Development Cycle Archive
Thread: ID#2: Two Changes to Bazaars and Vendors
Bazaar Cap:
6k is so minimal I don't see this having an enormous impact.
Vendor Cap:
This will cause many popular crafters to have empty vendors
Players will have less variety in the products that will be listed on the vendor, as only the most popular items will be offered.
"Monopoly"? What Monopoly?? I haven't run into 1 player monopoly, the only monopoly in this game is the Intergalactic Travel System.
As far as players not clicking the "next page" button, this is a matter of un-observent players, why hurt the the crafters and merchents for it?
Baz idea SURE
Vendor idea BAAAD!! at least 500 bare minimum
The second item has to do with Vendors. Currently, there is no limit to how many items can be placed on a vendor. This causes technical issues, encourages monopolies and actually hurts sales in many instances because most players don't "drill down" through all of the vendor pages to find items. We want to solve the technical issues, discourage monopolies and make vendors easier to use. An item limit is going to be placed on vendors and that limit is intended to be placed on 150.
~~~~~~~~~~~
Boy do we have some lazy folks or what. I was looking for a particular item on the bazaar and it wasn't in my home city of Moenia. So instead of going to planet and risking not finding it there either, I went to entire galaxy. Boy did I have some pages to scroll through. But I found what I was looking for as well. Traveled to the planet and bought it. Will anyone have that many pages on a private vendor? I seriously hope not or we have one crazed crafter that just cannot get enough and has way too much time on their hands. Will there be more than one page at some places? Sure and there should be. If we want to run that many factory runs, who are you or anyone else to tell us we cannot. Are you going to limit the number of factories we can run next so that we will not even have the ability to make that many items? I thought this was a player run economy. That means I can shop from who I want when I want. If I get up at 3am and the vendor was stocked in the morning with only a few things and now is sold out what am I going to buy then? Nothing. You got it and now I'll just hold onto that cash I got from that mission that you wanted me to spend it on another item to put it back into the economy that I cant because the VENDOR IS SOLD OUT. I wish that instead of coming up with ideas to make things harder on folks, bugs would be fixed. There are thousands of them. I personaly do not stock 150 items on my vendor as I do not have enough time as it is to keep it even well stocked as hard as I try. Monopolistic. Hmmm, yes Stryker comes to mind. However, could he be this successful had he not filled a niche that needed filling? Would he even still be in business if his product was not a good product? Please reconsider this. All these pages of folks screaming NO should have some kind of impact. If it doesn't, then I think that after implementation that every person working for SOE that had a hand in this should have to hang up his fighting character and become a crafter of some sort and have to live in the hell that they are creating.
Eladia Summerwind
Master Chef with 0 merchant and I did not want to have any either
Bazaar Limit to 6K:
Upping the Bazaar limit from 3000 creds to 6000 creds? That's aBAD IDEA!It would really hurt the new players. Imagine starting the game with only a couple hundred credits to your name. Well you're going to need supplies so you head over to the Bazaar, and due to an expected inflation, everything is selling for thousands of credits. The Bazaar should only be used for basic items. Stims, low end guns, surveyand crafting tools toget people started.
Plus what's the point in becoming a Merchant if you can't get people to your shop?
Limit Vendors to 150:
Another BAD IDEA! I'm a resource merchant. I tend to harvest A LOT of minerals, and I nearly sell out every day. I network and buy a lot of resourcesfromfriends along with what I mine.I typically divide the minerals up into stacks of 1000 and place it on several vendors. (Keeps it affordable for the noobs) If the cap were set at 150, I would fill them all up fast!
I'm a master merchant with a total of 6 vendors. I use all 6 vendors. I have three that sell ore, and three others (All in different locations) that sell Misc. items that I trade resources for. I'm also a master armorsmith. A full set of armor aloneis 9 items! Now if I make various types, various colors and various quality armor, I'll definately exceed my 150 item X 6 limit.
Bottom Line:
Don't change either! It's fine the way it is!
Arnest - Kauri Server
I am in favor of raising the bazaar price limit to 6000c. There are many items which I own, and would be willing to sell for that amount, but currently am forced to put on my vendor, which gets nowhere near the traffic I would like. Raising the limit would allow me to put items I have outgrown, but will be useful to newer players on the market where they will see them, as well as selling larger lots of resources and crates that I have.
I am not in favor of flat 150 item cap on vendors however. I agree that the current lack of a limit is annoying, as i spent 30 minutes scrolling thru 700 some items on a clothign vendor last week, and i don't believe i even got close to the end of the list.
