Development Cycle Archive

My wife runs a tailoring shop and is well known for her large selection of clothing. Her 'free time' in game is already taken up with custom orders, she can't handle a larger volume and still have fun playing. The majority of her sales must go through her vendor.

She has three vendor clothing vendors, a wookiee one (for your 'wookiee garb' category doesn't work), a stat clothing vendor, and a regular clothing vendor. Her other vendors are used to sell other profession items, such as my bio engineered items, her architect items, and custom orders. Your interface does not allow someone to register a vendor under multiple categories on the global map, so it's hard to spread out her massive amounts of clothing to less used vendors. She sells them all on the one clothing vendor.

The 150 cap would destroy her shop. It seems there are at least 100 different schematics in tailoring..by making multiple colors of many popular selections and giving less common selections a few varieties for those who want to be different, she easily can have 500+ clothing for sale at a given time. And it sells fast. Creating a cap of 150 would work fine for my vendor selling pet stims of various crate sizes. It would severly hurt the creative merchant vendors who have large variety. Don't do it.

6k cap on the bazaar? That sounds fine, and that alone may pull out many of the current people who run their own shops/vendors and let them use the bazaar to sell goods. That should help alliviate the vendor issue.

If you need another way to lower the number of items on a vendor, how about up the vendor maint costs for every X number of items for sale? Double the costs if you have over 100 items, triple at 200, quadruple 300, etc. Pulls money out of the game, and isn't an issue for those merchants making a good profit on 100s of items, but stops merchants who list 100s of items who aren't actually moving them off the shelves.

TH I'm of the opinion that BOTH hurt the position of Merchants. Currently the BEST reason for crafters to go through merchants for their sales is the fact that 1) You can only sell something for 3k on the bazaar. Because of this, most items ON the bazaar are calibrated to that. Raise it, and prices will go up. The need for merchants will go down because people are making twice what they were on the bazaar. 2) Merchants can sell as much as they want on a vendor. Now granted this is a lesser problem and concern Really most of us don't sell more than 100 items on a vendor BECAUSE we know people don't like to scroll down. So I don't have TOO much of a problem with it. However, it DOES sort of take away one of our neater tricks.

While the vendor cap is a lesser problem, and may not ultimately affect us in the long run, raising the 6k cap SEVERELY lowers the need for the Merchant, especially considering that you guys still haven't fixed the fact that you can keep vendors earned from the Merchant profession, even after dropping the entire profession. This is gonna hurt. So I'm DEFINITELY against.

Are you guys insane!?!?!?!?!?!? I have around 700 items on my vendor right now and I still don't consider myself "fully stocked". Might as well just say "Screw those tailors! we hates them!" if you decide to limit vendors to 150 items per.

DUMBASS'S!

I'm not sure I can get behind either of these changes. They both stand to really hurt player merchants and crafters.

1. If you must raise the bazaar cap, then please define what you mean by "commodity" items, make it a flag, and permit only those items to be sold on the bazaar. Or perhaps have a complexity limit. Otherwise, professional crafters are further threatened by dabblers who make all their money running missions, allowing them to grind crafting XP and sell on the bazaar at prices that would represent a loss for those who live by their crafting sales.

1a. If the goal is to attract people back to the cities, raising the bazaar cap is not the answer. For complex (non-commodity) items, bazaar access is pretty much the same sort of crutch that BH Droid terminals were while DEs were getting established. The droid terminals went away, and it hurt briefly, then stabilized. There are plenty of player merchants around now. Rather than raising the bazaar cap, designate "mall" areas in major cities, and allow Master Merchants to place one vendor in a city's mall.

1b. Allow players to search player merchants from the bazaar terminals, as long as the vendor is registered on the planetary map. This simplifies people's shopping, keeps them in large cities more, and provides an additional benefit to spending those points on Ad 3.


2. If you must limit the number of items on a vendor, then the following should be observed:

2a. The number of items per vendor should scale along the Merchant Efficiency tree. 150 should be the entry-level available on Artisan-level vending machines. Give 50 or 100 more vendor inventory spaces per Merchant level.

