Merchant Archive

**edit** is wrong with the DEVS ?

DIdnt we all Vote AGAINS the Vendor Cap ?

Was I dreaming or did the post about the vendor cap gor hundreds of replies saying NO, BIG NO

**edit** dont they see that this will only hurt the merchants/crafters. Everyone else that needs space for pure storage will do lot trading, 8 factories to store 900 stacks of resources/components and one house to store the remainign items.

If this is not enough they will lot trading again to store even more.

Id the Devs want to lower the record count on the DB make stacks higher. Resource should stack about 1M, Crates of ate least 1K, etc, etc. I'm an armorsmith and for every factory run to make 90 composite sets I have to travel back and fwd lots of times just to take the FKG crates of 25 components.

CHANGE THE RIGHT THINGS, NOT THE WRONG ONES.

DAMN YOU. DONT LIKE IT, BAN ME. I'M REALLY TIRED OF THIS **edit**.

NO RESPECT FOR THE CRAFTERS.

DAMN YOU

ALMOST ONE YEAR PLAYING THIS FKG GAME AND ITS ALWAYS THE SAME **edit**. SO MANY BUGS TO FIX SO MANY THINGS TO IMPROVE AND YOU SPEND YOU TIME FKG US.

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If you have less space then you will have to learn to cope with it..yes. That is my opinion. I am not making a judgement about the justice of you having less space. I am stating that it is a fact that the devs have told us there will be vendor item limits. If you choose not to play the game because of it ok, but if you choose to play you will have to cope with the new rules which will be less vendor space to deal with.

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Personally I don't want a correspondent that tells the player base to "learn to cope with it" when an overwhelming majority of people oppose/resent an upcoming change.

Up and until we see this change, I want to see you carrying the water for us - being an advocate, jumping up and down and even SCREAMING if necessary to get the point across LOUD AND CLEAR.

Now - you may very well be doing that. But your recent posts on this issue sound like you have rolled over and conceded the fight.

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rexan wrote:

o what do you suggest they do? They have stated that the database is growing to the point that there are going to be problems. And with the current situation, people canput UNLIMITED numbers into this vendor database.

I think SOE would rather deal with mule issues than an UNLIMITED player storage situation.

I live in a player city on Dantooine. We get insane lag when accessing the vendordatabase. Have you ever tried to access the merchant database on that planet? SOMETHING needs to be done to speed things up.

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DocSavag wrote:

We are currently waiting the next proposal to be released. They are most likely going to scale the vendor item limits to the merchant skills. But expect to have a cap and expect it to be far less than you want it to be even at the top.

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150 items per vendor? We went over this with the Dev team months ago. It still will not work. My *tiny* business has over 500 items in *ONE* of my vendors. The other 5 easily have 200+ each. What do they expect me to do? I don't even sell resources cause I would have to place 1000's of items up for sale to get the right mix of resources for customers. Now if they allowed me to put 1 resource on there and allow the customer to decide how much of that they wanted to buy there would be fewer items but I still need hundereds of spaces for all the other items I carry. Imagine what it must be like for a taylor or armorsmith.


-Indene-

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rexan wrote:

The Devs came here about 1 month ago as said, were raising the bazaar limits to 6k. And were going to cap vendors at 150. The reason is that the vendor database is TOO large, and needs to be reduced.

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I have a silly idea. When I go to vendors for resources I see 100's of the same resource over and over with same or different quanities. How bout making the vendor be able to stack all those same resources in a single entry with a max size much bigger than the 100k limit and allow the customer to buy as much as they want in a single purchase?

And for non resources allow factory crates to be opened and drained by the vendor.

And allow vendors to stack identical items back into a 'crate' to place on vendor. (the vendor then unpacks like the crate above)

And instead of nerfing bags create a bag that allows the merchant/crafter to put things in the bag for sale with an admin list so the vendor can allow that list of persons to see in the bag before it is bought.

And if the customer buys more than 1 of an item from a crate give it to the customer in a crate (split the crate) to reduce the database load there too.

-Indene-

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SueDenim wrote:
Of course the real 800 pound gorilla in the room is the fact that, for reasons inexplicable to me as an IT professional, the database design is woefully inadequate for dealing with the game design's central (and IMO, best) feature, the player-run economy.

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A *Crafting* based player run economy with some crafts requiring lots of sub components that must go somewhere.

-Indene-

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DocSavag wrote:

The problem is that more space means more items in the world and more issues for the database. The devs want less items in the game.

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Then they have a serious design issue. This game is promoted as a player run economy where *crafting* is the major source of activity. That means they had to plan on lots of items to make all those schematics happen. The schematics require lots of different resources. The qualities of the resources count and after 7 will count even more. That means harvesting and storing some resources for months untill a crafter has the right combination of resources to craft the better/best product. In such a game environment the database *must* be large and effecient. In this and other threads I have seen many good suggeestions to improve the efficency of the database but will just remention 1 here. Change the resource quanity cap from 100k to 4,000,000,000 (round up to the 32 bit integer) Then my small collection of say 5 100k blocks of the same resource would become 1 block (that is a potential 5:1 reduction in the size database). Since I have at least 10 groups of resources where I have more than 100k (and I am an independent miner) imagine what a guild might collect. They could easily drop the database size by a lot just by this 1 change.

