CUEmu - Thread Posts

FiveStars

Sat Aug 14, 2004 9:50 pm

Here are the 3 real reasons for the reduction of items per vendor and deleting vendors from those who dropped the Merchant profession.

Money, Money, and thirdly Money.
The strain on SOE’s Database servers has grown. The number of items in the game continues to grow thus putting a greater load on their servers.

There were 2 choices.
1. Spend more money on servers, so shareholders make just a little less money.
2. Screw you and me, they people who really pay their rent

Guys which one they chose?

Bluelagoon FiveStars
(Kauri)

RocketM

Sat Aug 14, 2004 10:54 pm

#2

The real reason for the nerf is the removal of maintenance fees on items way back when they did the last set of big merchant changes to help your sorry butt out. They overboosted merchants and now they are having to make some cutbacks to stop the database from choking.

During the initial development cycle, someone thought up a solid idea to keep vendors from being used for storage by charging us about 5% of the sale pricePER DAYto have an item for sale on our vendors. Under that system no one could use vendors for storage because it costed too much (except if you sold every item for 1 credit and put a 10 million credit entry fee on your house, which is no longer possible).We couldn't usevendors to sell thousands of useless junk items because that costed too much too. Vendors held items that would sell and make a profit for the owner and nothing else. It was a setup that solved all the potential problems of vendor overuse. The vendors themselves costed a heck of a lot more than they do now so they would decay a lot faster after you quit the game and not last another year or more.

I guess this situation was not ideal for some tailors or something so they scrapped this perfectly working system to implement changes that would pretty much guarantee massive database growth and cause all the problems we have now. The solution they have now is to make low item limits and again tailors wont be happy.Oh well.They should have just stayed with what they had because it was a solution that had been pre-designed toensure the database conservation that they need.

Zamphire8

Sat Aug 14, 2004 11:04 pm

#3

Some times throwing money at a database will not fix it. Is thier a bigger more accessed DB anywhere else? please enlighten me. I dont beleive they plan on nerfing the game to save 100k on some servers. I just don't think more servers will help thier DB issues? is it a Oracle DB? Maybe we should **edit** at them? But hay what the hell do I know.

Rock Ridge General Store And Mercantile
c:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::)-o)zzzzzzz)_)

MaDuece

Sat Aug 14, 2004 11:30 pm

#4

FiveStars wrote:

Here are the 3 real reasons for the reduction of items per vendor and deleting vendors from those who dropped the Merchant profession.

Money, Money, and thirdly Money.
The strain on SOE’s Database servers has grown. The number of items in the game continues to grow thus putting a greater load on their servers.

There were 2 choices.
1. Spend more money on servers, so shareholders make just a little less money.
2. Screw you and me, they people who really pay their rent

Guys which one they chose?

Bluelagoon FiveStars
(Kauri)

ARRRR! Capitalist pigs!

MUTANY! MAKE 'EM WALK DA PLANK!

burgerking

Sun Aug 15, 2004 1:08 am

#5

RocketM wrote:

Vendors held items that would sell and make a profit for the owner and nothing else.

Which is why it was such a crap system. To only stock your very best sellers seriously impedes customer choice and the quality of service you are able to offer.

Lojen - 12pt Master Droid Engineer

Co-Owner

7J&J's of Bestine8

Tatooine -1740 -3140

Droci

Sun Aug 15, 2004 2:21 am

#6

RocketM wrote:

During the initial development cycle, someone thought up a solid idea to keep vendors from being used for storage by charging us about 5% of the sale pricePER DAYto have an item for sale on our vendors. Under that system no one could use vendors for storage because it costed too much (except if you sold every item for 1 credit and put a 10 million credit entry fee on your house, which is no longer possible).

if they dont want us to store stuff on vendors, then where the heck do they want us to store stuff, once your houses, factory, and bank get full, vendors are the only option, do they not know about the storage problems many of us face

(Droci/Droku)

RocketM

Sun Aug 15, 2004 3:20 am

#7

burgerking wrote:

RocketM wrote:

Vendors held items that would sell and make a profit for the owner and nothing else.

Which is why it was such a crap system. To only stock your very best sellers seriously impedes customer choice and the quality of service you are able to offer.

*Any* effective limitation on vendor database space will limit the variety, but at its extremes more variety means more junk that no one would ever buy on the vendor -- more completely wasted database space.

Under the old systemyou could afford to sell *any* item that people were willing to buy, evenif it was a highly specialized item, as long as you charged a high enough price to cover a longer stay on the vendor tillit sold. You could even sell items that were very cheap without hurting your profitability, so long as people wanted to buy those cheap items. Over timevendors would gain in efficiency, selling exactly the things that people wanted to buy becausetherewas a monetary penalty for selling things that people didnt want.

The new system of hard-limiting the items doesn't encourage efficient use of vendors at all, but instead encourages people to only sell their most expensive items,the items with the potential to earn them the most money in one sale. Youmaynoteven be able tofind necessary but low-priced items on vendorsbecause no one will want to waste his limited space on an item with the potential to make so little money. Whichis better for the guy shopping, a vendor wherehe can findonly items thathe and other people want to buy, or one where he can only find onlyitems thatthe most expensive items that the crafter has to sell?

