Merchant Archive

I actually am not entirely against the new changes as far as the concept goes but I do believe the caps are rediculously low especially for tailors, armorsmith and resource vendors etc. These vendors require such high capacity just to have 2 or 3 colors of a specific item etc. It is quite problematic especially for tailers and resources. As a weaponsmith the 100 items per vendor is low but merely going to 200 items per vendor would solve my problems but I do not feel it is enough of a solution for other types of vendors especially tailors w/ their 255 items (even if you did every item in 3 different colors you are screwed nevermind 3 or 4 in 5 of the most popular colors).

Never fear I actually have a solution but it requires some coding for special types of vendors.

1) resource vendor - special type of vendor available at hiring 3 w/ limits based on skill boxes (hopefully 200 items at mgmnt4). The reason this is paramount is because post change you will never be able to buy resources in stacks smaller than 100k and even then your probably going to only see 4 or 5 different resources tops on a vendor. I suggest a special vendor where each resource type is an item but the stack size is limitless.. in other words if I just harvested 853k of 'syuibe' colat iron it all shows up as 1 item on the vendor.. the price I list is per unit. As a customer, lets say I only need to by 15484 units, I can merely put in the number of units (perhaps an interface like the add power interface of a harvester) and it calculates the cost based on the per unit cost. This will allow a resource vendor to stock 200 (if management 4 and they raise the cap to 200) resources on that resource vendor.

2) restackable identical items sellable from crates as singles... lets say I made 3 crates of laser carbines and instead of slicing all 75 carbines I want to sell them unsliced. I can then combine them into 1 crate of 75 and add to the vendor. When I put it up for sale I get presented with an option of sell the whole crate as 1 item or sell the items within individually. I then only take up 1 item on my vendor and can sell all the laser carbines without running out of vendor space. This also gives a market back to unsliced weapons and armor as a smith will have to think long and hard if he wants to use up all his item spots on sliced gear or just sell it and let another smuggler slice it for profit. This also would prevent the issue where only high profit margin items being sold (buff packs) versus low profit margin items being exluded (stim packs).

3) dye kits - this will help the tailors and armorsmith plight immensely as some items stick around forever and other items cant keep stocked merely due to someone's color choices. If clothing could be crafted without color options so that a tailor could take advantage of solution #2 a customer could then buy a dye kit to color thier clothing whatever color they want, same for non composite armor colors.


I think a combined use of these 3 methods along with some increase of item caps as one aproaches master (perhaps a non-linear increase as one spends more points .. mgmt 4 versus master should reflect the expence of another 46 skill points) would reduce the merchant database size immensely, reduce the lag related to item lookups, promote more economy for smugglers who exist other than a slicing alt for crafters, and still effectively remove the empty vendors from the game and prevent nonskilled persons from having vendors they are not entitled to.

wow that idea about the dye kits and resources rock! why arent you working for SOE? It sounds like you are able to give things more thought than their programmers! LOL

as an armor smith this would solve a couple of my problems. I have never bothered with non composite because if someone has a padded chest piece decay to 0 and he just wants to replace that one piece he had to go around looking for a color match. A dye kit would totally solve single item replacement issues w/ colored armor that isnt changable currently(ie non composite). The multiple items in a crate distributed by the vendor solves issues where i am not forced to only sell complete suits of armor.