Merchant Archive
Thread: Sales Guide system
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Fidgiter
Wed Jan 19, 2005 8:33 am
#1
Yeah, me again. Hee hee. A post on the new forum captured my interest and once again it ties back to Merchants.
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=economy&message.id=102
In the current system a consumer would need to travel Shop to Shop, City to City, Planet to Planet scanning each and every vendor along the way to find the "Best Price". It takes too long and people often just settle into a shop they know has what they need at the quality they want and pay what is asked. As long as people buy the crafter will sell.
My proposal would be to have a specialized vendor available to merchants which can be registered using advertising 4. The specialized vendor would be hard capped at 50 items and no merchant could have more than one specialized vendor. Each Major (NPC) City would have a "Sales Guide" terminal.
The "Sales Guide" terminal would be able to perform searches for specialized vendors on the planet the terminal is located in. The consumer could select the class of product and do comparisons of comperable products on the planet then pick and choose what suites their budget and needs best. Once a merchant draws a consumer that consumer can then browse their other vendors.
In this system the NPC City has an additional draw, crafters would have a business incentive to have "Sales" to draw consumers to their shops and consumers would be better able to make informed decisions when shopping.
Borion_Sunrunner
Wed Jan 19, 2005 12:06 pm
#2
Its a good idea, but past conversations with the developers seem to indicate they don't have (or aren't interested in having) the database resources to do any sort of cross-planetary system.
Fidgiter
Wed Jan 19, 2005 12:33 pm
#3
Which is why there would need to be "Specialized Vendors" with limits on the number of items that can be stored and it would be based only on a intraplantary scale. Ata max of 50 items per merchant that has 4xxx I think the volume of items to be searched on should be quite managable.
Borion_Sunrunner
Thu Jan 20, 2005 1:35 am
#4
I don't think its necessarily related to the limited number. Think more in terms of needing to do a database query of all 50-100 merchants on the planet (or whatever) and then get the 40 or whatever items from them, then combine.
Its the accessing of multiple vendor databases that I beleieve to be the design problem.
The language i've seen seems to indicate that we're never going to see any sort of interlinked merchant system, as much as we'd all like to see it...
Its the accessing of multiple vendor databases that I beleieve to be the design problem.
The language i've seen seems to indicate that we're never going to see any sort of interlinked merchant system, as much as we'd all like to see it...
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