Merchant Archive

oh just to mention, my vendors dont affect my item limit for my house.. i have over 300 items for sale on vendors and have lockdowns to.

As others have said, doing things to a PA Hall will not remove the need for private vendors at all. There are numerous examples here of non-PA related private trading, ranging from merchants with private customers to "pre-PA" groups pooling their resources in order to *build* a PA Hall in the first place.

I think that you folks should step back a little and look at the requirements and *then* look at the solution.

We have an advanced galaxy with many high-tech items. We have a cosmopolian environment where something is happening 24/7 (both in the galaxy and in the physical world). The need for a mechanism (or multiple mechanisms) for non-same-time interaction is pretty obvious. We have a means (email) for that in the communication space. We *had* a means (vendors in private homes) for the "tangible" space. Email is totally boundless, and is not dependent on PA status, fraction points, etc. Transferring tangible objects in a non-same-time way needs to have the same characteristics.

The vendor model is outstanding for this (other than the general limitations of the current Bazaar interface). It is familiar to people. It does provide some mechanisms to categorize and sort. It does provide a "seller description" so things can be marked. It is tied to a "logging" system (email). It allows people to set the price at 1cr (effectively just "transferring" items) or whatever makes sense in the relationship between the seller and buyer.

Can you improve on this model, given the feedback here? I'm sure that you can. I'd love to see your ideas.

I don't know how many "grief" incidents with vendor abuse you've had - I'm sure that there have been some, otherwise you wouldn't have addressed this. However, notice that you didn't check on how many people were using the vendors for "positive" purposes (I would categorize ALL of the posts here about different ways people where using these as "positive", frankly.) So, to avoid the grief felt by XX people, you have totally cut off YY people.

I have a suggestion - you guys have the transaction records - run a report that shows the number of players buying things from vendors at 1cr each and compare that number to the number of grief complaints you have gotten. I know that that doesn't capture the full range of "positive" usage out there, but it might give you an idea of how wide-spread that particular usage was.

I would add my voice to the others here that you re-enable vendors in private houses until you design and implement a better solution.

Mikka R'zrPoint
Chilastra

Why do we need a PA Vendor or Private vendors?

There are 2 senarios here. Let me start with the Private Vendor:

We have, in our guild, a Master Architect. He has about 1 weeks worth of orders backlogged. Some Orders take 30, or 40k+ resources. Some as much as 100K+ resources, It takes days to gather all these resources then make an item.

There is an issue with 'syncing' up delevery of the item to the person. The Architect can't be on all day every day, or even at the same playtimes, so, he uses a Vendor. However, he places this item on the Vendor and some other person can simply buy it up before the person whom it was meant for gets there. He is now unable to fill orders, and has lost a customer because he made a promise he can no longer keep, simply because he cannot make the delivery and he has different playtimes than the customer.

What this Architect needs is a way to place something on a Vendor only allowing 1 other person to buy it.

The Architect was using the vendor private house method to take care of this. He had 1 vendor in one house that was public where he sold smaller stuff to the general public. Small harvesters, furnature, etc etc.

But, the private house was used for custom orders. He could control who could get into the house to buy the items he listed there, so the items were not lost. (He also places the items in bags/backpacks with the persons name on them instructing no one else to buy the pack but only them)

--

PA Vendor:

We have a WeaponsSmith and a Master Doctor that wish to sell their wares to Guild members at Cost. Not for free, but what it costs them to make it. In the case of the Weapon Smth, he reserves extra good Materials for use in guns which he gives to his guildies. Some of these resources he pays in excess of 25-35 credits per unit for. He isn't interested in giving away these guns, because he wants to break even, but is interested in selling these guns to his guildmembers for what it costs to make them (some of these guns are quite expensive to make, due to just how much he can pay for really good resources).

A Vendor with a controlled buy/view list would be perfect. He doesn't wish to be 'griefed' by other customers because of the really good weapons he makes for his guildies, but, he wants to provide a better service and product to his friends, but once again, he doesn't wish to give it away.

We have an Armorsmith that wishes to do the same, but will no longer be able to now.

When these folks are in game, they want to be having fun. They don't want to waist their entire time trying to deliver a product or waiting for someone to come pick something up. They want to be able to drop it 'somewhere' and say "come get it" but still want to have a credit exchange along with that. What they need and want are private vendors, or a way to make certain listed items private and only viewable/buyable by certain folks or a group of folks.

Here's a simple idea that might help.When using your vendor and setting price, add a field for either a user list or a password. When someone goes to buy that item then they either need to be on the user access list or know and enter the password. I know you guys are having database problems so the password would be easier to implement and take less storage than a user list as it would be a single, fixed size field added to the vendoritems table. From a user perspective I wouldrather have the list.

On another note (though related) can we implement grouplists at some point. Either user definable or subscription based? Then if you set a userlist as indicated above for a resource sharing scheme, you could just put "<PA Name Here> Members" and have the vendor anywhere.

This suggestion would support vendors that need to "leave" an item on their vendor for someone else. It would also work for the PA Resource Sharing (or non-PA cooperative group). I think its unfair to assume everyone who works together is necessarily in a PA.

