Merchant Archive
Thread: Item Limit on Vendors is a very, very, very bad idea
p4Samwise wrote:
Make it a credit limit instead of an item limit. Neatly solves the problem of using vendors for storage, doesn't penalize bulk sellers.
That depends on what they are selling.
I will admit that I am leary of item limits because they seem to disproportinately hurt certain crafting professions, like tailor. If they scale the limits properly, it probably won't kill anyone (except perhaps the business-3 only merchant).
Credit limits, on the other hand, clearly discourage the use of vendors for storing high value items, such as that +25 weapons experimentation skill tape (though I don't think I'd be putting that on a vendor anyway). But now it potentially punishes high dollar crafters, such as architects (or resource merchants or sliced armor vendors, etc). But again, I suppose that this could be scaled, so any merchant who must deal in high dollar items would have to pay the skill point cost.
In the end, if any limit affects my own business, I will simply scale back my business to meet the caps and probably live a lower-stress existence in SWG.
p4Samwise wrote:
Make it a credit limit instead of an item limit. Neatly solves the problem of using vendors for storage, doesn't penalize bulk sellers.
That penalizes big ticket sellers like Architects and Armorsmiths and it smacks of price controls.
I don't support vendor item limits but I know we are going to get them eventually in some form or the other because "unlmited" is just not going to last. I hope it isn't as bad as they have proposed in the past and I hope that the change creates opportunities for independant merchants to take up the slack in selling items.
DocSavag wrote:
p4Samwise wrote:
Make it a credit limit instead of an item limit. Neatly solves the problem of using vendors for storage, doesn't penalize bulk sellers.
That penalizes big ticket sellers like Architects and Armorsmiths and it smacks of price controls.
I agree, the price control aspect is undesirable... but I don't think it's all that unfair to Architects and Armorsmiths. Presumably they sell a smaller number of high-ticket items, and it'd more or less balance out with the higher numbers of small-ticket items sold by other crafters.
If this is not the case (and one crafting profession inherently tends to make more money than another in a given period of time), perhaps some balancing needs to be done elsewhere in the game.
p4Samwise wrote:
DocSavag wrote:
p4Samwise wrote:
Make it a credit limit instead of an item limit. Neatly solves the problem of using vendors for storage, doesn't penalize bulk sellers.
That penalizes big ticket sellers like Architects and Armorsmiths and it smacks of price controls.
I agree, the price control aspect is undesirable... but I don't think it's all that unfair to Architects and Armorsmiths. Presumably they sell a smaller number of high-ticket items, and it'd more or less balance out with the higher numbers of small-ticket items sold by other crafters.
If this is not the case (and one crafting profession inherently tends to make more money than another in a given period of time), perhaps some balancing needs to be done elsewhere in the game.
In the end it is unfair because you either severely limit the ability of say an armorsmith to do business or you give the Tailor carte blanche to have 1000's of items. I don't think the limit will work based on sale amount even though I do understand the goal is to limit the 9999999999 items.
DocSavag wrote:
In the end it is unfair because you either severely limit the ability of say an armorsmith to do business or you give the Tailor carte blanche to have 1000's of items. I don't think the limit will work based on sale amount even though I do understand the goal is to limit the 9999999999 items.
Again, if a "fair" system needs to allow the Armorsmith to sell 1mil worth of stuff per day while a Tailor can only sell 10k worth of stuff per day, I think there are other imbalances in the economy - all elite crafting professions, having invested the same number of skill points, should have roughly the same earning potential as a function of time (at least, that's the way it seems to me).
If that's not the case, credit caps on vendors would actually serve as a balancing factor, since it'd motivate crafters of overpriced goods to drop their prices a bit (or to strike deals with more skilled merchants, either way).