Development Cycle Archive

Frankly, I'm less concerned about caps than functionality. The bazaar and the vendors are miserable to use.

First, your sorting bites. Sorting by name should list all entries alphabetically, rather than listing several pages worth of information starting at A. If I'm perusing inorganic minerals in Theed, and the entries are multiple pages long, I'll see Aluminum at the top of each page and Steel at the bottom of each page because your sorting is so miserable.

Second, reading the names of an item is torture, given the name column is so ridiculously narrow. Why are you using an entire colum to display an asterisk for premium auctions? It's overkill, and is not good UI design.

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BaudGnarly wrote:

to quote Doc Savag,. regarding the 150 item limit on vendors:

This is not desigend to help anyone. This change is to limit the number of items in the vendor database. That is it. All of it.

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well if it helps make the game less buggy and more stable, I'm all for it!

-duck

150

ITEM

LIMIT

IS TOO

LOW TO

BE

USEFUL!!!!!

Item 1:

I agree with the raising of the cap to 6K on the bazaar. It is high enough to allow more stuff to be sold on the bazaar without cutting into the merchant profession.

Item 2:

While I agree you should have some sort of a limit on vendors, I STRONGLY disagree with the 150 item limit.

As a Doctor I already have to split between a standard medicine vendor and a vendor that carries my advanced meds made with advanced sub-components due to sizing issues.

In order to keep a good amount of stock for each type of med pack in various sizes of crates as well as say about 10 individual stim/wound packs ends up being a large amount of items when you consider all the different levels (A-E) and types of packs a doc can make.

My suggestion as a limit is something like 500 items per vendor. Enough to set an upper limit, yet give merchants some flexibility.

Raising the bazaar price cap to 6000 will further increase inflation. Instead raise the number of sales allowed.

I'm a very poor combat medic on my one char, having a 3k cap assures me that I will be able to afford items on the bazaar, even if I'm paying an exorbant cpu.

Vendor limit of 150 could work, perhaps the limit should be based on your merchant skill level.

Why nerf them that badly? I love it when I don't have to click on 10 different vendors to view a handful of items. Why not do another census on the % of players in each profession, realize Teras Kasi has skyrocketed, and nerf them to hell instead?

Something else that may be of thought is being able to combine things like powerups in crates. You get 10 per crate and people usually perchace more than one crate at a time. Ive had people buy upwords of 10-15 crates off of my vendor at one time. If I could have combined them into larger crates, that would have saved room, not to mention page space.

Just a thought

aaron

I think the increase to 6000 cr prices on the bazaar is a fair change. I often find myself wishing there was a way to locate items for sale on regular vendors across the galaxy instead of spending hours travelling around, so maybe the price increase will put more things on the bazaar for one stop shopping.

I do not however like the 150 item cap. My customers and I are intelligent enough to click on the Next button to get to the next page of items listed. Ilike to shop at big mega-malls where vendors have hundreds of goods listed, I like to shop and smallout of the way shops in the middle of nowhere with only a handful of goods. All seem to be striving quite well it appears because stockon all of them changes regularly. If you have to cut the amount of items on one vendor, then increase the amount of vendors a person can have and decrease the amount of maintenance for them so people call continue to sell as many items as they like without penalty. You're going to have to fix the database/technical problems as the game expands in coming months so might as well figure out how to make it stable with more items now rather than just cutting and taking away what we're already getting.

Now, 2 related items that kind of go with all of this: 1 - No matter how many items you let vendors have for sale, as soon as stock reaches 0 items, make the vendor automatically turn off its map/global listings until it's restocked. Nothing I hate worse than seeing a shop on the map, driving to it and having zip in stock. 2 - If someone pays to have an item listed as a premium item on the bazaar, let those items be listed on the first page you look at, or however many pages it takes to list all of the premium listings, but only listed once. I'm gettingfrustrated scrolling through 10 pages of the exact same listings until items start to get different. Premium should be the first item(s) you see on a listing, not the first items on the next 10+ pages you click on when doing a galaxy search for goods.

