Development Cycle Archive

Bazaar Cap: Wonderful! Please do it! 6000 may not be high enough either, 8000 may be the way to go, considering the level of inflation on many servers.

Vendor Item Limit: NO! 150 Is TOO FEW! Perhaps 300 items, or even 250 would be ok. But 150 is far too few items. I would drop Merchant all together if this nerf goes through.

The reasons you gave for needing this limit, besides technical issues, are bogus. Everyone eventually learns to "drill down" through the vendors list, and if they don't they might take their business elsewhere, so what?

Many vendors have 300-600 items on them, especially resource vendors, weapon vendors, and armor vendors. Obviously the technical issues have not been that severe, and its only when your team has made changes that technical issues, such as the infamous 14 day vendor bug, arise.

Leave it alone.

Increase in Bazaar cap: Yes More opportunity to sell specialty items.

Cap on Vendors: NO. Limiting the Vendor is not a good idea...some of the crafters make a huge supply of items and keep plenty of stock in them. By limiting the number of items the crafters cannot make a large run and restock daily.....they would have to craft daily instead of trying to get resources...to craft daily to stock vendors....and on and on....

Part #1, Great Idea... It will allow the items that are just over the current limit to be offered, and allow resource sellers to offer larger quantity in one chunk...

Part #2, If the limit is set to 150, I would ask that you allow the entire listing of the vendor ot display on one page... Thus removing the problem of people not finding all your items on teh vendor if unfamiliar with teh "Next" option, and in combination with the first change, your lower priced items can be moved to the Bazaars to advertise for your vendor... I'd personally like ot see a 200 item limit on vendors instead, but I could live with 150... ^_^

Im pretty new to the game.. two weeks in.. and I can see big frustrations ahead of me if you go with this cap on vendors..

its already bad enough with the lag on the vendors thatI have to sit at a vendor for a half an hour just to have the items load.. then another 10 mins to buy just one single thing.. then another 10 mins to retrieve the item.. now youre telling these mercents they have to use multiple vendors just to keep thier items stocked for a day?

I didnt buy this game nor will I pay 14.99 a month to play it if I have to use my one to two nights I can play, browsing thru 8 vendors just to find an item...

When making these types of changes, please evaluate them with real-world scenarios:

Weaponsmith: makes 25 or so different types of weapons, plus 5 types of powerups, weapon repair kits, and maybe one or two other things (like used armor or maybe resources).
20 types of weapons *10 of each type for sale =200 items on vendor.
5 types powerups * 20 of each type for sale =100 items on vendor.
repair kits, and other odds and ends = 20-50 items on vendor.

That's 300-350 items, and I'm being CONSERVATIVE. Usually a WS is a master artisan also (and possibly another profession)- so they may sell vehicles, or crates of subcomponents (Control Units, Micro sensors, EGP's), meat, hide, bones, Loot, resources, etc.

PLEASE DON'T MAKE CRAFTING HARDER THAN IT ALREADY IS BY PUTTING LOW LIMITS ON MERCHANTS.

PLEASE FOCUS YOUR EFFORTS ON FIXING THE BUGS:
SORTING ITEMS ON VENDOR ONLY SORTS CURRENT PAGE.
OFFERED ITEMS DO NOT SAY WHAT VENDOR THEY ARE ON.
NO SEARCH CAPABILITIES.
ORGANIZATION OF CATEGORIES LUMPS TOO MANY ITEMS TOGETHER (MISC)
NO BREAKDOWN OF COMMON ITEMS LIKE WEAPONS INTO FURTHER CATEGORIES (MELEE, RANGED, HEAVY, ETC).
NO WAY TO SEARCH VENDORS REMOTELY.
VENDOR BARKING DOES NOT WORK FOR DROIDS.
MERCHANT SKILL ADVERTISING-4 DOES NOTHING!

FIX THE BUGS!!! STOP NERFING THE GAME!!!

Increasing the bazaar price limit to 6k is a good idea.

