Development Cycle Archive
Thread: ID#2: Two Changes to Bazaars and Vendors
Well I have to laugh here. the subject is how old posted & there are 34 pages?!?!? Talk about touchy subjects!
I could really careless about the Bazaar. Personally I think it is very limiting with a small price cap, raising it opens possiblities but will not promote a galaxy wide trade venue unless the price cap is unrestricted.
The vendor limit will drive me from the crafting profession. This is another insane idea by the DEVs. It will limit people to shopping at craft vendors that the players play almost 24/7 to keep their vendors stocked ( you know, Real Life requires $$ to pay for necessities like shelter, DSL & oh yeah, the monthly game charge! You have to have a source of income which usually = job which = being away from the game ). I sold 200 items yesterday! Yes I have multiple vendors but lets be real here, trying to keep 4 vendors stocked is almost a fulltime job unto itself. I shall also point out that everytime that a vendor bug is found, we loose items! The last bug, kept hush, hush for several days by the DEVs after the 30 day change - resulted in a friend quitting the game because when he wrote in a report over loosing some 500 Krayt tissues he had on his vendor, the CSR said "nope, sorry, can't help you there, AGAIN!!!, & 2 days later we got the backpacks with some missing items ( no the krayt tissues did not return to him ). Some customer service there!!! Can't we, for the slowly dying love of the game, STOP all the damm 'we're gonna screw with this' changes & fix some of the real game bugs & problems before deciding to make the crafters life miserable even further? Crafters are the Life Blood of the game! We make the guns, the armor, the vehicles, the harvestors that make it all work. We need to be able to sell in order to buy resources & factories & power & components to put it all together to make more credits to start the circle again. If you limit the ability to generate credits, the crafters charge more, players whine & complain, the crafters give up their professions, items go scarce, prices go up further, the remaining crafters become burdened with trying to keep up & then POOF!!! no more crafters. WHY?!?! Because they can't have a vendor with a decent item cap so that they can place a good variety of their wares up & actually enjoy the game by exploring & visiting places instaed of being a slave to the factory & the vendor. ( good analogy ehh? :smileyvery-happy
Seriously, don't screw with the vendors. If the game can't support those that InGame support the system & they become mindless to having to constantly stock the vendor & forget to have fun, start counting the people who stop paying the monthly charge to play. The game needs help to keep it interesting & fun. Punishing the merchants is not a good way to promote it. I'm not a bad boy & don't need to be punished!
Rhazohn Badwih - Master Droid Engineer / Master Artisan - Shadowfire
Wander in to WanderInc & get WIRED. next to the shuttleport in Brenn, Naboo
Taking the vendor stock limit down to 150 is a truly horrible idea, and it doesn't begin to address a lot of the fundamental problems.
You're going about solving the problem in the wrong way, IMO.
Part of what has people screaming is that your developershave CAUSED there to be an artificially high number of listings generated, because they were negligent in failing to implement a QUANTITY field. People create ten or more listings for the same item (sometimes in various amounts) because their customers have no way of easily specifying how many they want... so it's all-or-nothing, and one customer's purchases can freeze out another's.
One simple change could eliminate many, many more records than the 150 cap, and have people CHEERING instead of screaming.
Just allow listings on vendors touse one entry, with a "quantity in stock" field. People with 1000 identical powerups can list those powerups in ONE LINE, and specify how much each unit costs. People with 2.5 million units of Unobtainium can list the whole pile with one line, and a customer can buy exactly 3600 units if that's what they need.
People buy as much (or as little) as they like, and the number of records required drops like a stone.
Don't want people using their vendors as free infinite storage? Fine... kill two birds with one stone, and let them pay for the privilege. Have vendor maintenance rise as a function of the number of UNIQUE items listed, and you'llbe able to discourage this behavior (and if you don't, you have a wonderful credit sink.)
Start the cost off low, and have it scale up dramatically once you start getting into the thousands or so per vendor, and people will realize that there's no free lunch. They want more storage? Fine, they're paying for it.
Most professions won't need nearly as manyvendor lines listed if they can use quantity (one factory run= one listing), but to be fair to crafting professions liketailors (with many similar but non-unique items), provide them with a steep discount on the costs forthe first 1000 items or so.
