Development Cycle Archive
Thread: ID#2: Two Changes to Bazaars and Vendors
Wow, this thread is getting long.
Here are my two cents. I agree with the changes, though they are made from a DB point of view. As an ex-master merchant who ran a pretty decent resource business I understand the frustration of having your vendors limited to 150 items. However I have also seen the other side of the fence. I have beena player that has gone from vendor to vendor to vendor on the map to look for something. I have spent hours looking to buy a specific mineral, component, etc, and I had no idea what items were in stock. I would suggest the following:
1) Make the limits for the vendors based on merchant level, so that there is some incentive to work towards the higher level.
2) Somehow make vendors inactive when someone doesn't have enough merchant skills to control them all
3) Raise the Bazaar limit 10K for instant purchase items
4) Leave the limit in place for auction items, but set it so there is NO CAP on auctions. We already have the Valcyn trade forums where this happens all the time. Why not just move it in game, and let people have a better experience bidding.
I must say that these changes won't effect my resource business in a negative way. I have switched to a Showroom/email order/vendor pickup system. That will work just fine with in the 150 item limit. People that sell full sets of armor will have to put those sets in backpacks now, which makes buying the suits easier and listing them easier, etc etc.
Anyway, those are my ideas.
Although this is another personal anticdote, I think it's valid for others as well.
I chose to become a weaponsmith so I could mess around with and sell some of the lesser used weapons. Not every player wants to use the killa firearms that everyone else uses, even if they arnt the best. I wanted to be someone that can be relied on for making things like SG62's and Cryoban grenades, stuff that other WS rarely touch. A cap on vendor items effectively closes me out of the niche market and forses me to either pick up more merchant (something im not interested in doing), stock only stuff that sells to cover my costs (thus not doing what I became an artisan for in the first place), stocking all the time (something I dont have time for), or saying f**k it all for a game of soldiers and just drop any sort of artisan for a combat class because I cant do the fun stuff I became an artisan/ws for in the first place. Odds are thats what would happen.
VizSunrunner wrote:
Yes & yes.
The credit cap on bazaar is great mechanic. But, there has been inflation and I agree 6000cr is a good new cap.
150 is a huge number, I never realized it hadn't a limit.
If your selling more than 150 items every few days then you *are* monopolizing the economy and reducing fun for other merchants/crafters to a huge degree. If you are too busy/lazy/whatever to restock your vendo r every few days, tuff. Really how greddy and lazy can you stand to be.
Yes, you're right, I'm sorry that I actually want to make all 239 clothing schematics in a variety of colors (anywhere from 5-50, depending on how well the different colors work with a particular schematic)
Of course for every vendor who is well stocked, organized and has good stuff to sell, there are 20 vendors out there with nothing on them or very little and the stuff they're selling is of crappy quality.
Fiado (Scylla)
Raising the cap to 6k is pointless. Most people who want to get rid of stuff (good items) just place it for 3k. And it gets sold. Raising to 6k will hurt the market because now you're discouraging the purchase of items due to the price increase. The demand is low, so the price should be lowered, because stock is high. The demand is low, and raising the "price" of items will not work. In fact, with a cap, the Bazaar will never be what it should be. In fact, partial reason whyI started playing was due to the auction system, because I thought it would bring a lot more content into the game. As it stands, it's only there to buy nearly useless stuff. Sometimes you get something good, but most of the time it's useless.
I have a suggestion on this. Do away with the price cap - stimulate the economy. I know there's arguement that vendors would then become useless. This is only true if you let every item sell on the market. Since the Bazaar is public, and thus somewhat controlled by the Empire, I would say a limiting of items to be sold on the Bazaar would be worth looking at. What I mean by this, is allow only stock-named and stock-made items to be sold on the Bazaar. Personally I hate searching for something and up comes !!FWG +33% ASDF on the top as the item name. Changing to this selling rule will do a couple things. First off, people will buy useful stuff at reasonable prices.Crafters will become competitive with their prices if they want to make a profit (and may start a "Union" to control prices). People will be buying stock items which they may very likely want to slice. For pre-sliced, custom named, and otherwise "the best" guns and armor - keep those out of the Bazaar and on Master Smith's Vendor. This will eliminate the need for everyone and their crafting mule to set up a vendor. This will also open up more harvester slots so more minerals flow into the economy. Vendors will get the bonus of gaining a reputation outside the Bazaar as specialty shops; and they may get this by actually using the description field when selling an item instead of the name spamming damage and other advertising information. This will also eliminate going around to 100 useless shops to find one useful item.
I mean, a price cap of 50k or 100 or even 250k would be ok. Right now, only allowing the trade of small useless items on the Bazaar is pointless. I always see this big red box in every city yet I've learned that unless I want a crate of food, I might as well stay away from the Bazaar. It's just filled with CDEF pistols and bone armor. When I first subscribed to the game, I expected world-wide trade, like E-Bay in a game. Instead it's the corner market where you can see which rotting food is for sale on the other side of the galaxy. Consider my above suggestion as it's the best way to go to stimulate the economy and the interest in the crafting professions.
