Development Cycle Archive
Thread: ID#2: Two Changes to Bazaars and Vendors
That's really bad news, really really bad news, the people don't have the skills to be master armorsmith and master merchant at the same time without to be a complete non combat class
Thunderheart wrote:
DocSavag is a strong voice for the Merchants and based on the correspondent issues, this change may include the fact that only merchants can have vendors.
where is the fun in merchant?? i think that you have to delete the merchant profession and put this abilities in the artisan classes. I don't see the utility of the merchant profession, really not useful ones
XanEldarie wrote:
Breigh wrote:
*rolls eyes* Caps .. bold.. either way if what you says has any merit people will pay attention to it. Blinding us with it won't do you any good. bla bla bla...
And yet, through all this, you've not given any logical solution to the problem at hand; you've only done well to point out there's a problem.... Hmmm...
Of course there's a problem! This wouldn't be an issue if there was no issue to make an issue of! I've given my ideas, though you've spared your's.
Request For Comments: The community is invited to make comments and suggestions about the proposed changes from Thursdsday, January 8th through Friday, January 16th. At that time, the thread will be closed to further comments. Feel free to comment on any or all of the above items.
This means that, while your "approval" or "disproval" is appreciated, suggestion to support the overall outcome is wanted when giving a response more than "I like it," or "I hate it".
Over and over again you say how the original idea, and subsequent ideas, are unacceptable; though you give no idea of your own. If I've missed it, please, repeat it now that we know TH is watching.
Point is, between you and I, I seem to be the only one truely contributing here; even if its not exacly in the best way. Start chopping wood, or get away from the axe.
You call jumping all over people who voice their concerns contributing? To what? The decline of the maturity level of the forum?
I haven't given any suggestions on how to fix it otherwise because I just simply don't have any. I agree with a few of the options given by other people and have said so, some I think the devs could actually do.. others I don't. *Shrug*
Anyway I'd love to stay and toss this flameball back and forth but I'm going out. I'll catch up later 
If you work somewhere that pays you 25k a year, how much do you spend? now, that job gives you a 25k a year raise putting you at 50k a year. NOW how much do you spend? it is a direct percentage that you will level out and will remain constant. if you spent 85% of your earnings befoer, you will spend in that same area now, increasing the amount you spend AND save, but the proportaions based on percentage will stay the same. same will go for the bazaar. people selling 1k units of resource X for 3k will now sell it for a higher price, BECAUSE THEY CAN. people who were selling scout blasters for 3k will now begin inceasing their prices, BECAUSE THEY CAN. THe bazaar limit will not reduce the income of those good business men and women out there who know how to treat a customer. I would still go to Vallyn's for food before i looked on any bazaar...
AS for the Vendor item cap, i like round numbers. 300 is too much, 100 is too little. 200 (two full pages) is perfect. those of you upset becuase you need space for 300? pick up extra merchant skill and get a second vendor ya freekin leech. weaponsmith? (which i am), divide your wares to a ranged vendor and a melee vendor. guns arent selling? QUIT MAKING THEM!!! THEY ARE JUST CLUTTER!!! see? these are easily handled issues. quit crying NERF! just because it is going to make you adjust the way you do things. LIfe is not unlikely to use the Nerf Bat on you once and a while too you know...
so, quick recap for those who don't want to read it all... raise cap to 8k-10k. limit vendors to 200 items. there are my .02
Thunderheart wrote:
[...]this change may include the fact that only merchants can have vendors.
As ever Thunderheart show your complete lack of knowledgde about the crafter professions. Artisans have vendors at the business III skill. Then the affirmation that only merchant can have vendor is a complete and total mistake.
Elite crafters professions (for example, weaponsmiths) normally have one vendor because they too have Master Artisan. All the contrary opinion agtainst the cap limit at vendors is because these crafters that need to have high quantity of itens to sell (for example, tailors) normally have only Master Artisan and one vendor. But wrongly Thunderheart think that only merchants have vendors(something that is totally wrong)and he don't want to hear thecrafters that will have a lot of problems with this change (the cap to vendors).