I would recommend however, that a limit of 100 items of one type, so that when you drill down through the categories, only 100 are shown. it would still allow merchants to stock their vendors reasonably, and keep shopping more managable. This might work well with the selling items from crates option expressed elsewhere.
The bazaar pricing limit being raised to 6k credits is ok, I have no problem.
Lowering the # of items per vendor down to 150 is a stupid idea. A suit of armor consists of 9 pieces. It'll be next to impossible to keep a vendor stocked with a wide assortment of armor and colors with it. I already get complaints about not having enough of a selection stocked and I have well over 150 items.
You will force people to put armor on 2 vendors, so someone buying a Composite Chest on one vendor, may have to go look at the vendor next to it for another piece.
If you guys are hurting for database space why not lower the safety deposit space we all have?
I like the idea of upping the price limit on the bazaar.
I HATE the idea of limiting the number of items on a vendor to 150, and/or tying the number of items allowed on a vendor to Merchant skill.
I won't address the whole monopoly statement, I couldn't say anything better than what has already been said. I buy my items from a person because of price, quality, etc. not the fact that they have 21 vendors with 1000 items on each of them. I tend to frequent smaller shops rather than big vendor malls anyway, seems like the smaller shops have better values. Using this logic, Wal-Mart has a monopoly on retail sales in the US because they can stock a gazzilion items and the Mom & Pop place can't. I don't think so.
As for having to "drill down through pages of items" isn't that what the little buttons on the left side of the screenare for? To sort through the items to find what you are looking for?
I'm a Master Musician/Master Architect. There is NO way possible for me to Master Merchant as well. So you think I should be penalized for my choice of professions by limiting the number of items I can put on a vendor? And the only people that can have vendors and sell items are those that take the Merchant profession, therefore requiring them to also have Artisan? *sigh* Please just fix the bad code and leave player vendors alone already.
Seems to me it would make more sense to reduce the number of vendors in the world. Setting a cap on the number of items available on them would only increase that number and make shopping an even more frustrating process than it already is. I'm very tired of having to wade through countless empty vendors put up by folks to earn Merchant experience for their latest holocron grind.
...and now you will pay the price for your lack of vision.
Seriously though.
Why not just scrap vendors and the merchant class altogether? I mean, you did it for the mining class. Everyone wanted to mine their own resources so you scrapped miners. Everyone wants to sell their own products...scrap merchant.
Put in player city bazaars. Release the credit cap altogether and just have everyone sell straight to market.
*SHOCK GASP*
Yes, I'm a master merchant, but seriously, the skills don't help me at all. I survive off brainpower not code/skill power. I like the idea of the class, but its just not working as intended obviously and causing database issues... heh and supposed 'monopolies' yeah, right, whatever.
Bazaar cap should be higher, this will bring some items overform vendors because they are worth more than 3K. But why 6K, why not 10K.What was the logic behind the 6K concept?
How about letting merchants that work their way up the skill tree sell on the bazaar for more, rather than that worthless premium * thing. Reward us for hard work don't tie our hands!
A vendor limit of 150 is way too low. Think about armor smiths, 7 to 9 unique pices to make a full suit. A 150 item limit will only let an armorsmith put up enough pieces to make16 sets of armor. How are these guys going to have time to get out and buy/harvest suppliesor craft, they will be constantly restocking vendors!
I'd rather see the time limit that an item can stay for sale on a vendor dropped down to 2 weeks, 1 week isn't enough for vendors, but 30 days may be too long
One other thing you can do is limit the "junk" on the bazaar. I see way too many dead eye decoder components in the general item section.
If you ask the average combat character (and it seems that the majority of players are mostly combat), of course they're going to advocate raising the cap. They want to be able to sell their phat lewt themselves on gbay and earn more money for it. They want a wider selection of higher level goods that they don't have to travel to a shop to get. However raising the bazaar cap too highly would really hurt those of us who have vendors full of mid-priced items. Who's going to trek out to a player shop and search the item vendors when they can just stay in Theed and find durable goods that are 3,000-6,000cr? A lot of posts of those who are for the cap only want shopping to be a bit faster for them and don't give a crap about the stability of crafting and merchant professions. Maybe they'll start to care when their favorite tailor shop has to start only stocking one of each item in only the color black. When their favorite weaponsmith shop is constantly out of stock of the thing they're looking for, because the smith can't log on every single day to refill her vendors.
Please please, pay more attention to crafter and merchant comments on this topic, we are the ones who may be severely hurt by your choices and we are the ones that know the most about this system.
The best suggestions I've heard so far on both the bazaar and vendor issues are:
- raising the max bazaar price only for the buisness and merchant skill trees. This would give those lines a little more actual use while ensuring that merchants stay a viable profession.
