Merchant Archive
Thread: 150 ITEM CAP VOTE NO
SueDenim wrote:
Again, this is something that tailors have pointed out at length on various threads (I think mostly on the "In Development" section, somewhere around pages 65-69 maybe?) It's worth checking out the details there. But the bottom line is that due to the design of the tailoring profession, the "wholesaler" method just doesn't work for tailors, from a practical standpoint, especially if the merchant is doing anything more than a "top 10 sellers" sort of thing, just offering boots, gloves, and dusters in black.
There simply isn't the sort of good practical division between the "making" and the "selling" for tailors - they're nearly inextricable. Hundreds of schematics times hundreds of color slots times hundreds of colors. Simply figuring out what you *want* to sell is an art. Plus, again unless you're doing the "any color as long as it's black" top ten approach to tailoring, most of our items aren't going to have a really fast turnover. So I doubt there'll be a lot of "pure merchants" who want to bother with being the middleman for a tailor, especially when there are so many faster-selling *and* higher profit margin items he could be marketing. A tailor is already sort of required to be a merchant too, and this doesn't especially upset me; what does upset me is the idea that a tailor is required to be a *Master* Merchant just to do business.
The basic point we've been trying to get across is that tailoring really *is* different from all the other crafting professions, and the rules that might apply well to Chefs and Weaponsmiths and Pharmacists don't necessarily make sense for us. Our stuff can't be experimented on, and has no *inherent* gameplay benefit. We *have* to deal in style, color, customer service, and variety to succeed, because we don't have anything else!
From the merchant perspective every crafter has the same general issue with the wholesale concept. They all complain that they must stock all their wares and have control on exactly how it is presented. I'm not belittling the desire. But that isn't how real life retailing works and it isn't how it should work here either. If you want to maintain a small boutique and control everything you should be able to do that (but you can't do much else in the game just like you can't do much else in real life if you are the owner and supplier at the same time) .
If you want to mass produce and make lots of money you need to make some concessions to accomplish that. One of them is picking and choosing the items and colors ( or attributes) you want to focus your sales on. That doesn't mean you can't change them frequently. It doesn't mean you can't have a lot of choices. If you find a retailer who is willing to make you the cornerstone of his business you can have all the choices you want. The tools to make that relationship work better are still on the drawing board but it is possible to do right now it is just a bit cumbersome for the merchant to do it.
But if you came to me today in game and said I would like to sell a line of tailored items on an exclusive vendor I would be happy to oblige you. I would allow you to select the prodcuts you wanted to sell and set the prices and I would charge you a fee for selling them (usually 10%). I would provide you with feedback about what is and isn't selling quickly and I would forward all emails one sales (if you like) or simply give you a report when you wanted it and pay you on whatever schedule we worked out.
Board ate my post: so the short version...
I have to agree with the tailors and disagree with Doc on this one. This change will force many of us into the custom order business, which will take up all our time. A 150 item vendor is not feasible. No customers are going to accept a rotating stock. No tailor wants to babysit vendors. However, custom orders take a million times longer than vendor sales because of the talking to the client, the crafting of the items, and then the waiting for pickup.
So... spend all the points on merchant and have no points left over for other pursuits, or spend all our time on tailoring, making the points saved irrelevant.
We spend more time crafting than any other profession because we can't make finished products in the factory. And we do a huge number of custom orders even with a well-stocked vendor. Add additional custom orders to this, and vendor babysitting, and you have some burnt-out tailors very quickly.
Naufragus wrote:
Arrya wrote:
Go Doc! He is in there fighting the good fight for us behind closed doors
fighting for what and for whom..
i for one DO NOT want limits.
we need new skills not making the current ones just more tedious
Depends on what you are talking about. I do not support item limits on vendors. I never had and I made that quite clear in the development thread and the correspondant forum. I am a realist however and if there are going to be limits scaling them is the easiest way to allow people to get more item slots while still limiting the overall slots available.
If you mean do I support limits on the vendors out there owned by people who are no longer merchants yes I support that and so do most of the posters who post on this forum. I do however present both sides of that arguement and will continue to do so.
At the same time I am really frustrated by the implication that we aren't asking for new features. We have a whold list of features in the Top 5 posts that we are considering and I have sumarized several that seem to have a lot of support.
well It is hard to know what is going on "behind close doors". I disagree with the enitre secret forum/ correspont thing.
Nothing personal. But i dont like the fact that a few hand-picked people are shaping the game based on the comments of a handful of people who choose to post in the forums. Your issues thread has maybe 5 people commenting. It is mostly you and Drazerhasing things out.
I was talking to some people in game the other day. I told them that what they where doing could be macroed. They asked for the script and I said it was posted in their profession forum.2 had no idea that there where even profession forums and the third had never been able to find them on the website.