Vendor limit is spectacularly unfair to commercial Doctors and Medics, not everyone can afford a 50-unit crate, so to move items we break them into smaller denominations. I could fill a vendor with less than a full factory run of Stims, not to mention the Woundpacks, Rez packs and enhance packs that sell individually or in small numbers. Now I have to get EIGHT more boxes in Artisan/Merchant to sell in volume?
This would not make existing merchants more useful, if the idea is that Master Merchants can have 5 vendors with 150 items per vendor it makes them functionally useless -- at most they could support one Armorsmith or Weaponsmith, and what would the rest of us do? If you say 'Master Merchant', I'm going to hire a CM to disease you.
People need to learn how to use the NEXT PAGE button, and to click on the bars to sort alphabetically. Don't let the least common denominator determine the IQ needed to play the game.
Bazaar limit increase is fine by me. Bazaar I think of as 7-11 -- when you need it RIGHT NOW, when you can't or don't have time to find a vendor.
Making it a premium sale to go over 3k is reasonable.
So basically you are suggesting a way to limit the few merchants that actually stock more than 50 items at a time no matter how many vendors they have to be chained to their factories? Well brillant, let's discourage serious crafters/merchants even further. You put that 30 day thing and I was like yay I don't have to restock 1000+ items weekly. Now I don't have to relist anything ever, because instead I'll just be a slave to my factories or more likely I'll just quit being an artisan/merchant. Not to sound egotistical but I know my shop will be missed.
As for your monopoly arguement, well at least two other people within 100-150m of my shop in the same town also sell the same sorts of items and they sell a lot also. Well I guess it's your plan to make it even more of a pain in the arse to buy & sell items in the 'player-based economy.'
Bazaar cap to 6000 that is a good change, but you need to also seperate items offered to vendors from your bazaar listing cap, raise the bazaar item listing cap to say 50, and allow player city bazaar terminals (we know vendors are tied into the bazaar system so why not?--if a city gets destroyed, etc just shift items to the nearest npc city ala the bank).
Padre
XanEldarie wrote:
People in all professions with enough wisdom to use all given avenues are doing well enough to not have vendors at all.
Last time before I get impolite about it. You disagree with me? Fine. Does that make you 'wiser' than I? Hardly. I run quite the succesful business however, and have enough 'wisdom' to know how a change effects my business model, and I have enough 'wisdom' to have spoken to a number of other merchants about how this will affect their business model as well.
Reasons the AhaziTrade Boards are better than a vendor:
1.) It's free.
A vendor costs a miniscule amount in the big picture. Anyone that sells items for 3K or more can roll 3 sales a week into vendor maintenance and account for all vendor expenses +. Vendors are self-sustaining in that regard.
2.) It reaches alot more people alot faster.
That's not actually true at all. It's an accepted fact thatthe majority of the game's population never comes to the boards. So the global ad listing of a vendor + advertising in the major cities on a server will be accessible to a larger number of players than posting on the Ahazi trade board will.
Speed is also debatable. With resource sales, holocron trades, Krayt drop sales and lot trade offers, an advertisement on the trade board stays on the first page for a very short period of time. easily less than an hour.
3.) There's no cap, nor will there ever be one.
There's no cap on vendors now, and justifying a cap by saying there will be a cap is a rather circular argument.
4.) People can discuss a given item prior to purchasing it.
People can also discuss a given item by sending a tell to the Weaponsmith... they often do.
5.) Other servers can "peek in". This is good (and bad) in many ways. But I won't go into that.
Since I don't sell to other servers, there really isn't any benefit to me of other server players peeking in. They can't take my goods to their server, so they're not a 'market' I can reach. If they play on Ahazi, they can find my vendor on the global map on Naboo.
6.) No skill is required, outside intellectual prowess.
I disagree, knowing what to advertise on the trade channel makes a big difference between people ignoring you as an idiot, and people bothering to go by your store.
Need I go on?
Certainly, since none of your points have been all that valid. Let me go into a few reasons why a vendor is better than a trade board ad:
1) A trade board ad, for all that it can draw interest cannot sell items. A player cannot click on a trade board ad to buy an item, a player reading a trade board ad can't be certain that an item is still in stock. They still need to go to the vendor for that.
2) Customers cannot offer items of interest up to your trade board ad, for you to buy them later.
