Development Cycle Archive
Thread: ID#2: Two Changes to Bazaars and Vendors
I'm a very successful Tailor on my server but I sell anywhere from 20-200 items a day. I need more then 150 spaces on my vendor for stuff. I have one vendor dedicated to just selling crates of synthicloth crates and Reinforced Fiberplast Panels Crates, and those sell 40 at a time so people can do their own factory runs. So I usually have over 150 items in that vendor alone.
Tailors have 200 schematics, which means I won't be able to stock/show everything I can make on one vendor. What if I'm also an Architect and a Chef. Just imagine all the stuff I want to have available to sell.
As for monopolys...that's a stupid thing to worry about. Guess why people come to my vendor for black clothing. Because it says that's what it sells, and because it's usually fully stocked, and reasonably priced. I don't have a monopoly, because guess what anyone else who wants to make clothing in black, and sell them, still can. People arn't forced to go with me and pay my prices. Which is the nature of a monopoly.
Limiting the vendors to 150 items it going to severly limit my fun as I rather spend one day during the week to make a bunch of stuff to stock my vendors for the week, and then do something else during the rest of the week. Such as custom orders.
You say you don't want people to use them as storage banks. SOLUTION: If an item doesn't sell after the alotted time, a fee based on the price the item was listed for would be charged. This will give people an insentive to keep their prices low and to keep things on their vendor that people want to buy. When people use their vendors for storage they usually place the goods for way more then anyone would want to pay. Example: A Holocron. Put on a vendor for storage for 10 Million Credits. No one will pay that so in 30 days when it didn't sell the player has to pay 1/100 or 1/10 in fees. It will be less aventagous to store that Holocron in the vendor for 10 Million if every month they have to pay money to keep it there. If they lower it down, someone may buy it.
The only thing is how to handle it if the player removes the item from the vendor, before the month is over. Simple. If an item is on the vendor for more then 1 day it will experience the fee if it's removed or doesn't sell. (This will allow players to put up something, and take it down again quickly without a charge if they put the wrong price, etc...)
Anneke Rose (Mayor of Sanctuary and Master Tailor)
Raising the Bazaar cap is a bad idea: it will encourage more inflation. Right now established players mostly use vendors in Player Cities (which can't have Bazaars). The only people who buy extensively from the Bazaar are lower level players getting started, or people who need a quick hit of Stim B or something. Since there is a positive benefit to the crafter to be able to sell to these people, the 3K price cap acts to keep prices on lower level equipment under control. When you raise it to 6K, you will see everything start to creep upward to meet it.
A vendor limit of 150 will kill vendors as we know them. At the VERY least, make the limit 150 items PER BOX in some Merchant column like Efficiency. If you nerf your own economy, people will stop using it.
Raising the cap to 6k on the bazaar might flood that system a little more than it is now - in fact I'm sure of it. Are you certain that won't introduce the kind of issues you claim to want to work around with capping vendor item limits?
Just to be clear and I hardly ever use caps - 150 ITEM CAP ON THE VENDOR ITEMS IS THE STUPIDEST IDEA EVER.
Please do not dress this up in anything other than a database issue. Don't make it so our sales are so hurt by people who are too clueless to use the Next Items button, regardless of the ten signs saying "Use Next Items" and the vendor barking "Use Next Items". It's like a satirical article I read once called "I can't play with my cool toys because of a stupid dead kid". As for a monopoly, utter trash. With all due respect do you people really play a mercantile based class? It was hard enough to believe you even play a combat class.
Call it as it is - which is basically the database is having strife with a lot of items being stuck on vendors.
Crafters already are slaved to their factories, resource spawns, harvester runs ... do NOT add yet another freaking chain. If there must be a cap, it has to be more than 150 - as mentioned by others, double that, at the very least. I understand the technical issues, but you have to understand that SWG for crafters would take a huge dive.
Not to mention the fact that some people clear out of items really fast.
As it is, any crafting profession really needs a fair amount of merchant skills anyway to be of use. At barest minimum advertising 3 in the merchant tree. This is already skill point overhead. You are forcing yet another tough pill to swallow for crafters to actually do something with their wares. Understand? Crafting is not just aimlessly making things for no reason. It's about selling them too. Don't make it harder for crafters - or increase the empty vendor syndrome. You will be forcing (and I mean it, forcing) crafters to have to log in every other hour or be swarmed with 10,000 tells asking why X, Y and Z aren't on the vendors. That isn't good, it's not fun.
The Merchant profession would lose with these changes, along with Architects, Weaponsmiths and Armorers. (Those players that sale high priced items)
Chefs, Artisans, Miners, Scoutsand Drug pushers would benefit. (Those players that sell lower priced, high quanity items). It would also allow this group to dump the merchant skill tree.
End result, a bigger credit sink as I can see players immediately using the higher price cap on the bazaar to raise prices. The Merchant profession would see a big drop in use as it would no longer be required for high quanity (and higher priced) items.
