Merchant Archive
Thread: Vendor Item cap in development! What what what?
THIS IS WHAT I WAS TALKING ABOUT!
We have no voice and now we're being nerfed out of existance. If they think I'm going to restock every vendor every day they can forget it. I have a RL job that pays real money that I need to feed my children and keep my wife in nice clothes. Unless they want to send mea check every month I think this needs some serious rethinking.
The fact that this was presented in open forums and a copy wasn't pasted here shows that the Dev's consider us a small and impotent splinter of the player community, unworthy of even asking our opinions before opening it up to every troll in the multiverse.
It's an even better game now..I get to sit in my house and IMAGINE I'm a merchant.
I agree with Draznar's suggestion that the item cap be based on skill. If they do this, then there is a clear value to keeping the high-level Management skill.
Unfortunately, I suspect this whole issue isn't about monopolies or customers having trouble working the interface. It's about their database.
I've designed databases before, and I have no idea how they can be running out of space. (Well, I have an idea how, but it's not flattering to their programmers...) 10,000 players with 10,000 items each, with 1 kb of disc space per item is roughly 100 Gb of space used for player items, which is NOTHING for servers these days. And most servers have less than 10,000players and most players have far less than 10,000 items (rarely more than 1000 for anyone except merchants). That puts item data down to about 10 Gb, which would fit on most of our PCs. If their item database is blowing up, it'smost likely that they are storing more than 1 kb of data per item.
In any case, revising their database is a nightmare project, which is why they're trying to avoid it. In the mean-time we have to expect that they will go through with some sort of item storage nerf, so we should at least try to ensure that merchants get less nerfed by this than the non-merchant vendor owners.
Draznar wrote:
Doc had no say in this. And I would not be surprised that he had no idea this was coming.
BlueMorgoth wrote:
DocSavg, how the hell could you even let them get to the point of even suggesting this!
I had no advance warning of that post. It wasn't discussed with me at all. I'm responding in my own way to it but I suggest that all of you post your arguements against this serious Merchant Nerf in that development post.
Suggestions I've seen that make some sense:
- list in parenthesis next to vendors how many items they have
- have planetary listed vendors show up in bazaar queries
- have a bazaar listing option for ONE vendor per char at a high premium
- delist vendors that lack stock
- allow stacking of like materials
- improve sort function
- add search/keyword functionality in both bazaar/vendors
- fix categorization across the board
- allow junk dealers to buy anything at a set or limited but useful price level
- tie sale price in bazaar to merchant level
- tie "Premium" auction to increased sales level
- improve collums for # of chrages, # of resources/items in listing, etc.
- allow grouping of items (selling 'suits of armor', etc) for sale
- cap vendor price at some final reasonable level, to avoid people 'fake listing' products for 1trillion.
- havea space for advertisements on the bazaar so people don't populate fake items
- have auctions end when item reaches limit price
- ship items to other planets for people at a premium (percentage of cost probably)
of course the one that would reduce a lot of item load would be to have junk stop being dropped.
or my favorite, block sales/increase to super high levels maintenance on vendors for people who drop merchant skills with placed vendors.
--D'Ruk of iD Co., Corbantis
DocSavag wrote:
Draznar wrote:
Doc had no say in this. And I would not be surprised that he had no idea this was coming.
BlueMorgoth wrote:
DocSavg, how the hell could you even let them get to the point of even suggesting this!
I had no advance warning of that post. It wasn't discussed with me at all. I'm responding in my own way to it but I suggest that all of you post your arguements against this serious Merchant Nerf in that development post.
The 150 item vendor cap is serious bull**** and incredibly shortsighted. I posted my thoughts on that thread.
They have a bad DB design, and we pay the price.. yet again.
I finally get a business running by selling resources and running vendors for two friends and this crap is coming into play.
I can't wait till that patch! Every merchant that has more than 150 items on a vendor will probably lose those items.
Time to surrender my Master Merchant. Not worth the skill points anymore.
I'm off to the nearest starport to SPAM-SELL 100K stacks of resources.
I've had it!
It also might encourage the dabblers into giving up the profession and partnering with an established master merchant to sell their stuff for them. I know a few merchants on starsider that do exactly this and they are happy. Currently, with the proposed changes I can take my high volume things like BH droids and batteries and move them to the bazzar. If I want to, I can do one of two things, drop merchant all together and only craft droids on an special order basis. Or I can work up to master and become a merchant that others sell their stuff through (for a slight profit).
I beleive that this will help a lot of things. Merchants will become real merchants, they will have to manage inventories, work partnerships and advertise their wares. You will see fewer vendors in the galaxy and those vendors will have a higher likelyhood of being stocked and not EMPTY. Crafters can work on crafting and can use their points elsewhere as they see fit.
I know that mine is not the majority view but it's mine nonetheless.
Given the way the devs have acted to date, we're going to get some sort of limit whether we want it or not. Drazner's suggestion is a good one based on skill levels and makes having master Merchant worthwhile. My personal recommendation to you is to offer that as the counter to their proposal.
If there has to be a limit, please bite and scratch for it to be as high as possible.
And try not to offer business III and novice merchants up as sacrificial lambs. They still deserve to be able to operate a decent business.
I know I'm gonna catch hell for this but does anybody else see this as a good example of how the "New Communication Process" can work. Instead of, "Here's what we've done, live with it" we have "Here's what we're thinking, everybody poke holes in it". Just a thought.
DocSavag wrote:
I had no advance warning of that post. It wasn't discussed with me at all. I'm responding in my own way to it but I suggest that all of you post your arguements against this serious Merchant Nerf in that development post.
This statement in of itself goes a LONG way to prove that the developers have absolutely know interest in having anything in the game the way the players want it. You are supposed to be the liason between the developers and the players and had no notice / no say in this proposed change.
If they don't listen to the correspondents, they obviously don't listen to the rest of us...
donnah42 wrote:
It's sad that merchant abilities are up on the table for sacrifice to the database. I'm not understanding why they can't either make their database more efficient or just upgrade it.
I think ideas is probably correct on this point.
When dealing with databases, it's really, really crucial that the initial database design be ironclad and well thought-out, because the difficulty of changing something major once you're in production and stuck with a faulty design ranges from "extremely difficult" to "impossible."
This is the sort of issue that comes up in "real" businesses frequently, presenting a tough decision for managers, because it often boils down to one of two managerial choices:
1. Let's muddle through somehow with the current design, and make whatever band-aid fixes we can, and hope that I'm promoted to a different department before everything totally blows up. (usually the "penny wise, pound foolish" choice, as it doesn't involve spending much short-term money.) In SWG terms, this approach results in arbitrary item and inventory limits, the Nerfing of the Melons, etc.
2. Let's face it, we're screwed. We're stuck with a faulty design, and as painful as it might be (and, make no mistake, it *will* be), our only option is to scrap the current database, fire the consultants responsible for it, and rebuild from the ground up using a sound design. It'll be expensive, yeah, and involve lots of time and effort and downtime, but in the long run, it's the only way to save the system.
Managers, of course, *greatly* prefer option #1 to option #2.