CUEmu - Thread Posts

Sylvandk

Sun Aug 15, 2004 7:58 pm

1. if their doing this to reduce lag.. think of a better way..

2. if their trying to kill off big time merchants to give room to smalltime crafters, their just going to make it even harder.. big merchants will be fighting over the good things to sell even more..

3. it's going to be hell for everyone trying to find everything..

4. is it only an attempt to get ppl to open more accounts ?

5. the limits they set are amazingly stupid, and shows how little they actually play the game.. or if they do play they play on an underpopulated server where the average vendor has 10 items on it..

/shrug.. who gives a **edit**.. I know SOE doesn't.. raising the limit to around 100 per vendor just shows..

if they'd just stick with the other good idea's like empty vendors wont show on the map.. and empty vendors will poof after a shorter period of time sounds alot better than capping vendor item limits..

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rezalg

Sun Aug 15, 2004 9:33 pm

#275

As an aspiring tailor, I have a request:

Please don't limit my ability to put backpacks on my vendor. Since I refuse to "grind" my profession, I compete in the market by selling complete outfits, saving my customers the trouble of trying to mix and match colors. Currently, the only way to sell complete outfits is by putting them in backpacks.

I'd love to see a way for customers to look inside the backpacks on my vendor so they can see exactly what they are buying.

As for the vendor limit, I'd like to withhold any opinion until after it's been tested. A limit on the number of items would mean that people would have to start being pickier about what goes on their vendor. Masters would thus not be able to keep a complete stock of items, but instead would choose to carry only high-end master items, thus opening up the market to those mid-level and novice crafters to carry the mid and lower-end items that they can make. Couple this idea with the ability to remotely stock vendors and you may have a recipe for success that brings mid-level crafting back to the game as a viable source of income and gets rid of the pressure to grind to master immediately upon adopting a profession.

P.S. Thank you for fixing the necklace bug!!!!

MisterLeebo

Sun Aug 15, 2004 11:18 pm

#276

I know not a lot of people will like this idea, but being an optomistic kind of guy I'm going to try and spin this whole thing into a positive light. Perhaps SOE is intentionally making the running of a store more than a single person can handle. Just like in real life, one person isn't going to do a great job running a Mall or a Shopping Center (which is the state of most successful stores since they try to sell everything related to their profession). I'm thinking that what the developers had in mind for crafting in SWG was to try and mimic a player-grouping capacity that combat professions are benefited by. They want crafting to be a cooperation thing. They want you to form companies of similar-class crafters so that between all of you, you can create something much more powerful than what you can do alone.

Think about it. In a typical (balanced) MMORPG, you need one of each necessary skill-type to survive most encounters. Hence SWG is using the thinking that in order to survive thewar for credits, you'll need similar team-play, like a real business.

Just like you need a good group to tackle SWG's most arduous content (Corvette?), you need a Company to keep up with its economic challenges. Having one person alone capable of storing and selling every possible articles in his related field probably sounded a lot to the devs like a single combat profession being able to solo any dungeon or mob that they could come across. I don't necessarily agree with this assessment, but it's not my call.

If this is a direction SWG is going to take, I think it would be fair to add functions that promote the forming of Companies;

- Multiple players canrun a shopfront. Perhaps a new style structute for Player Cities? I think the Artisan's Guildhall or a building mimicking the Artisan's Guildhall would do well for this purpose. The purpose of this structure is to give the merchants a sense of authority sort of like they'd receive for running a Mall out of a PA Hall at present, but without the outrageous lot penalty. Having a shopfront basically starts the Company, which doesn't give you any new tag or title or anything, but Merchants should receive benefits for running out of Companies as they progress, making it cheaper and more efficient to work with a Company than alone. Depending on its size and how many members in a Company it allows, I'd think it should be 2 or 3 lots (no more than 5, but that's way too high in my opinion).

- Payment for items (and experience for merchants) is divided between the merchants. Like how combaties get the money divided up on missions, merchants get it via sales with the typical package (e-mail notification in case they're offline that the credits are in their bank). The difference is that the owner of the vendor that sold the item gets the majority and the rest is divided, this number might be changeable by the Storefront Owner.