-Indene-

P.S. if they were very efficent at the database the marker I carry in my inventory would be a number and a pointer to a shared database element that has the full description of just that resource (down to the serial number). The above proposal would still have *significant* effect on the database size because the *item* in the world is just the count of how many and the pointer to the items description. Now if the problem is the item description is getting too big then they are in a real world of hurt cause not only is it all the creations by crafters but all the resource shifting creating Items in the world and that is a core element of this game.

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rexan wrote:

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Actually, you have to spend 24 skill points to get the Business3 vendor. But once placed, they can sell back the 24 skill points and still maintain the vendor. (I consider this an exploit, and the developers have said they are working to fix this loophole). Then your small house that can normally hold 150 items can now hold an UNLIMITED number of items.

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I see this a lot. Why do you say that following the game specific rules is an 'exploit'? The rule is you must have this much merchant (or business) skill to hire a vendor (place a vendor). When you drop the skill you can no longer place the vendor. The skill is *PLACING* the vendor not using it. Now if the DEV's decide to change the game play to give the Merchant the 'skill' to use the vendor then they will be nerfing all the other professions (taking away an ability). I'm sure that will sit well with them. But then they should be used to it by now and as a Master Merchant it can only help me because people will have to offer things to MY vendor they would have sold themselves. Alas with a cap on the size of the vendor I will not be able to handle the load (I'm the only merchant in our city) and will have to turn away all those crafters. Sigh. Unless we get more vendors ((perk?))

-Indene-

crafting is becoming like the vehicle paint, more trouble than its worth....

it is increasingly becoming less fun....

for me, i generally like action....i want to run around and battle....but the combat in this game is the weakest i have ever seen in any game....it reminds me of playing the original zelda from like 1991....

without the fun of crafting, there is nothing to keep me here.

the nonly carrot still left is that i have heard rumors that the Space expansion is FPS style

I think I may have stumbled on another clue to the reason for the desire for vendor caps. We know about the database problems. We know they want fewer items in the world. And now I found this in another forum

on 03-04-2004 3:43 pm Thunderheart wrote in answer to a question about new servers from Chli:

Probably not for a bit. We're more focused on how to get more people on the existing servers.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=in_concept&message.id=6627#M6627

So make everyone have less and there is room for more people using the existing database

-Indene-

I'm so tired of this discursion.

THAT WILL NOT REDUCE THE DATABASE LOAD. WHY CANT THE DEVS SEE THAT.

This will only reduce the load if the players QUIT. Is that what they want ????

Why, you ask. Simple. Players are not going to delete theyr stocks, they will find other ways to store it. Let me give you some examples:

1 Lot = 1 Factory
1 Factory = 100 Stacks of resources, thats 10M resources
In the factory Input Hooper we can store Resources and components

All other Items will go into Bank, Houses (small houses = 150 items)

Then you say ... "But we only have 10 lots". WRONG AGAIN

Lot Trading is not an Exploit and have been used for along time.
Every player can have 5 or 8 chars on diferent servers, but most of us only play with one. Since this problem will affect everyone on every server, everyone will do it. Lets make an example:

5 Players on diferente servers join to do some lot trading.
This means that every player will end up with 50 lots on is main server, 10 that he already had and 40 more from the trade.
Dont touch your main lots, use them as you use to.
With the other 40 balance them between factories and houses.
10 Lot full of factories = 10 Factories = 1000 slots to store resources and crates of components.
10 Lot full of houses = 750 slots to store any kind of stuff

This means that this 5 players will end up with something like 10 houses to store 1500 general items and 20 factories to store 2000 crates of resources/compoments, and they still keep the normal 10 lots on the main char.

Now, looking at this, the storage wont be a problem. The DAtabase load wont be reduced so whats the problem here ?

1. The planets will be full of storage structures (More database load)
2. The Crafters/Merchantes will be the ones that will pay the bill because they cant give a normal service because they cant put the usual stuff on the vendors. One of my vendors is an armor vendor. I currently have always on stock 3 diferent Composite Armor and 1 Ubese. I try to keep at least 10 full sets of each armor on the vendor. Since I put the full sets inside bags, thats 400 items just to have 10 full sets of each armor set. I cant do it with less because even with only 10 full sets of each, sometimes they dont last 24hours, and I restock every day. WHat am I supose to do ? Tell my boss I have to login the game to restock the vendor every 4 hours ?

Well, this is a shame. This game is based on the crafters/merchants. Without them no one can play, and instead of improving the Devs keep makeing hour live more and more impossible.

Since this doesnt make any sence, maybe we are missing some information about the real reason they are doing it. If this is the case, came out in the open and say what it is.