Merchant Archive

Hey all,

I know there is a long thread already dedicated by Dov about this issue and a dozen other petition/rants/flames, but I wanted to bring back to life an old suggestion I've seen thrown around here time and time again, which may very well have been again suggested in a long thread - but I wanted this to have a place of its own.

Current problem - glut of vendors that have no right to be there from people placing vendors and dropping the skills. Vendors who are just personal storage facilities. Combined with the mysterious "DB Issues" brings us to loggerheads.

Current proposed solution - such horribly low, low caps. I can understand the need to curb it down some due to space issues.

Problem - yet again, by trying to fix the problem with exploiters, it will hit every legitimate merchant/crafting business there is.

First - by forcing vendor retention, not just placement, on merchant skills,I reckon a lot of the load problems will go away. I know this is a temporary effect as I am sure it will just introduce a glut of toons.

I agree in theory on item limits, but as they are they are way, way too low. As a weaponsmith with a pretty busy and well stocked vendor, even if I took Master Merchant it would be ludicruous to attempt to stay stocked. I can only shudder for the poor tailors who without a doubt will be hit the hardest by such low limits.

Devs want less empty vendors, but all they'll end up doing is repeating the problem. Why? Simple - if empty vendors are gone, only vendors with things on them remain .... which means these will be the only identified ones on the map (which is fine) but this will result in MORE TRAFFIC. Combine the two and we'll just end up with vendors going offline all the time.

So - how to stop people from exploiting vendors as storage while not killing real crafters - this is the key issue.

The first step as mentioned would be to force vendor retention tied to merchant. That'd do for a start.

What the old idea was (I can't take credit for it, it's been suggested many times before) - and I'd agree would be the ideal second step, is to allow customers to purchase directly from listed factory crates.

What does this mean exactly?

I put up a crate of T-21 Rifles. When a customer browses, he sees the 'catalogue' - which is the item listing as is now, but in crates- he's after 4 T-21 rifles. He sees the 'catalogue' listing of my crate of T-21s - give him the ability to purchase 4 rifles directly from that listing, as opposed to purchasing 4 individual items. It would be an added bonus for him to retrieve a crate of 4 T-21s to boot. And so forth and so on - I could simply put up a crate of a particular weapon type with a particular serial number, and customers could grab what they want, in numbers that they want, directly out of the crate.

Tailors could list a crate of "Red Shirts", "Blue Shirts", "Green Shirts", and have a crate of each available while taking up only3 spaces instead of 75.

As far as I can guess, items within crates only exist in potentia, so they don't need individual DB registrations. A crate of 25 T-21 rifles isn't 25 database spaces - it's just 1 item, with the ability to "auto-create" a T-21 Rifle matching the stats listed on the crate each time an item is pulled, and can be done X times where X is the number of items 'left' in the crate - and only when it's pulled does a T-21 from this crate needs it's own entry (to record conditionm slice, etc). It's the behaviour we've all seen, time and time again with various item changes and nerfs, most notably the pre-nerf FWG5 crates. They stated that because the schematic changed, it bugged taking prenerf FWG5s out of crates. Now, if they were already created, it wouldn't have been an issue of the schematic changed, moved country, had a sex change, or got abducted by aliens. No - these pistols needed a schematic to base off each and every time a pistol was pulled from the crate to create the thing in the first place. I'm positive that this is how crates work.

Under that suggestion, the proposed caps seem ok to me (but feel free to correct me any other crafting profession) - and this would prevent wholesale vendor storage of junk items that people are doing now. I don't see how exploiters could use this ability to maintain vast storage empires, and yet would allow real crafters to carry on as per normal.

Any thoughts people? As a crafter, would you guys be happy with the current "item caps" IF and only IF they made it so you could list a crate of product, counting as one space, and customers could buy directly from the crate? The only problem I can think of is that sliced weapon vendors would take a huge hit still, and I do run a sliced weapons vendor too, but just trying to find a less painful solution.