Merchant Archive
Thread: Merchant needs help against SOE Mafia
Message Edited by Okeefe on 04-04-2004 07:18 PM
I agree, the dropping of items into the Stockroom is truely annoying. It's existance is entirely understandable, however it's implimentation is outrageous. I am a Tailor, so I sympathise with your predicament Okeefe, I also have hundreds of products (not only clothing) with individual pricing. Having to daily re-sell and re-priceeach item removes the enjoyment from the game. YES management is essential, but removing litterally hours of gameplay to simply re-sell is unnacceptable.
Presently I am very worried regarding the initiation of a future 'hotfix' to reduce the vendor limit to 100 or so items. Can anyone cofirm this is going to happen, even to a lesser extreme degree? If so, can we get some kind of deadline to have our stock sold. I don't want to end up with a thousand items I have no-where to put or sell.
I doubt it will be 100 items, but a limit is certainly being bandied about. 100 items wouldn't be worth setting one up and the vast majority of crafters would simply give up and quit.
Personally, I have just about had it with the crap this game doles out. I don't play a game to be aggravated by inane implemetation everywhere I turn.
Can't PvP as a crafter, or as any template other than the big 3. SOE making crafting as big a pain as it can. Merchant being a greif move. The extremely limited character building all done, does not leave much to do.
I said 'to hell with it' and just relisted all the items at one flat price. I couldn't be bothered to go in and reprice properly, would have taken me hours. So now some weapons are probably overpriced and the rest are at 'clearance prices'. I would prefer to do this on my own terms, but hey, the game is already tedious enough without being forced to relist dozens of items while the game has no tools to do it.
I deleted over a hundred crates of power ups. Not going to bother making them. They are a 'mass' stock type item and as such your bound to have lots still left every 30 days. Same with spice, although I will simply stock a lot less of most spice lines. This doesn't mean I will make it more often, as would happen in RL, and I were being paid, it just means that there will be gaps in the inventory from time to time. Many Artisan Items fall into this category as well. I will make what I need, stock a few leftovers, if and when I have them.
Okeefe wrote:I said 'to hell with it' and just relisted all the items at one flat price. I couldn't be bothered to go in and reprice properly, would have taken me hours. So now some weapons are probably overpriced and the rest are at 'clearance prices'. I would prefer to do this on my own terms, but hey, the game is already tedious enough without being forced to relist dozens of items while the game has no tools to do it.
I deleted over a hundred crates of power ups. Not going to bother making them. They are a 'mass' stock type item and as such your bound to have lots still left every 30 days. Same with spice, although I will simply stock a lot less of most spice lines. This doesn't mean I will make it more often, as would happen in RL, and I were being paid, it just means that there will be gaps in the inventory from time to time. Many Artisan Items fall into this category as well. I will make what I need, stock a few leftovers, if and when I have them.
Though I agree with the poor implementition I have found that the hooligans mess up the price tags but dont destroy them. If I click onthe item in the storeroom the most recent price is still on them. I have to "rewrite" the tag but since I sell in large groups I have gotten better at selecting an item setting the price then processing bunches of them. If I pull it into my personal inventory the price is lost. All this is a pain and needs to be fixed. Starting with getting the empire to catch the hooligans and stop the wholsale throwing inventory back into the stockroom.
-Indene-
Naufragus wrote:
our correspondant doest reallly seem to care about this issue
"storage" should not be an issue with vendors...as i said all the arguments do not hold water....it was just koster being mis informed...
if someone is just using the vendor for storage then all they have to do is just list the stuff for 25000000000000 or simply relist the items like all merchants are FORCED to do - but in my travels i have yet to see vendors being used mainly for storage...dint the fact that they made it so you couldnt have vendors in private homes really kill this issue
i aslo am troubled by these limits you keep talking about.....
the question should be acked of the devs, which is better 50 vendors with 100 items or 100 vendors with 50 items...
all item limitsis going to do is piss of merchants -we dont really want this - and increase the numer of vendors in the game
the 30 day time limit just needs to go (i also suspect that this one reason there are so many empty vendors...100 items delist and the people either dont have the energy to do it again or dont log in for a week and their stock is deleted so they give up)
Perhaps they should simply tie the time limits to how much vendor sells. For example if the vendor sells nothing, in a given time period, say 30 days, the items should be removed, whereas a vendor that sells over a million a month should be unlimited time, updated monthly.
Just an idea. This would differentiate somewhat between vendors used for sales, and ones used exclusively for storage.
I guess I need more explaination about why you would have massive amounts of items that take more than 30 days to sell. I'm not saying you are doing anything wrong but it is not the way I have done it or seen it done so I don't have a frame of reference to articulate the issue. I've seen posts claiming to have to reprice hundreds of items at a time. Why would you have such a large inventory of items that aren't selling month after month?