You Developers have already removed color coded textof player crafted items (obvisiously to shrink the database instead of the humorous reasons given), Harvesters still do not function correctly with no debugging mentioned (maybe this is a database issue also), The bazaar itself is already a mess to deal with, now you wish to make it even worse. This thread is already swollen and any idea this far down won't be noticed anyways.
I think the bazzar needs to have a cap on how many of any char can place on the vendor.... cuts backs on all those Cdefs weapons tho the price cap is VERY nice thanks,,,,,,, um vendor thing sounds good I do NOT like to flip through pages apon pages of things.. maybe add the ability to customize what catagories are avalible on the side also so when we open it we know what is avalible by type on the selected vendor?
Do whatever you want with the Bazaar but please dont limit the vendors to 150 items. Having a limit like that would cause me to just quit selling stims and resources again. If you want a limit make it at least 300 or higher.
I fully support both changes. You don't want to increase the bazaar cap too far, or you will see even more outrageous pricing for subpar items. I usually sort my items according to bid, so then I go to the end and check out the more expensive items because I assume they will be the best quality. But then you see people who rename guns, or sell 10 units of bone for 3000 credits, and while there may be a chance that someone may buy one of these, I'm not sure if a warning on the bazaar is necessary or not to avoid these cases.
As for the vendors, I fully approve of it. What's the point of having more than 1 vendor? Now we'll know. You have to get down to the details. If you are a tailor and a merchant, you make one vendor for robes maybe. As for merchants who sell a plethora of items, this change will only make your vendors more effecient. You'll discard the items that don't sell well, giving room to a smaller more specific vendor. So you essentially cannot monopolize on one vendor based on name value.
Merchant Item Limit: GOOD!
Don't think that this isnt gonna happen. PLEASE PLEASE LISTEN TO ME! There will be a new way of doing business if you just cap the vendors at 150. The age of travel pack sales will begin. This is a really bag thing. As the current system sits, travel packs in vendors are insecure and blind. You can't see whats in the pack, and if you buy it, no one can verify one way or the other weather the pack had in it what was advertised. This will open the door to so many more problems.
So if you are gonna cap vendors at 150 items, then you MUST also not allow travel packs with items in them to be placed for sale. Either that, or allow people to look at what it inside a travel pack before they purchase it.
Let's really think this one thru before a huge mistake is made. And if you do just cap the vendors and ignore the travel pack issue, expect the database problems you have to get worse not better.
Just MHO
Bazaar limit increase, yes.
Vendor limit, no.
As a working tailor who has 100's of possible items to make, in 255 colors (or 1000's of colors when you look at items with more than one color), a limit of 150 would not even cover the variety of shirts I like to keep in stock, let alone all the other itmes of clothing. My customers have come to expect a fully stocked vendor and ask me when I am going to restock when there are still 100's of items left on the vendor. They appreciate the variety of items and colors they find when they come to my shop and tell me how frustrated they have been to go to other vendors only to find a very poor selection.
Don't make me go to only stocking the most popular items, and only in black and white.
Credit Cap:
This has potential to be good. As of now the bazaar is mainly looked at to get something you need quick. You need a generic crafting kit, go to the bazaar. You need a beginner gun cause your going to take up fill in the blank profession, go to the bazaar. The extra credit raise gives potential to findat least some extra better quality stuff.
Vendor Cap:
Really I find this a problem for those who have vendors. It's already hard enough to find good quality merchants these days due to the Jedi Grind, but all the extra troubles put on those who truely have fun can push more out. There's so many vendors that do not stock their terminals, so for most it probably wouldn't be a problem. However there are those quality merchants that get high volume traffic and find it necessary to stock the terminals with tons of items. These items even stocked up to 500 or more can be sold within the single evening. Then there are those merchants that do have a fair customer base, but they may be going on a trip. It's more convenient for those said people to give a nice stock to their terminal then go on vacation knowing things will be fine while they are away.
Josha Bash
obsydian13 wrote:
The idea of raising the cap has merit but I think the cap needs to be a little more dynamic. First off, there needs to be an initial Posting Cap that is separate from a Bid Cap. Somebody posting an actual auction should be able to start out at the cap and still be able to accept bids. Also, premium auctions need higher caps than standard auctions. My proposal is this: Post Cap 5000 std, 10000 prem. Bid Cap: 10000 std, 100000 prem. The high premium bid cap is to make it possible to auction rare items off.
I agree with the cap since vendors can essentially be used as uncounted storage space. I think 150 may be a bit low though... I suggest putting it in and seeing if it's too restrictive. Or maybe make it so the vendor item cap is related to the structure it's in... so a vendor placed in a small or medium house would have a limit of 150 items it can sell while a vendor placed in a larger sturcutre would be limited to 250.
Apparently you are not old enough to understand taxes.
Temporary taxes, or fixes, establish by any government take a minimum of 40 years to change after the date promised. Thanks for your imput! Perhaps you will donate all your lots to storing components REQUIRED to make a harvestor.
Fivo Asia
Master Artisan - Master Architect - Master Merchant
Tempest - Dantooine - Vesnia (City Manager)