The Bazaar isnt broken because of the amount of stores, it's about natural player movement

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Just to preface this, I actually love the map as a whole, I just feel the Bazaar could use some improvements to really help it thrive - as someone who's first months of the server was being a Bazaar dweller, I feel very loyal to the area and passionate to see it succeed. And I feel the rest of the Map is amazing and probably the best RP map I've been on.

What is one of v5 Bazaars most core features?

- It's complete open design, the T shape of it and open air design , being able to see Puffer Mart, the Business Shops and at the other side all the way to Parker
- It's shops close knit together, meaning voice chat got cluttered, but often players felt more involved because you could over hear these convos, just like a real bazaar
- Shop Scarcity, people AFK all day when to get their items sold.
- Ease of access to see which shops looked the best without having to run a mile.

What are v6 Bazaars core features

- Large interior building that is two floored, meaning you have to roam around a large space to find what you're looking for
- Rooms are large and spaced apart, meaning there is more space for roleplay builds to happen, conversations do not get spliced and people can have their own individual scenarios.
- Enough bazaars for everybody, to the point where Staff have now enabled it so organizations can now purchase two Bazaars at once.
- More secure car park.

Now what is the ideal Bazaar compared to community complaints?

One of the most common things I'm hearing right now is the underpopulated state of the Bazaar. However, previously - Bazaar, most times of the day, was artificially populated. Everyone who was a Bazaar main remembers the pain of logging on and seeing Bazaar 3 used by a guy selling a present box for $200,000. And that means he's secured it until he either logs off, or someone for some reason buys it, and he now gets F6'd for not using the Bazaar.

Now with the new Bazaar, we can buy one whenever we want, so that means - everyone should be populating every Bazaar right? Wrong.

The reason Bazaar is under populated is because most of it's shops do not sponsor natural player movement. Let me give you examples.

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As you can see above, the arrows represent natural player movement within the v5 bazaar. Every entrance you use, basically forces you to go past most of the shops and this also encourages player interaction and roleplay.

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Natural player movement in v6's Bazaar, tends to angle the player to entirely ignore most of it's shops.

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These shops on either end, specifically, are mostly totally ignored.


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Now moving onto the next thing, Bazaar visibility. In v5, driving past Bazaar, meant you could see inside it without having to even exit the car. You could see how populated, decorated or how many guns were on display simply by driving past.

Now .. in v6...

1755873413951.png

You have to seriously go out of your way to see the Bazaar, and there is no way to see how active it is without first parking and disembarking your car and searching both levels.

What's my proposed solutions?

Solution 1; Remove 1 floor of the Bazaar and leave it as an Interior.
This would increase the artificial scarcity , I don't feel it would solve the problem of natural player pathing as the entire space feels too large.

Solution 2; Delete the entire building of Bazaar, and the ground floor and make the entire area an Open Air Bazaar.
An open Air Bazaar would allow people to see how popular it is just at a glance , it would make it so people can easily see other players for interactions, allow for unique builds, more drama and more excitement.

Solution 3; Delete the shops on the furthest ends to reduce the amount of Bazaars and increase artificial demand.
This would make the space feel smaller and more tight knit and reduce the overwhelming feeling the Bazaar currently has and also deleting the more isolated shops means people will be competing for the space, leading to better designs, and more fiercer player activity.
 
You win some you lose some.

Old bazaar gave everyone nearby insanely poor performance, to the point where crashes on the business road were commonplace. New bazaar fixes that entirely, but is more out of the way to get at.

Yeah, the old bazaar was smaller, and acted as a thoroughfare, and that was nice for social interactions, but it was too small, and there were most certainly too few shops. New bazaar fixes that, but at the expense of nobody needing to go through it to get anywhere really.
 
It is already well known bazaar has been reworked for 6.1. Some players have already seen it and have given a positive reaction.

It is now mostly single floor and goes back to 9 shops. It remains completely enclosed now with metro connection as these changes were done for performance reasons, apparent from the fps drop driving past bazaar in v5.

I won't say any more on the matter until 6.1 is released, I am tired of the constant blame for "killing bazaar" or "killing roleplay" when let's be honest I delivered a design that many many people were asking for. This is the direction a lot of people wanted bazaar to go so we tried it. Sure it didn't land but 1 flaw in an otherwise widely loved map is a win in my books and I really don't get those who have focused on it as a terrible map for that one reason.

With a change as big as V6 getting as much right as we did first try is a miracle. As for the few misses, rest assured I'm still working on the map full time for now. 6.1 improves bazaar and introduces many new things to the map.

Treat this as my response to all the threads from the past few days. Im not responding to all of them individually because to be perfectly honest some of the things people have said have gone way beyond "feedback" and it's incredibly disheartening.
 
It is already well known bazaar has been reworked for 6.1. Some players have already seen it and have given a positive reaction.