- keeping the cap as is, but allowing players to use the bazaars to view items available on their planet's vendors. This could be another radio button choice (instead of just the city, planet, and galaxy choices, a "planetary vendor" choice could be added). This would make shopping easier and faster. Sure the shopper would have to go pick the items up, but at least they could go ahead and buy them without treking out to the shop and finding it empty. If implementing this option, vendor sales must be changed so that they list either the region name or the player city name that they're in, so that the person wouldn't see all items on sale in Rori, Rori, and the description should automatically include a shop coordinates so the person could find out where the shop was before they bought an item.
- making vendors created by people who then dropped their business or merchant skills inoperable. People would have to retrain the skill to have a working vendor again. These vendors would be unlisted from the planetary map (if they were still on it), not show anything for sale to visitors, and owners would be unable to add new items to them. Owners would only be able to retrieve items from them unless they retrained their merchant skills. This is a large problem that the merchant community has been complaining about since release. If it had been fixed earlier, the servers wouldn't be stuffed with so many storage vendors and an item cap may never have become this big an issue.
- and, uh, fixing the stupid database so that player abilities, storage, and gameplay no longer need to be sacrificed to it.
sorry but yall ****....does anyone actually think through anything in the design/concept room??? at ALL???
another great example...of sitting in the back room and dreaming up stuff without understanding what the hell it is your doing.....limiting vendor space to 150 ...you might as well remove the merchant profession..as I can tell you know...its a dead profession....held onto only for a bare minimun vendors or one person makes a merchant on a second account and runs a guild/cities entire mall via that one toon.And why you say.....have you played a merchant???? is there any fun runing a business and inventory for a hobby when you work for a living??? and do you think the 14 yr kid is goin to run a merchant when he cant sit still long enough to do a quest? man yall are clueless as to who and what personalities play what style and how far you can push the limits of that playstyle. atm....its work not a profession...and you might as well remove it.
6 months...and ya'll have yet to make the mental leep that would allow you to build a viable economy ...one that a casual player can participate in and manage without killing themselves... no consideration of what it takes to run a business...obvious cuz you cant run yours...and secondly..your asking 'coders'to design an economy...did you talk to one economist? one person at all thats successfully run a business? /sigh
...but no...yall refuse to consider any thing from an operational standpoint...nor from a human standpoint...just patch this ...or plug that...or throw someone a bone ..maybe they will stay 3 more months and put up with this crap.
I've run one of the biggest malls on corbantis since day one....and I can tell you there is nothing in this game friendly to the merchant..and yet...you just keep tryin to create hurdles to demand more time from that merchant then you already drain from him...not to mention you've yet to fix inventory deletion bugs....i alone have lost well over 10million resources do to your supperbly designed database and resulting vendors...I've flipped you code team off so many times my middle finger hurts from it.
and to top it off ...you whine and complain that you cant afford the cheapest commodity in the computing business...DISK SPACE!!! .... to scale your database (wont get into the noob you hired to design the db to start with).
As big a fan I am of SW and the hopes and effort I've put into this game....I've yet to see one thing thought out in this game other then may the freaking dancer profession .... but i guess that was an obvious one to get attention with all those hardup noob coders.../boggle
my intention was to be here on the 5 yr anniversary ...but i can honestly say thats in jeapardy atm ...this is a hobby...and no hobby should make YOU jump through the hoops in order to find fun...in order to just put up with the process and hurdles to your fun....a hobby is to be FUN!!
And the constant hurdle jumping is not like a job...its worse then a job...and thats not a hobby!!
Sad thing is ...your way past point of no return..you hired noob coders and your stuck with the product...and thus so are we...the only question is....is...living the adventure worth the pain of the ride....increasingly that answer is NO!
well this turned into a rant....my apologies..but after 7 months of fighting vendors...im spent!!
signing off.....disappointed
/shakefist
I have np with the 6k cap on the bazaar. I think that this still leaves a ery important role for NPC vendors.
I also agree with the 150 item cap. I'm not sure this really will help much monopoly wise, but help for the DB is enough reason for the change IMHO.
Please don't make us re-set up vendors, though. Make the change painless (e.g. no new items til a vendor is below 150), and please make sure stuff doesn't disappear on us.
Just to put my 2 cents in and maybe help some arguments.
Raise bazaar limit is good but cap a 5k not 6k.
Lower vendor limit is bad. I believe you should lower it, but 150 items?That's rediculous. How about 300-400. As a Novice Tailor (2-2-2-2) I had over 200 items on each of my 3 vendors all thatwere unique and sold quite well. I was often told it was nice to see such diversity. If you implement please make it higher so as not to seriously hurt the merchant community but to regulate as intended.