All in all, the 150 limit is (at best) a half-baked idea that creates MANY more problems than it solves. I predict that if implemented as originally written (or anything close) theresults will be exceedingly bad for pretty-much the entire player base... the examples have been well-documented in this thread.
Fix the real problem: The utterly horrible design of the vendor interface. Your database will be vastly more efficient with the use of a "quantity" field, and both the buyers and sellers will actually be HAPPY with the change, instead of being ready to form a lynch mob.
Don't trash the professions of good, honest players just to deal with a problem of people trying to get something for nothing. Make them pay, and you combat two problems at the same time (unintended consequences of vendors, and inflation).
ok the bazaar thing sounds good to be because i never use or own a vendor so plus for me but..
my friend is a weapon smith that stocks 600+ weapons at a time i can not see him only haveing 150 weapons at a time that is a horrid idea the cap should be 500 if anything!
dont know if my last post went threw because i hit **edit** and someother key and made me go blah to the frist form page heh
I would vote no on both. Merchant is already a bumprof. Being able to sell wares for higher on the bazaar will just make it that much less of a profession.
Raising the limit will also hurt player vendors who sell some goods for lower prices, as more people will flood the bazaar with more wares, so people don't have to find the player vendors.
If this goes into affect, I would suggest that you allowplayer vendors to be seen on the planetary bazaar. This way the cap would not matter much, as everyone with the skillcould be seen there as well. Limit it to planet only. Put the skill to register your vendor on the bazaar somewhere high up in the merchant tree.
As far as item limits, well, 150 is a very low number. I would say at least 300 to 500 minimum.
Thunderheart wrote:
Draznar wrote:
I want to expand on my idea to tie vendor item limits to Merchant Skill. I think that the limit should be as followed:
- Bus 3 = 50
- Bus 4 = 100
- Novice = 150
- Man 1 = 200
- Man 2 = 300
- Man 3 = 400
- Man 4 = 500
- Master = 1,000
This is an idea I like too. I shared the idea with theLead Designer and he likes this idea too.
The thing here is to implement it right away means that as a merchant goes up in level, it wouldnt automatically upgrade in numbers. If you gained a new merchant skill box which unlocked more slots, you would have to create a new vendor. We'd be able to add an automatic check and upgrade in the future, but it wouldnt be for a long time.
Even still, I think its a great idea to add this ability in. I dont know what the max numbers would be yet though Ill ask.
You all need to figure out how to make this automatically update. Not so much for when people raise skills, but for when people DROP thier skills. This would GREATLY discourage the common practice of mastering merchant, placing 6 vendors and setting them up how you like, then dropping the whole tree. If you had to re-aquire master merchant every time you wanted decently stock your vendor, people might be more likely to keep it.
I vote YES to raising the bazaar cap to 6k. This would allow me to sell higher-end meds on the bazaar.
I vote an unequivocable NO to the vendor limit. Some of us place a vendor in malls where we may be limited to one vendor. As such, I sell everything from my weapons to resources to deeds off this vendor. I am not allowed to place another vendor in the mall due to player rules. Now in my house on Dant, I have several vendors for separate things. And I will soon place a merchant tent on Corellia but am running up against the maximum allowed vendor for master merchant. so PLEASE find another fix for vendors because this nerf is NOT IT.
BTW, I know a DB expert personally who is aghast at the problems you are having. I keep telling her to quit her current job as CTO of her startup but so far, she hasn't listened but you might be able to contract her to fix your mess and actually help you build a SCALABLE STABLE db...
I'm not in favor of the 150 item limit. Although a limit is completely fine with me, I think 150 is way way way too low.
Trouble is, the game's real-life *database* design apparently can't cope with the demands of the *game* design. If this is something that *can* be fixed (even if doing so might require firing the current database consultants), fixing this *must* be Priority #1!
But instead, all the "fixes" seem to go directly against the game design. In order to keep the game running and simultaneously preserve the job status of the database consultants, in other words, the player economy has to be destroyed.
It may be that, whether for technical reasons or political reasons, a technical fix that would preserve the player economy game design is impossible. If that's the case, you might as well go ahead and scrap the player-run economy concept too, and just make SWG "Everquest in Space" to salvage some long-term survival for SWG. The current approach just looks like slow death by bleeding, as every component of the game design necessary for the player-run economy to function is slowly stripped away.