It is now mostly single floor and goes back to 9 shops. It remains completely enclosed now with metro connection as these changes were done for performance reasons, apparent from the fps drop driving past bazaar in v5.

I won't say any more on the matter until 6.1 is released, I am tired of the constant blame for "killing bazaar" or "killing roleplay" when let's be honest I delivered a design that many many people were asking for. This is the direction a lot of people wanted bazaar to go so we tried it. Sure it didn't land but 1 flaw in an otherwise widely loved map is a win in my books and I really don't get those who have focused on it as a terrible map for that one reason.

With a change as big as V6 getting as much right as we did first try is a miracle. As for the few misses, rest assured I'm still working on the map full time for now. 6.1 improves bazaar and introduces many new things to the map.

Treat this as my response to all the threads from the past few days. Im not responding to all of them individually because to be perfectly honest some of the things people have said have gone way beyond "feedback" and it's incredibly disheartening.
I wouldn't even call the new Bazaar flawed, just needs to be tweaked a bit (As you are already doing), the old Bazaar's "roleplay" pretty much consisted of;

- Casino Boards (Which were fun! But repetitive and mostly predatory)
- Drama
- Mass RDM from sweaters
- AFK Players sat hogging a bazaar all day.

The few times there was great roleplay it typically utilized a large space outside the Bazaar, like the car park. Such as fight clubs, dance floors, karaoke nights etc.

The new Bazaars shops give us some great space for building great roleplay shops which was sorely lacking in v5, (And now we dont have the permanent wooden tables at the front... Thankfully :cool:)

I appreciate this response, and thankyou for giving your time for the community, I didn't mean to jump on the bandwagon and I hope it doesn't look that way, was just giving my thoughts on something I felt hadn't actually been mentioned from an observational perspective not just "me see less player in bazaar so bazaar bad" mentality.
 
I think a crucial part of the v5 bazaar was unironically the parking and how quick everything was so I feel a design like removing the underground parking and moving it above ground would not only bring life to bazaar but also solve the issue me and many other have had with the road to car dealer leading no where.

I dont have a problem with the underground parking in fact I think its 1000 times cooler than in my little diagram, but I just feel it makes bazaar feel less open and lively. I doubt my diagram is even usable since there are probably some map issue somewhere that would make it not viable.
 
It is already well known bazaar has been reworked for 6.1. Some players have already seen it and have given a positive reaction.

It is now mostly single floor and goes back to 9 shops. It remains completely enclosed now with metro connection as these changes were done for performance reasons, apparent from the fps drop driving past bazaar in v5.

I won't say any more on the matter until 6.1 is released, I am tired of the constant blame for "killing bazaar" or "killing roleplay" when let's be honest I delivered a design that many many people were asking for. This is the direction a lot of people wanted bazaar to go so we tried it. Sure it didn't land but 1 flaw in an otherwise widely loved map is a win in my books and I really don't get those who have focused on it as a terrible map for that one reason.

With a change as big as V6 getting as much right as we did first try is a miracle. As for the few misses, rest assured I'm still working on the map full time for now. 6.1 improves bazaar and introduces many new things to the map.

Treat this as my response to all the threads from the past few days. Im not responding to all of them individually because to be perfectly honest some of the things people have said have gone way beyond "feedback" and it's incredibly disheartening.
The new map looks amazing and shapes the server way better. Its a much more modern look and feel and improves a lot of roleplay like driving your car around makes much more sense, where as the metro makes much more sense to use aswell. People complaining about the map simply find change hard or lack the insight to see what the map improves.

Like you said yourself, its a massive change to the map and its amazing how many things were fixed and improved the first try, people should look at its beauty, and not blame the entire map for a single con.

The map is amazing peeps, and I am sure that besides myself, many others want to see how much more you can improve this already amazing map.
 
@peeps if you take the blame then all of us who playtested it should too. We had a positive outlook, but nobody, not you, not the other devs or smt could've foreseen how players move.

In retrospect it's obvious, but that's always easy to say.

If we are blaming people for the downfall of Bazaar, VaultCorp probably also didn't contribute postiviely to it by moving the in person sales to a much easier platform that can be accessed from anywhere.

The map is fresh. People are still adjusting themselves to it and I've seen a massive change where people reside from month to month. We've seen Bazaar die and thrive on v5 as well simply due to a change of the culture of players.

You can see forest/hicktown area is a lot more lively recently because of a few players who keep decorating the Church.
 
Fuck it, Leave bazaar how it is now and Remove the roundabouts
yeah im not sure iff bazaar is the problem , its more everyone drying leaves to get xp , it gives way more xp then growing drugs what take a much longer time, and crafting and selling gonne give you almost none xp
so almost the whole city is just sitting in there base, getting money and xp
 
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