Development Cycle Archive

why not a bazaar that can be placed at metropolis into player cities, that crafters can access, with no item limits and no price limits....

but restrict the use of this bazaar terminal to the player's merchant skills

Don't really care about raising the price limit on the bazaar.

But the vendor item cap at 150 is ABSURD. Do you DEVs realize just how many items there are too craft? How about you sit down and just look at what a weaponsmith can craft and then categorize everything into sections with how you would logically break them up among vendors. Now remember, one single person can only have 6 vendors. Then also consider that some people like to have stocks on their weapons so you can assume that for each weapon that has a stock option, add another type of weapon to the total number of craftable weapons.

I am a Master WS and I focus on only the Commando Weapons line. In that line there are 2 ranged weapons, Flamethrower and Heavy Acid Rifle. I need to stock AT LEAST 15 of each of those a day to keep up with demand thanks to the decay implementation increasing my demand. There are 4 use based ranged weapons, Rocket Launcher, Acid Stream Launcher, Heavy Particle Beam Canon, and Lightning Beam Canon. My customers usually buy several of these because they only last for 30-33 uses. Then you have the mines which there are 3 types of. Do you DEVs even know how many mines PAs usually buy at once to protect their bases? It A LOT. So I need to have at least 25 of each of these on the vendor in case a PA comes to clear me out of them. And then last but not least are the grenades. You have C12s, C22s, Cyrobans, Glops, Protons, Thermal Dets, and Imp Dets. For one, C12s sell like crazy. I can easily reach the 150 cap by just stocking enough C12s to keep everyone happy. Everything else I need to keep at least 20 on the vendor or I risk being out of stock with in a day.

Now this is just an example of 1 combat line of weaponcrafting. Think of how many things an Architect can make. Or even a powerup vendor. Powerups can only come in crates of 10, which by the way make no sense to me whatsoever. So you would be limiting a powerup vendor to only being able to stock 150 crates of 10 PUs each or 1500 total. That will sell out immediatly.

All in all, a 150 item cap will make the life of a merchant even more difficult than it already is having to deal with the vendor lag WHICH IS STILL NOT FIXED.

I have no problelms with the ideas at all... i'm VERY much for the raise on the cap, although i'd actually suggest 10k rather than 6k

As for the 150 limit, that would be fine if you show ALL 150 on the first page instead of having st go through more... and also, i would suggest making more vendors available to place (meaning instead of maxing at 6 - or whatever it is at master merchant - maxing at 10 or so) Otherwise, this actually hurts the merchant profession because they are losing out on a number of sales if they deal in commodities

I am _against_ raising the bazaar credit cap. The bazaar is a place for non-craftsmen to sell miscellaneous junk, or to sell newbie items to beginning players. I think little to nothing should be on the bazaar beyond that. A more effective change to the bazaar would be to sell advertising spots on it with waypoints and marketing blurbs for vendors to get what you need from.

I am _for_ the cap on vendor item lists. All the responses against it that I glanced at were along the lines of, "but I have all this stuff and I won't be able to fit it on a vendor!". No, you won't. And you should not be able to.

If you are engaged in producing and selling your wares as a business, you should be spending points in the merchant tree to get additional vendors. Small businesses can fit their limited stock on the one vendor. Once you grow to be the next Umbrella Corporation, you need to pony up the points to support that stature.

I think the bazaar increase is a good idea average price of resources seems to be around 5cpu, so witha 6000 limit you couldbuy/sell lots of 1000 which is a reasonable size for buying resources.

I can see where your coming from with the Vendor restrictions and i can uderstand the techinal side of things, but 150 sounds too low. Most armours are 7 to 9 pieces, that means that i could only stock 16 suits at a time. I put 10 suits on last night and they were gone in under 2 hours. I would prefer a higher limit maybe 300 or how about about having different classes of vendor like harvestors, a low end vendor could hold 50 items and a high end vendor could hold 300 but cost a lot more maintenance.

Also is there anyway thatwhen a vendor is registered on themap that it could show if that vendor has any items on it, this would stop people trecking across a planet to findan emptyvendor.

So the point of 6k is to ruin the merchant class, and bring everything onto the bazaar? All this will do is lower prices of items so most people will use the bazaar. Like the Merchant class needs anymnore nerfs about it.. Thanks once again to work backwards.. If you truely wanted to make this game a true economy, you would remove the bazaar all together..

On the vendor issue, I would say that a higher cap would be better, although I'm not sure how much to suggest, as I've never maintained a vendor. It would seem logical to me that perhaps the max amount could be related to one of the Merchant trees.

On the bazaar, I would like to see a higher cap, and 6k sounds good. I like the higher cap idea for selling/buying resource stacks in larger quantities. However, again, I'd like to see more benefit for merchants with this, perhaps in having higher caps (if any). The 25 item bazaarlimit would keep vendors from being obsolete.

Also, concerning the bazaar, I'd like to see auctions done away with, or have the cap on bids removed.The value of a credit is so pitiful now that the bids foran auction item is instantly maxxed and sits on the bazaar for the full time period. Useless.

The bazaar limit increase would be great. Right now, prices are often artificially low due to this limit. 6k is a fair level.