As a doctor teras kasi class, I have no room for vendor skills, so to people in my catagory a higher bizzare cap is a good idea as it will provide a better means to sell high end items, a 10k cap seems better than 6k though. Also, it would be a great help to vendors and players seeking items, to have terminals within the main cities that are for people to place addvertising for there vendors, right now I see many using the auction function on the bizzare to do just that, and a time specified auction option on vendors without a price cap would be preferable to the auction option on bizzares.
As for the bazaar, I would like to see a 10k max...This would allowa broader rangeof items to be placedand doesn't cut into the higher quality/priced items.
As for vendors, I think a cap of 300 would suit more folks and instead of raising the cap with experience, you use the current system and are allowed to place more vendors as skill increases. Not sure on the max number of vendors you can have at master, but if it's 5 then that's 1500 items. It's still not alot for 5 vendors, but much better than 750 for 5 vendors.
Sorry Merchants, but we are all screwed. Its painfully obvious that everyone who isn't a Merchant that sells things wants the vendor price cap increased.
This is a flat out insult to people who have been Merchants and have been patiently awaiting the fixes to make this profession viable on its own, instead of a suppliment to a crafting profession.
I had looked forward to being a pure Merchant, but my months as a Master Merchant were just wasted, and when the Holocron said to become a DE, I had no problem jumping ship even if it was to another broken profession.
Once again, the Database problem raises its head and results in a Nerf of Incredible Proportions (a N.I.P. from now on). The first was making limits on house inventory, the second removing the ability to store items in packs in houses, the third was killing the 75 items per lot and going to some arbitrary number pulled out of God knows where, and now this.
Instead of screwing us over again and again, how about replacing your database with something that works. That database has been nothing but problems since Beta, and you still haven't fixed it. I am now a Master Artisan, Master Armorsmith and Master Droid Engineer, with the remaining points put into Merchant. I require so many sub components, so many specific resources, and so many finished items to sale that I have 3 houses and 4 factories filled to the brim with items JUST SO I CAN CRAFT AND SELL MY WARES. You were the ones that made the crafting system this way, and yet we have to be the ones to suffer because you can't get a functional database.
Stop with the NIPS! STOP! Unless you want everyone to drop crafting and just run around killing things with CDEF's and other loot items.
Thunderheart wrote:
Draznar wrote:
I want to expand on my idea to tie vendor item limits to Merchant Skill. I think that the limit should be as followed:
- Bus 3 = 50
- Bus 4 = 100
- Novice = 150
- Man 1 = 200
- Man 2 = 300
- Man 3 = 400
- Man 4 = 500
- Master = 1,000
This is an idea I like too. I shared the idea with theLead Designer and he likes this idea too.
The thing here is to implement it right away means that as a merchant goes up in level, it wouldnt automatically upgrade in numbers. If you gained a new merchant skill box which unlocked more slots, you would have to create a new vendor. We'd be able to add an automatic check and upgrade in the future, but it wouldnt be for a long time.
Even still, I think its a great idea to add this ability in. I dont know what the max numbers would be yet though Ill ask.
I think is better in this way:
- Non - artisan = 50 (Of course i have my rights to keep a vendor that i made when i was a merchant because is only a machine, i worked hard to have it. And ifthe non-chscan have a pet then why not the non-artisan could have a non-merchant special vendor? Another example, i'm not a droid engineer, thencan't ihave a droid? that sounds ridiculous for me, the vendors are only machines, maybe the vendors only for merchants could have special habilities and more options, this is a good idea. And another good idea is to remove the merchant profession also and put this abilities in other professions that require vendors like armorsmiths, weaponsmiths, medics, artisans, ...maybe like the mitigation concept in fighter classes. )
- Novice Artisan = 150
- Bus 3 =300
- Bus 4 =350
- Novice Merchant =500
- Man 1 = 600
- Man 2 = 700
- Man 3 = 800
- Man 4 = 900
- Master = 1,500
I like this idea and would like to see it looked at
Katmer wrote:
Just allow listings on vendors touse one entry, with a "quantity in stock" field. People with 1000 identical powerups can list those powerups in ONE LINE, and specify how much each unit costs. People with 2.5 million units of Unobtainium can list the whole pile with one line, and a customer can buy exactly 3600 units if that's what they need.
People buy as much (or as little) as they like, and the number of records required drops like a stone.