I can certainly see you having items that didn't sell but hundreds? Over and Over again? I'm missing some piece of the puzzle.
I will tell you that simply telling me you think the devs are wrong about storage issues or misinformed etc is useless information to me. I could repeat that to the devs but it would be a complete waste of everyone's time. They believe what they believe and they have the access to test their theories in ways that we don't have. Their opinion is that items on a vendor are supposed to be sold. They gave us 7 days originally and we lobbied for months to get it changed to 30. I'd wager that getting it raised higher than that will be a tough sell and before we try to sell it we need some examples of why it is a big issue and what game play issuesare driving the request.
As for features to make re-listing things easier I think that is possible and I would assume that any sensible redesign of the interface would include batch processing of multiple items at the same time. That will help with the job of re-listing items.
Message Edited by DocSavag on 04-10-2004 02:21 AM
"I guess I need more explaination about why you would have massive amounts of items that take more than 30 days to sell. I'm not saying you are doing anything wrong but it is not the way I have done it or seen it done so I don't have a frame of reference to articulate the issue. I've seen posts claiming to have to reprice hundreds of items at a time. Why would you have such a large inventory of items that aren't selling month after month? "
because, no matter how many items you stock a certain percentage is not going to sell, every month. Not the SAME items, just more items. So if you have 6 vendors with an average of 500 items each, for a total of 3000 items, and if you sell even 90% you will still have 300 times per month that have to be relisted. Now, if your lucky you can spread that out over the whole month.
Our group has aWeaponsmith, Armorsmith, Artisan, Smuggler, and Combat medic, all ofwhich have the capability of producing items for resale. This makes forlarger numbers than the ones in the example above. I know of vendors with over 2000 items on them, I, luckily don't have that many.
I can certainly see you having items that didn't sell but hundreds? Over and Over again? I'm missing some piece of the puzzle.
It's new items every month, does that make it easier to understand? They gave us FACTORIES!! you think we make production runs of 5 at a time? 50? 500? Personally, I use the factories only for subcomponents so I have lower inventories than most weaponsmiths, and yet I run into this. Not only the items, but the "'beep' Auction unsuccessful" emails every few seconds hour after hour, day after day.
"I will tell you that simply telling me you think the devs are wrong about storage issues or misinformed etc is useless information to me. I could repeat that to the devs but it would be a complete waste of everyone's time. They believe what they believe and they have the access to test their theories in ways that we don't have.""
Yes, and as we all know thier ideas bear little or no semblance to anything we could loosely call reality.
"Their opinion is that items on a vendor are supposed to be sold. "
Thier 'opinion' is irrelelevant. Reality is what counts, and if the people playing here are being upset by their ideas and opinions, then they need to change them. If they can show us ANY hard goods industry in the world that sells 100% of it's inventory every 30 days they may have some basis for thier opinion.... I suspect that this was simply implemented with the same lack of thought as most parts of the game. Some of those ideasmay sound good on paper, but have no basis in real time play.
"They gave us 7 days originally and we lobbied for months to get it changed to 30. I'd wager that getting it raised higher than that will be a tough sell and before we try to sell it we need some examples of why it is a big issue and what game play issuesare driving the request."
Ican't even imagine the lunacy that prompted them to set it at 7 days....
As with most aspects of this game. no thought, whatsoever, was put into customer service, or how the various parts of the game would add to , or detract from the 'fun' aspect. What has happened is that the game has turned out to be tedious and dull. It's more like dialing in to work.
The BIG question to ask SOE, is WHAT DID YOU EXPECT US TO DO AT THE END OF THE 30 DAYS??????
If they can answer that, then the rest may make sense, but I doubt it.
As for features to make re-listing things easier I think that is possible and I would assume that any sensible redesign of the interface would include batch processing of multiple items at the same time. That will help with the job of re-listing items.
DocSavag wrote:
I guess I need more explaination about why you would have massive amounts of items that take more than 30 days to sell. I'm not saying you are doing anything wrong but it is not the way I have done it or seen it done so I don't have a frame of reference to articulate the issue. I've seen posts claiming to have to reprice hundreds of items at a time. Why would you have such a large inventory of items that aren't selling month after month?
OK, why would I have such a large inventory of items that aren't selling month after month? I'm making low-cost items, such as shoes and sandals (using that as an example), and selling them for 500 credits each. They are worth 500 credits, no more and no less. I have a chain of stores, spread out over several planets. I stock about 24 of each shoe that I sell, in each vendor. I don't expect to sell all of them, but I need to have a lot on each vendor in case there are a lot of people buying shoes for some reason, plus not having to travel all over the place restocking every few days. I can't afford to set up a vendor with less than a thousand items on it, of all sorts of items. I'm not selling sets of armor for 100k plus, I'm selling things like shoes for 500 credits each.
