Development Cycle Archive
Thread: ID#2: Two Changes to Bazaars and Vendors
You guys see what is happening here, right?
This is just like the house item limit issue from a few months back.
Hit them with something so horrible as to be game breaking for many people then give them a fraction back of what they had before so they think the Devs have done them a favor.
Dev #1: Our database can't handle the strain of unlimited vendor items. Let's reduce vendor limits to something it can handle like 1000 items.
Dev #2: Ok, here's how we'll do it. Let's tell them we're limiting them to 150 items so they'll be grateful when we "give in" and set it at a 300 item limit.
Dev #3: Excellent idea! Now let's make it so vehicles and pets can only be called in Master Ranger camps.
You guys are on drugs.
I stock my vendor at roughly 300 items and within hours much of that is gone. You folks that think #2 is a good idea, I suggest you think about why type of merchants you like to visit. I am a master chef / master merchant. I stock 4 stores to be convenient to YOU. Not to me. Trust me its a pain in the &** to stock 4 locations. So, this will mean that I have to close to one location..most likely my player city just to carry a small fraction of the stuff I used to make available to you. What does this mean to you? Well it means that you can just stop by the tent 300m from the starport to pick up what you want on your way to hunt. You cant access me from Dantooine anymore unless you want to spend an hour and up to 7k coming to my shop and going back to wherever.
Or the alternative, I leave allmy shops open. I no longer make food because all I have time to do is fly here and there and restock my vendors because I can only stock 2 crates of fishak now instead of 10...hrmm which means I have less time to make fishak...less stock...less availability to you..And that doesnt even begin to go into choice. Oh and those single stacks of food you get when you wanna try something out or dont have much money or are roleplaying...forget about em. Theres only room for crates here pal.
The only good you can get out of agreeing to number 2 is being known as a good little sheep that doesnt cause trouble. There is nothing good for you here. Nothing. Competition will be reduced meaning higher prices, cheap low profit items wont be sold, selection will be slashed back, many merchants will opt out of business rather than put up with this idiotic demand on time. This is supposed to be a game. Its not supposed to be a full time job where you ponder why you pay to come to work every day. I *thought* I was a merchant. I guess merchant is now redefined as babysitter...no wait, they get paid. Oh and you know those days where you just cant find what you are looking for...say that BER13 Chem harv or that nice Krayt weapon. Well, you can count on seeing those days a LOT more often. Like most every time you shop.
electricnomad wrote:
I think 500 should be the max. 1,000 per vendor is still monopoly territory.
Please stop encouraging the mis-use of the term "monopoly".
There is nothing remotely LIKE a monopoly that can be caused or even facilitated by the INFINITE capacity of vendors, let alone something as small as 1000.
You might want to call it "Wal-Mart Syndrome", or "Super K-Mart-itis", but it's not a monopoly, because EVERYONE ELSE CAN DO IT TOO!
Allowing a merchant to offer a wide selection with "one stop shopping" is not monopolistic, because their doing so does not stop you from doing it too.
All this does is provide good customer service.
Please get a dictionary, and look up "monopoly" before using the term again. If you don't understand the definition, please ask for help.
But please stop encouraging economic misconceptions.
Bazaar cap - Good idea to 6k but no more....If the cap goes beyond 6k it reduces many players need toactually go to vendors and leave the city. Many a player city found find even less players venturing there.
Vendor limit - I agree IF an item could have quantities in stock that doesnt count towards the limit. Many a time Ive had to trawl through about 6pages of the same 3 items to eventually find what im looking for.
Katmer wrote:
Please stop encouraging the mis-use of the term "monopoly".
electricnomad wrote:
I think 500 should be the max. 1,000 per vendor is still monopoly territory.
There is nothing remotely LIKE a monopoly that can be caused or even facilitated by the INFINITE capacity of vendors, let alone something as small as 1000.
You might want to call it "Wal-Mart Syndrome", or "Super K-Mart-itis", but it's not a monopoly, because EVERYONE ELSE CAN DO IT TOO!
Allowing a merchant to offer a wide selection with "one stop shopping" is not monopolistic, because their doing so does not stop you from doing it too.
All this does is provide good customer service.
Please get a dictionary, and look up "monopoly" before using the term again. If you don't understand the definition, please ask for help.
But please stop encouraging economic misconceptions.
How about monopolistic then, in an anti-trust sort of way?
Because when someone is allowed to saturate the market and undercut everyone else, they become a de facto monopoly. People in SWG head for the cheapest, most-stocked vendors around. Allowing about 5000 items to be sold in one shop is monopolistic gameplay, plain and simple. By reducing stock, if one shop sells out, people will head elsewhere and spread the wealth rather than focus it in the hands of multi-millionaires.
Thunderheart wrote:
ResourceMan wrote:
It is good to see you are considering the good ideas by the community TH
Now what about stoping the guys that have dropped their merchant skills yet still have several vendors cluttering up your database? IF you drop the skills to use a vendor you should not beable to keep using a vendor.
Dude, I spent all day lobbying hard for player ideas.The thing is that this is all about real game development for an MMO and a large team and its a lot more in depth than it appears.
On the vendor/dropped skill issue, Im speaking with DocSavag about that and its a correspondent issue.
I think Ill be able to get it so that basic vendors have 150 and merchants can earn more slots as they earn skill boxes (which I think is a great idea) and Im checking into the correspondent issue. It probably wont be until next week though.
I have to champion this issues, write up tomorrows friday feature, get the droid invasion written up for In Dev and get the patch notes notes done. On Monday Im meeting with a producer and a developer to go over correspondent issues and find out whats what. (Some are fixed, some are in QA and some issues are going to In Concept.)