The problem with having a shared house to drop things off at and pick things up is that you can't be sure who picked up what. I like to receive the email that lets me know exactly who got what item.

Mantyss Xin'Shou

Gorath

Yike tough problem with the griefing issue. To those suggesting they remove or not allow items in private vendors to show on the bazaar, how would that work exactly? Couldn't someone turn his house public to sell the tiemsthen turn it back to private before pickup could be made? I'm sure it would make this more work for a griefer but they could still grief.

Right now I use a "private" vendor for only two things.

1) Special Sales.

I am faction neutral.I very often give people discounts on my merchandise for all types of reasons. If one of those people happens to not be faction neutral I can't trade with them. The only way for me to sell to them is through my vendor. So they come to my shop, I mess with my house permissions and make the house private. I put the discounted item(s) on my vendor. When they finish purchasing I turn my house public and change my house permissions back.

2) Temporarily closing my shop.

I consider it a personal embarassment to have a nearly empty vendor. If I know my stock is too low and that I do not have time or resources to stock it, I close my shop and change my sign to tell why its closed and for how long. In this case its not really a private vendor but a vendor that happens to be in my private house.

With no vendors in private structures I will have to find workarounds for these cases.For case 2 I can just change my sign and deal with the fact some folks won't read it and will come in anyway. Or, I could remove the items left on my vendor, remove the vendor, and close like I have in the past. Pain in the butt but doable.

What do I do for case 1? If I want to sell somebody a deed for half my normal price for whatever reason (maybe he provided half the resources)and I cannot do a trade window with him, how shall I do that? How do I prevent someone who just happens to pop into my shop from buying the deed out from under the right customer?

Could there be a way to make it so vendors with items in the stockroom could not be in a private house? How about a "private sale" option on vendors?

One thing I have to wonder..... what is my current vendor in my private home doing right now? What happened to it? What happened to my items on it?

Mantyss Xin'Shou

Gorath

Holo, I have a huge problem with this. I am a merchant, tailor, bioengineer. I take special orders on clothes and put them in my vendor. My friend sells his meds through my vendor. My house is full of bioengineered pets that can be tamed by any CH that decides to walk in, and so I keep my house private and deal with special orders.

Now, of course, I expect to log on and see no creatues in my house. Yesterday, after I realized that I could not drop a creature for display without making the house public, and then could not make it private again because I have a vendor, I gave up. I started a new character on Tempest.

The problems are: tissues do not work in clothes so my idea for a character did not work anyway

And: CHs can steal my pets, other BEs can DNA sample them

While I was doing my house maintance yesterday, I was contacted by a CH who needed a pet. I said, "the house is public. Come on in and take what you want. Just tame whatever you see that you like." What can I do now anyway?

So, Holo, Please fix it so that vendors CAN be private, so that we can deal with our other problems as best we can. Again, you change (not fix, just change) one thing and make another few things worse.

Fivod, Bloodfin

I have 2 vendors in my PA hall which has been public since the hall was built. Reason? When the hall ate up 9 of my lots I could no longer have a house/shop and the hall became my residence, showroom, and store. My guild is most supportive of this, but it means we can never close the hall off for a private guild function.

I would like to be able to have a reduced price vendor for my PA, not just give them all admin rights to the hall. I would like to be able to set entry or vendor access to friend list/PA members/faction members/all, as I choose. I would like to be able to have SOME area in my home that I can set as private. Someone operating a store in their home should not have to put up with people traipsing all over the house.

A separate vendor/house issue: I can now make and place a vendor in my friend's house, but even before initializing I cannot move or pick it up, and neither can my friend. Only way to remove this vendor if it isn't where you want it is to destroy it and create a new vendor.

Dear Holocron,

I really appreciate that once you change things around and people are ranting and whinig and complaining, you take the time and listen to us and evaluate our input and change some things.

But why can't you do this BEFORE you change things and screw up and annoy everyone. And even if you don't ask us, why don't you put these things on TestCenter first and listen to the people complaining there? That would save both sides a lot of frustration, and could probably get these boards back to a discussion about the game instead of ranting about changes already implemented.

And please, don't give me that "everything was on TestCenter and in the update notes and known and tested" again. House limits were not. Vendors were not. Lots of other things were not. But these two are just fundamental things that you could have asked us about before going ahead and just doing it.

Thanks,

CaLViN

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.

-Raph Koster, Creative Director


the problem with this raph is that anybody with admin access can also access the pa halls bank.

I would like to use my vendor for a PA drop-point. I give quantities of my wares to PA mates for free(and in exchange they help me with other stuff). I'd like to be able to have a vendor which is only usable by PA mates

Solution would be to add a entry/ban list to vendors similar to the one on house. Like that I could keep a PA vendor, and a public vendor both in my house, without worrying about the public taking the cheap items I dropped for PA members.

I also leave peoples custom orders on my vendor so people can pick them up at their leisure. With this system I could just add the people with orders waiting onto the entry list, and no-one else could access the vendor.