Oh, and 3 - If someone lists one unit of copper, iron, hide, or any other common resource for 3k (or 6k if this change goes through), please give us the option to kill the person who listed it if we buy the item

well th, i fully support the change to a 6000 cap on baazar vendors. makes perfect sense to me especially for smaller crates of consumable type items.

as for vendors, how does an infinite item cap encourage monopolies in a free market system? flooding the market with product in general doesnt create a monopoly. controlling people who make items, through various means is what creates a monopoly. the public will buy what they deem worthy. if i see a vendor with 500 powerups that are all overpriced and of poor quality, i dont care who you are, i'm not going to buy them.

as for the cap itself, let me guess, some of your metrics suggested that 150 items was the average amount of items for sale on a player vendor... is that a correct assumption? in some cases, where the items sold are specialty non-consumable items, i'd say 150 items is a decent cap. for instance, something like a bio engineer who sells bio eng clothes or an architect who only sells harvesters. those items are harder to make, and sell in fewer quantities in which case a 150 cap is reasonable for sure.

however you have designed the merchant profession so that it could in fact stand alone. with the features of vendor offers and the stockroom, a player vendor really is meant to be a shopping mall of sorts. i know for a fact there are plenty of vendors out there that move enormous volumes of consumable items each day for crafters other than themselves utilizing the offer feature. for example, a good friend of mine runs a vendor in his cantina which sells items for the entire guild, including many high-volume consumable type items. items like stimpacks and petstims and powerups that move FAST and have to be stocked in large quantities. hitting those type of players with a 150 item cap would be a big hit to their buisnesses and a pain in the rear in general.

finally, please clarify your statement TH... "An item limit is going to be placed on vendors and that limit is intended to be placed on 150." is that 150 items for sale? 150 items total throughout the vendor? does this include the stockroom section? the offers section? are they each at a 150 item limit? whats the deal here?

if its 150 items total you're gonna wreck up some people's buisnesses who rely on vendor offers bigtime. remember when the community cried out at the hopper size mistake on harvesters a while back cause they didnt want to babysit them every few hours? same thing will happen here to those with large buisnesses.... clarify please what that means so maybe we can have a more directed discussion

6k is still too low for the Bazaar. Making it 20k would be better.

Lowering the vendors to 150 is good. People use them as extra storage, and that's a little wrong, IMO.

Bazzar increase is a good thing. It will open up a lot of items to be sold on the Bazzar. However, you will need a better way to search through it all. After all you will now have several more pages of items. Keyword search maybe.

Merchant Idea. VERY BAD ONE. I for one am a Master weaponsmith. There are so many different types of weapons, i could only put 2-3 of each. I would have to restock certain items on a daily basis. Thus leading to me losing a sale because i didn't have enough of one item. Yes i know i don't have to but equal amounts of each weapon, but you get my point. Now lets look at it from a Merchant point of view. We have a guild merchant. He sales the products from several people. We have 2 WS, 1 AS, 3 Doctors, 2 Arcitechs, etc. This means he would have to put a limit on the number of items we could give him at one time. If something doesn't sale for a while we would need to take it back and replace it with something that might. Anyway i really think this will hurt the buisness of being a Merchant.

I have an idea for merchant. It isn't on this topic, but it is one i have experienced. I dabble in Merchant to sell my weapons at my house. So basically I sale them at 2 locations. My house and at a merchants. However it it sometimes a pain to get my money from the merchant. Just because of the times that he is on and i am. It would be Great if a merchant could set me up an account. Kinda like a bank. The Merchant can set a Percentage as his cut. When something of mine sells, it would auto deduct that amount and put it in his bank and the rest in mine. I could go to the vendor and pull it out as i needed. Or it would deposit in my bank and send me an email. That is an idea i would like to see.

This is horrid. I sell powerups and people buy between 5-10 crates at a time. So this means I have to log in all the time to restock my vendor not to mention find places to store all the powerups I make in crates. With so many different types of powerups this is gonna suck and will basically make me to decide not to even bother with this anymore. I have not read a single post where someone is complaining that vendors have to much space . As far as drilling down, yea maybe a noob does not know that but I think most if not all vetran players know how to use a vendor.

The Vendor cap needs raised much higher than 150. As an armorsmith (since I don't sell pre-packaged sets so the customers can actually see exactaly what they buy rather than taking my word on it) I will only be able to put about 15 sets on my vendor. Im currently selling between 20 to 40 pieces per day. I would have to constandly play 'fill up' with the vendors to try to keep them stocked. It's a challenge already keeping enough goods on them when i put 300 on them. The auction time was increased to 30 days so we wouldn't constantly have to play vendor maintenance, but this turns right around and forces us to spend sime time daily (or at lease every other day) doing vendor work.