Merchant Archive

Holo Said:

In general, I agree. However, you DO have a way now, which is the way that was intended--giving your PA members admin rights so that they can freely pick up and drop stuff in the hall.

Now,I can see that you want to have more granular permissions on the hall, which is fine, I think we can manage that.

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Well, no, not really. Since the limit on PA hall inventory is 250 items - ours is fully furnished. Does that mean I need to GUT the PA hall in order to plunk down my energy stocks? uniforms? armor? weapons?

Some functions for a PA vendor would include accepting donations, and allowing for distribution of items to everyone in the PA, like uniforms. I suspect more the first than the last. Then there's the power of being able to set one price for people in your PA, and for the common man.

We have a vendor in our PA hall for the same reason as most of the others posting here, as a good way to exchange goods when other people are off line.

Couldn't all of the reasons people are using vendors (other than mass amounts of extra storage) be solved by having a "vault" (private bank) in all houses and PA halls?

You could then set permissions on the "vault" separately from the permissions on the main structure. Make the vault large enough to be useful, but not large enough to adversely affect the database performance. For a house, 20 items would probably be enough to handle "small custom crafters". Any larger volumes then they should have a public vendor.

For PA halls, make it larger, like a 100 items. Some might think that is too small, but keep in mind most of the PA members will have houses with their own vaults that they can put stuff in as well. With 20 members in a PA that would be 500 items of "shared space".

In line with these changes, we really need some adjustments to how we can assign security to things. I would really like the ability to set access permissions to groups. IE:

Friends (everyone on your friend's llist has access)

PA (everyone in your PA has access)

Faction (everyone in your faction has access)

Just one man's opinion.

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Holocron wrote:

In general, I agree. However, you DO have a way now, which is the way that was intended--giving your PA members admin rights so that they can freely pick up and drop stuff in the hall.

Now,I can see that you want to have more granular permissions on the hall, which is fine, I think we can manage that.

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My concern in this method is that currentlyan unfurnished PA hall canstore 250 items. Thatwon't go very far even in smaller PAs. I can't imagine what the large ones would do. Maybe PA halls could be given a certain amount of storage per PA member?

A lot of this gets back to the housing storage issue, which I'm sure you guys are working on, and I don't want tohijack this thred, but 250 items just isn't very many given the variety of resources and subassemblies crafters need to keep on hand.

Also, there's cases where some items just can't be offered for free, even to PA members. Many people will sell at resource cost to PA members on vendors, which isn't something the housing permissions can handle very well. Vendors on the other hand, do.. Maybe what's needed is a PA Hall terminal that acts something like a vendor, but more like a vault? Some items could be offered free, others for a cost, and the structure is accessible only to PA members.

Holo,

This is semi/sort of related.

Is there any way to ban only a FACTION from a house??? This making it semi private/public. I mean it makes sense for Rebel merchants to not sell to Imperials... and vice versa.

Holo-

This is a very good oppertunity for you to show that you are hearing your customers and not doing things just because it was not what you intended. Give us back our privete venders while you and your team work on the problem. This is not a game breaking issue and in the short term you can make some loyal customers happy instead of adding to the nagitive issues already being addressed with the current patch.



Thanks,


Guny
Master CH/Novice BH
Ahazi

Now that administrators can drop and pickup anything in a private or public structure, the arguement to make a private vendor is moot. The only point to a private vendor now would be to grind merchant XP with the people in your guild and this would be an exploit of the merchant profession. If your guild members are all administrators, you can drop the stuff for them in your structure and they can just pick them up now.

Zannon

Holo- I think you've missed something here.

Here are the reasons I've seen Venders "misused" so far:

-to offer items to certain other characters (not just PA Members) at a discount or cost

-to allow certain charcters (not just PA Members) to pick up items with little to no interaction (to work around the house/PA Hall Admin List feature not working)

-to store excess items

Of the above three uses, only one seems to be potentailly game-breaking (#3 BTW ). It seems to me that the propsed solution will only offercater to PA's, but what about Merchants that want to have a "perfered customer list" or just sell at cost to their friends (those within a PA or not)? So far there are quite a few alliances between PA's whose Merchants would like to offer previlleges to their Allies without completely opening their PA Halls to them (some things should still be private, even between allies). And what of Merchants that don't see any advantage to joining/creating a PA? Starting a PA in a huge drain on resources, the one who owns the PA Hall looses 9 lots, and this is a huge lose if that person was also a Merchant.This really eliminates the possiblity of Mercahnt PA's.

