Development Cycle Archive
Thread: ID#2: Two Changes to Bazaars and Vendors
Ya know, why dont you P.O.S. idiots who made this P.O.S. game just get rid of the player run economy all together, since you are gonna turn that into a P.O.S. too.
You say you want to listen to your playerbase, but I think the egos of your lead producers are enormous and need to have some hot air let out of them. They do what they want to this game and they don't seem to give a crap about the playerbase, nor are they in touch with the playerbase. So please, do yourselves a favor, and for lunch today eat a big P.O.S.
ockeew wrote:
having been to eolas a bunch... I will say that I only shop vendors who are known to be in stock. eola even wtih his huge list here... still sells as fast as he can make the stuff. why? cause he makes top grade stuff. anyone who knows anything, knows that the best sell fast. granted I've been to other WS vendors, some well stocked, some not. I don't go back to non stocked vendors, espeically not ones that aren't stocked 2x when i go. the nerf gods should leave vendors alone... and if they want to start breaking things, they should start to fix the database by hiring a database engineer, not by limitign vendors.
Hi Ibab 
.
Just a reference for folks in the monopoly argument? Ibab buys a lot of stuff from me, he likes the stuff I make, doesn't stop him from shopping elsewhere to. Not a monopoly, merely a good business. I invite anyone to come by tonight and watch my fun late night of crafting, once I finish finding spots for my harvesters on Corellia that is .
love the increase on the bazaar
Hate the decrease on the vendor item ammount. Alot of people dont have enough skill points to obtain merchant skills to get more vendors. This would imo hurt alot of peoples sales. Also i feel that people like the unlimited items you can put on a vendor to be used as an extra storage place. I can easly fill my house (a large) and my bank and then if i need to use harvesters i can only place a vendor to hold my extra items. So please dont decrease item storage on vendors.
I just caught a post saying only merchants would have vendors...
Right so in order to sell my spices,slicing kit,weapon upgrades etc i have to dump all my combat classes and just sit in a room and run to a factory evreytime i log into play? Glad i spent my money every month then because that sounds to be great fun
Heres a tip for the DEVs stop altering this ridiculous proposal and listen to what the majority of us are saying...
LEAVE IT ALONE!
I am so sick of huge gaming companies like sony forcing me to play what i thought would be an enjoyable game their way
If this goes ahead i will cancel my subscription and play something enjoyable its getting to the point that theres no point any more!
Second tip for the DEVS- try playing this game for 2 months as a player and see how much YOU enjoy it
Utterly disgusted now
Mor-Dan wrote:
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
Everything I make sells. So it is not wasted space.
Honestly,
I don't see that TH is actually listening to our overall comments orpointed analysis. He grabbed onto ONE ideaposted and decided to run with it. And now he's talking about removing thevendor skills for Business?!?!
I just don't understand why they don't just fess up and say the following:
"Folks, we have a crappy database that cannot be upgraded (no capital for it), so we need to do something to reduce the number of items in the galaxies or the crashing as seen in Bria will continue. Please help SOE come up with solutions that do not adversely affect classes if at all possible. We will run this thread for three days, run a poll for one on the login page, and then attempt a few fixes to the database"
You SOE folks would earn TONS of respect and probably USEFUL ideas that you could then attempt to implement.
Essentially they're talking about gutting merchant. We're only supposed to have one shop now? Instead of several across the galaxy? So people have to spend a minimum of 2500 credits to get to a shop of a vendor they like and trust for something that might only cost a 1000 credits itself?
They still have never corrected the 75/lot 250/max issue for houses, so we see people using vendors for storage.
Let's break down the issues as posted:
Database difficulties: Performance and query-based issues. Nothing we can do there. SOE need to get some hardcore Oracle properllerheads to come in and optimize. Oracle does backend DB work for thousands of sites with many manymore queries per sceond than this palce.
People storing items in vendors for non sales: Usually because there is such a low limit on housing lots that people can't even decently decorate their own homes!
Fix: Have a max sales value for items in the vendors. Say, 1 million credits, anything else would have to be bartered for directly. Return housing limited to the promised values.
People cannot find items: Again a SOE issue, since the queries do not reach across all results in the query, just the first 100 returned results. Also, the next page does not work properly since the queries manage the results in such a way that if you hit next after C for copper, you may end back up with A for aluminum.
Fix: Correct the queryies in the DB, and test in TC keyword searching, additional categorization, and proper categorization fixes for all items (you know so crates go in the categories they are from, etc)
People are creating monopolies: I cry "Dewback Cookies" on this one. There is NO WAY this is accomplished anywhere in the various galaxies. There is no way to monopolize resources of an entire galaxy, let alone monopolize crafting sales or other people's merchants.
Fix: None, a perception rather than a fact.
There are too many items for the DB to handle: This is related to the database, but perhaps reducing the number of live items will help.
Proposed fixes:
- Allow stacking of like items in vendors and the bazaar with a set price per item, with selection for minimum order #.
