Development Cycle Archive
Thread: ID#2: Two Changes to Bazaars and Vendors
After some thought, I've changed my mind slightly.
I still like the idea of raising the cap on the Bazaar.
But the 150 item limit is too low; I understand the database problems, and vendor lag/malfunction is extrememly annoying. If there must be a limit, then it must be higher than 150.
1) Raising Bazzar cap Good. Will make the city bazzars more useful and can find better items there. I know I will use it knowing I can sell/buy items in the city. However I would like to see a higher cap. Nothing wrong with a player being able to buy a 30K vehicle in the city and not have to travel to a player vendor to get items.
2) 150 Item cap on Vendor very bad. Making a limit is not a bad idea, 150 too low. Instead of going from infinite to almost zero, try to do it in steps. Maybe cut it to a limit of 1000 items. See the effect on the game. If it needs adjustment then take it form there. Clearly a problem has been identified and the DEV's believe that a change is needed, but to jump to such a low number just seems a little too extreme. Just seems like it will be a band-aide to cover a greater issue that will just surface later in some other form. Fix the root cause not the symtoms.
As a Chef who sells in a Cantina setting, limiting me to 150 items requires me to potentially restock the bartender more than once a day for a high traffic cantina.
How about you add more content, and fix broken professions?
I think we can all live with bazaars and vendors the way they are, we've been doing so for 6 months now.
*KettemoorBoth ideas are bad. Allow me to briefly reiterate what many others have already said, most likely.
Cap raise to 6000 - The 3000 credit cap was very strategic. Many types of items are sold in the 3000-6000 range. Furniture, powerup crates, high-end artisan items, many tailor-crafted items...the list goes on. Player cities are already too empty. If everyone can post most of their items to the Bazaar, why would anyone want to come see me on the off-chance that I may have something different? People have to KNOW that they are getting things from vendors that they can't get from the Bazaar.
Vendor cap at 150 - If you are trying to limit database space, this will absolutely do the trick. Vendors will no longer have more than 150 items, and bare minimum 50% of the merchant/crafter types out there will become so upset (myself included) that they will leave - some complaining, others just quietly walking out the back door - and that will REALLY free up DB space.
I agree with a previous poster - Stop trying to 'balance' the game, and just concentrate on bug fixes! IMHO, in order it should be bug fixes/game balance/new content. New content is less effective if the classes and everything else isn't balanced, and you can't balance anything until you know everything's working right!
Devitt Kylrathin
Master Artisan - Citadel, Corellia, Intrepid
Both of these suggestions will help some and hurt others, and I see a lot more hurt than help. Raising the bazaar limit is going to do nothing but increase the base price on newbie items like crafting tools and survey tools beyond their immediate reach, while at the same time increasing resource rates. You aren't going to see 2 stacks of 500 at 3k combined to one stack of 1000 for 6k, you'll see 2 stacks of 500 for 6k because if enough people do it, that's what people will pay.
If you want to make the bazaar more friendly, replace the item limit with a credit limit. You can place one item for 25k, 25 for 1k or 1000 for 25 each if you're a masochist. Give the mid-level crafters a place to sell things in bits and pieces without flooding the market and give people who come across a high value item they no longer need an easy way to dispose of that single item, but it prevents people from bypassing the merchant to maintain their entire business via bazaar. Give merchants a higher credit limit than the regular player that increases with skill so they can attempt to salvage what may be left of their business if you actually go through with the second half of this ridiculous idea.
The vendor limits are a game killer, much as the 7-day cycle and broken factories were. In the days of redeeding factories, merchant crafters were literally chained to their shops for the majority of their time online to babysit them. Quite a few people got fed up and quit. The same was true with the 7-day cycle that meant hours spent recycling items before they disappeared after an unspecified and seemingly random time limit. Quite a few more people, myself included, reached the end of the rope being a slave to the vendor. The 30 day limit helped, but the 150 limit just puts it back in.
Any high-volume crafting professionwill be forced to dedicate their time to restocking a fast empty vendor if they wish to stay in business, or be relegated to the part-time merchant people only visit as an absolute last resort. The only way someone running a business in this game can ever leave the house is if they can spend the hours needed to stock the vendors in advance. No POI's, no hunting trips, no parties, no hanging in a cantina with friends, have to stock the vendor first. The vendor they could stock to 300 and take a night off now needs to be refilled every night before they can leave. The vendor they loaded with 500 so they could, heaven forbid, take a weekend off and enter the real world with their real family, now goes empty that first night to the aggrivation of everyone who runs out to their empty shop over the weekend.
I would love to take up crafting again, but I don't have 8 hours a day 7 days a week to babysit a tempermental NPC. I doubt many others do either.
Vendor limit though is a problem. As a master Weapons smith my well stocked vendor is what brings the people in. I get an email a day from people telling me how nice it is to find a weapons vendor with something on it. I also am leery about tying the vendor cap to the merchant skills. The character I want to play has some combat skills. I don't want to spend all the skill points I have set aside for combat professions to have to be sunk into merchant just so I can have a decent vendor cap. As for customers having to "drill" down. That is what the filters are for. I don't mind explaining them to my customers and I haven't had any I repeat ANY complaints about too many items on my vendor, not to mention you need a lot of items for when the game eats 50 pistols for some reason that can't be explained. If SOE in its infinate nerfdom just HAS to set a limit set it high enough to allow us to do more than stand next to our vendor so we can keep restocking it or allow like items to stack like someone explained above. I could live with a 500+ Item limit but less than that is just going to hack people off because I can't restock instantly because I'm out having fun shooting something to take a brake from manufacturing.