3) If you don't have a vendor (since your argument was that trade board ads are better you're suggesting them as an alternative to vendors, hence this argument), than you have to do all transactions in person, via the trade window. Which becomes a problem with customers of opposing factions and big ticket items since many people prefer not to carry a ton of credits around.
4) If you have a vendor, you can tend to the details of your business (crafting schematics, moving harvests, running factories) without having to stop each time to make a sale.
5) Thanks to the way code is, vendors don't take any skill points either.
Yes, ads in the Ahazi trade forum are useful.. I use them every now and then when I stock a new batch of sliced weapons. What you're not understand is that I'm not saying 'I can't run my business I don't have enough customers'. I'm saying 150 items per vendor is not enough for me to serve my customer base. Increasing the amount of advertising I do won't change that situation for the better.
The changes haven't been made. And this is for everyone, please stop complaining, because you all know the change is going to happen. A few people have already pointed out that the devs may not take into account who likes it and who doesn't. Why not be PROactive, instead of REactive, and come up with ideas that would help the overall situation at hand?
We have been proactive, we've suggested for quite sometime that they strip vendors from those people who've given up merchant. That alone would ease some of the vendor DB bloat. All an item cap will do is punish merchants that are succesful and dedicated.
Thunderheart wrote:
I agree. It's still early to commit and we're still accepting community ideas, by Ithink we're going to make it so that as merchants gain skill boxes, they gain the ability to put more items on their vendors. The lower and upper caps havent been established yet.
DocSavag is a strong voice for the Merchants and based on the correspondent issues, this change may include the fact that only merchants can have vendors.
I also like the idea of making it so when a merchant gains skill boxes they can gain the ability to display more items. I posted this idea as well.
Making it so only merchants can have vendors seems like a bad idea. You are gimping crafters even more. Not all crafters want to craft all the time, some like combat as well. Forcing them to get novice merchant and spending extra skill points to get a vendor takes away skill points they can use in combat skills.
If the decision is made to only allow merchants to have vendors, the vendor offer should be reworked. Merchants should be able to give partial control of their vendor to crafters. As it stands now, you can offer an item for the amount you want, merchant resells or offer for 1cr, and give stated priced you want to sell for, receiving money upon item being sold.
I suggest a commission fee placed on items that other crafters place on the merchant's vendor. Max the fee to some percentage, and only allow it to be changed when both parties agree. This does bring up a problem if a Merchant leaves the game. What would happen to the vendor, etc? But this does bring in a collaboration between merchants and vendors, more so than the current system.
I really dont have time to check out all the threads, nor the merchant forums, so I dont know if this has been suggested at all before. But when I mention it to my others online, they like the idea.
TH,
In response to the NEXT button issue, I have some suggestions for improving the bazaar and vendor terminals.
* Add another level of grouping -- give us Resource Containers->Mineral (Inorganic)->Steel for example. This will reduce the number of queries we make and reduce the returned dataset size.
* Give us a text search feature -- allow us to do a search for "Muon Gold" and get a complete list of all items that have those words in their name or "Variant of" name.
* Make factory crates appear in the category of the contents they contain -- Dont make use have to click on Factory Crates and search for muon gold through the scads of weapon powerups.
All of these will reduce the number of requests we make from bazaar and vendor terminals, as well the first 2 will reduce the dataset size since our queries will be more narrow in scope.
I think 99.99% of the people out there would agree with these requests and feel that these are features of the system that should have been in from the beginning. Since they will help SIGNIFICANTLY with the NEXT button issues, maybe now is the time to add them.
Thanks,
Radric Tycho, Eclipse
As long as we're talking vendor/bazaar issues....
Can I bring up the possibility of the following:
- Allowing items be posted in a "Reserved for _________" manner? (i.e. Being able to put up an item that can only be purchased/retreived by a very specific player? I see need for the all the time. Perhaps this could be the case for a 48 hour period, perhaps, then it goes into the 'anyone can have it' category.)
- Having the bazaar UI actually remember the manner in which the columns are set? It gets pretty tiring to have to manually adjust these each time I use a bazaar/vendor terminal.
Thanks for listening. Carry on...
/bow
Respectfully,
I would suggest limiting the number per item on vendors instead, but I would say about 200 would be reasonable