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gatekeep wrote:

now that the admin bug is fixed we could simply have a supply room there, but with 250 items as the limit, and over 30 members, it's obviously not a very feasible solution.

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I was thinking about this as well, but even if item limits weren't the issue as they are now, I'm not sure I like handing the keys to the house over to one person let alone 30. I trust friends to group with, cry on their shoulders, and will move mountains to help them, but particularly as the number you are trusting grows, so grows the risk that someone on your growing admin list will take something he/she is not entitled to. In words Holocron will fear, this will lead to more CS tickets.

I think a much better solution would be a way to leave things on a vendor for a class of people (your friends list, your PA, your faction, a specific player, etc.) for pickup (either for free or at a set price separate from the rest of the vendor).

I don't expect this to be done immediately of course, but getting it on the list for an upcoming update that we can look forward to would be nifty.

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Holocron wrote:

In general, I agree. However, you DO have a way now, which is the way that was intended--giving your PA members admin rights so that they can freely pick up and drop stuff in the hall.

Now,I can see that you want to have more granular permissions on the hall, which is fine, I think we can manage that.

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I had a huge response ready to post and the boards ate it and then restarted...I'm not going to retype it.

However, I will take you to task on this "way it was intended" method that we have now - who designed a system that would require ALL members of a PA to be an admin on their hall to be able to share items? That goes against every single thing I've ever learned about any sort of security, whether it be real life issues or game, and I find it hard to believe that you guys intended that to be the way things would work. Trusting people in your PA shouldn't be an issue, but can you be assured that nobody will accidentally do something to bork up your hall? And we have an item limit that's been imposed as well - should we forego all furniture and decorations in our PA hall now that we have to use the floor space to share stuff?

I hope you guys do manage to come up with an alternative solution, and I hope it's sooner rather than later. My playing group, which numbers close to 50 and is placing a PA hall this weekend, is severely impacted by the inability to have a private means of sharing resources and crafted items.

Solution:

Instead of using a Vendor to hold supplies for PA why not add an additional item(s) Architechs can make. For Supply Closets of something...

Like for example...

Weapons Locker - Accessiable to anyone in the PA (member) but you can only store Weapon's and Weapon Power up's. Maybe have a limit on number of items placed in it depending on the size... Make it so 3 differant size can be made and for each up size you get 50 slots... so small is 50, med 100, large 150...

Armor Locker - Same as Weapon but only holds Armor...

Pharm... Only for Medical supplies

Deep Freezer or a Storage Cabinet to hold food

I am sure you all can see what I am getting at... Mkae special containers that do NOT require a maintance cost but are like lockers or some sort of storage unit that is accisable to anyone in the PA. Also make it so these items can ONLY be placed in a PA Hall no where else...

Well that is my suggestion...

Greets ...

Holo ... I might have a solution for the PA Storage/Vault issue.

Put an "Access" list on the elevator controls in the PA hall. Allow anybody on the "elevator" access list to have Pickup/Drop authority *only* in the downstairs of the PA hall :-)

After all, the downstairs is sorta like a vault anyways :-) You don't have an access list for the elevator controls so it should not interfere with any programming on the guild panel or house panel.

As a programmer I can understand some of the programming issues involved with this ... your basic "owners get to drop AND destroy" is your road block ... your going to have to change that into 2 properties in your object so you can *assign* drop/pick authority to something besides the owner ... once your code monkeys do that, then you have all sorts of options.

Hero out

Bailis,

Good point, I did not think about selling to people in your factionor PA for REDUCED prices before submissing my post. Now I see the other side of the fence. Please disregard my last post. Maybe a good alternative would being able to make restricted vendors in a public house...one where you set who can access it and buy things from it. Or maybe a way to give a discount on your vendor to certain people...so the price would be listed at retail, but then people in your PA buy it for 50% of that price.

Zannon