Merchant Archive

No one has forgotten anything. I have talked to TH every day this week about this issue including this morning. He is still planning on having a meeting on Monday where he will discuss what can be done about the limits.

The message is still that there wil be limits. I am waiting to see what they are willing to raise them to after the Monday meeting.

I cant believe there isnt a middle ground solution to the vendor issue. Yes I can see one side that says people are using unlimited storage and its affecting the database. As a resource vendor I also see the issue of nerfing it to just a paltry 110 items being a final straw for a number of players, myself probably included.

So why cant the solution be to limit the vendor to 300 items INCLUDING the number of items in a backpack. That way you can store 300 items only and not a large number of backpacks with lots of stuff in them counting as just 1 item. This prevents people abusing vendors as storage while allowing those of us selling gooods to keep a good selection on.

If you want another solution to people keeping too much junk on vendors then why not make the Junk Dealers proper junk dealers - you can take stuff to them and get 6K or a fair price per item. That would solve a whole load of problems in one swoop - people get a fair price for loot so no one stores junk on their vendors hoping it goes for more.

Another solution is to get rid of the 6K limit on the bazaar. A lot of people wont selling clothing and armor attachments etc on the bazaar because some are worth more than that - so they place them on a vendor. The bazaar is a better place to advertise them but no one does it as they see themselves losing money. so remove that barrier and let them sell there - this way youd set up a proper market in which items find their true value as overpriced items wont sell and people will compete against each other - competition is good.

Surely this is a much better solution that meets everyones concerns than to nerf the hell out of vendors and the economy. I for one enjoy owning a vendor and get a great deal of pleasure from having a large varied stock of common and uncommon resources for armorsmiths and Jedi - everything you need from composite to RIS armor and lightsabres. Nerfing my vendor will make it harder for armorsmiths to find the resources they need as I stock a lot of non current uber resources. Its also one of the few things that now keeps me playing the game.

As an armorsmith I know only too well how hard it is to find good quality resources, especially for RIS, but doing this will only weaken the choice and range available making such things even harder than they already are. Id imagine this will apply equally to the other crafting professions such as weaponsmith, chef etc. Less vendor items means less items being crafted means less of what the community needs being out there. It also means people will only stock what theyre most likely to sell - eg how many poeple will stock something low demand like chanlon intrusive ore for RIS when they can sell the current uber naboo wooly hide. Some resources are just gonna become impossible to find as a result with the only victim being the community.

110 items is a poorly thought out knee jerk over-reaction to the problem. Where did this number come from anyway? Sure 'fix' it but dont take away yet another thing I like about the game - theres fast becoming nothing left to interest me. The armor nerf was gonna be bad enough for my business but now it seems like its gonna be decimated. A suit of composite is 9 items. I like to sell singles and suits - 110 items restricts me to selling just 9 whole suits and 20 singles and no armorsmith resources. Its not enough.

And with a lack of ground content Im getting bored. Surveying and mining and selling what I find is one of the few fun and challenging things left I do in the game - please dont kill it.

For those who say nerfing the vendor limit will fix the economy? It wont. The economy is broken because of credit duping and credit purchasing inflating the money supply so that a few people can pay totally stupid over inflated prices for goods - wake up and smell the coffee - nerfing vendor limits will only make the problem worse as credit dupers and purchasers will continue to be rich while the rest of us are prevented from making as much money as we currently do. Nothing will change. It wont fix prices in the economy. If anything it will raise them - less items on vendors means restricting supply while demand is unchanged - that raises prices not lower them in a real economy.

I currently offer both 100K, 50K, 20K and 10K batches of minerals. Force us to have 110 items only and I can imagine Ill only sell in 100K batches meaning poeple will pay more to get what they need if they only wanted 20K for example. Who else will do the same? With house and bank storage unchanged people are gonna start selling in 100K batches only - they wont have a choice. How does that help the economy?

