Merchant Archive
Thread: Vendor Item cap in development! What what what?
Korrack wrote:
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...
Wait one minute.....They DID NOT say, hey, this is on test and it will hit live in a few weeks.....this is a part of "We were thinking of this and wanted your input". Everybody calm down......I'm sure this isn't the last we will hear from them on the issue......now if it gets implemented over the objections of the majority of people, I would say "Vent on!!!" but it's not......everybody needs to take a long breath and realize that you're not going to go home and have a 150 item limit to deal with today.
BlueMorgoth wrote:
Doc, wasn't directly bitching at you, just venting some frustrations. I would have thought something this serious they would have at least given you a 10 minute warning before posting it and that you may have started crying foul over it already.
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.
It would have been nice if they had come to me and given me the job of letting you guys know that a database nerf was necessary and to give you their proposal and get your feedback before they announced it to the whole community. Sadly it doesn't work that way. You guys knew about it before I did.
I have posted a proposal simular to that in the correspondant forum and I believe Draznar and others have posted it in the In Development post.
keylargodave wrote:
Wait one minute.....They DID NOT say, hey, this is on test and it will hit live in a few weeks.....this is a part of "We were thinking of this and wanted your input". Everybody calm down......I'm sure this isn't the last we will hear from them on the issue......now if it gets implemented over the objections of the majority of people, I would say "Vent on!!!" but it's not......everybody needs to take a long breath and realize that you're not going to go home and have a 150 item limit to deal with today.
No they didn't institute the changes, but they didn't even consult the correspondent of the profession they are proposing a massive nerf to. That was my vent. Once the changes go in, and trust me they will, because they HAVE to, then I will just drop Merchant and become a combat class cos those are the only things they actually fix in the game. Their database is dying, so gimping something is the only way they can try and fix it. It is inevitable that some day they have to gimp items counts of something, be it merchant vendors, backpack storage, house storage etc.
I'm surprised that no one else has pointed out the serious potential impact to player cities this nerf would also have. These 2 changes seem designed to move sales to the bazaar. Ok, fine and dandy (of course, I see no benefit of doing that). But what about the significant negative impact that shift would have on player city economies? Many player cities rely on the sales taxes from their vendors to support the extremely high costs of maintaining the city. With a shift to the bazaar (which, of course, isn't located in player cities), a significant tax revenue stream goes away. That impact could/would be huge!
Now, I'm a Master Merchant/Master Architect, that mostly sells furniture and deeds. I have just one vendor. Makes it easy for me. I've considered splitting furniture from deeds, but I've failed to see the benefit of doing so for either me or my customers. However, with a 150 item limit, I'd actually have to create like 5 vendors, and device some incredibly complex way of seperating the vendors. Like one just for torches. Another just for miners. Another, just for chairs. I mean, the seperation would be excessive and confusing for everyone.
Bah! I'm rambling. This just would plain sukc.
Srednii wrote:
Well I guess I can just give up totally on stocking a full range of colors. Hell, I can just stock 1 black piece of each type of clothing! ya that's the ticket!
No you can't, you have way more than 150 schems. Too bad they couldn't at least pick an arbitrary number that's workable.
The thing that comes to mind reading all this that's really bugging me. Some of my family and I had a mall running before our merchant dropped it for politician. The original plan was for me to go ahead and pick it up instead and reopen it again later. Not sure I want to bother now. Only four of our vendors were run on consignment, but the crafters we worked with were based on other planets and using our mall as a satellite location. With no caps at all, sometimes working out restocking was a pain and just from scheduling problems there would be days where one would run out just because we couldn't meet up in time to transfer the stock. We tried to restock them with 2-400 items at a time because there was no convenient way to hook up with them daily for restocks. Even then, things like disposable weapons and powerups sold out fast. I can't imagine babysitting 150 limit vendors with multiple suppliers spread across 4 planets every day, and I sure don't see them giving us anywhere to hold the overstock in the meantime.
And you know what else? This is yet another hit to the casual gamer. We got them to increase the stockroom rollover from 7 days to 30 days so we could take a few days off from restocking vendors if we needed/wanted to. Yay! LOVED that!
But now they will implement this 150 item limit and we are back to even worse than before with needing to babysit your vendors! A busy merchant can sell out 150 items several times a day! You mean if I want to stay in bisiness and not go broke from overhead, I have to babysit my vendor and restock it every day or several times a day? Ummm. No. I refuse. I will drop merchant and tailor before I do that. Fun. Not work. Got that? Restocking vendors all the danged time due to whacky mechanics and database issues is not my idea of fun.
Empty vendor? That customer never comes back. The average customer doesn't give a fig why you might not have stock in there at any given time. Most won't even realize there is a limit! All they will know is that your vendor doesn't have hardly any selection if any. The average customer will just "move along."
Most players don't "dig through" all those listed items? Ha! Most don't know they CAN! Maybe if the Next Item button had been a big red glowie named Holocron cube, they'd have managed to notice it was there to click on?
Casual gamer friendly. Non-combat types can have just as much fun. Yah right, you betcha.
Well I guess I can just give up totally on stocking a full range of colors. Hell, I can just stock 1 black piece of each type of clothing! ya that's the ticket!
Man, this is the worst idea the devs have come up with yet. True incompetence is required to have let things slide so far they have to nerf merchants.
Xazias wrote:
the vendor cap isnt a big deal if you have more then one vendor available to you, however for those that only have one vendor available to them, it is a big deal. I have 6 vendors, ill be utilizing all 6 so i can continue to stock the normal amount in my shop, it will just be split up over 4-5 of the 6 vendors. To me this isnt a bad idea, but like i said for those with only one vendor available to them...it is.
I have 3 vendors set up in certain high traffic pleaces along with the remaing vendors in my city. My high traffic vendors have 300-400 items minimum stocked when I restock them. The high demand stuff get's cleaned out in 1-2 days. With the 150 item cap I will have to restock my vendors 2-3 times a day.
The best idea that I have seen is whe people have multiple items of the same thing the vendor only holds one of them while the rest are in the stock room. When said item is bough one is automatically pulled from the stock room and the vendor is refreshed after each purchase until supplies are out. The only problem I see with this is items that have different stats due to them being made with different resources.
For a game that is centered around the player ecomony this isn't the best way to promote it. 