Deceasing the vendors slots to 150 is insane, as a tailor I have over 600 items on my vendor on any given day which is needed to offer a good selection of clothing for my customers.

If you increase the number of vendors I can have as a merchant than I would be alright with a change to vendor cap but if I dont get anymore vendors than please do not do this.

Are you out of your mind? Limit the amount of Vendor space for sales? So yoru telling me I can only sell 7 suits at a time (63 items) a few Mk3s. AUK's, Ubese Shirts, Belts. On the 9th on this month I wil be putting up over 3k items in 3 vendors, and thats one Mk3s/ COmposite suits/ Ubese Shirts/ Belts/ and speical helmets. Impossible to do this if you guys have it yoru way. IF this comes in, I will quit Period!!!!!!

So Armor crafters and Weaponsmiths can only make one item/suit of each lol. DOH who the heck smoked crack that day to think of this one up?

Types of Armor- Armor crafters make, Bone/Mar/Ubese/Chitten/Armorweve/Composite/Ris (9 items on each suit just about) and most items used, Armor upgrade kits, ARmor repair kits, Ubese Shirts, Belts, Mk1/2/3 and layers, and you guys think a cap is going to help the consumer? And plus we do use these things as storage beucase of all the dam resourses we need to make armor, the cap on houses are insanely low for crafters of any type but you say use factories, yeah ok sure and what do we use to dig up the minerials? No lots due to the fact we are forced to use factories to store crap in.

Only one way to help this out, let crafters hvae a storage vendor for us. if you cant tell already storage is the problem and should be fix. I hate doing someone elses job

I think the 3K limit is what keeps the merchant professionalive. Maybe your limit should be raised as you gain more merchant abilities.

For those of you customers who approve of the 150 item cap, consider the following:

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  Would you rather see my vendor with 150 tailored items, or 600?



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  Would you rather wait 3 days for a backlog of custom orders, or would you rather find that matching outfit right now and buy it off the vendor?



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  Would you rather trek all the way out to my shop to pick it up when I happen to be online, or would you rather shop whenever you happen to be in the area?

Capping the vendor item limit at 150 could be very painful for many.

Armorsmiths could only put 11 full suits of armor in their vendor, and depending on color varieties, that may not be sufficient to meet their impulse shopper's needs.

Chefs, Tailors, Bio-engineers, and especially weaponsmiths, need the room to stock products.

I believe a much higher cap,say 500, would be more favorable for people not wanting to deploy multiple vendors.

It seems to me that your two suggestions are interlinked as an excuse to make the bazaar more useful while hurting the merchant profession.

If you raise the bazaar cap to 6000 credits, which, actually is a *GOOD* thing, you will of course find more people selling items on the bazaar. Therefore, your database size for the bazaar doubles, triples, or quadruples, and you have to devote more machine-power to that.

So, you now cut down on the amount of items on a vendor, from unlimited (since LAUNCH, I might add) to 150. It seems, probably to more than just me, that this is a potential fix for your forthcoming bazaar database problem, you now free up the space so that you can devote vendor DB storage to bazaar DB storage.

First off, the limit of 150 items is TOO LOW. Make it 500. Then you won't see the deluge of complaints from certain people that you will otherwise. Quite frankly, a weaponsmith, bio-engineer, or even an chef or architect might not care all that much about a 150 item limit. 150 different weapons or pet deeds or food items or harvesters is a good variety, and if someone has a fair amount of merchant skills, they can definitely keep in stock with this system.

But what happens with a tailor? If a tailor wants to stock 25 different colors of each item, that automatically makes it so they can only stock 6 different items at any given time. That's ridiculous. Let's say they have master merchant (6 vendors). So, that means that a fully-stocked master tailor/master merchant with 25 of each color of an item can have, at most, 36 DIFFERENT item types for sale, in several colors. That's not even half the available clothing types, in fact I think it's less than 1/8 of all craftable tailor items. What you are asking them to do, in effect, is become custom-order only for most things, stocking everything in one or two colors that sell well and devoting much of their game time to filling custom orders, which conversely cuts down the rest of their gameplay. Last I checked, tailoring didn't take 250 skill points, so I'm sure most tailors have other things to do in the course of a gaming day than stocking vendors and sitting in their shop custom-crafting 24/7.