- People appointed to Administrator can remove items from any vendor and add/remove players from the Company List. The owner of the Shopfront is automatically the first Admin when it's placed, so as far as the game is concerned he owns the company (make sure the person you trust the most places the lot) and can appoint the other trustees to Admin just like you do with a Harvester or your house. The company list is more like the Hopper List, they can only modify their own Vendors.

-Entry Fees and Experience wouldprobably go to the Storefront Owner. Most of the time this is probably 1 credit anyway, but if it isn't, my opinion is it's the Owner's primary job to bring customers to the store with the others keep it worth visiting, and this helps to prevent other characters for leeching Merchant Experience off of other people without working for it. Ideally, being part of a successful company should offset the deficit in Merchant Experience from entry charges.

- Merchants running Companies would get special marks for their Company on World Maps. This way people know that this is a Company, not just a string of vendors, which will give the buyer confidence that if the item they seek isn't for sale on one vendor, it might be nearby.

- Merchants in a Company receive bonuses like the ones given for using Bazaars. Vendors in a Company would hold more items, cost less maintenance and be privy to the special marks on the World Map in the above suggestion. These bonuses are put across the Merchant's Skill tree so they get better as your skills go up.

- Merchants in a Company can access a special Company Chat Channel and can send E-mails to every member of the Company. Since they're all working in the same field, it will help to communicate the location of good resource spawns that they can share in harvesting and having a chat channel will allow the members to feel like they're working together as a team. The Company Channel would be exactly like /guild or /group chat.

I'm interested in hearing any responses to the suggestion.

v Leebo v

Need someone whacked?

I can stuff them down their own Food and Chemical

Processing Unit and make it look like an accident...

QuadShot

Sun Aug 15, 2004 11:26 pm

#277

Ok, maybe I'm a rock and just missed it.... I have some vendors, but I'm not a merchant anymore, what's going to happen to my vendors now!? If I loose them, I guess I'll have to stand at the star port and spam my goods or I'll just drop the game all together since it will no longer be "conducive to the MMORPG genre".

Things that are different are NOT the same!
Words mean things!

UBAL

Sun Aug 15, 2004 11:52 pm

#278

Ok, I´m not all into this merchant thing..

But I understood something about SOE wanting to make you have to have a certain lvl to have any amount of items on vendor..

I have 2 "fighter" chars more or less, I don´t like destroying stuff, and I have taken AND KEPT0040 artisan to have my 1 vendor which I don´t sell from, but I only use for storage since it would take more than 10 houses to store all the items I like to collect...

So I just need to know, the 1000+ items I have.... When do I have to setup so many houses to store all my items in it.... because the only thing SOE will really gain from this in my experience is people leaving for being beeped over, and the planets being spammed with either people crafting and selling at starports making merchant an even more useless profession than it already is, or so many houses for storage that you cant go anywhere without FPS at 1 all the time from all the houses that are suddenly being built for storage, simply because the houses have no storage capacity... and it certainly wont help if the vendors dont get any storage capacity anymore..

as I said, I have KEPT my artisan 0040 so I could avoid having to do all of this, with my vendor, and now I hear that they found a way to screw me over after spending all this time using those skillpoints on having my vendor, and not just thrown away the skills, like I understand is what they are trying to combat here.

But as this is a constructive criticisms thread then here is my proposal :

Make vendors have an admin console, where there is a timer for your items, just like on bazaar, the owner of the vendor can put a friend (or unknown if it should come to that) on his vendor admin list, BUT only the person placing the item on the vendor can take it out, and the vendor cannot just be deleted without all items having been removed.

The owner of the vendor will then whenever doing something that will affect the other peoples items make the vendor send out a message to the others.

For instance, if the owner wishes to delete the vendor, the other people stocking items on the vendor will then have 7 days to move all their items from the vendor and to an alternative location, if not, then the items will disappear with the vendor after the time of 7 weeks.

