Development Cycle Archive
Thread: ID#2: Two Changes to Bazaars and Vendors
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.
oh tell me this ait so, I use a vendor to sell my wares, I dont mind having a big bulky vendor. if this is the case it is going to be more of a time sink to run to NPC bazzars to hock wares. not to mention if I say climb the DE tree I may also have to climb the merchant tree to to sell high end bots thus the need to drop my combat skills so I have the frilling skill points to have the skills jsut to sell crap.
If you really want to free up some database room, then get rid of the vendors that non-merchants have. People who have used the merchant tree to get their vendors and then after dropped the merchant tree completely. Those people should not have vendors any longer. I know that at least 30-40% of the vendors out there are ones that were placed by people who are no longer merchants.
This will solvea lot of the problem. Only allow vendors for those who actually have the merchant profession. I know this will happen sooner or later but this is the first thing that should be done before anything else. Half the database would be freed up if you took this step.
Just imho, but here goes!
Price raise...okay, I like this.
Limit things to 150? No, no, no, no! Not unless you're going to start either penalizing or removing empty vendors from the map. I can accurately keep track of how many times I've treked accross the waving grasslands of Coronet only to arrive at an *empty* vendor. If I manage to stumble accross a player with a well stocked shop I almost weep with joy and add that waypoint to my datapad. This will only cause those players who actually stock their shop to "baby sit" their shop more and it will probably run empty faster as a result.
Anyway, that's just my two credits. For what it's worth! 
IPourBooze wrote:
... in this game the creation of a Monopoly is IMPOSSIBLE. It really worries me that you threw this out there as a reason for these changes, it indicates that some serious groupthink is present in your organization. I suggest you look really hard at the team that made up these suggestions. It's obviously feeding upon itself and working up to a circular argument that can only mean future bad suggestions.
Some good points in this post on the monopoly issue. I didn't read the rest of it cause it was so long ( I skipped to the end).
However, one way of achieving a monopoly is by undercutting your opponents due to price advantages you may acquire by various means (import quotas, tarrifs, etc). Monopolies happen on the front end as well as the back end. If someone "owns" the local market it can give them an advantage that's impossible to overcome, especially in a non-full-fledged, semi-controlled economy like SWG.
As an example, compare a guild of crafters in a PA to a single crafter. If a guild of crafters have only one player who is a merchant, and he is able to list all of the items of the group on one or two vendors, they achieve a price advantage over the single player who pays the same price for a vendor, yet of course can't produce as much stuff. So you have economies of scale, etc.
In real life, if a store like Walmart wants to carry thousands of items, they have to pay for more real estate to stock it and display it. SWG vendors have no such restriction. Perhaps they should increase maintenance based on number of items in stock (rather than value, which we all hated).
This isn't a huge problem as I see it, but it is a valid concern.
That said, I too think it's mainly a database issue and someone is looking for a justification to cut down the number of items hanging around again. Personally I know someone who keeps hundreds of items in a vendor for storage, and that's definitely against the spirit of what they wanted vendors to be used for.
Mongobob said:
"I may also have to climb the merchant tree to to sell high end bots"
Reply:
That's the point. You dont use a flame thrower without being a commando, why should you get a vendor without being a merchant? Make the class count for something.
/sarcasam on
Heck, maybe you could sell your bots to a MERCHANT for RESALE. There's an ORIGNINAL IDEA.. we could call it a STORE and you could be a SUPPLIER. Crazy, but it just might work!
Thunderheart wrote:
..., 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.
Bravo!
Outstanding!
I believe that someone on the SWG dev team was thinking this when they proposed these changes.
RaiCella wrote:
Heck, maybe you could sell your bots to a MERCHANT for RESALE. There's an ORIGNINAL IDEA.. we could call it a STORE and you could be a SUPPLIER. Crazy, but it just might work!
I like the idea of increasing the cap on the Bazaar. Not that it affects me very much. With a limit of 6k I might start selling more furniture on the Bazaar, but probably not.
Limiting the stock on vendors (on each vendor, I assume) to 150 would be a problem for me because of the number of different kinds of furniture I need to carry. I try to keep 3-4 of the rarely purchased items in stock and 10-20 of the common items. It totals up to 400-500 pieces of furniture.
I've split my furniture across 3 vendors. The difficulty is figuring out how to split them up in a way that makes sense to customers. I'm not sure its POSSIBLE to split 450 pieces of furniture up on 4 vendors in a way that makes sense and puts no more than 150 pieces on any vendor.
Idea 1: Splittable Crates
If your goal is to make vendors easier to use and to reduce database size, here's a suggestion: allow merchants to put crates into a vendor in such a way that customers can buy items out of the crates rather than a crate at a time. For exmaple: add a new check-box on the 'sell item' dialog to enable customers to break apart a crate. The customer would then be allowed to split the crate and pay for the contents pro-rata.