I can certainly see you having items that didn't sell but hundreds? Over and Over again? I'm missing some piece of the puzzle.
Well, my customers don't bother looking to see which items have been on the vendor the longest, so are just as apt to buy what I just put on, as to buy what has been on there since I set up the vendor. As to the number of items, just think about having two dozen of each personal harvester (there are six personal harvesters), two dozen of each type of low-end clothing (shoes, gloves, helmet, belt, bandolier, pants, shirts, skirt, robe, etc.), two dozen boxes of droid batteries, two dozen each of different size boxes (not everyone wants to buy a crate of 50) of stim-A's, B's, and C's, plus the wound healing packs, bounty hunter droids, CDEF weapons (pistol, carbine and rifle), crafting tools (generic and specialty, and several different grades of each), surveying instruments, vehicles (three different kinds, at last count).
I will tell you that simply telling me you think the devs are wrong about storage issues or misinformed etc is useless information to me. I could repeat that to the devs but it would be a complete waste of everyone's time. They believe what they believe and they have the access to test their theories in ways that we don't have. Their opinion is that items on a vendor are supposed to be sold. They gave us 7 days originally and we lobbied for months to get it changed to 30. I'd wager that getting it raised higher than that will be a tough sell and before we try to sell it we need some examples of why it is a big issue and what game play issuesare driving the request.
I have never seen any explanation from the devs as to what they actually thought the vendors would be used for, that is, what dynamics they thought were going to occur. Information should be going both ways. However, it seems that a lot of information about the dynamics of the game is treated as "top-secret" and shouldn't be shared with players, because somehow that would "give away" the suspense of playing this game. So players have had to figure out their own ways of using vendors. The biggest issue that exists, in regard to vendors, is that most people really really want to buy items from the bazaar. They don't want to run all over the place, going from shop to shop, looking for a particular item. They want to be able to just go to the bazaar, look at the listings, and choose what they need. However, the bazaar limits a person to an extremely small offering, where we can only put up 25 items for sale in the entire galaxy. I could easily sell100 items per week in nearly every city in the galaxy. But, since I'm not allowed to do that, I set up a chain of stores, which most players really would rather not use (because the bazaar is much more convenient). And having a chain of stores, spread out all over the place, requires massive amounts of stock. One of the most common complaints about vendors is if they are empty. Empty vendors are bad vendors. So crafters are forced to overstock their vendors in order to keep the customer base happy. That is what drives the number of items on a vendor, is making sure there are a lot of items for customers to choose from.
The dynamics that were created by people having vendors is much more complicated than whatever was envisioned by the devs. And because of the poor implementation of the controls for using a vendor (for instance, it takes months before players learn that there is more than one page of items per vendor), the merchants have had to "make-do" with however they can manage.
You know, merchants would really like to be able to sell everything they put on their vendors, but the economy fluctuates, and people sometimes have a lot of money, and sometimes don't. And there will be times when there are lots of new players, and there will be times with very few new players. Some of my stores go for a month just selling a few items, and sometimes will sell several hundred items in a week. Depends on the economy, migration routes, moon cycles, and fads. You can't just say that I need to lower my prices, because my prices don't fluctuate, just my sales do. I just keep relisting the items as they fall off the vendors, and eventually they will sell. But I will keep adding to how much I have, in order to keep the stock up, in order to never have an empty vendor, in order to keep my customers happy. So in the end, I will always have to keep relisting items. It seems like the same items, because I keep the same things in stock all of the time, and I don't know whether one pair of shoes has been there for six months, or one month. It is just a pair of shoes.
As for features to make re-listing things easier I think that is possible and I would assume that any sensible redesign of the interface would include batch processing of multiple items at the same time. That will help with the job of re-listing items.
There have been a lot of really good suggestions made on the forums about how to improve vendors. The only one I have seen implemented was to have the time limit increased from 7 days to 30 days. It would certainly help the merchant community to have some sort of active debate with the devs themselves, about what should or should not be done about vendors. We debate amongst ourselves, out here in the forums, but never once have I seen anything that would indicate that the devs themselves would be willing to have interaction with the players on making decisions that will affect how the game is played. I don't know if that is done on purpose. I suppose that you, the correspondent, are supposed to be our intermediary. But from your comments, Doc, and with all due respect, I don't really feel comfortable with your understanding of the real issues going on. Nothing I have mentioned above is going to be new information for any of the merchants, but seems to be the first you have heard of it. I would venture to say, Doc, that your playing style as a crafter may be a bit different than others. That isn't bad, but you may be making assumptions about the rest of us that are not valid.