Vendor system not working well

[qmodal]

The following region chat (or something like it) occurs every couple of hours around Yrkanis:

A: "Is there a crafter on who can make me a XXXXX?"
B: "I have some on the NPC vendor"
A: "I looked and it's not there"
B: "Yes, it is"
A: "No, it's not"

and so on. The problem seems to be that the NPC vendors are flooded with similar items, and items over the 100(ish) limit are not being displayed. Specifically, there is also some evidence that this limit is applied BEFORE filtering, not after, so you may see only 5 items listed but there are actually more of that type for sale.

Clearly, this situation sucks, both for buyers and seller. Short of any future major redesign of this inadequate system, I suggest that the following gentle changes are pretty much essential for the system to continue to be usable in the short term:

#1: Limit the trader window list to 100 DISPLAY lines, not 100 vendor database accesses. (There may be more than 100 items displayed in 100 lines, because of stacking.) The limit should be applied after any item filtering.

#2: Use stacking for ALL item types, in trader windows. This would include armor and weapons, not just the mats that currently stack. Identical items should stack regardless of crafter or price. (Near-identical crafted items should probably stack together too, since there is frequently small variation in stats between similar crafted items.) I'd suggest that the stacked items would be (invisibly to the buyer) ordered cheapest to most expensive, and oldest to newest within identically-priced items. A buyer would then get the cheapest items out of a stack of near-identical ones, and for a given price, items that had been waiting longer would sell first.

This change would reduce the side-effects of crafters flooding the market, and would also reduce the ridiculously long lists of quartered mats like gingo teeth and yubo nails.

#3: Add crafter name (and possibly also guild name) as filtering criteria in the trader window. This would allow a kind of vendor boutique -- "let me see all the things a vendor known to me has made"

#4: (optional suggestion) Discourage flooding of the market system by decreasing sale profits on a sliding scale according to the number of (near-)identical items a vendor has for sale. For example, if you put 5 identical vests up for sale, there might be no penalty, but if you have 10 up you might get 5% less of the cash when someone buys one, and if you have 100 up you might get 99% less. (The price to the buyer wouldn't change, just the profit on the sale would be reduced for the seller.)

If something doesn't get done about the trading problems in the next few days, I know I for one am going back to selling my best crafted items via region chat, rather than let them languish in trader limbo hidden behind hundreds of junk items.

Thanks for listening,
Adayl
Crafter of Matis

P.S. I thank Nevrax for putting my name on my crafted items, and I beg Nevrax to respect those other crafters who want to be anonymous.

P.P.S. The horrible mixture of pre- and post-Patch 1 trading features means that the current system of NPC vendor levels (vendors in particular locations selling player-made items only in certain quality ranges) really, *really* stinks. But that's another story, and another complaint.

[syneris]

There are some missing quality sections which could be 1 result of that item not being shown on the vendor. Wasn't fixed in patch 24 but they did make it so you can see what color armor is on vendors (YAY!!). Quality 51-75 are missing in both Fyros and Matis. Not sure of the exacts but 101-1?? (under 130) are missing. I've heard that there is a quality section under 50 missing but i'm not sure of the numbers. This means that none of my q70 weapons or q110 armor will show on the vendor
More filters would be nice but i don't have much of a problem finding the items i need. The number of players is low yet growing at a good rate (new unbaised prepatch1 people), so finding items could be a problem in the future.

edit: oh yea the missing qualities is a known bug

[qmodal]

In the case I investigated just before posting, it was a missing q30 dagger, and many other daggers in the q10-q50 range were listed. So it's not the missing qual range bug, unless q30-30 is one of the missing ranges

[xenofur]

kinda obvious question, but, did you send this off as a suggestion ticket too?

[bizango]

A simple suggestion, default the "Allow Resale" to off instead of on.

That way, people who don't care about whether or not they are selling their exp grinds and they are too lazy to uncheck it won't be flooding the merchants.

More complex would be to add an "order by" clause based on known properties of the items, like HP, Damage (for weapons), stat bonuses, etc

There are three quality gaps I know of, 21-40 (for sure), 51-70 (approximate) and another further on up.