2b. Allow items to be stocked on the vendor as crates, but sold individually. The decision to list a sale as a whole crate or a stack of individual items is made explicitly at sale time. Either way, the crate will count as a single item in the vendor's inventory. If listed as a stack of individuals, then the image and description presented to the customer are of the item rather than the crate, and there is some sort of "number in stock" indicator.

2c. Create a special kind of container, called a "bundle". The bundle counts as only one slot in the vendor's inventory. It can store a heterogeneous set of items that must be sold as a unit. This would cover cases like tailors selling entire suits of clothes. The way I see it, this container could only be used from the vendor interface. "Create Bundle" would appear on the Vendor Control menu. Using the menu item would pop open an inventory window. You drag in the desired items, close the bundle window and the bundle appears in your vendor's stockroom. Purchasing the bundle would dump all its contents into your inventory and destroy the bundle. You can't edit a bundle without withdrawing and recreating it. Like everything else, it poofs after seven days in the stock room, along with all its contents. In order to discourage people from using grossly overpriced bundles for item storage, there should be a withdrawal fee equal to 10% of the sale price.

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KzinKiller wrote:

Limit on vendors: not a problem once you fix it so people can sell containers holding multiple items, with those containers counting as only a single item. A full set of armour should only be one item, or you are making life very hard on your successful elite crafters. Your crafters have been asking for this to be fixed for a LONG time and you should get that done before implementing this change.

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That change would only help armorsmiths. Which means the 150 item limit would still roger Tailors, Weaponsmiths, Architects and any Merchant that stocks a good variety of crafted items in more than one location.

Weighing in as one who supplies harvested meat, hides, bones, and flora:

- Raise the regular Bazaar cap to 10,000. Currently, the 3,000 cap means that I have to split out my stock in smaller piles to get the price I am looking for. I've noticed that if I put something decent up, for a good price, all (or nearly all) tends to be bought by a single player - who then sends a /tell if s/he wants more. By increasing the amount of the cap, suppliers can increase the amount of resources they can sell in larger stacks. If people are over charging, they will not sell their goods.

- Do not set such a small limit on the private vendors. The business class is part of the reason that the economy is as fluid as it is. There are no monopolists, no matter what people may tell you. Price and convenience determines what is purchased from what vendor. When I need a weapon, I will travel out of my way to go to a good and reputable smith, because I know that I will get the best price that she can offer for the best quality she can offer that day. Players that do not research a little to find the right smith are either going to be influenced by sheer idiocy (yes, some players are idiots), or, more commonly, by convenience. Why would a player want to spend time traveling over half the galaxy to find something that is only one or two points better than what his local smith can offer, or is only a few creds cheaper?

Monopolies will be created by vendor limits. These monopolies will be controlled by the people who are willing to grind the most to keep their vendor full. These monopolists will be people who do nothing but acquire stuff to sell and stock their vendors continually, who do not enjoy any variation in what they are doing. Currently, when in the game, I hear constant observations by the artisian types I know that they barely have time to do anything but acquire things to sell and sell them. By imposing a small, arbitrary limit, you will be further limiting how these people enjoy the game. In their limited time, they will have not choice but to become a slave to their vendors. Then, they will stop wanting to sell items, making it half way impossible to find what you want, without going to the monopolies.

My 2 creds worth.

To continue what I was saying up above before I hit the wrong button...

I have invested WAY to much time into getting my business to the point of where it is. I was spending 95% of my time for 4 months on my business, not playing, while my online buddies were passing me up in everything. I just recently (within the last two weeks) finally got a set schedule on picking up my resources from my harvs, from my contract miners, etc and putting them on my vendors for purchase.

Doing this 150 limit will put me RIGHT BACK to where I was, spending all my time on my business with no time to play for myself.

I guarantee I will quit, cancelling both my accounts, before I do this again.

bazaare raising is not as good as people who agree with it are thinking. The whole point of having your own vendor joining a city and starting your business is to sell and profit from stuff outside the bazaar. It makes it more holistic of a world. If everything were at a one stop shop then traveling in search of the perfect armor or weapon becomes dismal and boring. It alot better if you have to search 3 planets and get the satisfaction of finding your dream weapon as opposed to just stubling to it on the bazaare.

