Merchant Archive
Thread: The changes to vendor
Hey yall- im not a crafter type, nor a merchant, but i really dislike the idea of the new changes to a vendor 
So here's my idea- why not add skill modifiers to the merchant profession which allow additional items to be placed on vendors. These could be maybe +25 in each level of one line, and +50 at master, and would allow a master merchant to place 300 items on a vendor instead of 150- it seems this would make merchant a more desirable class to have, and, for those who don't have it, make knowing a merchant almost necessary to peddle their wares- which is what the merchants are supposed to do- peddle OTHER peoples wares
Please, respond to this with any ideas you may have- just remember, the idea here is to allow big stores to maintain their huge stores of items- and to make the merchant profession a more viable one
otodok-is-here wrote:
Hey yall- im not a crafter type, nor a merchant, but i really dislike the idea of the new changes to a vendor
So here's my idea- why not add skill modifiers to the merchant profession which allow additional items to be placed on vendors. These could be maybe +25 in each level of one line, and +50 at master, and would allow a master merchant to place 300 items on a vendor instead of 150- it seems this would make merchant a more desirable class to have, and, for those who don't have it, make knowing a merchant almost necessary to peddle their wares- which is what the merchants are supposed to do- peddle OTHER peoples wares
Please, respond to this with any ideas you may have- just remember, the idea here is to allow big stores to maintain their huge stores of items- and to make the merchant profession a more viable one
This essentially the current counter proposal given to the devs in the post in the development forum by several merchants.
DocSavag wrote:
This essentially the current counter proposal given to the devs in the post in the development forum by several merchants.
Does this mean that the devs are talking about putting the master merchant cap to only 300 spaces on each vendor?
Three hundred per vendor...for a *master*?
This hardly seems worth the incentive of giving up all those skill points, since 300 spaces per vendor is just as bad as 150...and still shows a total lack of foresight, consideration, understanding, or concern for any crafting profession whatsoever. Three hundred spaces is simply not enough to run with. It's just not, and there's no way I could make it work...and many, many other crafters are in the same situation. Hard to believe, since the devs are the ones that put the professions together in the first place. You'd think that they'd be clever enough to do the basic math.
Funny how for a player-based economy, they're doing everything in their power to make it impossible to actually make the economy work at all.
/sigh
I don't like the proposal to limit the vendors any more than anyone else. I do understand why they are doing it. They even warned us when they gave us unlmited items for the same maintenance rate and 30 day auctions that they would probably have to limit the items eventually.
The reality is that too many items in the game makes the database choke. In a perfect world the database would just handle it. But you have to fix what you can fix and right now they are fixing it by limiting the database by reducing the items in the vendors. I don't know what they are going to come up with. We'll know for sure when they put it up on test center for a trial. We'll have to see what it is and make our requests for adjustments. We have made our voices very clear about our feelings about the vendor item cap. I know they are trying to come up with a solution that punishes us as little as possible. I don't think they will come up with a way that doesn't punish us at all.
DocSavag wrote:I don't like the proposal to limit the vendors any more than anyone else. I do understand why they are doing it. They even warned us when they gave us unlmited items for the same maintenance rate and 30 day auctions that they would probably have to limit the items eventually.
The reality is that too many items in the game makes the database choke. In a perfect world the database would just handle it. But you have to fix what you can fix and right now they are fixing it by limiting the database by reducing the items in the vendors. I don't know what they are going to come up with. We'll know for sure when they put it up on test center for a trial. We'll have to see what it is and make our requests for adjustments. We have made our voices very clear about our feelings about the vendor item cap. I know they are trying to come up with a solution that punishes us as little as possible. I don't think they will come up with a way that doesn't punish us at all.
Hehe, I wasn't implying that you in any way condoned what the situation is. In fact, as I expressed in this thread:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=merchant&message.id=19560
which you may or may not have read, I think you were treated quite appallingly by the dev team on this issue, and I applaud the fact that you have made your displeasure with the situation and how it was handled known in no uncertain terms, but very diplomatically at the same time. You are in a difficult position, and I appreciate your efforts as a correspondent.
I also happen to agree wholeheartedly with the idea of a vendor cap, especially in light of the terrible database that the game has to rely on. I totally disagree, however, that this vendor cap is a fix in any way at all. Let's be honest here, if we can, and call it what it is: a nerf, and a crippling one, if it's done badly. It's already begun badly...it is a knuckle-whitening wait to see whether or not the end will be just as bad.