[seedyman]

A simple suggestion, default the "Allow Resale" to off instead of on.

That way, people who don't care about whether or not they are selling their exp grinds and they are too lazy to uncheck it won't be flooding the merchants.

More complex would be to add an "order by" clause based on known properties of the items, like HP, Damage (for weapons), stat bonuses, etc

There are three quality gaps I know of, 21-40 (for sure), 51-70 (approximate) and another further on up.

Unless they changed it recently, it defaults to whatever you last had it on, so you only have to uncheck it once. (not sure if this carries through logoff)

[qmodal]

Yes, making "resale" default to "off" had occurred to me, but I deliberately did NOT mention it as a fix because that would suggest I believed that crafters putting multiple identical items up for sale are doing so accidentally. And I don't believe that. Not in general.

No, the checkbox setting is not carried thru logoff.

If there is a q21-40 level gap, then that would explain why the q30 dagger i had put there never showed up, and my wisecrack about the q30-30 gap just makes me look stupid.

But if this low-end level gap exists, it's beyond me to understand why this has not been the focus of an emergency patch. After all, this is the kind of level range where newcomers should *not* be confused in a world that is confusing enough without bugs.

[varelse]

I was under the impression that the quality range of items displayed at the npc vendors was related to the town they are in. For example, Yrkanis, Zora, Fairhaven, and Pyr have the vendors with items of up to 100(ish) quality, since those are the "beginner" towns where refugees spawn when they leave the newbie island. The other town's merchants seem to have items in higher quality ranges, so to find the items you need, you many need to find the merchants in the right town.

I am wondering if you have done that yet, because I had no problem finding all sorts of items well above my level (90) when out shopping for "fashion statements" in towns in the various regions. In fact, that's how I found out about the town-dependant quality ranges... by complaining that everything I found on the merchants was "too rich for my blood". Someone kindly explained the system to me, and I found some nice armor that was just my "size" in Zora... I had been looking in Min-Cho!

Oh, yeah, and about that marking the crafted items... choice is GOOD, forced "marketing" is BAD. Some people like their privacy and they may be crafting strictly for their own guild - as of yet, there is no way for these people to prevent themselves from being bombarded with /tells asking for freebies and trying to cut deals.

Each /tell lags my game as it opens... several times, my mom on newbie island, or some friend, has nearly killed me by starting up a /tell chat session at a very inopportune time. I can only imagine what a crafter of high level, in demand items would be going through after his or her name leaked out through this new marking system.

[zumwalt]

Items are listed at the vendors based on what they would normally sell in there typical selling range.

There are 2 melee merchants, 1 handed and 2 handed, don't look at the 2h melee guy for a 1h dagger.

Also, as been mentioned here, the different cities hold different level equipment, aka natae holds q200 if I recall.

Filter works wonderfully, and I have had neh a problem with it.
Especially if I look for price 1 to 99999 instead of 0.

Don't look for light armor q10 on a heavy armor merchant in a q200 city.

I have done alot of testing with the merchants to find out who puts what on market when.

Also, the INDEX for the merchants might not always update properly, so if something is put on the market the originatory might be the only person who CAN see it until the database INDEX is rebuilt.

[qmodal]

Yes, my post took into account the variation in quality by NPC location, but I didn't mention it (until the very end) because it's kind of a separate issue. The missing items really are missing from the NPCs that are supposed to have them. This has been verified time after time by many players.

The problems with quality-by-location in the outlying towns include:

1. It's a global selling system, but a local buying system. This ends up being more confusing than helpful.

2. The level ranges are too high, because players travel to the outlying towns far earlier than the ranges would suggest.

For example, in the Matis zone Majestic Gardens, which contains main city Yrkanis and outlying towns Avalae, Davae and Natae, players at level 50 can travel anywhere in the entire region without much danger (if they avoid trouble spots). But if your q110 armor dies when you're near Davae, you have to trek all the way back to Yrkanis to buy new, because everything sold in Davae is q200 or above (maybe q150 or above if there wasn't a bug, I don't know exactly). It's even annoying to have to travel from one end of Yrkanis to the other to buy armor, when there are NPCs right next to the teleporter that won't sell what you know they're hiding.