Development Cycle Archive
Thread: ID#2: Two Changes to Bazaars and Vendors
Lets see... I keep about 1k items posted at ALL TIMES.
I will NOT be tethered to my merchant just to restock him.
Bazaar price cap upgrade is good. But the reason why I even took merchant is so I could sell my own stuff with no limitations.
I mean who goes into a superstore and finds out they only have peanut butter. Go ask a clerk where is all the jelly and they will respond... sorry i can only put up 150 items. Cmon.. who does this ???
And please... Devs.. Tell me... on a personal level... have ANY of you gone into an electronics store and they ONLY carry 150 items? NOPE ... they carry thousands and thousands. I know this will affect the speed of the database .. but this limitation seems silly. I mean.. cmon .. think about it... that is only 6 crates of weapons. I have about 40 crates sitting in my Factories.. so what am I going to do?
But the fact of the matter is the high-end stuff is still going to be sold by vendors, and the junk is still going to go on the bazaar. The bazaar is where people like to rip each other off (they do it on vendors too, but not as brazenly).
Raising the limit to 6k will mean that there will be a bunch of locked containers and encoded transmissions on the bazaar for 6k instead of 3. There won't be much better stuff on the bazaar, just the same stuff at double the price. An increased limit sounds swell, but it's really just a more efficient way to rip people off.
Not being a merchant, I can't comment much on the vendor cap. But I will say that vendors being overstocked has never been an issue for me, if anything they're far too often understocked or just plain empty.
Anyone wanna buy broken electrobinoculars for 6k?
The cap raise is a good idea, but I might go for 5k instead of 6k. It probably won't matter much in the long run which you use.
The vendor item limit is also a good idea, and I think it should be even lower. 50 seems too low, but 100 sems too high. Maybe 75?
Why? Well, I've been both a merchant (almost master) and a non-merchant who is a crafter. If you really want to give value to the merchant profession, make it so having multiple vendors is a more desirable trait.
I know a master weaponsmith who has ONE vendor, and has never had more than ONE vendor. Yet he has millions and millions and millions of dollars. Should he have needed some good merchant skills to achieve that level of wealth?
He has trouble keeping his vendor stocked, and he would kill me for suggesting he shuold have to have more than one vendor, but having been on both sides of the equation, I think I'm qualified to have an opinion here 
An item limit of 75 items would require people who sell a LOT of merchandise to have more than one vendor OR to hire a merchant to sell for them, which is the way it should be.
HOWEVER, if you do this, you really need to make vendors easier and more friendly for multi-person use. There has to be a better way for a merchant to act as a reseller than the current "put it on my vendor for 1cr and I'll buy it and relist it". This sort of thing makes resale a pain in the butt.
Merchants need commission / cintingency sale options, so the WS can tell the merchant OK, list these items for 8000 each. If they sell, send me the money, minus your commission. If they don't, then I can get the items back out of the vendor and no one has to swap 1cr trades aruond anymore.
Bazaar Cap: so-so
The bazaar cap was in place to make Merchant a viable class. If you want to sell your super cool Rod of Smiting for greater than 3,000 credits, the design of the game was originally you went to a Merchant and offered it to them to sell it for you, or they bought it outright. Now we skip the merchants and just sell our stuff on the trade forums.
A Merchant produces nothing. Without other artisans,they have nothing to sell. They're advantage was supposed to be the ability to have vendors and be able to sell items. But that never happened.
I say go ahead and change it if you want. I don'tthink it will help or hurt anything.
Vendor Limit: **** No!
Once againwe come to the problem ofa "one-size-fits-all" vendor strategy forelite crafters. Yes, the Architect who sells Heavy Mineral Harvestors at 150,000 a piece is the same as the Tailor who sells Spec-Ops Dusters for5,000 as the Chef who sells Tatooine Sunburn for 1,000. They should all be limited to 150 items. Absolutely....that makes no sense whatsoever.
This problem has been stated again and again and it always comes back to a Tailor who wants to stock clothes or a Chef who sells food individually cannot keep a vendor stocked with a decent selection with only 150 items.
I believe if you insist on putting a limit in, it definitely will need to be more. Probably around 300.
Caveat: If you want to make Merchant-skill more necessary, this is the way unfortunately to do it. I've never seen a way to increase Merchant's usefulness without nerfing everyone else. And as a 0/0/0/4 Merchant you can have 6 vendors for a total of 900 items at the proposed levels. Now it just costs more SP's.
2nd Caveat: (Off Topic) If you're going to continue to nerf us into inter-dependence, it sure would be nice to be able to have 2 characters per server. We don't have to be able to use them at the same time. It would just be nice to have another character since it seems we are being forced into specializations. Some of us are really getting bored and quite frankly, it's an insult to me to have to dump what took me 6 months to make just so I can continue to grow in the game...Please consider letting us have 2 characters per server as you did for Test Center!
Why have a cap on the bazaar at all? Correct me if I'm wrong but there are ceratin planets that cannot be built up. Hence no vendors. No way to resupply anything even remotely expensive. If crafters were allowed to sell their wares on bazaars, They'd get more business.
Secondly. Vendor item cap. Why? if I currently have 300 items on my vendor (or 3000) I'm just going to put up more vendors to handle my inventory. Capping the number o fitems on a vendor isn't going to solve anything.
Just some thoughts........
You idea with the bazarre to up the current cap to 6000 credits - I LOVE IT 
But my god...your idea to down the vendors to 150 needs to be rethought. I know why your doing it, the database. But my problem is that I have a mining company (See signature for location), and I end up with WAY more than 150 items on the vendor. This would HURT my sales because I would end up putting less items on there in bigger blocks. Currently my best selling items are in blocks of 3-5k units. I'm taking millions of units and breaking them up into these smaller pieces that people can easily afford and come back for repeat buys. If you implement this my saleswill go way down because I'm going to have to put larger chunks of resources on there that many folks can't afford.