FYI Kurt,
I have printed this in color and framed it above my computer to stare at and smile.
This simple phrase is something I would be glad to see more of, "Champion". You pull this off and Merchant will finally be worth keeping more than Artisan.
Thanks.
Fivo Asia
Master Artisan - Master Architect - Master Merchant
Tempest - Dantooine - Vesnia (City Manager)
I would like the cap to be 5k, but I guess 6k is ok, so long as this isn't going to keep going up. As you stated, this is threat to merchants and shops. Having people come out to look at shops gets them to browse other things as well.
I would like the vendor cap to be doubled however, to 300 or maybe 500. I'mturning my inventoryin about a week or two, with that rate going up as I advertise more. While I understand there should be limit, it needs to be enough to allow for stocking. Some things go really fast, some don't. And if you travel, you want to be able to have your vendor stocked while you're away. This also allows for more play instead of always worrying about your vendor being stocked.
Strohm
M/Artisan, M/Architect, Novice Merchant
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.
Creating new vendors is par for the course. It has to be done at hiring 4 to put clothes on them. And this idea is a nice compromise which finally gives the dedicated merchant a true advantage over the "dabbler".
However, lack of automatic checks are problematic because of the potential for abuse: players who drop skills can keep the higher vendor item limits.
Example of abuse:
- Joe masters merchant.
- Joe places2 standard npc vendors which have 1000 item limit.
- Joe then drops all skill boxes except novice merchant
In the above example that Joe, as a novice merchant, is entitled to keep his 2 npc vendors. But without automatic checksJoe still has a 1000 item limit on those 2 vendors.
I keep seeing "monopoly" thrown around and still don't see how a monopoly is possible in this game. If someone is a better crafter or has more items for sale, that isn't a monopoly, its good business. A monopoly is if one person or group controls all of something. As long as I can drop a vendor, I can sell, eliminating the monopoly. Heck, even person to person sales for those who can't drop a vendor stops a monopoly.....
I don't get it.....
electricnomad wrote:How about monopolistic then, in an anti-trust sort of way?
Because when someone is allowed to saturate the market and undercut everyone else, they become a de facto monopoly. People in SWG head for the cheapest, most-stocked vendors around. Allowing about 5000 items to be sold in one shop is monopolistic gameplay, plain and simple. By reducing stock, if one shop sells out, people will head elsewhere and spread the wealth rather than focus it in the hands of multi-millionaires.
The proposed solution does NOTHING substantive to stop that... if anything, the proposed solution makes that outcome much MORE LIKELY!
Why? Because fundamentally, most people are lazy. The rich players in the game after a change like this would get MORE of the business, because many of the mid-sized businesses would get wrecked, and the rich ones can compensate by simply paying folks in a PA to put those same 5000 items on 34 vendors in a single mall instead of on one of them.
People will still shop in one place (hint: they shop there because they are getting better service! Watch and Learn!), but it will be a bit more cumbersome for the customers, and a LOT more cumbersome for the sellers.
This change will not force anyone with even half a brain to go looking everywhere for something... most who have tried have seen that trying to hit random vendors leads to HUGE failure rates (since a large proportion are empty or nearly so) even today with infinite room.
If sellers who actually do some meaningful business keep having their vendors sell out ten times more frequently, that means people are going to find a lot MORE empty vendors... empty vendors that used to be stocked by a WIDE VARIETY OF SELLERS (that sounds like there's plenty of competition to me...).
You're assuming that if someone finds an empty vendor, they'll just keep checking an infinite number of different ones until they find what they want.
It doesn't work that way, because PLAYER TIME HAS VALUE, and there are a great many cases where people will just NOT BUY WHAT THEY WANTED instead of wasting multiple hours of their play time in a (quite likely) fruitless search.
Instead, they'll probably just email the sellers who used to have plenty in stock (you know... the ones who provided them with good customer service back when it was possible?) and try to make individual arrangements.
[hyperbole]
Those nasty, evil rich folks will still get richer... curse their eyes! If only we were able to implement a worker's paradise where the consumers were forced to buy equally from all!
[/hyperbole]
Sellers who provide good customer service get rewarded MORE than sellers who don't, under a free market system. I can understand that some people REALLY, REALLY don't like that... but that isn't a good reason for policy-making to hamstring the ability to provide good service, in my opinion.
Why did I work this hard?
When I first started playing SWG, I noticed that every place that I went to that was listed on the Map had NOTHING in stock, I sought to change this and created vendors with Hundreds of items in stock. My Miners and Factories vendor alone carry's over 300 Items. Why so much? I produce a hundred at a time of certain BER4 Miners that I constantly sell out of. If I'm forced to produce lower volumes because I have to make smaller lots, then I'll probably have to raise prices. Plus I'm THE ONLY vendor in Tatooine, Kauri that carry's these things on a consistent basis. If a limit MUST be implemented it should be about 1000 Items.
Seriously though, while my friends are off at hunting party's I'm tending to one of my 3 factories making sure I have hundreds of Powerups, Parts of all kinds, Resources, Food, Vehicles ... many people have complemented me, telling me that most of the vendors they've visited have 2 or 3 items in stock, so now you guys are going to punish me for my diligence?
I don't get it?
Limiting items to 150 is a bad idea.
As its been repeatedly said the real problem is vendors being empty.
If you let vendors change the name on there vendors they could use to say something meaningful. Rather than a resource vendor the name could be 100k tattoine fungi. Make that a merchant skill and you will make everyone happy.
As a chef my item of different food and drinks runs over 100. If you limit me to 150 items all i will carry is my top 10 best sellers.