Development Cycle Archive
Thread: ID#2: Two Changes to Bazaars and Vendors
Bazaar cap: that does sound ok, for those that use the bazaar to make thier money, this will allow them to expand their sales.
Vendor item cap: yes, i agree, this should be put in place, but 150 ITEMS?! why so low? Tailors have over 200 schematics! even if they do notregularily stock allof the items, they will still want to stock more than 1 color choice for each item.
I am a master tailor, I have 4 vendors (accessories for bags and jewelry, wookie wear, regular clothes and modified clothes) i can keep 3 of those 4 under 150, buti would have to short my customers on alot of variety if i had to keep the regular clothing vendor under 150. I normally stock between 400 - 500 items. I get complemented constantly on my variety. This change would cripple my sales.
500 sounds alot more reasonable.
Katmer wrote:
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).
I agree -- this sounds likea pretty good approach!!
Ifeel that 150 item limit is way too low. That's only 16 suits of armor for me. Should I just stand there and craft new each time a piece sells? This is going to be a huge time sink. Poor tailors can't even offer "one of each" in one color.
I feel the reason of "monopolies" is just a justification of this is change and has no real merit. The reason of lack of knowledge of people not knowing how to view multiple pages is my problem that I have to deal with, not something that needs to be fixed by you.A manual update wouldsolve this one. Come on, do people really know how to scroll in the bazaar but are not able to use the same interface in a vendor?
This leaves us with the real issue, database performance/maintenace. Either fix the database, which clearly isn't going to happen, or give us a reasonable limit or even better make it a skill mod in merchant.
Look everyone knows that some people are using vendors for unlimited storage. I think this is really what you are trying to "fix". I think this should be fixed as it is clearly not the intent of a vendor. But 150 items is totally unreasonable.
Oh and seriously abolish vendors that have been placed by people who have since dropped their skills. To be fair provide fair warning so people can clear out, but personally I feel anyone who has done thas has to have known this was dodgy from the start, and deserves to get steamrolled!
That'll go a long way in easing the commodities load, I reckon. Plus I think it's rude that the full perks of the Management line can be retained with ZERO skill point investment.
Again, stop trying to throw reasons out there like prevention of monopoly creations and easing people's woes who are too stupid to figure out the Next Items button to try water this down. We are not blind fools.
I see the key problem as being the people who are having invalid vendors as bottomless packhorses.
Your vendor cap will only serve, along with increasing the bazaar's range, as a double slap to merchants all over. You need a cap - fine - but make it pretty high, and if you tie it in with skillpoints in the merchant tree, I guarantee a lot of people will free up. Or get second accounts and have a master merchant toon, but then that's more money for you to pay someone to figure out how to handle the database load! (I know it's not that simple).
how about a 10k cap on the bazaar? i like the idea of raising it.
i don't know much about vendors, but 150 does seem too low if you'e a high level merchant.
Along the same lines, why does it show ALL the categories, even if your vendor just stocks food? A client-side dynamic category listing based on the vendor item data would be nice.
And once again, I'll state my request for a Commodities Market system. Players feed resources (minerals, hides, chemicals, etc) into the terminal with a minimum sell price per unit. Other players go to the terminal and put in an order with a maximum buy price per unit. Transactions are completed automatically as sell orders fill buy orders at or above the price the sellers want, and buy orders are filled by sell orders at or below the price the buyers want.
Have the terminals in each static city, and limit the buy/sell orders to each city's set of terminals. Require players to physically use the terminals to load in/retreive resources (you'd want to have more than one terminal, and spread out a bit). Show resource quantities, their specs, and low/high/average prices in a data window... heck, make the architect-made data terminals link in to the Galactic Commodities Markets to view the data from the comfort of your own home.
Vendor cap of 150: NO. I know you're trying to reduce item counts on the server, but a glance at the Merchant forums shows that the players most affected by it are highly agitated by it. I can understand why -- running to factories, and unpacking items from crates to load them onto vendors -- is NOT FUN. The game has enough time sinks as it stands. Capping vendor items to 150 is a Bad Idea.
Open question: Does the "In Development" forum mean "We're thinking about doing this and open to feedback", or "We've started coding it, and it's going live whether you like it or not, the purpose of the forum is to make you think you have a voice and to warn you in advance so that when the change goes live, you're not completely caught off guard".
For the record, I can tolerate both changes. The decreased load on the database brought on by the 150-item vendor cap may even be enough (I don't have the data to judge!) that I'd support that change. Stocking Vendors is Not Fun. Rollbacks are Much More Not Fun.
And I can even live with my suspicion of what "In Development" is really for -- because it still represents an improvement over prior levels of communication about upcoming nerfs.
I think raising the bazaar cap is rubbish. The bazaar has always been a place where I can find items cheaper when the seller is in a hurry to clean out their inventory. A good example is body suits and flight suits. I can always find a good suit on the bazaar for 3000, whereas with player merchants tend to charge 6000-8000 for them. 
If anything this will inflate the economy because players will sell their cheap items for more on the bazaar. Plus 6000 would make it so about 80% can be found on the bazaar. Seems like a bad idea to me.
To top it off they thought they were HELPING merchants by removing hex-code in crafting items because it reduced the effectiveness of premium auctions which are a joke. They are always "fixing" things that seem fine instead of upgrading things that don't work.
Why isn't there a poll on the vendor cap? Is it because it is already set in stone? The way you state it, it seems like it's already a done deal.
Credit cap increase, GREAT!!! I sell resources and HATE having to divide up resources to get the fair market price for them.
Vendor limits. I don't necessarily agree with the assertion of monopolies and drilling down page by page. I always check out the wares and am extremely selective about what I buy AND drill down to multiple pages, which I do not encounter much.
Search your feelings young jedi. You know it to be true! 
Bye Bye MCH, now MRM/MD (YaY! THANKS TO THE CU, BACK TO BETA TESTING!!) 
Also Smuggler's Alliance Ace 
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 like the idea of increasing items as you get more skill, but if that's 1,000 items per vendor as a Master, that's WAY too much.
I think 500 should be the max. 1,000 per vendor is still monopoly territory.
What is pathetic is that to solve a technical problem, and only a technical problem, a "solution" is proposed along with a ridiculous "exaplanation" (vendors missing out on sales?!?!?!), and a token gesture (raising bazaar limits).
What a joke you are becoming TH - just a puppet for the corporation. The way you throw a few bones and hope us dogs can't see the forest for the trees.
Fact: If vendors felt they were missing out on sales because they were stocking their vendors too much, the wouldn't stock them so much. Einstein? Nope.
How long must we suffer the slings and arrows of "database limitations"
At least spare us the token BS explanations.... or don't we deserve the truth?