In regards to the vendor limit to 150, this would be horrible. I run multiple stores and vendors with a full selection of all Architect items (with multiple copies of each). I need to do this I need at least 250-300 item limit.

Database problems should not result in game functionality changes. Databases can be scaled to handle enormous amounts of data. If you are having data issues, you may need to look at your data architecture, not gameplay.

wow this change will drastically increase the amount of bazaar usage, since bazaars are only in static cities can we get this change with a player city? Also lowering from potentially infinite to 150 isnt cool. If a cap must be set in place 300 seems to be the right number. Most products that are of decent variety need this much and most sellers dont use this much but the ones that use way over it wont be such a burden to the servers

Well I will try to add a few comments where I can here.

I have been running some vendors for a while now and although I still barely know what I'm doing, Here is what I have seen.

Raising the cap on the Baazar:

• The baazar is like a conveiance store, and one of the things that people spend the most money on at your local conveiance store is Gas. In SWG, Resources are the gas. This would probably see the biggest increase of traffic.


• Merchant skill should have some impact on the cap on the Baazar.


• There should be an option to have your item transported to you for a fee.


• The names of items on the Baazar should be easier to see, and to sort. Also, there should be a way to purchase a few items at once.


• Remove the auction function of the Baazar, it is extremely under used. Add an AUCTION ONLY form of the baazar that has no $ limit, but has a % fee

Limits on Vendors:

• Overall it's a good idea, but needs a bit fleshed out. Vendors should be specialty sellers. They should limit the items sold on them to the type of vendor they are created as.


• Merchant skill should have some effect on this.


• Add the ability to purchase multiple items at once.


• Add the ability to sell multiple items at once for the same price.


• Add the ability to manage better from the stock room.


• Make the selection of the vendor control default to the vendor being used.


• Add the ability to have items from your stockroom transferred to a vendor in another location for a fee. (smuggler ability?)


• Add the ability for an Image Designer to change the apperance of vendors (fat/thin etc.)


• Add the ability to have your vendor items listed on a type of baazar ( for a fee, also possible smuggler enhancement? )


• Add delivery option to local delivery terminal (again, smuggler enhancment?)

Just some ideas, have a nice day.

I feel that raising the cap on the bazaar would be good, allowing more stuff to be sold where new players can find it easier. Also, if I can put higher priced items up on the bazaar, i might actually use it for more than 'orders that the customer thought they wanted, but i think are hideous and they decided i was right and they didn't want after all'

150 cap on vendors? No thank you. I can see that more vendors would be good, and give merchants a benefit, but for some reason my vendors, if they are in the same room, all blend together in the list, unless someone clicks on that vendor instead of region. Even if i had separate vendors for each type of clothing, i could still get more than 150 on each one without too much more effort. but that would be a minimum of 5 vendors (shirts, pants, dresses/skirts, wookiee, accessories, special orders, etc.) and I have more than one location. This might force people to limit their merchant empire, and while a cap might be necessary, I don't want to spend the skill points for master merchant, which would make me in effect a completely non-combat character, often killed by durni's and gubbers. Perhaps a more reasonable cap of 300-400 would be acceptable.

You want to make vendors and merchants more usefull? Scrap the price limit increase and and take a cue from DAoC.

I just reactivated DAoC two days ago after a 9 month absence. Since then, DAoC has implemented personal venders in their housing zone. They have a great feature: an NPC in each zone where you can basically seach EVERY PRIVATE VENDOR. In SWG Ispent several hours last weekend traveling between all the registered vendors on Bria trying to find certain types of harvesters with very little success. The frustration over this time sink was huge. If you want to make merchant vendors better, then somehow make them searchable from remote locations.

Another thing, if you want to reduce the number of items on the item DB (your "technical issues") what you need to do is remove the item count limit on factory crates (ussually 25 items per crate on many schematics) and add the ability to combine crates which have the same seriel number. My crafter has, between factories, houses and my vendor, anywhere between 300 and 500 items in property. I bet you I could reduce this by half if I could combine identical factory crates!

As far as the proposed changes go, I don't think they are an improvement. Honestly, there are only few things available at 6,000 that can't be had at 3,000. The only inpact it will have for me is that when I sell Clamps on the vendor, I'll split the stack of 25 clamps in half instead of in thirds.

As far as the item limit goes, I think this will be a minor issue for most sellers - I seldom see more than 150 items on a vendor anyway. The biggest impact is that Malls will be hurt by this- if you are setting vendors in your own home, you can just drop another vendor if you hit the limit. Malls, the best places to shop, make this a more complicated process since the seller doesn't necessarily have the ability to add a vendor at will. The idea that this will reduce monopolies is silly though. Instead, it will increase inconvience as it will be more likely that the item I traveled across two planet for 30 minutes round trip will be out of stock. (Bah!) As far as people not buy stuff becuase they didn't look on page two: thaks bunk: we all are familiar with the public Bazaar, and you almost always need to drill down to multiple pages there.

Best of luck with the change, but I don't think it will really impact 98% of the players either way.

The 150 item limit on vendors would kill tailors. At least those of us who try to keep a good selection available for our customers. I'd just close up my shop if this change went in.. and put those merchant skill points to use elsewhere.

Ri'a