Vendor system not working well
Posted: Thu Nov 18, 2004 2:35 am
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.
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.