RocketM

Sun Aug 15, 2004 3:23 am

#8

Droci wrote:

RocketM wrote:

During the initial development cycle, someone thought up a solid idea to keep vendors from being used for storage by charging us about 5% of the sale pricePER DAYto have an item for sale on our vendors. Under that system no one could use vendors for storage because it costed too much (except if you sold every item for 1 credit and put a 10 million credit entry fee on your house, which is no longer possible).

if they dont want us to store stuff on vendors, then where the heck do they want us to store stuff, once your houses, factory, and bank get full, vendors are the only option, do they not know about the storage problems many of us face

They dont want you to store more stuff! They want to force you to be less of a packrat and use the space you have efficiently.

Mallstrop

Sun Aug 15, 2004 3:58 am

#9

Yeah, its designed to stop people storing things on vendors. I haven't seen the official reply onif bags of stuff count as 1 or many items but I sure do hope that they count as multiple items, like bags in your inventory.

Storage is designed to be limited, and I like it that way, at the moment I'm just selling off tons of old junk that I nolonger have room for. Although I don't like hoarding stuff that I think I might need in the future, it tends to happen when I see a bargain.

I think they should also nerf factory storage, its ok to leave things in the output hopper for a week or so until you need them, but sticking things into the input hopper as storage, I see as an exploit, using an undersight of the Devs for personal gain.

I say keep a very hard cap on the bussiness 3 items limit, stop people taking advantage of the vendor with minimal skills

Halle Oki on Chimaera - Bounty Hunter
******* Oki - Jedi
Icet Oki on Chimeara - Bio Engineer / Merchant (account closed)

RocketM

Sun Aug 15, 2004 4:03 am

#10

A bag only counts as only one item according to players on the test center. This change will not prevent people from storing items on vendors. You can still store 2500 items on one vendor even if you have a 50 item limit on your vendor if they are all in backpacks. It will prevent people from selling 2500 single items on their vendor but not from storing 2500 items. In that way it will be a failure at stopping vendor storage in a way that the original system would not fail.

Astrolite

Sun Aug 15, 2004 4:11 am

#11

What they need to do is give everyone X amount of storage. If you want to put all X items in one small house, that's fine - or use it in a vendor, etc. And give merchant a bonus on the value of X.

This would allow people to put down more harvestors and stop some of the lot exchanges across servers.

Also, if implemented, it's easy to scale since you would have tangible numbers to work with.

astro'lite

thegreyman

Sun Aug 15, 2004 4:21 am

#12

There are only two possible reasons for the merchant nerf:

1. Database issues.

SOE is either too cheap, lazy or incompetent to maintain a piece of technology that a first year college student can manage.

2. The Second account.

If you like PvE, PvP and crafting items, it will be impossible to play the game to your satisfaction. Devoting 49 skill points for 6 vendors to hold 660 items, plus an additional 77 skill points to master an elite crafting profession leaves 124 skill points that you can use to build a character with which you will actually PLAY this game. That is enough to master one elite combat profession with32 skill points left over to do with as you will.

Everyone who knows how to pvp knows you cannot pvp with only one elite combat profession and expect to win. Everyone who knows how to pve knows that with only one elite combat profession, gameplay gets stale, boring and repetative. And you can forget about a hybrid profession like commando or a profession that requires mastery ofa starting profession, such as doctor.

The bottom line is that you cannot enjoy the game as a whole if you have to devote the skill points to gain the ability to hire vendors to hold 660 items.

They want you to buy a second account.

Pure combat players may think they will not be affected by these changes...yes they can have a well rounded pve/pvp toon, but they do not participate in the crafting/merchant side of the game. What these players will find are vendors that do not have a large selection to choose from and they will ultimately have to spend much more time searching through vendors to find what they are shopping for. The player economy will implode.

The existing merchant system does not affect gameplay, so why do they declare the vendor cap an oncoming reality?

IMHO the real reason for these changes are a little bit of #1 (due to the expected influx of new JTL players), and a lot of #2...this is, after all, a busness, and the honchos at SOE may be feelingpressure from their corporate mastersas SONY stock closed today at $33.15US, down considerably from a five year highof $158.50US.

A final word of advice to the executives at SOE: Balance. Things in this game are broken and must be addressed. The combat balance, Dathomir, and GCW, for example are major issues that must be addressed.Assigning priority is the key.

Nerfing Merchant and revamping Image Designer (stat migration, et all) have as much of a beneficial effect on game play as changing the color of the login screen.

First they came for the Jedi and I did not speak out because I was not a Jedi.
Then they came for the Bounty Hunters and I did not speak out because I was not a Bounty Hunter.
Then they came for the crafters and I did not speak out because I was not a crafter.
Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Mallstrop

Sun Aug 15, 2004 4:24 am

#13

I think the only real solution is to make the bags count as the same amount of items as their contents. storing 50 extra items at Business 3 won't be worth people taking the skills for a storage vendor.

Halle Oki on Chimaera - Bounty Hunter
******* Oki - Jedi
Icet Oki on Chimeara - Bio Engineer / Merchant (account closed)

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Thread: The REAL reason for the Nerf!