Merchant Archive

Database size is a design and technical issue that should never limit play or the SWG experience when there are technical solutions available to solve the problem.

houses and forget about merchant limits.

They do it because people fundamentally disagree with the ridiculous limits placed on accounts.You would think by now that SOE would realize the more you try to restrict this the more creative people become to accomplish what they fundamentally want do in the game.Rather than nerfing things why not try the approach of fixing things so you can accomplish a goal and not alienate the player population.

One, to add citizens to a city or two, get around character lot limits.I wish to address reason two.If you removed lot limits from accounts people would fundamentally drop less structures.Someone runs out of lots and they need another house so they lot trade.When normally they would just drop a 2-lot house they drop 8 more lots since they are going to all the trouble of lot trading.I think this would have some return in the long run but not a huge impact.

When a person reaches their item limit in the house they drop more storage, when they run out of lots, they lot trade or store on vendors.All the limits really do is make it more difficult to accomplish what people really want to do.I know that I would not have 75% of the building we have if we could have stored all my items in a single PA.I find it very annoying that I have to store resources and components in multiple houses/structures.I think maintenance should be based on the size of the structure + the item count.Fine you want to store 2000 items then you have to pay for it.This also helps drain money from the economy.

Lower stack sizes do not prevent resource hoarding in any fashion.Just means more storage needed and more storage to track and display on the landscape.You forcing more houses/storage to be dropped.

components crate at the same size (100).I have 2 houses with nothing but heavy ore mining units.I much prefer they track one grate with 300 that 300 individual database entries.

components to be recreated like you stack resources.

make them all have the same serial number so they can be used to factory run in quanoty.These types of items create a very large amount of database rows to track because they get very low usage in crafting.This would actually make them useful and they would not just sit in bags or on vendors/bazaar taking up database space.

1) Remove illegal vendors - SOE is very good about knowing how many vendors you have deployed and how many you should be able to deploy.Place a check when the vendor owner initiates the vendor he owns. You want to do this instead of when an item is stacked since that would slow that function down on each item, being placed for sale.See if the deployed count is equal to or less than the number allowed to deploy.If it is not then do not allow the player to stock or restock the vendor.Combine this with the empty vendor removal code and you have removed all illegal vendors but given the player the opportunity to remove his or her items before losing them.Also place a check in the drop skill code that will not allow you to drop a merchant skill if the currently deployed vendor count is equal too the vendors deployed.Require the user to remove the vendor before you can drop the skill.

crate/stack up for sale the sale price should be by unit.Then when a purchase is made a sliding bar will display from 1 to stack size for purchase and multiply that by unit price to compute prices, and then split the crate/stack into the appropriate size.This would greatly reduce the vendor database since merchants would no longer need to split crates to put up single items and smaller stacks to accommodate all purchase levels.This would only work on each item/crate/stack placed for sale.Combining existing stacks/crates would have to be done manually since the over head of check every item on the vendor would create a horrible lag when posting new items/crates/stacks.

The problem is, what we really have is an artificial limits.If you figure a formula of user X structure limit X lots = max value of storage per player all is really happening is we increase one of the factors in the formula to get around the hard limits.We still accomplish the same thing except it detracts from the player experience and creates frustration that could be avoided.