My guild's tailor currently stocks 800+ items on her vendor. She is not a "monopoly." There are many other tailors within 4000m of her shop and they all seem to do fine. She has made a million credits, sure, but has never cracked two million, even though she has been a tailor since July. And many, many, many other merchants of all types have. Tailoring is simply not profitable like weaponsmithing can be for example, and so forcing them to limit their selection will kill their business. A blue shirt is a blue shirt, but there is a great variety in gun or armor quality, so people go to the best. With tailors, they go to whoever is IN STOCK and has the right color. Low vendor item limits = out of business tailors.

Or an armorsmith? Their armor takes what, two bracers, two biceps, a helmet, boots, leggings, chest and gloves per set. 9 items for one complete set. So tops, they can have 15 suits or so of armor for sale at any given time per vendor, again having to devote several vendors to different armor types if they want variety. And of course they have different colors too. So if someone wants green composite, custom order. Yellow ubese, custom order. Please see the above tailor argument for what this could do to an armorsmith's business. At least armorsmiths have the benefit of quality differences, so the people who make 80% resist composite will still be in demand over the 40%.

And what does this do to the merchant profession? Isn't the point of being a merchant supposed to be selling lots of things? The best merchants are SUPPOSED to have a "monopoly" of sorts, selling things across the galaxy like a brand name. So if a merchant has 6 vendors, at the moment they can service 6 different artisans selling their goods, and profit simply from being a salesman. With the proposed change, a master merchant will be lucky to service 2 artisans, because a successful artisan will likely need more than 150 items for sale at a given time in most cases. You know this is the case, or you wouldn't be proposing this cap; obviously, many vendors are highly stocked. You will be hurting a LOT of people. So this limit would also spell doom for the merchant class as anything other than a support class, there is NO hope for a merchant to just be a salesman if they can't have multiple artisans giving them wares to sell.

This kills the mall idea, because many vendors in mall environments also have their main shop vendor, now they will have to pull the vendor from the mall so their shop can have more in-stock.

So to summarize, the change to the 6000 credit limit on the bazaar is a GOOD thing, but not at the expense of the vendors being capped at 150 items. If the changes go in as planned, you will be forcing any artisan who wishes to be successful at all to become a merchant in order to have vendor storage, and the merchant class as a stand-alone profession will die. You will force variety of clothing out of the game, as every tailor will stock only what generally sells quickly (black). You will force serious artisans to give up trying to adventure, as they will have to continually make custom orders to stay in business to make up for what isn't in stock, and therefore won't be able to devote any time to other pursuits such as hunting, exploring, etc.

The only way I see this situation being avoided is to cap the items at 500 instead of 150. That might solve almost every issue, because most people could deal with 500 items per vendor, even if it is less than what they are used to. But asking people to go from 800+ to 150 isn't even funny. It's just sad. And I'm trying hard to convince my tailor not to quit playing if this goes in to effect.

Regarding monopolies:

I think an above post said it best. Powergamers will hold their monopolies no matter what obstacles you put in their path. Casual gamers who can only stock a vendor once a week will be affected the most.

And please tell me what is wrong with a monopoly if people in the game support it? We are not talking about the railroad barons of the 1900's here. This is a game and the economy is complex but not overly so. When players shop at the same mall, at the same vendors, time and tiem again, its because they like the products or they like the price or its just convenient for them.

Final suggestion:

Bazaar Cap = 5000 credits

Vendor Cap = 300 items

I like the bazaar change for two reasons. The first being that 3000 credits is chump change, and the second being I'd be able to sell resources in stacks of 2000. Less clicking is always good.

The vendor change I'm kind of indifferent about since I don't run a vendor (yet). I do like the sound of not having to go through multiple pages of vendor items though.