Merchant Archive

another piece that could soften the blow is raising the price cap on the bazaar. The bazaar price cap wasn't so bad in the beginning. Since then the prices have inflated way beyond the bazaar limits. Simply increasing the cap to 100k on items on the bazaar will let non merchants sell 25 items at a moderate price on the bazaar and allow the auction function in the bazaar to be significantly more useful. This wont cover items like 'Rifle Speed +6', which would fetch 12 million in my galazy, but rather allow most items to be sold or resold in limited amounts. In my galaxy a well made weapon (one not made with krayt tissues or other enhancers) carries a cost of around 30-45k. Considering a 3hr doctor buff often costs 18-20k this is not far out of line with the economy. Raising the cap to 100k gives a wide range of flexibility for a player to resell his weapon should he drop a skill, sell a crate or partial crate of good chef food (100k would even allow a 1/2 crate of bio-enhanced food), be a resource seller only interested in selling low quality 1credit/unit resources etc. Since the bazaar system still operates on a 1week listing timer it draws a distinction between merchant vendors and non merchant vendors merely by the hassle of 7 day timers and 25 item restrictions.

Message Edited by EEMAN on 08-11-2004 08:19 AM

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SigmaXIII wrote:

deserves a big bump

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I wish you'd done it earlier, before I posted an almost identical suggestion in a new thread. (Resources By the Unit)

Shows that great minds think alike

Dye kits would be the one thing that would make pretty much every tailor quit since it would take *all* of the fun and creativity out of tailoring. Especially with no experimentation, our ability to choose nice colors and put outfits together that look good are is what distinguishes us from each other.

Message Edited by Gyopi on 08-11-2004 02:12 PM

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Gyopi wrote:
Dye kits would be the one thing that would make pretty much every tailor quit since it would take *all* of the fun and creativity out of tailoring. Especially with no experimentation, our ability to choose nice colors and put outfits together that look good are is what distinguishes us from each other.

Message Edited by Gyopi on 08-11-2004 02:12 PM

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hmm i see your point with that but w/ a volume nerf on the way the only way to offset that is single colors w/ after sales alterations. do you have any middle ground idea? I am scratching my head but its obvious we wont get 1000 items per vendor and w/ all the color options (and usually never any i like when i am buying clothes) a tailor has to maintain it makes volume a much bigger issue. But then again I guess there is no reason your items had to be white.. you could still color them however you want and still give the customer the ability to re-color. With a volume nerf as extreme as what is going to happen, having less popular colors would be abandoned and only the top 3 most popular colors would ever get listed. Without being able to re-color clothing, everyone will be forced to wear only the 3 most popular clothing unless they happen to know a tailor or see one around. Its been a long time since I have seen a tailor in game, it seems they stock their vendors and logout. Gone are the days of tailors role playing in their stores as a fashion designer etc (atleast as I perceive it in my galaxy). Non composite armor has it bad too. What if you had your chest peice decay and thats the only piece you need to replace.. unless your using some defacto standard color, its probably not going to match and you will have a clown-suit armor set.

These are excellent ideas to soften the blow of the vendor item limits, but using them to try to stop the limit will not work.
Just some minor comment
1)Who need to sell 100 different named resources in stack of 100K+ much less 200 different ones? Also would this not be exactly the type of vendor a armour smith or weaponsmith would use for storage, just set the CPU to 255 or what ever is the max.

2) Again such stacking of would encourage the use of a vendor for storage. Making 1000 advanced blaster pistol barrels and stacking them would be to easy.

If vendor maintains was dependent the total price of the items sold on them then it would be a different story... say 1 cr/hour for every 10,000 cr on the vendor (rounded up). Selling 1 million units, of resources at 100 cpu to keep people from buying them would cost way to much for most people (10K cr / hour). but a item would take 416 days to consume it cost in maintains.

3) one generic dye kit would take some away some of a masters advantages. So why not make dyes in different colours. Say one "blue colour" and the number of shades it could colour the clothing in would depend on the skills of tailor that made it, and the number of items it could colour would depend on the experimentation. 6 hur's and a greyscale could cover the spectrum, and different one for the leather and metal palettes.
There is no reason why clothing could not be coloured at the creation, that way tailors would still have a chance to show off good colour combos on the clothing for sale. And it would be good for guild uniforms and the like. (it would be horrible to have to colour every single item by hand)
Also if dye's are introduced tailors should be able to colour clothing with out them, to help them do fitting for clients.


The annoying part is I have seen the 2 first ideas several times in different forms on these boards, if the DEV's read it they would be aware of such "alterative thinking".

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Tarnak_Archvold wrote:
These are excellent ideas to soften the blow of the vendor item limits, but using them to try to stop the limit will not work.
Just some minor comment
1)Who need to sell 100 different named resources in stack of 100K+ much less 200 different ones? Also would this not be exactly the type of vendor a armour smith or weaponsmith would use for storage, just set the CPU to 255 or what ever is the max.

2) Again such stacking of would encourage the use of a vendor for storage. Making 1000 advanced blaster pistol barrels and stacking them would be to easy.

