Merchant Archive
Thread: Ideas on vendor/bazaar changes
This appears to be one of those bite the bullet issues thats going to hit the crafting community. The probelm with the DB is that we keep adding to it and rationally it can be assumed that no DB can store an infinate number of items. Even if they increased the size of thier database 3 fold there would still be an issue with stockpiling resources and goods which would cause serious issues. The alternatives to vendor caps would probably cause more problems than setting it.
I've taken some time to think about this and hopefully I'll be offering a few constructive suggestions:
I. The price cap for instant sales on the bazaar could definately use an increase. With the amount of money flowing around on the servers noncrafters have to have a viable means of selling resources and newbie crafters have to have a viable means of recovering some of the cost of advancing in thier trades.
A. Set the bazaar cap for instant sales to 5000 cr.
1. Allow for a price capof 10000 cr with the use of the premium sales ability.
B. Remove the bazaar price cap on auctions.
1. This would allow a commodities market to develop which would be a positive development for both crafters and resource suppliers.
2.Address the money sink issue bybasing fees on a percentage of the price paid for the commodity.
3. Allow the Merchants the use of their efficiency skills to reduce these fees.(essentially they becomethe most effective brokers)
C.Allow the Merchants to have more slots for sales on the bazaar.
1. Management would be used to increase the slots by 10 items per level.
2. Master Merchants should be alllowed 75 slots total on the bazaar.
II. Artisans should keep the ability to have vendors. It's important that they establish themselves and vendors are one of the few ways that they can provide an outlet to the goods theyproduce. Certain items just don't fit within the bazaars pricing capacity.
A. The Artisan vendor should be less efficient than the Merchant vendors.
1. Limit the Artisan vendor Capacity to 150 items or scale its capacity to the business skill tree.
2. Establish a fee structure for the Artisan vendoron a percentage or per sale basis.
III. Merchant vendors will require some scale back as presently they area problem for the database. Seeing as a substantial increase in the size of the database would not be a cost effective strategy for SWG some changes need to occur.
A.Capacity
1.The proposed 150 item limit is too low. The capacity should be scalable with skills appropriate in the merchant class but should start at 250 items.
2.Scalable capacity should probably work in the following manner:
Novice 250 items
Level 1 of the appropriate skill tree+ 50 items = 300 items
Level 2 of the appropriate skill tree+50 items =350 items
Level 3 of the appropriate skill tree +100 items=450 items
Level 4 of the appropriate skill tree+ 100 items=550 items
Master Merchant +200 items =750 items on each vendor
Considering the amount ofvendors a Master Merchant can have there should be no problem with total capacity of goods. Even a slight investment in the class would yield adequite capacity for item intensive crafting classes. Dabbling in merchant is practically a necessity for some of the crafting classes and should not be something for which people are penalized for.
Does the Merchant Communityconsider this viable? WillArtisansbe willing to acceptthe nerfing of their vendors on some level? Would a commodities market based upon an auction system without a price cap benefit the SWG economy? Can the developers indicate what would be an acceptable capacity that players can work with?
These are the questions that must be address before any substantive changes are implemented to the economy of the game.
reasaonable ideas. most have come up time and time again. especially about the bazaars. it just seems so self evident that its amazing that some of these things where not implemented ages ago.
my problem really is the reasoning behind nerfing the vendors. it is more about technical issuies than game mechanics.
if items need to be tweaked i can quickly come up with 50 ways to reduce the number of items in the game that would not upset any one.
i could generally live with that proposal..
Item stacking is something that should be considered to cut down on slot space as well. I had not thought of that until I read some other posts. Factory crates could also have more capacity but at some point though use these items become unique and would have to be reflected in the database as such.
The problem is that yes it is a technical issue which they could address but there are alot of folks using vendors as storage. Increasing the size of the DB is an option but it would most likely be reflected by additional cost for play. That is not something which I am willing to deal with.