Another alternative would be to just leave it the way it is, and have it work that : those without merchant skills (merchant skills being the entire merchant tree including artisan 0030 and 0040) will instantly on patch lose their vendor and everything on it, and will be unable to place a new one without having and keeping the skills.

And if they are so fond of their limited item vendors, then atleast make it a decent lvl... 100 items on a vendor is a total screwover... 100 items for each lvl through : artisan 0010 = 100 items, artisan 0020 = 200 items, artisan 0030 = 300 items, artisan 0040 = 400 items, novice merchant = 500 items, management 1 = 600 items, management 2 = 700 items, management 3 = 800 items, management 4 = 900 items, and in the end master merchant = 1000 items ( or 1500 to make it more attractive to take all those other skills).

Naplam

Sun Aug 15, 2004 11:52 pm

#279

Maybe the vendors should have different modes like a storage mode and a selling mode. Storage mode could have no limet so people with a lot of components can still store things

IGN Naplam Jedi
Grame Doctor

"the NGE is pure dag nasty evil"
"warned you we tried"
"listen you did not"
"now screwed we will be"
SWG A Lost Hope

Creadux

Sun Aug 15, 2004 11:53 pm

#280

QuadShot wrote:
Ok, maybe I'm a rock and just missed it.... I have some vendors, but I'm not a merchant anymore, what's going to happen to my vendors now!? If I loose them, I guess I'll have to stand at the star port and spam my goods or I'll just drop the game all together since it will no longer be "conducive to the MMORPG genre".

I don't get it ... Threatening to quit because they may take away the vendors you don't have the skill for anymore ? ... I spose you'd like to say, master the Commando profession then drop it but still be able to shoot /flamesingle2 ... so would I. The solution is simple really .. sell your goods to a REAL merchant for resale.

I've been thinking alot about what irks me about being a merchant and an artisan. I think the revamp should start at the bazaars and vendors themselves. There is a ton of mislabeled and empty categories there. Armor Attachments dosn't hold armor attatchments it's in clothing attatchments. there are no buildings under buildings they are under deeds. They reall need to get a hold of their database super and sub types and do it quick or it will just spin out of control as they add content and items.

In my case, I am a master architect 4/4/0/4 merchant. I mastered merch but decided I really didn't care how specific I could be in selecting my vendor types and races and dropped that column. my stock levels run about 1600-1800 items spread across 6 vendors. I sell most of everything out maybe every month. If not it is at least 1000 of the items that get sold every month. Anyway, I have no problem with vendor item limits per se as long as the devs can see fit to increase the number of vendors for those with more skill invested in the merchant tree. Say at master you can have16 vendors each new box gives you 1 vendor across the tree and you get 1 at novice and 3 at the master box. Each vendor can hold say 125 items as a limit. I would also not allow people to select where their vendors get registered on the subcategories on the planetary maps. I would take an inventory of what is on the vendor and categorize it by the types of items automatically.

Adding vendors while applying a vendor item limitwould allow people to be more specific about the types of items they are selling so people don't have to wade through a bunch of empty and mislabeled vendors to find what they are after. It would also require people who wanted to carry a lot of stock such as myself to do so or seek a reseller merchant for my wares.

JediLeong

Mon Aug 16, 2004 2:35 am

#281

DocSavag wrote:
I am researching what happened to the other thread.

Left testicle says SOE deleted it because it was getting nasty.

My solution: Make vendor maintenance increase proportionately to the value of items for sale. That'll get rid of storage vendors selling bags for 99999999 credits and help players to monitor themselves rather than having a fixed upper limit.

Yeah, all the guys who are happy with everything are playing the game
They aren't spending their time sending you guys letters or posting
on the forums - Haden Blackman

Ajib

Mon Aug 16, 2004 2:49 am

#282

This is utter insane. The thing that hurts me the most will be item per vendor limit. I'm selling resources on one of my vendor and the itemsfluctuate between 100 - 400. I really don't want to setup multiple vendor just to sell resources. It'll be a pain to maintain and annoying the customers having to browse multiple vendors.

Please rethink anda lot of players have good suggestions on this thread.