If vendor maintains was dependent the total price of the items sold on them then it would be a different story... say 1 cr/hour for every 10,000 cr on the vendor (rounded up). Selling 1 million units, of resources at 100 cpu to keep people from buying them would cost way to much for most people (10K cr / hour). but a item would take 416 days to consume it cost in maintains.

3) one generic dye kit would take some away some of a masters advantages. So why not make dyes in different colours. Say one "blue colour" and the number of shades it could colour the clothing in would depend on the skills of tailor that made it, and the number of items it could colour would depend on the experimentation. 6 hur's and a greyscale could cover the spectrum, and different one for the leather and metal palettes.
There is no reason why clothing could not be coloured at the creation, that way tailors would still have a chance to show off good colour combos on the clothing for sale. And it would be good for guild uniforms and the like. (it would be horrible to have to colour every single item by hand)
Also if dye's are introduced tailors should be able to colour clothing with out them, to help them do fitting for clients.


The annoying part is I have seen the 2 first ideas several times in different forms on these boards, if the DEV's read it they would be aware of such "alterative thinking".

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you are missing the point.. its not that they are being used as storage that is the problem.. its the fact that when you have to parse a table with billion of entries that causes a problem. So what if you stack 1000 barrels ona vendor and use it as 'storage' you still only get 200 records on that vendor and those 1000 barrels are just a single entry on a database. The debate isnt over what is a fair amount of items any one person in a game should have.. it is over what the database can handle. If this debate took place in a world where the database could handle any amount of items and they just wanted to impose policy on how many posessions you are allowed to have their game would be gone.

These are the same guys that ran UO. The one thing that keeps a player happy and keeps him playing more than just a few months is the accumulation of collectibles. The devs know this, it comes as no surprise that the majority of gifts come in the form of the most popular items in the game - paintings. If it wasnt for the problem with database storage and rendoring issues they would let us have more than 250 item cap in our structures. The goal here is not running around with a belt spanking everyone who uses a vendor is storage.. that was never the issue. Storage vendors exist only as a player-made solution to a problem they have; insufficient storage. The job of the devs is keep the players happy. A happy player is a paying player. If a player wants more storage and there is no technical reason why he cannot have more storage then by giving it to him he is made happy and continues to pay monthly fees. If a player wants more storage, a technical reason does not exist preventing this wish and the devs sadisticaly want to punish him for no logical reason, he does not continue to pay monthly. It is financially advantageous to give the community what they need especially in concerns with storage as long as it doesnt break the game. If by combining 1000 items into a single database record does not do that then I see no problem.

Your 1000 barrel analogy was baseless. I can already do that without combining them into a single stack if my goal is purely storage. 1000 barrels is just 40 crates, last I checked a backpack holds 50 items and takes up just 1 record on the vendor database (though the backpack contents fill another table with thier items so its much less efficient on the DB w/ the same cost to the player). The same analogy goes for resources if you want to exploit storage. Nothing you have claimed to be a 'exploit risk' exists outside of what is already possible even after the new change.

As far as who needs to sell 100 different named resources in stacks of 100k? ANY resource vendor worth its salt collects 2million units of a resource and puts it on the vendor.Why limit a vendor to just a few resources if it doesnt hurt the database, and as I said, once it takes up 1 record as opposed to 10 your DB load is significantly lower. This isnt policy just to punish players and its not some conspiracy to create hyper inflation in the marketplace. It is simply a policy to cool the heels on the DB and I believe my solution will achieve that goal AND keep happy players paying their $15, $30, $45 and somtimes $60 a month recurrent.

If you try to solve problems like this with questions such as 'well who actually needs that?' or 'I get along fine in this game with 20 items and no structures why cant they?' then you are missing some of the most important tools of management and administration. There obviously IS a need otherwise there wouldnt hundreds of storage vendors and a discussion ongoing about the upcomming vendor nerf. You need to ask 'What does the community want?', 'Is what they want within my possibility to implement with no serious consequences?', 'what are the costs associated with giving them what they want?'. If there are no consequences and the costs are minimal, then you must do it to keep your community happy. If you dont do it when you can, your community will know it, morale will suffer. Depending on your circumstances you will be voted out of office, lose your subscriber base, have massive employee turnovers etc. If you cannot do it for financial or technical reasons you explain that to them and usually they understand. If you are doing it to be a dictator who loves to make baseless policies on what everyone SHOULD do.. then everyone thinks you are an a-hole, an idiot, or just plain insane. None of which are, as a manager, what you want your community to view you as since it completely undermines your position.

Message Edited by EEMAN on 08-12-2004 08:56 AM

agreed. it is the accumulation of wealth and posessions that seperate an MMORPG from other games like planetside or unreal tournament or counter strike. To limit possessions to the extent they have is in direct conflict with the stated goals of an MMORPG community. Once you set a low ceiling on things like this you also set a ceiling on how long someone will play the game. The devs want to point to their success in UO of long term subscriptions. I played UO for years and without vendors I had item limits in the thousands just in one house. there is no way I would have played that game as long as I did if they set a ceiling at 200 items.