The 150 item vendor cap is interesting. I do see a benefit it capping the number of items. First off, I see many shops that have 8-10 vendors sitting around inside - most of them belonging to the owner. I don't know how many vendors can be placed at once, but 150 per vendor sounds reasonable. Currently, every naked Twi-lek on Naboo can store hundreds of items in their non-existant back pocket. I wouldsay a cap of 100 would work, too. Right about now everyone who even reads this is saying "No, that won't work <flame>. I wouldn't be able to sell enough of each weapon! If I sold one of each weapon, I'd only be able to sell 2 of each weapon on the vendor!" This is exactly the point - not that you won't be able to sell all the weapons you want - but that you will be forced to specialize your vendor even more than in the past. Currently, people do set aside a vendor for rifles, and then pack them with dozens of each type. This works, but I often find that half the items of interest to me are factory made, and low to moderatequality. Forcing the specialization of vendors, along with the economy boost suggested above,a trade for minerals would come in to place as each vendor tries harder to get the best stuff to make his/her items. And as time goes on, the person who's using the best minerals, and who's doing the best job in a given market, will gain the reputation as being the person to go to if you want that type of item. And all the while, everyone who's selling a 'decent' item, one which is not top quality, will be able to find a trade on the cap-free Bazaar mentioned above.
The only problem with the vendor cap is the guy who's a Master Weaponsmith and Master Armorsmith. I think that if vendor item slots were adjusted depending on your crafting skill, that might be able to work. The biggest nerf comes to Merchants. In fact, they're nerfed as it is. Anyone can ask someone to stand inside their house and sell items. It takes a Master Merchant to set up, run, and maintain an actual mall. As it stands, all Merchants get is more vendors, and again, anyone can hire a bunch of people to stand in their house and sell items. The Merchant class needs to be looked over and modified so it fits a specialized market.
Also, one last thing. No matter where you go, you find dozens of weapons for sale which are not the best quality. If the Bazaar was opened up, you'd then see hundreds and hundreds of medium-quality items (which will drive up demand on high quality items). To counter the masses of not-so-useful items, I suggest an increase in the number of minerals required to make an item. As it is, you can dig into dirt for a minute and gather enough metal to put together a flawless pistol. And it only took you 2 minutes to complete the entire process. I would increase the mineral cost 10x just to drive supply down.
So basically, a lot needs to be done. If you take Economy 101, you'll be intoduced to supply and demand, and how they relate to cost. Since SWG's economy is created by pulling money out of thin air (missions), the economy will need constant maintaining. As it stands, the supply is huge, and the demand is low, and the price is high. Increase the cost of item-crafting by 10x, and the supply drops dramatically. Open up the Bazaar to free trade and watch prices fluctuate daily - watch auctions REALLY take place. All of a sudden you have a high demand economy where the prices are favorable to the buyer and the seller, new markets open up to suppliers of rare minerals, and specialists earn their reputation and good business.
Anyways, that's the fix if you need it. We need a market - not a small corner market - but a futuristic mall of the galaxies type of market. I have earned a decent amount of money and every time I look at it I have no idea what I will ever use it on................
-Vexus
Price cap on the Bazzars at 6k? Areyou guys serious? Move pistols on our server only sell for 5k. There would be absolutly no reason to keep stocking pistols in my weaponshop anymore if I can get all the traffic of the bazzar.
Why the hell did I master merchant then. Planet advertizing will mean absolutly nothing when compaired to the convienence of the bazzar.
Also, 150 items per vendor? That seems a little bit low. As a Master merchant, I have shops on 3 different planets. I would hate to be limited to 150 items max at each location.
Thunderheart, you seem to want to give the Master tag meaning for professions. But here you are trying to totally subvert the merchant class.
However, I'm adamantly opposed to the 150 item vendor restriction. This is a bad, bad idea.
Look, I understand you want people to stop using vendors as a form of storage, but you shouldn't cripple all the honest businesspeople to do it.
I think we need to think just a little bit outside the 'stick and stick' approach to the game population...
Well the price cap on the bazaar is ok. however wasnt the plan to keep exceptional items off the NPC city Bazaars and force players to go shopping at a player vendor thus supporting the player economy outside the NPC cities.
Also 150 cap is too low! I have a Master Weaponsmith, Master Armorsmith, and Master Artisan Character. I run several vendors each have more then 150 items on them save maybe one vendor of 5. Either increase house storage reconsider the proposed limit of 150 items.
Thunderheart,
Vendor management is one of the most unfun things you can do in this game. I understand your motivations, but without some better management tools I fear it is just going to frustrate folks. I'd be for the change if you did the following:
- Made the organization of items on a vendor much more logical and ensure that *every* item has a logical category for it on the side.
