Merchant Archive

What is the developers purpose in this change? Knowing this can go a long way in helping merchants provide a solution that isn't so extreme, but we don’t know what they are trying to accomplish with this change so we really can't provide any sort of counter solution.

I see three potential reasons, there may be more but these alone demonstrate that any potential compromise may be shot down because they don’t address the cause of the limits as the developers see it.

One, is they are trying to save database space. If this is the case, it's sad case. If a game play issue can be solved by simply buying more machines, buy more machines. To restrict the players in order to save money while charging a premium for this type of service is a kick in the goodies. Grounds for leaving in my humble opinion, so I hope this isn't what's behind the change.

Second, they could be doing this to restrict people that drop merchant abilities and use the merchant as personal storage space. In which case the solution is extreme and punishes all people equally for the sins of a few. In this case I would suggest exploring a item limit based on sales volume. One and half times your average weekly volume might be a good start.

Example: if you sell 200 items a day that would be 1400 times 1.5 = 2100 plus 110 items per vendor at master for a total of 2760 items across 6 vendors. If you don’t sell anything then 660 items for a master. (can't buy your own stuff restriction would be needed) This way People using vendors for storage will get no more benefit from having master merchant, but true high volume merchants will be able to be high volume merchants.

Third, this may be a trust busting measure. The problem from devs perspective may be that crafting professions are futile unless you are one of the few that get into a good mall. People go to malls because they are stocked. People don’t stock there vendors because people always go to malls. So this may be a measure to remove empty vendors and force malls to work on a smaller scale thus opening up markets for other people to be crafters in. Kind of a mom and pop vs. Walmart issue, and if this is the case there is probably very little that can be done to sway the developers with out some trade off to restrict malls. Higher item limits for 6 vendor max per building is the only trade off I can think of.


Any ways do with this thread what you will.

The only logical assumption is that it is both. They stated both objectives in In Development threads relating to limiting vendors months ago. They are obviously concerned about too much of the economy being in the hands of only a few players. How to go about addressing that without kililng all the larger crafters is the tough part.

Well if it is a trust busting measure it's only a so so solution. Those that stay will consolidate further. Instead of one weapon smith you might have two or three with 12 vendors specializing in different weapons. Problem still exist, just in a different form. The other question is will it create more problems in the form of shortages and inflation.

The reason why malls are popular is not that people can put 200000 items on a vendor, it's because although there may be better brandy at half the price in a small shop BFE no where, I'm not going to spend a week and a half to find it. This is due in small part to the fact the real life time is greater then virtual money, but mostly due to lack of information.

If increased competition is the goal then a global yellow pages or some sort of a way to comparison shop from a single interface would be a much more effective solution. Short of that, merchant skills that allow 50 or so unrestricted sales on the bazaar would allow competition to occur with price visibility, which could hurt malls quite a bit since they have been able to charge premiums due to lack of any visible competition.

In fact, giving master crafters 50 or so unrestricted sales on the bazaar would probably go a lot further with a trust bursting goal then this.

Lack of real markets and price information for consumers and resource dealers is the real problem.

Crate sizes and resource stack limits are anti trust restrictions as much as they are database restrictions. We always fill up as much space as we can, so increasing those just increases the scale at which one or a few people can operate.

Right now anyone can sell a suit of composite for 200 credits, but if those restrictions are loosened to much someone might be able to sell a suit of composite for 200 credits and meet the demand at that price, long enough to drive everyone else out of business at least.

These vendor restrictions, if implemented, will be good fire power to argue increased stack sizes, crate sizes and house storage limits since the vendor limitation would be fulfilling the antitrust functions in this case.

At the very least, even with a bad database design it should be feasible to separate out items based on container location. Items in bank have a data base, houses have a data base, items in houses have a data base, items in factories have one. So the database design would be duplicated just what database you talk to would be different based on where the item is located.

But yes, we really have very little idea how it was created and what problems they face.

Back on topic, maybe another intent of the devs with this change is to make malls more of a group of merchants and not crafters. So the big malls we are used to would be run by large groups of merchants that just buy and sell with a little markup.