Toothman
Master weaponsmith
Vendor cap @ 150 - I disagree with this, it should be higher.
Well, after reading the first page of posts it's clear that most people are against the item cap on vendors. I play on Bloodfin and I had to suffer through most of last weekend with NO VENDORS at all because of a serious technical issue. I can only assume this is because there are too many items on vendors since they increased the time limit from 7 days to 30 days, and the system just can't handle the load.
Now, before any of you say
"why don't they just get new hardware...memory's cheap"
forget it, if it was that easy they would have done it already.
Personally, I would rather have a vendor system that is stable, even if it means an item limit. I will offer a refinement of this suggestion. How about making the item limit contingent on one's merchant skill. Maybe you start out with a limit of 75 items at Artisan/Business III and you max out at a limit of 200 or perhaps 300 at Master Merchant. This will allow players who really want it to get the higher limit and it should also cut down on the total number of vendor items and make the system more stable.
My wife is a tailor named Ezmrelda who plays on the Eclipse server. She never posts here on the boards because she is obsessed with having the best little clothing shop on the server so I am here speaking here on her behalf. She runs a shop just outside of Tyreena that has been hailed as the best clothing shop on all the server, with the best selection, service and lowest prices. Inside the store are 5 vendors, each with a specific color selection including bio-components. On each of these vendors she hasaround 2000 items stocked at any given time.... Everything on them is clothing based. She is not in a mall... Not in a high volume area(just outside of Tyreena)... and is not a monopoly of any sorts (though she makes a decent amount of credits every day)... just a little boutique. What do you all at SOE intend to do with her stock if you implement the 150 item vendor cap? Make it evaporate? Give her a set amount of time to remove the excess items before they are deleted? Force herback into the hell of continuously restocking depleted vendors? She has expressed to me that she has found her calling in the game and will never do anything else... she is a tailor.... she obsessesover having every imaginable color combination, is fanatic about coordinating outfits and custom design... If the vendor cap of 150 would go into place she would quit... everything would be pointless... This is just looking at things with her, from her point of view...
I personally look at the economy of this game as being a great one... even though at times it may have its flaws... It is completely player driven, and in my own opinion quite realistic. On Eclipse you have your big dog Merchants with their mega-malls like Stry'ker, Nurofen, Shotgun etc. mixed in with your countless niche shops and vendor tents. These mega-malls help to drive the economy and promote asense of community in the cities they are based in. Yes people can grief about how they consider these malls to be monopolies but these people all worked VERY hard to get to where they are through countless man-hours invested in the game. Take Stry'ker for example... I remember when he had a tiny house just outside of Coronet with a couple of vendors together, making OK guns at the time... but it was so nice to see such a shop... where hundreds of people flocked to see what was new and just hang out with each other. A major sense of community has built up aroundthese so called monopolies and much more good than harm is coming out of them. Not to mention that many of them offer apprenticeships of sorts to up and coming crafters of the various professions.... I know that my wife has employed the aid of several NoviceTailors in the craftingof goods for her store... When it comes to game mechanics... this is one of the greatest systems that you all at SOE have in this game and you are going to meddle with it? Why?
Because you say that the strain on your database is too great... that keeping track of the thousands of items on all the vendors on all the servers of SWG is too great of a task for your hardware/software/peopleware to handle... that it causes severe lag on certain planets where the concentration of player vendors/cities is high...(yes I have to admit that thevendor lag on Dantooine as of late has become unbearable) From a business standpoint I can see your reasoning with putting the vendor cap into place.... Just switch around a bit of code by investing a minimal amount of manhours and you can avoiddumping more money into additionalhardware and themanhours needed to manage such a massive player economy. It makes complete sense in the short-run of things when you are looking at the bottom line. But in the long run it will have drastic effects on the player economy of the game not to mention the number of people who subscribe to your game. I personally know of at least 20 crafters on Eclipse who will quit their professions or quit the game entirely if you implement the vendor cap. This will immediately plummet the economies of all the servers into chaos and prices will skyrocket ashigh quality goods become hard to find... people will become frustrated that they can't find what they have beengetting forsuch a long time.Not to mention the exodus of the established player artisans will be extremely detrimental to the sense of server community. I could continue with mydeposition for an eternity but I won't.
I will simply sum things up... Why meddle with something in your game that works so well? Yes we can see that there are major technical issues on your end, but didn't you all have the foresight to put the systems in place to handle the beast you created? Obviously not. So you opt to take the short sighted road out and make the communities you created suffer through yet another upheaval in your game. I find it hard to believe that a company with at least $3.2 million in monthly revenue from this game alone can't look past their own noses into the future... that you all can't look into the next 5 years into the life of your game... god forbid what happens if and when you all can implement the space expansion.
Shadrow Slade- Eclipse Master Ranger
Ezmrelda- Eclipse Master Tailor/Artisan/Merchant, Pandoria- Eclipse up and coming Merchant
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