The 150 item cap is far too low. I simply sell med resources and getting 150 items on the vendor is more than easy. this will only make stacks of resources grow and make it so people with lesser income who need resources will not be able to afford the larger stacks. It creates a promotion of rich big business and the downfall of smaller merchant and fighters who live on smaller stacks. I say a cap works if its higher. Actually, anyone ever think of making the vendor a crafted item or bio eng'd item? something like that. Make the vendors hold base 150 and if you use better metals with high shock res for example they can hold more. That will make a new market for vendors and make being master artisan have another perk.

I think basing changes on numbers and the promotion of different audience is a bad approach. Thats why i am grateful for this thread. So, that you can see how much effect this will have on your players.

Please bear with me as thisis my first time posting to this or any board.

I'd like to address this issue purely from the perspective of economics. Please forgive me if I appear to be going off topic but I assure you I do have a point that deals directly with these proposed changes.

There are incredibly high inflationary pressures in Star Wars Galaxies as a whole. The reasons for this lie in the fact that, despite the developer's best efforts to make the game a "player run economy" too much money is pumped into the game by mission terminals and loot that is far outpacing the money being taken out of the game by garages, spaceports, trainers, etc. Using a bathtub metaphor, the taps are stuck on and the drain is clogged. This causes the total amount of money in the economy to rise very quickly (especially as more players advance in skill.) The result of this is an overall decline in the value of money due to it's abundance as is illustrated by the 5000 credit dancing tips and skyrocketing price of goods. The proposed change to the bazaar caps solves this problem aboutas well as buying a bigger pair of pants solves a weight problem. Let's face it 3000 credits just isn't what it used to be. This kind of problem not even six months after official release is very serious. Something must be done to slow this inflation soon.

One solution is to reduce the awards given by mission terminals. Not exactly a good idea because no one wants to see warrior professions out of work.The high payouts from combat missions are easily the largest source of new money being injected into the Star Wars economy. The problem isn't the missions, or the size of the payouts but the fact that the money is merely created by the system (like printing new dollar bills.) A solution to this problem could be to have playercreated missions. For example, My main character is an architect on Tatooine that makes considerable money by mining and selling resources. There have been many times when I have found the perfect spot to place my harvestors only to double click on the deed and find the area unbuildable because of a MOB lair. I would be willing to pay good money for a band of more combat capable characters to come and eradicate these beasts so I can build my structures. The more powerful the monsters, the higher the price of eradication. This step could also be used by towns to control the monster population in they're surrounding areas. This is justone example ofa way to address the problem instead of just loosening our belts a notch.

Another approach to this problem would be to have a zero sum economy where all money has to come from somewhere. This is clearly not the case as can be seen by the ability to reset the mission terminals indefinately in order to get those high payout missions that are nearby and close together. If the mission terminals could only payout as much money as is brought in by fees from trainers, shuttles, the bazaar, garages, etc. that would also serve to balance the inflationary pressure. If the developers wanted to inject money into the economy, just increase the money pool for missions. Also NPCs could take cash off of incapacitated or dead characters, hold on to it for a while and eventually lose it to a character that kills it or surrender it to the "great big pool of cash" when it returns to the ether (unspawns.) Some mix of these two solutions would likely work best, but I think the latter is technically quicker to implement.

I also agree with the other posts that advocate beefing up the merchant profession. Things like max items per vendor (150 is too low for some professions,) bazaar price and number of items caps should scale up with merchant levels.

Anyway, that's my two cents. I really hope the developers recognize the fundamental economic problems with the current game system because every time they make game play more fun (like with vehicles and mounts) they affect the economy. and lets admit it, if everyone had millions of credits, a scout blaster would cost like 100000 creditsand that would really detract from the fun.

Zix Starduster

Master Architect/ Master Artisan/ Master Merchant

Th,

Is the dev team trying to kill thevariety in the game?

There is a wide variety of items that people can make and sell. Let's look at clothing. You have at each design of clothing item and then you have each different color combination.

If the devs want a diverse market, then there needs to be available goods. Available goods of differing colors means that there needs to be a variety on the vendors when I as a player got to buy the objects. Cutting in half what is already there is insane.