My point in the previous post was that if you go to the trouble of creating a game that:
A) must have a purely player based economy;
B) has crafting professions which have dozens of individual items, and then dozens of individual variations for many of those items, most of which do not stack at all;
C) has a database so substandard for the purposes it's being used for that probably an Excel 97 spreadsheet stands a 50-50 chance of defeating it in a one on one test;
D) has already severely limited storage space of *any kind* in the game and no intention of ever increasing that storage space, despite the considerable hardship it puts the player base through (CAN I GET A WAREHOUSE OR 10, PLEASE!?);
E) has significant imbalances between the needs of combat vs crafter classes (such as the same number of lots regardless of profession, which makes absolutely no sense);
F) has an unending variety of the *exact same types of resources and items* that do not stack at all, or stack in absurdly small amounts (ie., no forage items stack, five billion different types of copper and any other resource for no reason, factory crates that have ridiculously small numbers within a stack...10 trees in a crate, single ore mining units, instead of large crates mirroring the quantity that the schematic was created for, etc);
G) has many, many vendors in the game that are perpetually empty, or belong to people who have wholly given up the professions which allowed them to place vendors in the first place;
H) has a bazaar system that has a useless function (auction) that serves no purpose but to additionally clog up the database;
I) has a dev team who have taken no visible steps whatsoever that lead in the direction of either upgrading or totally replacing the database...which I devoutly hope will be considered as part of the coming space expansion (I have no doubt that I'm not the only one who would gladly deal with a week or two of downtime if it meant that a new, awesome database was being put into place);
J) has a dev team that have, for whatever reason (technical or otherwise), ignored bugs that have been extant in the game since beta and which are still live, in favour of adding new content which introduces myriad numbers of new bugs which are then also ignored, as well as swinging the nerf bat again and again and again, instead of fixing the current issues and then work towards balancing professions and then adding new content;
K) and has, in short (too late), quite a number of immediate and extremely significant solutions which do NOT hurt the player base...such as allowing the stacking of many, many more items, as well as a severe reduction in the number of different variations of the same exact items, which the dev team could use *instead* of placing such severe limits on vendor item storage,
then I have neither sympathy nor patience nor any reason to believe that any significant, meaningful effort at all will be made to make the impact of a vendor cap as small as possible. In my estimation, a cap of 1500 items per vendor at master merchant level is acceptable...barely, for some professions, such as tailors and weaponsmiths, as well as some architects who deal strictly in furniture, and some armoursmiths who are extremely prolific. But a cap of 300 hurts a vast number of the crafting population, and is, frankly, in my humble opinion, an insulting slap in the face to the entire crafting population of the SWG universe. The idea that a master merchant can only put 300 items on a vendor at one time doesn't make the profession seem at all worthwhile.
I like the idea of making the item cap grow incrementally as one advances through the merchant profession, because that does add a lot of very nice value to the merchant line indeed. And as I said, I dont mind the vendor caps, in theory, at all. I support a healthy vendor cap...no matter what kind of database you use, they all have limitations, and of course unlimited space is not currently a luxury any MMOG has.
I do mind the crude, thoughtless, and arbitrary way this was introduced, though, and I certainly mind the way we, the player base, are expected to submit meekly and the attitude that sometimes comes back from the dev team when the players complain stridently about something that is obviously a great detriment to the game overall. There is a great deal of unfounded...or barely founded...whining and complaining, 'tis true. But that doesn't mean that all the shouting is simply the rabble stirring up trouble for no reason, and that is very often how we, the rabble, are treated. And I resent it.
Now, all that being said, I am fully aware that nobody has any idea what the actual vendor cap will be, either at minimum or at maximum. However, be that as it may...the number of 150 should never, ever, ever have been even considered anything more than laughable, much less introduced to the community at large, even if it was just a starting point bargaining chip. One hundred fifty items, even as a suggestion, does nothing more than illustrate the glaring misconceptions and lack of understanding the dev team has for the crafting professions as a whole...and that, of course, is the worst cut of all, since it's THEIR game.
I hope that TH, as he so fervently and frequently exclaims, is really going to bat for us on this with all his might, and is truly comprehending the horrible storage and space issues that merchant crafters have overall, and what a deadly impact a small vendor item storage cap would have on many players. I dont want to leave this game, but if the vendor cap goes in and is too low, I will be forced to leave, because there's no other profession combination I find in the least bit interesting to play. Leaving won't be my choice. It will be forced upon me by the very team that is trying to get people to stay, and have more fun playing. That alone indicates that there is something awfully rotten in the state of San Diego...and I'm hoping that at least some folks on the dev team are able to smell it, too.
Thanks for all your dedication and hard work, Doc. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this turns out all right. I love this game. I dont want to have to leave.
Oh no I wasn't suggesting that I was misunderstood or blamed on this issue I was just balancing my understanding of why it is necessary to make a change with my displeasure with it.
Unfortunately it is far harder to redesign a database after launch than it is before launch. The chances of a major change to the design now are slim until they run out of patches (like the vendor nerf)
I hope that we can mitigate the issue a bit with scaling limits and make the skills in merchant a little more desirable in the process. Ultimately the database will win the argument we can only hope to push the implementation a little in one direction or the other.