I usually I have anywhere from 100-300 items on the vendor and I seem to have no problem with people scrolling through 2-3 pages of items to get what they are looking for. It's not like the Misc category on the Bazarre that goes on for 10+ pages. And I've never seen a persons vendor with more than 4 pages of items on it.A vendortypically a specific type of item that people are looking for and they don't mind looking through the items.
Please reconsider this idea.
Thank You
150 items per vendor is not enough items. I dont mind the cap. But 150 is too low. Try atleast 250. 500 would be best.
Swiggy
Vendor Limit - NO - I am a 2 accoutn player with 1 account being my artisan character and I produce my goods in bulk. I run the max amount of vendors available and still I average between 325 to 2500 items on each vendor as they are broken down into specific type items like weapons and resources.
I do not use the bazaar as I specilize in the merchant profession and want my vendors. Some of the higher end crafted items take multiple components and I run these in large 1000 runs and do not want to have to limit my runs to smaller ones just to cut down on vendors not being able to hold it.
Those of use with high stock on our vendors will now have issues of where to place the over limit goods should it go into effect due to space limitations in houses. My pa hall alone has 250 items (The max) of component run items for mass running products.
This will only damage the player run economy further IMO and with the economy like it is now with massive profession changings due to holo hunting this will be a bad thing.
as stated before, this will also allow resources to be sold in larger stacks, and i think that is a good thing, as it can be difficult to acquire decent resources in decent size stacks.
i can't speak to the change in vendors, as i don't use them that often.
i would encourage you to make the vendor/bazaar interface easier to use. i think that might be one aspect of you vendor problem. it's not that there are too many items to browse, it's that there are too many items to browse with THIS INTERFACE. set it up to where it sorts the entire stack of items, and then shows them to you, NOT where it sorts each page individually. This is something that the community has been asking for for some time, and i think this would be a good time to give it to them. ^_^
about how you all FIXING the bug instead of limiting the vendors number ever think of that ! limiting the vendor to 150 times is just plain stupid as a master artisan and armoursmith I have many items to sell I make one facotry run of suits and it is 125 pieces. they sell witin a few days every time .so now you want to spend 50% of my time loading items twice a day?? christ do you get paid per click we do ?
this is just a bad idea,BTW we said it was a bad idea limiting the vendor to 3k before 6 months ago 
6k is better
I don't like this change at all.
Increasing bazaar price cap creates new competition for crafters. Many items in the 3k-6k range currently are useful for crafters to (1) get revenue while climbing up their skill tree to Master and (2) to get merchant xp when placed on a vendor. The Devs have given us Player cities, and have encouraged business to be moved to vendors there. After much advertising, false starts, and other problems, those vendors are now starting to be recognized and frequented by a growing base of customers.
Now those vendors all of sudden will no longer be *fully* stocked, once the item cap goes in, and more items can be obtained from bazaar terminals. How can the Devs not see the problem? All that work done after the player cities got implemented will be for naught.
I don't want to repeat all the negative - but absolutely accurate - comments in preceeding posts. Just to say Nay to the proposed changes. As a Med crafter and Artisan, I know this will definitely take me out of these professions. Mining resources and selling them in bulk will be faster, bring me more revenue, and give me more time to *play*. Why bother with even more *work*, with this ill-advised change?
Devs, fix your DATABASE problems. And all the other bugs that are still making the game so hard to play.
Don't put this change in. It's the kiss of death for the crafting classes.
I am against both of these.
1) alot of my stuff will be able to be sold on the bazaar, atleast the most popular stff, I dont want small houses sold on the bazaar. I can sell them for 6k. Also i have enough trouble as it is competing with people who are selling furniture on the bazaar.
2) the limit of 150 WHAT IS THAT ALL ABOUT? if i had a limit of 150 I would have to have 6 vendors just to have a good amount of each piece of furniture. I woudlnt be able to healthly stock most of my items either, I have about 50 medium harvesters on a vendor and intend to have 50 of each on there. Its not a monopoly. its demand, I sell out faster than I can put things on the vendor. With this 150 item cap I woudlnt be able to stock very well at all. This will be yet more damage to crafters of all sorts. weaponsmiths stock 100's of guns.
As well as the poor item limit in houses, where am I going to put my stock if I cant put them on the bazaar? Do you want people to go around with under decorated houses and just be filled with stock because we cant spare the space to decorate our house. I am proud of my house, I reached the 150 item limit in my medium house and only decorated 2 rooms. I was forced to get a small house to stock items.
Again this is more evidence of nurfing us when its not our fault at all. If you have technical difficulties then solve them another way, spend a bit of money, it doesnt kill you. Crafting has become less and less enjoyable over the last few months.
I am still not seeing any reason for nerfing the colour crafting, I have seen probably 2 special stat items in 3 months. and when you loot items that have special stats, only 1 of them will be that green colour text anyway.
I cant log on every hour of the day to update my stock on my vendors, with these proposed changes, thats what i would HAVE to do. I work, i sleep I go out, SWG is not my life, i cant spend all day every day trying to get around YOUR problems, being technical difficulties.
If you do this then I am going to quit crafting and holo grind like the rest of them, 1 less architect on infinity, means more money and business goes to THE MONOPOLY of the other 4 or 5 major architect players. Ive worked hard to build up my business and reputation and I am not going to have that spoiled by SOE because the management are greedy money makers and are too tight to spend some money upgrading systems.