage monopolies instewad you should find ways to encourage crafters whos vendors are not kept stocked to keep them stocked. i don't know how but there is no way to slow down a crafter who cares. he will find another way. i would probably hire someone to go across the galaxy doing personal trades to my customers.
The bazaar. if you don't make it 50k limit or more its not worth messing with.And since we are messing with caps how about you allow people to load up a reasonable amount of items on the bazaar. 25 items can sell out by the time you get back to your home planet some days...
TH:
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.
The Bazaar cap is a great change.
The vendor limit, while a good idea, is too low. You'll force large merchants to keep stock sitting around to be able to constantly refill the vendor; this wouldn't even really be a viable solution because...
NOTHING HAS BEEN DONE ABOUT THE "TEMPORARY" HOUSE ITEM CAPS THAT MAKE STORAGE AND DECORATING A ROYAL PAIN IN THE YOU-KNOW-WHAT!!!
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=963930&highlight=#M963930
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=823757
Raise the cap to 6000 credits for sales
Raise the cap to 15000 credits for auctions.