Development Cycle Archive
Thread: ID#2: Two Changes to Bazaars and Vendors
After reading some comments I'm ammending my arguement:
If the purpose of this cap is to make people use more vendors to sell their wares that's totally unfair to people like me who sell tons of different stuff. The purpose of being a merchant is to sell more than one thing. We can't do that with a limit on our vendors. I see my Master Merchant role, which I recently had to drop for Holocron, but will regain once complete, as one where I am person that sells many things in my store.
I compair it to a coporation. I began with a house out of the way selling some weapons from a newbie smith, and some other folks I'd met along the way. Now my mall is right next to a shuttleport in a huge city and we bring in millions a week. During this transistion my business has expanded to sell more goods at the quality my older merchandise established. That's what having multiple vendors is about, selling different products, not selling the same thing on different vendors because my vendor inventory is too small.
If you want to do something for us merchants, make a Player City Mall that only Master Merchants can place. That'd be nice.
VENDOR CAP max 150.. NO
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The vendor cap at 150?? NAH.. no way
BUT make vendor items cap a merchant skill. A master vendor could place like 500 items and a novice merchant could place 50
while a artisan with only business skill could place a vendor with 25 items.
What you also must do is UPGRADE that horibble bazaar explorer.
I want a place where i can type SEARCH: "steel" and then i get only steel instead of All metals copper iron etc.
Also the items should go more in appropiate slots.
I would also like a search region for vendors (not planet or galaxy.) but if you arrive in a player city that i can search the whole town what it is selling.
Bazaar Credits MAX 6000 NO.. only premium sales should go higer then 3000. I would like to see REAL auctions on Bazaar.
No limit on auctions. When sold 10% of auction goes to whatever (money sink)
Xader_Vartec wrote:
Limiting the vendor items will only make it HARDER to find items on vendors.
2 ways to have a merchant vendor
1) (the way it SHOULD be done) Someone is a Merchant, they make an arrangement with a crafter and sell THEIR items.
2) That single vendor then stocks many different items. Although some do it that way (good for them) the way many do it is to be a crafter and have a vendor themselves only stocking their own items.
If you lower the vendor cap you will be almost forcing the the second way. How can a single merchant go about creating a "Walmart" store with a lot of different items for a lot of different crafters with such a low limit?
The problem is there should be no LIMIT on sale values for MASTER MERCHANTS on the bazaar.
Just shaking my head.
Jeez, Kurt, can we at least have 5 days notice before you guys implement this so we can try to save our freakin' businesses.
Does ANYONE at SOE play this game?
Fivo Asia
Master Artisan - Master Architect - Master Merchant
Tempest - Dantooine - Vesnia (City Manager)
150 would limit my stock of meds SUBSTANTIALY. Do not do this!
Bazaar Limits -- Good but 10k seems like a more reasonable number to me.
Vendor limits BAD BAD BAD. please don't nerf our already horrible item limits in this game. A hardworking crafter or merchant shouldn't be penalised for working hard and being successful, and the caps on houses (which was supposed to be a TEMPORARY fix like 5 months ago) are so low that most crafters have no choice but to have an empty, undecorated house just to store their materials.
I mean we get a guest appearance from Frickin' Raph himself on camps and you guys drop this bombshell!?!?!?!?!?!!?! This is game breaking.
stunned
Fivo Asia
Master Artisan - Master Architect - Master Merchant
Tempest - Dantooine - Vesnia (City Manager)
Bazaar caps going to 6000 = Good.
Vendor limited to 150 items = Bad.
One of my characters is an architect and would suffer if he were limited to 150 items. I'd have to chose between things which I could sell for a lot of credits and things which go for less and don't sell too often, but people need/want. Not everyone is gonna go buying an equipment factory, but if I don't have a few of those on my vendor just in case someone does want one, I'll be out a sale because I had to make room for other things like furniture, harvesters, torches, vehicles, etc. And I don't want to hear "Get another vendor" as I shouldn't have to pay the extra maintainence for another one when I alreadypay good moneyfor my harvesters, one vendor AND trying to keep a roof over my head.
When you have a ton of items no one wants to drill down sub menus only to find there's nothing in it.
I say don't let their be a 150 item cap. That's retarded. It's only encouraging paying for multiple vendors
and that's annoying.
Please note that the players the most heavily impacted by this change have pointed out several arguments for why 150 items is an unreasonably low limit. Many of the agreements raised have been in the nature of 'Well yeah it's too hard to sort through a vendor with a lot of stuff'. This is their agreement that your user interface sucks.
Merchants are the heart of your economy, completely shafting the service professions because your database isn't coded to serve the number of people it's serving is a systems design problem, YOUR systems design problem.
I admit that this solution of yours is quite perfect, limiting the number of items will completely free up vendor DB space... since it destroy the business of many tailors and push a large number of other merchants out of the class out of sheer frustration. You asked us for ideas to rectify the fact that there are a large number of Vendors out there that belong to those who no longer are vendors.
Well I must admit this is an INTERESTING solution to that issue.
I do have two questions:
1) Has any thought been given, at all, to the possibility that removing the Non-Merchant Merchant vendors would effectively reduce the vendor database load?
2) Did the query to get the average number of items on a vendor do any ranging? I.E. did you eliminate the thousand some-odd vendors that have no items, or only a handful because they're Holo-grind vendors? Did you perhaps restrict the query to those vendors that belong to those who've been merchants at least a month?
Heck here's a third one for free:
3) Is this 150 number anything but a number pulled out of your.. air?
There are lots of people who had been CHs who've sounded off about how they quit it post-nerf. There were however a HUGE number of Master CHs so some thinning of that herd is not TOO bad. The number of REAL merchants is pretty low, can the player economy survive the hit it will take when those who have pride in our stores can no longer keep up with clients and get fed up with the class? Do you really think upping the bazaar limit will make up for that hit? And do anything other than overburden an already overburdened bazaar system?
Talk about poorly considered.
ElanMak wrote:
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!!!
I have purchased more than 80 items AT A TIME from this shop! Stilgar and Tree are famous! Stop screwing up what works!
Fivo Asia
Master Artisan - Master Architect - Master Merchant
Tempest - Dantooine - Vesnia (City Manager)
Yes to the market price cap rise.....Some of us do not have vendors but do have items worth more than 3k
No to the 150 cap on vendors....There does need to be a cap....maybe double that...300
Bazaar change:
Absolutely should increase the price for auctions. If feasible, I'd like to see that be unlimited. Hey, if someone wants to spend more than the seller thinks it's worth, who are you to say no? And there's the 25 cap on bazaar sales, so your database wouldn't get too stressed.
Vendor change:
You want to make the change to help merchants? Not to stop the usage of vendors as extra storage? Sure, I believe that. It has nothing to do with the database load. Nothing at all. Can I remind anyone that you said you'd raise the house limits over 75 per lot to a maximum of 250 and never did?
That sarcasm aside, if you need to reduce items on the vendors, at least be reasonable about it. As an armorsmith, I sell Composite armor in two colors,5 full suits of each (90 items), Advanced Kinetic Ubese in one color, 5 full suits of each (40 items), armor repair kits singly and in crates (30 items), and Mark3 PSGs singly and in crates (30 items). Then I have some odds and ends, some specialty armors, special orders in backpacks, etc.
150 is just far too low for an armorsmith.
And while we're talking about bazaar and vendor changes, can you consider making armor searchable by armor type, not just by body area?