Development Cycle Archive
Thread: ID#2: Two Changes to Bazaars and Vendors
From a quick glance, I might be alone here, but I don't like the hike. I think it will only drive up the cost of items in the game, thus perpetuating players in the game having too much money. The bazaar has been a beautiful thing, because I know if I find something there, it won't be more than 3k to buy. I know 6k isn't much more, but the things that sold at 3k are now going to be sold at 6k. This will eliminate on a small scale the need for some merchants to even go through the hassle of their own vendor. Then you won't have those merchants paying for the upkeep of having a vendor.
I just kinda feel that there is no need for the price hike. People do a great job of advertising their itemson the bazaar. I think you should leave higher priced items to be sold on player vendors.
wait, wait, wait.Great idea!!
These changes should onlybe for master merchants. RIght now, master merchant is useless. 500 item vendorfor a master merchant and a 6k bazaar listing price for master merchants. It should NOT be raised community wide.
LexanMilson wrote:
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.
Hoarding resources? Good grief. Something like this wouldn't prevent me from hoarding anything, it would just prevent me from being able to keep my vendor stocked properly.
With the current holomonkeys running around, there's nary a stocked vendor in sight. I take pride in the fact that I keep fully stocked vendors at all possible times, and my customers have found that they can rely on me to always have a wide selection of items. I may not always have what they're looking for, but invariably when someone comes looking for item X and doesn't find it, they buy item Y and send me an email about getting item X when I have one.
This is because I take the time and effort to stock my vendors and keep them stocked. I don't run one "uber-vendor", I run 4 (Vehicles, Commodities, Armor, Slicing Supplies and Custom Orders). I used to run 5 but couldn't keep meds stocked at all so I dropped the med/food vendor. Every one of them has items on them. A couple have several hundred. You can find anything you want, within reason, at my shop, from crafting tools to repair tools, to weapon powerups, shield generators, and other stuff. Does this mean I'm running a monopoly? Hell no. It means I'm running a large, well-run, properly-maintained shop.
Here's a little story: Three days ago I finished a run of 72% kinetic-resist layered Ubese armor. I put 16 suits on the vendor. That's 160 items, as each suit is 9 pieces plus the backpacks they were stored in.
It took less than 15 minutes to totally sell out, and that was at 100K per suit! If there were a 150 item cap on vendors, I wouldn't have been able to stock even that many, because my armor vendor is already pretty fully stocked with PSGs and individual armor pieces. I might have gotten 2 or 3 suits on, but likely not even that many.
This proposed change punishes merchants, and punishes the badly, for wanting to keep a large and diverse stock. That's it. Nothing else, it will accomplish nothing else than to punish good merchants, possibly in the hopes of punishing the ones that are using vendors as portable holes.
In all seriousness, if this goes through, I will close my shop, as it won't be worth keeping open any longer, as the effort will outweigh the benefits by that point. I play this game to have fun, not to spend every minute I'm logged in doing nothing but restocking vendors and listening to customers whine about my vendor being empty. I'll drop Merchant like a hot rock, as that's a lot of skill points I could put to much better use than tying them up in a timesink.
Lobaca-Scylla wrote:
While your looking at modifying vendors why not set them up when registered to remove themselves from planetary registration if they are empty and show up only if they have an item on them.
As for bazaar increase the more the better. Its a great start but would like to see it higher.
Vendor Cap - A little low i think alot of people think around 300 items is fair. Im a master merchant and I sell goods for both architect and tailor items...tehres a ton of tailored items and to keep a couple of each stocked is alot of vendored items.
Lobaca
I totally agree with you on this. I hate visiting vendors repeatedly to find they still aren't stocked with anything but CDEFs and melons...and pre-nerf melons at that...
How about increasing the Bazaar to 20k? Then allow Merchant abilities to kick in to reduce costs??
Wait, that would mean making this game work as intended. Sorry, my bad.
The Data Library fault, and the resulting problems using Oracle where exhaustivly explained in enormous detail in BETA 1. I saw it on the pre game boards, and I wasn't even IN BETA 1!!! So now that you went ahead with something the entire world told you would not work well, and the forcast proved true, you want to punish the paying public to clean up your db library that you where told OVER A YEAR AGO would get hosed?!?