Idea 2: Larger Crates
While we're at it... one way to make the database a LOT smaller would be to allow factories to put up to 1000 items into a crate, regardless of complexity, or to allow merging of crates.
If you did both of these things, I would probably go from about 800 items in the database to about 200: it would save a huge amount of vendor space and a fairly large amount of working storage for subassemblies. It would also produce a huge reduction in database churn: instead of shoving 10 crates of 100 structure modules into a factory and getting out 10 crates of 10 walls, for example, I'd shove 1 crate of 1000 modules in and get 1 crate of 100 walls out, cutting the DB workload and item count by a factor of 10.
Idea 3: Auto-Stacking in the Interface
A third idea which would make the user interface work a lot better: for a given vendor, allow the system group items having the same schematic and name. Instead of displaying 20 items called 'Torch', have it display 1 item called 'Torch (20)'. The reson for grouping by schematic AND name: If you only group by schematic, It will group a BER-13 heavy mineral with a BER-7 heavy mineral, which is bogus. This puts the onus on the merchant to name things sensibly... but most of us do anyway. If you only group by name, then dissimilar items having the same name (e.g. the four different 'Loveseats') will group together.
This idea is a bit harder to implement than the others and doesn't help the database, but it would probably help the interface pretty significantly.
I hope this helps.
I'm all for raising the Bazaar price limit, after all, it used to be supposedly 10,000 wasn't it...only in practice it was actually 3000. 3000 credits isn't that much nowadays and the stuff on the bazaar is often not worth buying anymore...raise the cap and more valuable stuff will appear for the public to browse and buy.
As for the limit, I don't have a vendor so my opinion shouldn't count as strongly as that of someone who does...but I think that 150 items is too few for a vendor. A limit is reasonable, but 150 seems a bit low. In my experience, about half the vendors I have visited have been completely empty and I'm willing to bet this is because things just sell fast.
The vendor item level cap is a horrible idea. It will penalize those merchants and crafters who try to run vendors where a large variety of inventory is necessary--I'm thinking of tailors, especially, since I am one, but I can think of situations where it could also easily hurt furniture making architects and weaponsmiths, and probably some others that just aren't occuring to me (pretty much anyone who makes and sellsitems that aren't fungible). Tailors can't make do with a single vendor having a 150 item cap--it just can't be done. There are well over 200 individual patterns and many, many different colors, and even if you only stock popular patterns in popular colors, you're looking at 5 to 8 of each popular article. You're just not going to be able to keep it down to 150.
Nor can you easily get around the problem by supplying a master merchant. I gave up my merchant skills so I could keep master tailor, master a combat profession for guild hunts, and still keep up minimal dancing skills (I belong to a guild with an entertainment focus). I started vending through a master merchant guildmate who also sells for one of our doctors and our armorsmith; she keeps a single vendor for me that I supply with merchandise. Even keeping a limited amount of inventory on it means, for a tailor, 250-350 items. She'd have to give up two of her vendor slots just to keep a full line of my clothing in stock, and that would mean dropping one of her other vendors.
This is a BAD idea. It's a terrible idea. Don't do it.
If you do, I'll adapt--I'll go solely to custom orders. But that pretty much means tailoring will become a hobby for me, not a profession.
Quit mucking with your system and screwing up crafters. Your crafting and vending system is probably the single best (certainly the most unique) part of this game; why do you seem so intent on breaking it?
As to item caps.... As a -melee- weaponsmith (One of the few) I have alot to stock... almost always 300+ items daily are in stock on my vendor... and I don't have nearly the variety that an Armorsmith, Ranged weaponsmith, Tailor or Medic would need.
I think that a cap would be a -good- thing if only to limit database size -- which we know to be problematic for you.
However, with a vendor limit should come a house storage increase... or better yet, allow the stockroom to actually be a stockroom. Allow us to put crates of items in there and have the vendors automatically pull items for sale (Perhaps a flag to sell as crate or in singles... or maybe we just have to stock crates manually.. dunno).
Furthurmore, I must agree with what was stated before -- allow the cap to increase as part of merchant skills (I am NOT a merchant nor do I intend to be one, ever, but they do deserve something).
Ok, I have to chime in here. At first I brushed off these changesas a being a done-deal anyway, but thinking through the impacts, I want to voice my disagreement withwhat is suppose to being solved here and the impact these will have.
1. Raise bazaar limit to 6K
While tons of people are saying yes to this, the reality is, this change will have a lot of negative impacts
- Resource prices will rise more (more of the people using vendors to sell athigher prices will move to the bazaar which will then drive up the pricing of the part-time resource suppliers). We have too much price inflation occuring already in the game (Lowca).