Not to mention you will actually be MAKING monopolies by cutting the casual gamer out of the market faster.

Example:

Player X goes to buy something from vendor A that is ran by a casual player. If it isn't there, he doesn't have time to wait around, he goes to Vendor B that is ran by a hardcore player who is always online and can keep his vendor stocked.

What does player X do the next time he wants something, he goes to Vendor B because players are creatures of habit.

Since hardcore players are online more often, they will have a higher chance of keeping an eye on their now restricted cap and keeping their vendors stocked with the high selling items. Casual players will be even MORE likely to be cut out of the loop of player buying habits because there vendors will not be restocked as often.

Granted, all things being equal, hardcore players always have this advantage, but by shrinking the size of the vendor cap, you make it even harder on the casual player and you limit the amount of variability vendors will have.

Bad Idea.

Besides, let's say it like it is. This is all about memory space and you guys not wanting to shell out of more memory to keep up with everything that is going on. Monopolies are a side excuse.

That statement might not be entirely true. People who use vendors now as storage space would just get more houses to store. This would reduce the number of lots available for harvestersin the galaxy. In turn, the resources would still be limited.

I think raising the bazaar cap is fine. Give the new players exposure to more goods. However, I don't see the cap on vendors as being necessary. Furniture vendors would need tons and tons of items up for sale since there are so many variations. Resource vendors could easily have more than 150 lots.

Maybe I am missing something, but when I used a vendor in my town, it won't list things on other vendors in the region. Maybe it is bugged, and that is why people aren't drilling down as you say. It will list things on other vendors I own, but not other vendors for sale.

WOOOWIE!

You're gonna get a LOT of LONG threads from now on since they can only be created by devs.

20 pages and counting on a thread started just hours ago.

At least they stay on topic now, for the most part.

Take the good with the bad, I guess.

Anyways, I've never owned a vendor or been a real artisan yet, so most of what I know is from being an end-user.

BAZAAR

I've sold some odds and ends on the bazaar, but rarely look there at all anymore.

I agree that 3000 credits is too low.

I don't see why the limit can't go up to 10,000.

I would use it more often, but I would still buy a HUGE majority of my stuff from shops.

It's certainly not unheard of now to spend 20-30,000 credits or more on a single gun nowadays.

Bio clothes, quality meds, and armor can cost significantly more.

People like me who are Scouts out of necessity, because we have professions that require it, would probably find our skills less useless if we had more incentive to harvest quality stuff to sell on the bazzar in decent quantities.

Less of a need for resource splitting, because of pricing issues,means less strain on the inventories of the artisans and medics who buy our resources. I know these folks love to buy in bulk as much as possible.

Market rates would probably limit the amount we charge bellow the cap, but then market situations could change organically, and we could charge more, yet still our prices could be considered "fair."

Besides resource sellers, I see tailors benefiting the most, since I've seen a ton of clothing for sale at 3,000 credits, the same types ofclothing I've seen for sale in shops for significantly more. I've noticed that a lot of tailors use the bazaar as an advertising method for their shops, where they can make more money.

VENDORS

Like I said, I have only been a buyer, not a seller, of vendor goods. The only things I've sold area couple items I've returned for various reasons.

The monopolies are not caused by the quantity of goods sold, but the quality of the goods.

People will always go to the vendors who sell the best items and the most reasonable prices, but they might be less likely to go if what they want isless likely to bein stock.

The proposal states that because "players don't 'drill down' through all of the vendor pages to find items" is a justification for limiting the number of items.

But as a shopper, the reason why I don't look at other pages is that I forget that there might even be additional vendor pages 99% of the time. This is the reason why some vendors actually say, "and don't forget to look at the items on the other pages!" Heck, I don't even know what button to look for to click on to get to more pages off the top of my head.

Perhaps the user interface should be refinedina waythat makes the method of switching to additional pages is more recognizeable.

I understand the desire to create a limit on the number of items sold on vendors for database reasons, but 150 seems too low for the reasons stated by others.

The request by many to make the limit 200-500 seems reasonable.