The dev corresponadnt forum should be visible for all to read. Otherwise there is no way of knowing what any of you are doing
Naufragus wrote:
well It is hard to know what is going on "behind close doors". I disagree with the enitre secret forum/ correspont thing.
Nothing personal. But i dont like the fact that a few hand-picked people are shaping the game based on the comments of a handful of people who choose to post in the forums. Your issues thread has maybe 5 people commenting. It is mostly you and Drazerhasing things out.
I was talking to some people in game the other day. I told them that what they where doing could be macroed. They asked for the script and I said it was posted in their profession forum.2 had no idea that there where even profession forums and the third had never been able to find them on the website.
The dev corresponadnt forum should be visible for all to read. Otherwise there is no way of knowing what any of you are doing
I didn't make the decision to make the correspondant forum closed. I didn't particularly like it either at the time it was announced, having seen both sides I understand why it has to be that way, but that is a luxury you don't have at the moment.
I trusted Marqie to tell the devs what we were saying and to bring up issues that she knew were our issues based on her experience and her knowledge of what was going on in the forums. I try to do the same thing. I am very passionate about this profession and I have very strong opinions on it, but I present both sides of any issue that I post in the correspondant forum
I am not sure how you would shape the game with the comments of people who aren't commenting. No one can force the 75% of the player base who never visits these forums to comment. If they want to have their voices heard they are going to have to come in here and do it.
The other point I would make is that the devs don't take ANYTHING said by a correspondant as gold. They challenge us constantly with questions and their own perspective. I can't just go say "99% of merchants don't use the twi'lek vendor please remove it" I would get.. "..we disagree, the metrics suggest the percentage of twi'lek vendors is a lot higher" or "we are seeing posts on the artisan forum and the Architect forum that they like the twi'leks". .
Naufragus wrote:
well if it is so benign then why not make it READ ONLY for all but the hand picked correspondants
Mostly because they sometime talk about features or suggestions that aren't set in stone yet and they don't want 5000 people taking it for granted that those features will be impelemented in the next publish. Everthing TH posts on in public forums is considered a promise. In the correspondant forum it is understood that nothing is a promise and it is all just discussion. To be honest that doesn't even happen very often. Most often the reply to me asking for more details about an upcoming change gets this reply: "I'll tell you want I can tell you when I can tell you..."
My job in those cases is to respond if I know how that will affect the merchant profession or if I know what impact a certain thing is having because of the posts that have been made about it here.
DocSavag wrote:
They are trapped by the realities of the database situation I believe.
This is total crap. Again a lame excuse and nerf proposed by SOE cause they can't handle the data. I am usually pretty leniant with devs cause I do see they are trying to make the game better, but this is rediculous! They honestly couldn't have planned the data correctly? That is why they nerfed item storage in houses. In the first month they put a limit on item storage in a house. Well at teh time they said they would do the quick fix then work on adjusting it for larger structures. Well newsflash it is 4 months later and large houses and PA halls have yet to be adjusted to the 75 item per lot used code that was supposed to be implemented. All this in the name database issues.
If you want to fix database issues take away vendors from people who gain and dump vendor abilities. Don't impose some @ssanine 150 limit on vendors cause the system can't handle the data.
Either get enough database space to run a descent game or fix some of the other problems. To the devs I'm sorry...I'm trying to see things from your point of view, but I can't stick my head that far up my @ss.
yes it always seems merchants have to pay for the database problems...
the database excuse for game design is past old.
istead of revamping the game to fit the database the database should be revamped to fit the game...
also with so many holo grinders getting merchant, could this be a cause of some of the problems...
If they're going to keep claiming "technical issues" as justification for major nerfs, it'd help a lot if they'd give us a technical *explanation* somewhere of what the problems are. To people with a technical background, the general claims about the database's limitations seem really strange and fishy; they could perhaps dispel a lot of wild-ass guessing about what "the real problem" is if they'd give us a little bit of their nitty-gritty underlying reasons.
i dont claim to be a programming whiz by any means but it is beginning to sound like the inital code was just written very very badly.
it doesnt really have anything to do with orcale or the database size...just bad code and it would require them to rewrite newarly every thing....
if i recall, Koster's team made some of the same technical mistakes with UO and much of it had to be redone because it didnt work with Direct X or something
Tigershark34 wrote:
DocSavag wrote:
They are trapped by the realities of the database situation I believe.
This is total crap. Again a lame excuse and nerf proposed by SOE cause they can't handle the data.
I agree, it sucks.
I think it is just something that we are going to have to deal with though, for whatever reason, it is not an easy problem to fix. They have people working on it, but it is not something that is all the sudden going to go away next week. In the mean time, they have to find ways to solve these problems for the short term because people are loosing items toserver crashesand performance is grinding to a halt.
Something to think about though, if they do not address the problems they are seeing now, it will get out of control and it will cause many, many more problems for merchants. Better to take our medicine now so to speak and help be part of the solution rather than to end up as a victim of the problem.