- This will move a ton of current vendor only items onto the bazaar and out of the player cities
- This will establish the 'new' price cap for various items reducing their current value (i.e. weapons that generally sell for 7-10K will migrate to the 6K maximum as everyone will get use to buying only from the bazaar for those items)
- This will further reduce the need to pickup merchant skills
Sorry, but this suggestion really goes back to the overall fundimental problem of what is the role of the bazaar in the game world versus the vision for player shops. The only reasons people really want this is to,
- Reduce the need to use a vendor or hire a merchant
- Avoid traveling all over the galaxy only to find empty vendors (convienence)
2.Applying item caps based on Merchant skill
My first real reaction is, what are we really trying to fix here. If it's a database problem, this will not solve it at all. My gut says all that will be accomplished with low caps is more player frustration, a huge increase in cross-server bots and all the surplus items moved into houses.
As to the monopoly comment, as many have pointed out, there is no such thing as a monopoly because a PA can load up a vendor with 3000 items everday. The only monopolies SOE has provided is specific extremely high-value drops on specific mob that ALWAYS spawn in known location (i.e. Krayts). While there are some special loot drops around for sale, the majority are farmed regularly by organized groups that can then allow their crafters to produce high-end items on a consistent basis, thereby creating a false impression that they are better than the other Masters.
I can understand an overall cap, but the basic cap proposal is probably too low for most crafters. Storage is a huge problem for crafting professions.
3. Limiting vendors to Merchants only.
I strongly urge you to stand back and think about what you really want accomplished in the long term. There are many problems with Merchant (primary being there is no real value or enjoyment from having the merchant skill, Ad3 being the most useful today), but attempting to solve the overall Merchant profession problem by restricting vendors to Merchants only will have a huge impact on player shops and player cities.
The problems with Merchant need to be addressed by adding new worthwhile abilities and activities to the professsion and not something that is essentially a huge nerf the majority of small crafters. While people love to say hire a merchant. It is already too time consuming to be an active crafter and shop owner, coordinating with another player every day to restock a vendor and the various payments involved is just too much additional frustration and burden. Before any change like this is brought in, the ability for a Merchant to 'rent' a vendor to a player that they can maintain is key.
In summary,
1. Raising the bazaar limit will be seen in hindsight as a huge error in regards to progressing the reason to have a player city or shop.
2. Putting a low cap on vendors will not resolve any database bloat but annoy a lot of players
3. Limiting vendors to Merchants is not something that should be done until Merchants can 'rent' a vendor to another player.
Merett, Lowca
Master Weaponsmith (former Master Merchant)
Bazaar change = Fine, BUT JUST round it off to a more EVEN number like 10k instead of 6k, that way people can put better blocks of supplies / resources like chunks of 5k power for 10k credits , alot better for the seller AND the buyer.
Proposed vendor change = BAD BAD BAD, there is already extremely limited inventory space in the game as it is, Large houses only hold 150 items for example, yet take up double the lot space of a medium house, and medium housing has 150 item limits. This will be a HUGE nerf to crafters, use a lame excuse like trying to cut down on MONOPOLIES, is completely rediculas, we could say lets put a cap on the Number of dev Ideas out there, and stop their monopoly on the gamers.
Here are a list of reasons why capping vendors to 150 items, is bad....
#1 Adds more work to the game, instead of GAMING, not only do crafters have to worry about locating resources, paying maintance running around the galaxies to tend to their harvestors, houses, vendors, merchant tents, and all other cash losses to keep up with their demands, but now they will have to STOP any progress in making goods, till their vendors free up more space.
#2 Enforces yet even more 24/7 logging into the game, forget about taking a break, because we (SOE) want to consume not only your waking life but your sleeping life too, forget about taking a couple days away from the computer, because we want you to micro manage EVERY SINGLE aspect of this game.
#3 Will add yet more bugs to vendors, will make gamers have to file more I LOST items on my vendor tickets.... Every change to "Fix a Problem" tends to only create more hassle and problems.
#4 Players that specialize in making odds and end items, like Power-Ups, Droid Batteries, Fireworks, Fishing Gear, Clothes, Repair Kits, or even Components, will be hit the hardest, as they will now be unable to maintain a good stock for the 100s of customers they service.
#5 This will make the merchant profession EVEN MORE USELESS!! There already is limited reasons to maintain merchant skills, lets just NERF the broken class to pert near uselessness.
#6 This WILL EFFECT every gamer in SWG, Adding MORE work to crafters to try and maintain an inventory on vendors, will enevitably make crafters become even more frustrated with the game, and they will lose interest in crafting, because they have no space to store their goods, thus, with less product in the game, prices increase for the combatants, not to mention more and more crafters will just quit the game..... No crafters = No weapons/armor = Nothing to make money from the missions from. So all you non-crafters saying i think its fair to nerf vendors need to really evaluate how it will trickle down to you, and how YOU will like it when your weapons and armor falls apart and there's no one wanting to craft for you anymore.
#7 Yet another nerf to tip people from playing the game, which will reduce SOE revenues.