Development Cycle Archive

---

Thunderheart said:

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.

---

Only merchants, acutaly buiness III or was it IV get them to.

My input.

I like the changes for the bazar, like has been said, prices have inflated, you cant sell as much for 3k anymore.

I dislike the vendor changes, reasons allready said by others.

My suggestion.

Extend the ability of vendors. Allow whenyou list a item, say a crate of powerups, 500 for a crate of 10, whenyou list there is a areato add additional items(in thise case more crates). This lists the crate, teh price, and a number available, the rest are put in stockroom. that way listings can be minimized, yet restocking wont be so bad. also add so that the stockroom screen can have either a add, or drag and drop to restock the stockroom.

Along the same lines same mechanics, but add a color choice for tailors (or anything with color choices) and you have one entry for hotpants, and once clicking on the color icon next to it are shown available colors, chose one and your taken to the detail tab for it, can view the color and purchase. this solves those problems, hopefully withought much work.

Another way to reduce the DB burden would be to allow resources of the same type to stack together, regardless of quantity. If they're so worried about the capacity issue, they can code it so resources take up 1 Inventory slot per 100,000 units, but still only appear as a single item.

Here's another one :: allow us to combine crates of identical items, and recrate singles.

My thoughts (as a non-master armoursmith and merchant)on the suggestions:

Bazaar Cap: Strongly Against

I can see this idea eroding the ability of non-master craftsmen to make any money from vendor sales. With the current 3k limit I can make and sell low-end armour in my shop and make a living out of it. If the limit were increased more of the things I can make and sell would be in the price bazaar range. Who is going to trek out to my shop when they can pick the same stuff up at any bazaar?

I cannot see how increasing the bazaar limits will help object counts if the intention is to shrink the database. If the limit doubles people will have twice as many bazaar-eligible items to sell.

Vendor Limit: Strongly Against

This would be bad for all serious sellers. Currently I am selling Bone (2 colours), Mabari (8 colours)and Chitin (3 colours) armour without any duplicates I am already at 100 items for sale.As I progress up towards master, I am going to have another 4 types of armour in various configurations (layers, materials, coloursetc.) and PSGs. I don't think even at master merchant with 6 vendors @ 150 items per I will have enough space.

If I only restock once per day I will just have to hope the business is slow enough that I don't lose any sales from selling out of anything people want. Lost customers from empty or low stocked vendors are almost impossible to win back.

If the intention is to stop everyone from stocking 1000s of items, why not just tie vendor capacity to skills (merchant tree would be best). Those that want huge vendor inventories will pay skill-points to have them, while the majority of players will either carry smaller stocks or use a merchant to sell their wares. How about letting more advanced vendors hold larger inventories, ie. Bulky 150, Droid 300, NPC 500 and so on.

Given the choice I would stick with what we have as neither idea appeals at all. Perhaps if something similar was proposed with a simultaneous patch to give the poor Merchants some more love it would get more backing.

Another point that i dont think anyone has mentioned. (Talk about a bold statement)

Assume this new cap does go through at 150 items. (or merchant only vendors, whatever). What happens

1) First wave of people who drop accounts/quit crafting

2) Economy Rollercoasters as supply is destroyed

3) Economy levels off and a new flood of merchants are created to accomplish the required # of items for a store. If someone is selling 1000 items now, they are going to still sell 1000 items post patch, because they need to sell a 1000 items. So yes, skills and player alliances will migrate to allow that to happen.

4) The business of the people who quit the game/crafting moves to those who remain, requiring them to increase what they carry.

5) Bottomline - After a short term reduction in database records, they will return if not exceed pre-patch levels, because the DEMAND is still there.

If anything this increases what you improperly call a monopoly as only dedicated players can properly stock stores.

All this changewill lead to is Whack-A-Mole problem fixes.

Why it should be a price limit on Bazaar ? But well, at least 6K will be better.

But NO PLEASE, don't set a cap on vendor... what 150 objects ? Nothing, I wil have to fill it each hour or so....

Technical issue ? Add more clusters....