- Remove vendor interaction and then eventually vendor storage for people who do not have the proper skills for the number of vendors present. This forces the items to be sold or deleted fairly quickly.
- Allow PC stacking of non crated items, but still have the stacks take up inventory space. Reduces item "count" while keeping inventory space"
- Allow junk dealers to buy all types of items, not just ones labelled 'junk' for a small but non-useless amount of credits. perhaps .5-1 cr/crafted resource used. newbies would be able to make some cash, and extra items would be deleted.
- Reduce the amount of garbage 'drops'. This is a hard habit to break for all the EQ playertypes who want the 'phat lewt' but it might reduce the amount of cruft in the DB.
- Allow items with color palletes to have one time choice configuration options, so that tailors, ws, DEs, etc do not have to stock 100's of items just to have a decent color representation. You're doing this with composite armor atm, so it can obviously be done. (tailors and such still have 100's of possible items though)
- Ask players to delete items in their houses and inventories as a part of the "clutter removal" campaign
- Give more of a reward for practice mode crafting so less people grind and produce 100's of junk items which the get dumped on the economy.
Proposed Merchant changes to help with the issue while not gutting the profession and other crafting/non-combat classes: (ideas only, not saying they all have to fly)
- Allow consignment sales, ala Offer at set price, with Merchant configurable comission percentage
- Allow Draznar's "business/merchant skill based item amount per vendor", though I prefer it spread across the business/merchant trees instead of just up one branch. (perhaps 100 to start in Biz 3 and +25 per vendor for each tree in merchant
- Allow transshipment of goods to any bazaar terminal in the galaxy, based off a percentage of sale price. That 500 credit item is cheap (say 525 credits total), the 200k one might be better to pick up yourself.
- Allow vendors with planetary listings show up in the bazaar terminals.
- Show number of items in vendors in paraenthesis. Vendor A (2) Vendor b (2000)
- Remove items that win auctions from bazaar display.
- Have a "stockroom" building for merchants where they can store and stock to vendors on same or other planets. If they reach capacity, they risk losing expired sales after 2-3 days.
- Delete items that are not picked up from the bazaar after 3 days.
- Improve database sorting and querying so that people can find what they want easily.
Honestly, I'm expecting that this will go through in such a way that Merchant and noncombat classes are hideously nerfed, essentially for no good reason other than SOE cannot deal with tehcnical issues before they become crises. We've been telling them for ages that allowing stackable like items would reduce count, but they didn't want to listen.
Hopefully I'm wrong and they listen to many of the brilliant ideas other people have posted and try those solutions first... but TH and the rest of SOE forums crew do not inspire confidence in me. They too often have ignored well thought out solutions for what is convenient and easy for them, while penalizing and limiting play in this game.
--D'Ruk of iD Co., Corbantis
This is a great idea! In addition to this, you should be able to pull up a small menu that shows what colors the seller has put up on the merchant as well. So, let's say you want a revealing flesh wrap. You select the flesh wrap from the vendor, hit a button that says something along the lines of "available colors", select the color from a list of the colors available for that item, and then hit purchase. I'm not sure how much this would help the database issues, because you can't have multiple colors with the same serial number, but it should help the interface problems that they're attempting to fix here.
Katmer wrote:
Jeeebs wrote:
I sell Resources... mainly in lots of 5k-25k... just b/c people dont need that much of the same item once and a while... Right now i have roughly 8 million resource units for sale on 2 vendors... Now at the breakdown of on a average of 10k per lot thats 800 items... That is roughly 5.5+ vendors i would need... Now i have master merchant so 6 vendors isnt a problem for me... HOWEVER... I do sometimes have 10 million resources and i wouldnt beable to place them all on the vendors for people to purchuse... AND if i was to put them in my little tent (b/c i need the other lots for harvs) I dont even have enouf room to store everything...
As I wrote before, the fundamental problem is one of DESIGN.
I sell resources as well. A LOT of them. One of the fundamental design flaws is that there is no user-selectable QUANTITY field for purchases.
That forces us (if we want to provide good customer service) to often put in many, many lines in our vendor, all associated with THE SAME RESOURCE.
Powerup vendors run into the same problem.
The solution to DRASTICALLY reducing the load on the database is to allow us to load our items into the vendor and CONSOLIDATE identical items into just ONE LINE, and specify a price per unit.
Then the user simply buys however many they want, by specifying their quantity.
If you have 2.5 million units of BadDatabaseDesignium, you should be able to display it on your vendor as a single line, and the database should store it that way. When a customer wants some for a small order, and they need exactly 7650 units of it, they can buy PRECISELY THAT AMOUNT from you, without having an untold number of extra lines consumed.
Database load is greatly reduced, customers find exactly what they need MUCH faster and easier, and you don't have to worry about stocking and restocking the wrong quantities for your customer's needs.
It's a complete win-win, and almost certainly eliminates the perceived NEED for a cap. Everyone gets helped, and most importantly, NO ONE GETS HURT with this solution.
Please, Devs. Just fix the interface and instance storage problems, instead of slaughtering successful sellers in the name of improved performance.