Merchant Archive
Thread: Vendor Interface for buyers is not intuitive
It's not intuitive at all for buyers to have to click refresh, and then look at pages of text. Things should appear instantly, with icons to tell players what is for sale, visually. It needs to look like a shop or market, not a database.
And players hitting refresh the first time to see what's for sale is just.... do I even need to say it?
Kana
/agree completely
I normally keep my clothing vendor stocked with 100-200 items at all times. Every once in a while, though, I get a random /tell telling me that my vendor is empty. In every single case, telling the customer to click on refresh or choose a category did the trick.
You're right. It's an unncessary step and it's confusing to a lot of people.
It is an unattractive and frustrating interface for everyone to use. They got the crafting device interface much more appealing, so maybe there's hope they can improve the vendors.
In the NBP notes from the devs, on page 4 it says they fixed the "auction auto-refresh to show available", so maybe that will pass down directly to the vendors too.
It ain't much, but it shows hope for the future to me.
This will be tough to implement. If I have to download 100 pictures for a page of items, your bandwidth just got shot. Multiply that by the gazillion things for sale all over the galaxy, and forget about logging in. I believe the details are on the server, but I could be wrong.
Have to be done on the client I would think. Even then you'd be sending all of the characteristics of the item you wanted to display. Take like clothing for example. It comes in different colors. Do you keep several colored pictures of the same item on the client? Or do you colorize the item to send to the client. Now multiply that times 100 items per page.
I agree that the first time you use a vendor it can be a little confusing. But I am not sure the interfaceis completely theproblem. Obviously the buyers need to be educated on how to use it, and every vendor public and private work the same way. A real quick fix would be to display a message "Press Refresh to see available items or select from the list of categories at the left" and then if nothing is available state that.
Loading items upon entering a vendor and displaying pictures would put a tremendous strain on our network connections and hardrives. For someone who knows how to use the interface, simply opening a vendor and drilling into the specific category without any initial 'download' is quick and easy. This is a reason why the left side should not be removed. I play a BH on another server, when itis time to look for new weapons, I havea pretty good idea of what I'm looking for (Weapons - Ranged Weapons). I do not want to sort through hundres of melee weapons or stim packs. I would love to see more categories, for instance Weapons - Ranged Weapons - Pistols.
As a customer, my biggest problem is finding the vendors (fix global ad) and finding the item I actually want to buy. Nothing gets to me more than when I walk intoa house that has a sign "Joe's Weapons and Armor" to find 4 vendors that are completely empty. This could be because of supply/inventoryissues (can't really fix this, playstyle)or because of the vendor issues many of us have had (maintenance, stockroom, etc, etc)
Other things that could be fixed:sorting and paging.
Otiamo
I've lost track of the number of times I had a customer say "You didn't have item x, stock more!"
Of course item x was on the second page.
There shouldn't be a second page for one. I shouldn't have to click next. But given that there is one, why is the alphabetical listing so screwed up? It just loads 100 random items, then when you sort by name, THOSE items get sorted, but anything on the second page that starts with A is still missing.
And players hitting refresh the first time to see what's for sale is just.... do I even need to say it?
During beta, they changed it to be this way. It was because the bazaar was very laggy sometimes, and having to wait for it to load the first page before you could do anything was a major pain. This still may be an issue for some people. I find it somewhat annoying personally, but I'm not sure they should change it.
I also think that they should get rid of the whole LEFT side. I have 6 vendors, so they all sell a "type" of item.
But not everyone wants to have different vendors for different types of items. Besides which, it depends on the item... I sell clothes. I can't possibly have a vendor each for shirts, pants, misc, dresses, handwear, footwear, headwear, cloaks, robes... and that's not all the categories under "clothing", I'm just tired of typing. ,-) The left side is very useful. It's also nice to be able to switch between the one vendor you're looking at and all the vendors in the shop.
And players hitting refresh the first time to see what's for sale is just.... do I even need to say it?
During beta, they changed it to be this way. It was because the bazaar was very laggy sometimes, and having to wait for it to load the first page before you could do anything was a major pain. This still may be an issue for some people. I find it somewhat annoying personally, but I'm not sure they should change it.
A real quick fix would be to display a message "Press Refresh to see available items or select from the list of categories at the left" and then if nothing is available state that.
That's exactly how it works now. When you open the vendor interface, it says in huge type in the place where you'd normally see items, "To request an item listing, select the desired filter parameters from the left, or click the Refresh button." But that's a bit wordy... they could make it easier to read. Then if there's nothing there, it says "No items found that meet the request criteria."
There shouldn't be a second page for one. I shouldn't have to click next. But given that there is one, why is the alphabetical listing so screwed up? It just loads 100 random items, then when you sort by name, THOSE items get sorted, but anything on the second page that starts with A is still missing.
If there's a second page, there should be a thing that says "Page 1 of #" where # is the number of pages. The problem is that no one sees the "next items" button as a page button, because there is NO OTHER REFERENCE to there being pages.
They do need to display things in pages; not everyone has a super fast processor or internet connection. But yes, they should sort the entire selection at once, rather than page by page. And they should make it darned obvious when there's more than one page.
My biggest pet peeve about the vendor (and bazaar) interface is the whole "available items" thing. If I'm standing in front of a vendor, and I buy something, and I have room for it in my inventory, that's where it should go. Available items should only be used for items that are remote, or to hold items you don't have inventory space for. (actually, in a case where you're standing in front of the vendor and don't have inventory space, I think the sale should fail. But that's me, maybe others won't agree.)
WaerbGloofin actually to display the pictures to users, they do not need to download them because they are already on everyone's disk. Think about it... when you walk into a city, you're not downloading all the graphics you are simply loading the graphics form your hard disk.
Even individual players are all settings stored on your computer.... your computer is generating everyone else based on settings they have.
To wrap up, displaying the icons on the vendor is no worse than displaying icons on your datapad or crafting tools... it's all the same stock.
Kana
The pages thing is a real problem - I get tons of people who say "I can't find the Whatever Shirt you're talking about on the vendor," because they don't realize there are more than 100 shirts there, or don't know how to look.
I think the deal there is that the original design for bazaar/vendor did *not* have pages - just one big page. And when that was changed, they didn't really think through how the interface should work differently.