Ajib's Xfire Miniprofile

nurTsunami

Mon Aug 16, 2004 3:36 am

#283

I agree that any type of fixes made to this whole thing needs to include fixes to the categories under which things get sold. Things get put under confusing andcontradictory categories, making things hard to buy and sell. Clean up the categories to be logical and easy to browse! I also thing raising the cap on bazaar sales to 10k or more will remove the need for some of the smaller vendors around.

__________________________STARSIDER_____________________________

Richelieu - Master Doctor/Master Medic/Master TKA
Amelia - Tailor/Merchant/Architect
Vacationing in Azeroth

Mohr

Mon Aug 16, 2004 3:48 am

#284

I don't see how this is going to make the game more fun to play. My vote is for leaving it alone. Spend the time on something else that is broken please.

P.S. I'm not a merchant but I do buy a lot of stuff and would hate to see anything done to hurt the crafting/merchant classes or make it harder for them to do what they do.

Gaenjin

Mon Aug 16, 2004 4:13 am

#285

Thunderheart wrote:

Just a quick update folks. I have a meeting to go over the limits and changes tomorrow afternoon. I've been going over the proposed changes put forth by you, through DocSavag and they will be addressed. I'll have an answer for you either Monday and Tuesday.

Most of the people I've talked to in game, are crafters as primary profession, with some Merchant skills as a "necessity to do business". This is the only MMO that I've ever played, where a regular player was forced to sell his loot to a "reseller" or for a dirt cheap limited cap on Public Auction, orvia a Forum Post, instead of being allowed the option to own their own Merchant.

(yes I have a Master Merchant badge, no it wasn't for Jedi, it was long after I unlocked, and was for actually being a Master Merchant for a bit. I dropped it because I thought the current design was very poor and ill conceived.)

The changes proposed to Merchant class, are nothing but negatives. The changes should be positive, not negative. So we have to ask ourselves, what exactly is the problem? Why do Crafters feel the need to have their own Vendors. Why do Loot Farmers feel the need to have their own Vendors?

One answer I can think of, is control and reliability.

People come, people go.

Some can be trusted, others can't.

Are enough Merchants going to be available to place vendors and sell a Crafter's supply line.

Are Merchants going to sell on consignment, or are they going to purchase and resell?

What methods are currently being practised?

If Merchant is being used as a secondary supplement skill, just to sell one's own crafted goods (or loot), then it sounds to me like the design premise as a separate and stand-aloneclass is not working.

Merchant reminds me of Miner. Nice in theory, but not working out in practice. Maybe Merchants could be something like Droid Engineers, and be able to manufatcure Sale boothes, Vendors, Advertising methods (this would be real neat), uhmm maybe even offer Advertising Services... something that would define Merchant as a Stand-alone class, rather than a supplement.

Every player deserves access to a means to sell their goods, something beyond a Bazaar thing with a cost cap. Everquest has ability to turn your character into a Vendor at their "Bazaar". Dark Age of Camelot allows everyone to buy a Vendor to place outside their House...

Just some thoughts that I've had from playing with Merchant for bit, a few months ago. It's very difficult to find items without having to waste hours and hours travelling around, looking at signs, walking in a house to see if they have a Vendor that's not listed on Global Map... the whole "Sale System" of this game really sucks, to be blunt. I think there are a lot of areas of improvement, and to be honest, this new system that is proposed does not address any of the problems. It only makes the current problems worse.

I think that the Devs would be doing the game a severe injustice, as well as the Merchant class, to not stop these changes, and take the whole Merchant class back to the board for a more thought out revamp.

Enginear

Mon Aug 16, 2004 4:20 am

#286

I was master once but now have 3404 in merchant since hiring dun give me nicer vendor but same old fat, ugly vendor after many tries, if the newlimit dun reach at least 5000 item for me, I going bye bye. Just change all my account from 2x 3 month and a 1 year (yeah I tot wat can goes wrong with LucasArt but darn it is SOE) to a monthlyso I can add myself to the statistic of "How many quit after Vendor nerf?"

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Thread: Merchant Item Limits Focus Thread: Please try to be constructive and rational (Pt 2)