Like I said above the best solution is to ensure items in backpacks are counted as part of your 300 item limit. This solves the storage issue in one easy sweep. With the current proposal Im probably gonna leave the game - it seems all the things I like about it are slowly but surely being removed.

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QuiJonOz wrote:

Looks like we are losing our steam... hopefully the Devs don't "forget" the huge thread that preceded this one.

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There is only so long thata personcan stay incredibly freaking angry, and then you just go into a long slow burn. It is unfortunate that stupidity can keep its energy level up forever.

Please, DocSavage, we need your help. If there had been some sort of carrot for us, in the form of better vendor and bazaar interface, correction of the inane filter system, easier ways to list and relist sales items, quicker fixes of vendor bugs, better customer service for vendors losing items, then we probably wouldn't be quite so angry about this. But this is simply a slap in the face to those of us who have worked as master merchants and actually used all of the skills that are given by that profession. We have never even been told, as far as I know, what slot merchants were expected to fill in this game. Many of us have created our own content, as befits an MMORPG. I have supported the work of five crafters with my master merchant. If this was not what master merchant was designed for, then I can't imagine why it was even created as a profession.

My game content has simply become trying to work around problems. My immersion has become trying to guess what else will go wrong. Isn't this supposed to be a game, something that we do for enjoyment and relaxation? Why, then, do I feel like I am in a job, being managed by someone who can only find fault with me and with my work? The point of changing gameplay in an MMORPG is to ADD content, not take it away. If the devs keep concentrating on taking away content, soon we will be left battling the butterflies outside of Keren with CDEF pistols, the tailors will be making only black ribbed shirts,the CH's will be using rabbits to attack with, we'll be eating artisan foods and using personal harvesters.

Please, dev's and Doc, please don't kill this game.

TH, it was too late within 72 hours of Publish 10 hitting test. Once the word got out into the community (and we did make sure it got there), the market went crazy. Crafters are discounting heavily to get under the limits, and as an architect, my business just went into the toilet. No one wants to buy furniture, since it will just crowd them more; no one wants harvesters because they won't have the space to store resources; no mayors want civic structures because they don't know how many residents may quit the game--no one wants much of anything. Except factories and small houses, and I'm not selling enough of those to make up for the loss of other business.

Do what you want. Even if Sony completely backtracks now, I'm probably going to let my sub expire on the 27th anyway. The insane nature of this change, combined with the way it was stealthed into the patch tells me that Sony doesn't know what they're doing with the game, and they don't care how much they anger their customers. It's like trying to build a business in the middle of an earthquake/fire/flood/tornado zone. What disaster is going to happen next? Crafters can't use their tools on a day with a 'y' in it? That would be no more arbitrary than this was.

I've just lost all interest in trying, under those circumstances.

I posted this elsewhere, but it fits here as well:

Here's my $0.02

Yes, I like the idea of vendor item cap.
Yes, I like the increase to 6000 on the Baazar


I'd also like to see implemented:

* Removal of vendor from world registration when vendor is out of items
* Mail sent to vendor owner when vendor is out of items
* Mail sent to vendor owner when vendor is out of maint (Don't know if this is already implemented)
* Possiblity to rename vendor after it has been initialized (So you can name your vendor: Meds! Restocked 8/8/4) which would register on world registration.

The vendor item cap may be too low at 150. I don't do a lot of sales, but I am not a merchant of any kind. Perhaps the item limit could be integrated into the merchant tree? Again, this would encourage more people to take more branches in Merchant.

Perhaps:

Buisness 3: 50 item
Buisness 4: 100 item
Novice Merchant: 150 item
Management 1: 200 item
Management 2: 250 item
Management 3: 300 item
Management 4: 350 item
Master Merchant: 450 item

This would help limit those vendors with tons of items on it, but it wouldn't hurt that much.
It would also be handy to have a better breakdown of item types for those long lists, or perhaps list the items grouped by type, instead of in order of being added to the vendor. For example, all weapon powerups would be on one page, instead of across three pages. This would make vendors more efficient.