- Make it easy to "refresh" your entire inventory to 30 days again with the click of a button
- Make it easy to reprice all items of a similar type via the vendor interface
- Put the cap at 200 items not 150
- Fix housing storage so that when we do large factory runs we have someplace else to put items rather than on the vendor. If you even followed the 75 items per lot limit, that would be fantastic. Smalls and mediums would remain the same, larges would go up to 450 items and PA halls to 675. As it is now people build large quantities of small houses to maximize storage thus contributing to suburban blight. Our PA hall is full at 250 items just through decorations. Since we have no room left for storage, folks craft and do other things in their own houses rather than coming together in the PA hall to chat and be a community. Right now our PA hall is a pretty building giving us guild chat which members rarely visit.
Regarding the bazaar I almost never use it so I don't have a lot to say. Anything that encourages folks to stay in the major cities and not venture out to player cities or outside vendors seems like a bad thing though. The bazaar is already deluged with massive quantities of worthless or overpriced goods as it is. Perhaps some sort of an interface to tell a seller the average price of the item they are selling in the last 30 days and some easy way to filter out the weapons and armor with zero condition, etc.
Thanks,
Grom
IMHO player vendors is a good thing. Instead of making changes to drive players away from player vendors, like these, you should concentrate on making player vendors even better. The most popular bazaar on the server (Read: Coronet) are allready lag infested through the sheer number of people there. This change will just force more people to Coronet, and not any other cities.
I also remember from beta the 10000 cap we had then and all the associated problems. It was ahuge improvement when the bazaar went to a 3000 cap. Keep it that way please.
I propose this idea from my other thread on General Discussion.
*copy/pasted from my original post:
It seems to me, that there is a core flaw in the way that Bazaar's were implemented. The way it stands now, a player can harvest his meat/hide/ore/ etc, or craft a particular item he *hopes* is in demand, and places it on the Bazaar in hopes that it will sell. This has led to the Bazaar being jammed full with endless worthless and duplicate items. There are dozens and dozens of identical items set with completely custom names, some misleading names, and at all different price ranges. This leads to a Bazaar system that people usually skim through in hopes they see the item they want for a reasonable price. The current system is chaotic guesswork, and not an efficient way to run a database, nor a player economy. Buyers should beseeking sellers, not sellers desperately seeking buyers.
I think we need to seperate the Bazaar system into two seperate terminals, or at least two seperate concepts in the one terminal window. The first can be the system we have now, which is essentially a pawn shop. Ahard capped pricing system(3000 credits max)for sellers, selling small amounts of resources or low quality and/or level items. The second system can be for the "procurers". People in need of an order filled,canfill out a form for the item they would like to have made, and the price they are willing to pay along with detailed specifications. Prospective crafters can then peruse the system, and either claim an order, or bid for an order. The winning bidder now has the order, and a timeframe for completion which is determined by the original buyer of this item. If the crafter cannot complete the item within the specified timeframe, the order is placed back on the market for other prospective crafters to bid on. This would also have to entail a monetarypenalty to the crafter who fails to complete the order on time (which goes to the original buyer), to avoid exploiting. I think a crafter who successfullybeats out the competition ona bidfor an order should receive an experience bonus in direct relation to:
A) The amount of resources used to fill an order
B) How the procurer, or original submitter of this order rates the crafter's work after purchase. (Obvious possible exploits)
C)The amount of time required to fill this order.(Perhaps calculated by how many seperate crafting screens you must go through to finish the entire order?)
D) The amount of specifications that EXCEED the original requestor's specifications.
This would make more sense than the current "Crafter missions" to me. Maybe I'm just bored/tired and in my exhaustive hallucinations this just SEEMS like a good idea, but I thought that a system like this could be really cool! It has been a long time since I've used a bazaar, so I'm not sure about this, but does the non-player run Bazaar have the functionality to list items for sale on player owned vendors in Player Cities? If not, it should!
What do you guys think? Would anyone use a system like the one I've illustrated above? I'm sure there is a lot of potential for exploits with the EXP Bonus idea, but nothing thatsome in depthexploration couldn't iron out. I am no longer in the crafting area, but I used to be. And one thing I didn't like about it, was that I was pumping out endless pieces of armor with no idea who (if anyone) would buy it, what stats they were looking for on it, how much they would pay, and where a convenient location for them to pick it up would be. Who knows, perhaps the poor small population of people on Rori and Talus would actually be able to let crafters know what they REALLY need, and attract new merchants ready to corner the markets andfill those orders!
I would recommend that the developersfor SWGtake a look at the Consignment system in the recent title Horizons - Empire of Istaria (sp?) Their system is in no way an earth-shattering new perspective on MMO game economies, butthere aresome good ideaspresent in that system that could, if*borrowed* in a unique way,improve the current Bazaar system in SWG.
All that said, I don't frequent these forums, so if this idea or similar has been expressed already, I don't mean to step on any toes.
Comments, suggestions and even flames welcome =P