Bazaar overhaul

[Lilosh]

Originally posted by Aamen
Now, what I think would really help tradeskillers is better inventory control.

Say, for example, a search feature not unlike the /bazaar command, but for your own personal inventory and bank space. It would allow you to 'see' everthing you own, and perhaps add some columns showing which bag and slot it resides in.

I know we just met, but will you marry me? I'm only selfish and angry occasionally.

This is an amazing idea.

-Lilosh

[Jaradis Stormcaller]

Up the trader limit but completely redo the Bazaar zone to be the size of Sanctus Seru. Spread out the stalls equally around the zone, with multiple bankers all over (so people don't crowd around one area). The problem with the current bazaar's frame rate is having 400 of the 600 people in zone all crammed into one small area.

Imagine Sanctus Seru, have no trader stalls in the area right near the zone in / port up area, have them all through out the rest of the zone with small areas each spread out. The zone is large enough that even with 1000 people in the zone, it would be so spread out that your graphic lag would not be that bad.

[Qualtar Shylok]

Yeah, I agree, the simple solution is to just increase the bazaar size and limit. But what worries me about that is what happens in another year when that area has reached its maximum capacity? Then what? We are back at square one.

I know for a fact my servers bazaar reaches its maximum capacity of 500 nearly every night. And then you have hordes of people trying to get a spot when someone goes ld, or logs. There is probably another 200 people everynight that dont get to set up a vendor due to the limit cap.

So now we have a bazaar that has a capacity of 1000, twice the size as before, and within the first days it fills to 750 or so, and would probably only be a few months before it reaches max capacity. There are ~4500 people on each mature server. It is not unreasonable to think that 1/4 of the server population would leave their vendors up when not online, or leave them up on a second account when online.

Expanding the bazaar is the short term solution.... but not a permanent fix.

I firmly believe to diversify is better.. even if it means some people lose a bit on convenience (traders and vendors alike). If the bazaar crashes.. everyone crashes (which happens at least once a week)... having the bazaar set up in multiple locations minimizes this impact as well.

BTW, I am not offended in the slightest that some folks do not agree with my ideas, so please dont be offended if I dont agree with yours. Its just a discussion, I welcome all input whether I agree with it or not.

[TaraLujan]

The coin wieght problem could be solved with "bearer bonds".
5k, 10k , 50K etc .
bought and solds like items at a cost with no faction.
could restrict to only being sold at banks.

ie go to bank buy a 10k bond (wt 0.1 stackable), take it to were ever you need the money and sell it for the same value to the vendor.

[atonic]

Posts that amount to “EQ needs to be re-coded to inconvenience the 399,999 other subscribers so I can take more of their plat” always bother me. That’s all the original post amounts to.

Raising the trader limit to 800 or 1000 would sure help. I know there’s been 2-3 times where I actually had to re-log to be able to go into trader mode…. since ‘trader’ went live.

Perhaps if they would hard-code all of the lag minimizing settings into the zone, like names off and 0% clip, folks wouldn’t get so bogged down.

[Kieroth_whiteleaf]

Personally, I'd kinda like to see another "bazaar" zone, but not one in every city. Maybe put a banker in the freeport tunnel and turn that into a bazaar zone as well.

I'd be a proponent of a search feature that checked both zones as well.. just keep the **** lag down. I've got a brand new computer and I move around *fairly* comfortably in the bazaar, but my cousin's POS computer can't bazaar shop even if he does apply all the tricks. Spreading people out a bit would be a huge help.

For god's sake, just don't make PoK a bazaar zone.. that would suck.

SFG

[Boleslav]

The perfect place for a "Norrathian Bazaar" zone would be the EC Tunnel! Shady and company, tired of lagging sales and terminal loneliness, work a deal with the powers that be in Luclin to bring a bank and Bazaar to the tunnel. It would need to be set up so that you could search both bazaars at once, with a column to tell which zone the trader is in.

Also, the crowding around banks is silly, and really cranks up the lag. If you spaced the merchants out, there would not be a problem in raising the number of traders in the bazaar. Two zones, each capable of holding 750 traders and a shared search would hold up for quite a while.

Boleslav Forgehammer
Paladin of Brell in his 65th Campaign
E'ci – Sacred Destiny

[Eleena Transient]

Just put a port crystal in ec tunnel and bazaar that provide instant transport back and forth. No need to make it search both when its only 1 zone away (considering the code required for ec to poll the baz and vice versa).

[Wolfkind]

Forget the bazaar

One way to get rid of these problems is to have no bazaar traders at all, instead you could have a personal assistant (available at any bank) who would handle all the selling of your items that are placed inside of traders satchels (limit of 80), at any bank that the buyer happens to be at. That way there would be no need for people to choose between selling, and playing, and they could even sell while they are offline, eliminating lag and server load.

[solithan]

bazaar changes

How about disabling spells and songs in the bazaar. Maybe its just me but the player modles dont lag me as bad as MGB mod rods or wolf form that people like to cast, or bard songs. As for space, there is already tons of it, people just like to cluster near the banks best I can tell, but they could open up a few walls I guess.

[Minuit]

Putting "mini-bazaars" in cities raises all kinds of new problems. If /trader mode were allowed anywhere but the bazaar (and possibly the nexus, the arena, or planes of knowledge and tranquility) then I _guarantee_ you that not more than one hour would pass after the servers go live before you saw this kind of situation:

"Oh, my. It seems another trader has set himself up in competition with me. Perhaps I should introduce him to my old friend, Lietuenant Dagarok..."

*BLAM*

"Ah, that's much better."