Lets do this right. You have a db problem & need to decrease markers. OK, things happen, let's be constructive. Increase Bazaar sales figures to 9k (adjust as appropriate) to allow the plethoratude of high volume-low cost items to get to a larger market easier. Limit Vendors to 300 items (adjust as appropriate). Allow some sort of intelliget storage aka warehouse or something, without a lot penalty, to allow db links in your libray to improve db effeciency. This would involve ressetting 2 parameters, correcting one fault, spend about 50-90 hours bd coding and accomplish what is openly said here. It would not reduce the db size (and your cost, which is what you are trying to do weather you admit it or not).
Announced issue resolved. Game play becomes easier, paying public is not punished.
Bazzar change - good idea - up it to 10,000 though.
Vendor change - not such a good idea, lot's of good reasons why are brought up in this post.
the new proposed bazaar cap will empty a lot of non essential vendors...
but the vendor limit at 150 is far far too low. instead implement it like this...for non merchant profs cap it at 50, for novice merchant +50....and then +50 per box in the efficiency line or wherever...and finally at master +100
so a total of 400 items for a master merchant per vendor
Bazaar Cap: I agree with the increase. But I disagree with the proposed cap. It should be capped at 10k.
Vendor Cap: No input.
On #2 - the player vendor: Again, I have no merchant skills, but I have read most of the points made here already. Its clear that the # of 150 is too low, but its also clear that the numbers everyone else are coming up with are totally arbitrary. To give you feedback on your question I guess I need to be more informed of the problem. Is it simply a DB storage problem where a small % of players are exploiting the fact that there is currently no limit and thus storing 20k items in one vendor? If this is the case wouldn't any limit that was high enough that most vendors would never reach solve your problem? Say a number like 1000 or 2000 that most merchants would never notice? Combine something like that with other changes mentioned like preventing those that drop merchant skills from maintaining stock on existing vendors or other NON-CAP changes that wouldn't affect the majority of merchants seems to me like something that should be looked at before something as drastic as a prohibitively low cap such as 150.
As for so called 'monopolies' I dunno... I guess I just see far too many loopholes in the system to think that any item cap would prevent the top tier merchants from remaining above others. From sharing lots with other players to the ability to set up multiple vendors at Master Merchant to players paying for multiple accounts themselves and setting up 10 or 20 vendors to get around a low item cap. Sure, the average player would never go to these lengths, but we're discussing the top teir/extremists here who I'm sure are already doing some of these things to work around existing mechanics so I fail to see why it wouldn't continue.
So in short:
on change 1: sure (indifferent to happy)
on change 2: no (does nothing to address the problem as I understand it)
Please oh please for the love of GOD PLLEEEEAAAASSSEE implement Both of those changes!
Raising the price cap in the bazaar is good.
With sorting, I don't see how it is hard to find things in the vendor. Maybe people don't realize they can sort items. Since I have no vendors I do not have enough knowledge to have an opinion.
How about a permissions system on the bazaar so that players can set permissions so other players can pick stuff for them off planet if needed. Would cut on the down time we hate so much. I know this is removing a money sink, but I am sure it could be incorporated easily enough....maybe include a processing charge for another player grabbing the item for you.
Once again, no on the vendor price limit hike...no on 6k 
Bad idea on both counts. It is extremely difficult to keep items in stock for some crafters, and capping the number of items will hurt them badly. Tailors immediately come to mind, as they tend to offer many choices of colors on their vendor for the same item, raising the number of items well past the 150 unit sales price. Unless you are going to allow some way for people to color their own items to their specifications, you are severly limiting this profession. You need to find another way, because this isn't it.
As far as the Bazaar, again its a bad idea, unless you plan on completely removing the Merchant profession from the game. Merchant is already delegated to a profession crafters pick up to complement their own profession, and not as a viable stand-alone profession in its own right. This will be the final nail in the coffin, so to speak, for any stand-alone crafters.
A suggestion: Make player vendors operate in a manner similar to the bazaar by allowing Merchants (not Artisans) to give administration rights to their vendors to individuals. Allow them to set a percentage of sale price to be paid to the vendor owner and the rest to the seller, similar to what is done with player-city shuttle fees where part goes to the "money sink" and part to the city. This will allow Merchants to sell goods without having to buy them and resell at a higher rate and allow crafters the option of many different points of sale. The Artisan vendor then becomes a "basic" vendor to allow non-Merchants to sell their goods only.
And would you please explain this "monopoly" thing? I don't get how you could possibly have one in this game unless someone is going to all the vendors of his competitors and buying their stock up and hoarding it, and that is impossible simply due to storage space availability.