I like the Bazaar change, I would even raise it to 10K. I'm an MBH, I have no vendor but in my travels I get lots of resources that people want. It will be nice to not have to split things up quite so often now. I don't feel 10K is to high, it will give players a chance to put items on the Bazaar they normally would not have to get better exposure for their vendors.Any changewill of course raise the amount of inventroy on the Bazaar, can we get a better way to sort through it all ?

The second change is good for the reason stated, ease of use.

---

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.

---

Question: Is either the bazaar/merchant issue presented in this thread a top 5 issue for merchant? (highly doubtful) If not, why are we wasting time on this?

Comment: Stop taking away functionality. Merchant needs unique, desirable abilities of their own, not just stealing them from other professions. All this reminds me of colored text. Removed, without warning, and 'supposedly' going to be a merchant thing. Stop it.

Why have a limit on the bazaar at all? Or at least take away the limit for resources, so people who want to sell their meat at 30 cpu (a reasonable price, imho) don't have to split it up into tiny little chunks. There's a great solution to you DB problem right there -- bigger chunks = fewer chunks.

great idea, encourages more bazaar sales, maybe ill find more stuff without having to run through the country side hoping to find a vendor that may or may not exist.

secondly i hate scrolling through the pages, BUT. i think it would be better to maybe put a certain ammount of similar items on there, then when one is sold, the next simlar will fill its slot. if that makes sense.

other wise the vendonrs will run out quick.

for exmaple, a vendor has 60 stim packs, rather than have 60 stims packs, have 1...when it is sold, the next stim pack fills its slot. they would all be the same quality though, so you wouldnt miss out that way.

Here is something else that should be considered for vendors...

A better way of handling resources.

Resources can be a pain in the but. Sure, you can sell really large blocks of goods (100k units) for a great deal, but then you loose the business of those that only want a few k, and can't afford larger blocks. Keep everything in smaller blocks, and the person who wants 200k has to make 40 seperate purchases.

I run a vendor for a miner friend, and sell his resources for him. Generally I split a 100k block into 5k, 5k, 10k, 10k, 20k, 50k. Beyond that, if there's more 100k blocks, I put them up as 100k, and work to keep the smaller blocks in stock (if the 5k's sell out, I split some larger blocks, to keep a full spread).

Basically, I'm trying to do something that a vendor ought to be able to do on it's own... sell the customer the amount they want to buy. It would be incredibly helpfull if I could sell a 100k unit resource container as a splittable resource, rather than as a singular item. When you sell it, you set the price per unit, the minimum purchase amount, and the unit increment.

For instance, I can set 5 credits per unit, a minimum of 5k units, at an increment of 5k units.... it would then take one slot on the vendor, and when someone goes to buy it, they get the option of buying 5k, 10k, 15k, on up to the full 100k, paying anywhere from 25k credits to 500k credits.

This would be a tremendous help, not only to myself, but to my customers as well. It would make things easier to read and browse through, and allow me to place even more product for sale, while taking less database space (one sale of one resource container with a few special options, rather than as many as 6 different sales of 6 different resource containers).

Thank you,
Lazarus Long

The bazaar change is fine. Even raising it to 10k would be a better improvement. People have been asking for this change since the first weeks of the game. I believe the ONLY reason you are finally putting this in, is not because it's a great idea (which it is), but rather it's like giving a kid a sucker after he's been to the dentist.

The dentist part is the second proposal of limiting vendors to 150 items.

This is an incredibly STUPID idea!! The crafters that actually work their butts off to make sure their vendors are always stocked fully, will now have to check their vendors several times a day instead of just stocking up once a day with a lot of items.

You Dev's seriously NEED to play the game for more than a few minutes at a time.

A GOOD crafter can sell 500 items in a matter of hours if they have produced something exceptional.

Sure that guy that's selling grinding ore on his vendor for 20cpu doesn't have to worry about restocking his vendor because his items aren't flying off the vendor.

You Dev's keep making change after change after change that does nothing more than make this game a time consuming drudgery.

When will you learn that people play the game to have fun.. not to have more stress and work, than they actually have AT WORK!!

Pull your heads out of your asses for once and listen to the players!

BTW we STILL want to be able to color our items that we craft! How many thousands of posts did the people that PAY to play this game ask for that to be reverted.

Maybe you should have thrown that in as a carrot to sweeten this stupid a.s.s deal.