How would you propose to solve this? Make trader PCs completely untargetable and unkillable? Congratulations, you have just introduced a new way to camp city guards -- "Trader Kiting". Perhaps remove the guards themselves? Sure, and perhaps Ping Fuzzlecutter could sell Soulfire as part of his regular stock, since nobody would be doing _that_ quest any more. Change the factions inside every starting city so that nobody would ever be attacked, ever? Why not? While you're at it, change the name of every city to "Generica".

Keep in mind that even in the Bazaar, a zone carefully designed to have no combat, no gravity, and no hostile NPCs, people _still_ find ways to 'grief' one another. Do you think they only do it because of the 500 trader limit? If so, then I've got a lovely prayer shawl to sell you.

Adding bazaar areas to existing zones would open up cans of worms by the case-load, and things are complicated enough. I don't see how breaking up the bazaar would add enough actual value to the game to justify the customer service nightmare that it would entail.


Minuit
Brell Serilis
Yada yada yada

[Qualtar Shylok]

How would you propose to solve this? Make trader PCs completely untargetable and unkillable?

First of all, why would "Lieutenant Dagarok" agro a trader anyhow? If you are in a city that you have bad faction with, then maybe you shouldn't be setting up a vendor there. Thats one distinct advantage and disadvantage of spreading out the bazaars.

Otherwise... its the same as they are now, only difference is you become beta neutral while in /trader mode, since cities have faction issues... you can not attack a player while in trader mode. You can't charm a PC and have it attack either.

You also make it so that a player can not go into /trader mode if they are under attack or agro (to escape being attacked in cities where their faction is not good) i.e run through town, agro mob, /trader, mob leaves, run through town, agro mob, /trader, mob leaves, etc, etc..

Thats not an issue at all actually, just need to be creative.

[kiztent]

Originally posted by Qualtar Shylok
Thats not an issue at all actually, just need to be creative.

But I think the point is what problem are you trying to solve, and does being creative really solve it?

If the bazaar is too slow or laggy on your server, how does forcing people to spend an hour running around solve the problem? More to the point, does it really SOLVE the problem.

And anything creative you can think of to implement your plan, someone else can think of something creative to break it to their advantage.

Solve the problem by making the bazaar easier to shop in, not by making it harder to shop please.

[Boleslav]

Allowing traders in most city zones could still be used and exploited, allowing traders to be griefed easily. Look at all the zone-wide changes that have had to be made in the bazaar to limit griefing. You're not going to be able to make those changes to all the zones you are talking about. Therefore, the griefing that was happening in the bazaar will happen in all those places.

Also, you could easily skulk around a city and go into trader mode to allow wandering NPCs to pass. Then go out of trader mode to get to another way-point, and go into trader mode again. It would give players a time-out button when in a hostile city. Not that this would be earth-shattering, but the potential for abuse is there.

Your proposal calls for three things

1) More Bazaar capacity (Yay!)

2) Decentralized Bazaar – This is bad because people use the bazaar for convenience. I want to spend the least amount of time possible buying and selling stuff . The central bazaar lets me set up shop where I know the majority of customers will look. It also lets me peruse the most merchants when I choose to shop. People would avoid the work of having to track down traders in remote locations, and focus on one or two areas. The other trading areas would be little used, and the resources that went into creating them would be wasted. Why do you think that EC (or Gfay on some servers, and NFP on others) became 'bazaar' zones before Luclin? Because people wanted to go to one place to buy and sell stuff. You would see people /auc in other zones, but the majority of the bazaar-like trading happened in one place. Trying to spread it out will fail. People don't want it spread out.


3) Limiting Price Comparisons – While your intentions are good, you really create a more 'slimy' marketplace. People will find it harder to get an idea of what things are worth. People willing to spend the time already can make quite a bit of money buying low and selling high. These people would have a much better chance to dominate markets in a decentralized, no price list, bazaar system. In general, tradeskillers will not benefit from this. Most tradeskillers are not necessarily marketers. They want to make their goods, and sell them, but put their passion into creating things rather than marketing them. Tunnel rats (or whatever you call them nowadays) who have the focus to do little else but manipulate player trade will be the winners. The 'middlemen' that everybody likes to rail against would be the ones to clean up.

So, your proposal will not fly on two of three accounts.

Boleslav Forgehammer
Paladin of Brell in his 65th Campaign
E'ci – Sacred Destiny

[Kieroth_whiteleaf]

As a game developer (NO, NOT EQ) whenever I get a proposal I have to evaluate it on one basic criteria:

Will the amount of work required to execute the proposal outweigh the potential benefit?

In this case, I'd have to say yes, therefore your proposal shouldn't fly.

Work outline:

Completely restructure the code for the cities.
Create workarounds for faction v. trader modes.
Minimize potential griefing areas
Make players could deal with the griefing that is "unavoidable" through code

Proposed Benefits:
Create a multicity bazaar system so players can't find everything they need in one location. This will theoretically increase roleplay and interest in starting cities.

Based on what I'm seeing here, if this is a reasonable sample of the player base (Yes, I've taken enough statistics to realize that it's not an appropriate sized sample for assertations, but it's good enough for this statement) VERY few players actually *WANT* the proposed "benefit" even if the work involved was 0. The general consensus that I'm seeing is that MOST players want Bazaar improvements including additional vendor capacity and lag reduction. Most seem to agree that they want the bazaar to remain inside a single zone so they reduce loading times from crossing zones.

If we're going to be proposing features to the game, features that *I'M* seeing as potential requests are:

*method for offline buying/selling

*eliminating ability for spellcasting/bard songs within bazaar (I don't agree with that one - CHA spells wouldn't work and there are some NPC vendors)

*larger coin denomination for bigger purchases

*merchant "buy" ability


Basically, since your desires seem to run counter to the majority of the people so far, I can only come to one conclusion with this thread:

You're beating a dead horse.

SFG