Artisan Archive

I'm currently tracking the same issues. I have an app that tells me where I am on maint, and it is alwaysconsistent for the regular NPC vendors (within the hour tick mark at least), but for vendors listed on the planetary map, there seems to be an issue where they are triple or quad charging for that cycle while they bring the machines up.

It also looks like (doing the math now) that ALL vendors eat at least an extra hour on server reboots, but that the planetary map listed vendors run through the money faster than the 'standard' vendor. From the numbers, 4-5 extra hours perserver rebootper vendor (assuming a master merch rate of 10 cr/h for listed vendors).

I actually posted some numbers about 2 weeks ago when the patch went in about this, but gave up on getting any replies to the issue, since most people don't sweat a few hundred credits per day on their vendors or don't check.

Hope this helps somewhat,

D'Ruk of iD Co.

As a note, the reason that this is a concern at all really is that the rates are not 'regular', so there's no indication what the effective rate is. This is essentially an issue if you prepay for a month, and don't regularly check your vendor for status, especially outplanet vendors with large inventories. Currently, you could prepay for a week or three, and end up with a self deleting vendor because it has eaten maintenance too quickly.

That is why I care, not because of the number of credits. I just want to be able to leave my vendor for longer than a day and be able to know how many credits it has with some degree of accuracy. Especially with the holidays, where a lot of people take vacations away from computers.

--D'Ruk of Id Co.

ps. I think there are 'server' start scripts that initate a lot of the objects in the galaxy and those may be misfiring... See harvesters, city centers, vendors issues.

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Fribble wrote:

As a note, the reason that this is a concern at all really is that the rates are not 'regular', so there's no indication what the effective rate is. This is essentially an issue if you prepay for a month, and don't regularly check your vendor for status, especially outplanet vendors with large inventories. Currently, you could prepay for a week or three, and end up with a self deleting vendor because it has eaten maintenance too quickly.

That is why I care, not because of the number of credits. I just want to be able to leave my vendor for longer than a day and be able to know how many credits it has with some degree of accuracy. Especially with the holidays, where a lot of people take vacations away from computers.

--D'Ruk of Id Co.

ps. I think there are 'server' start scripts that initate a lot of the objects in the galaxy and those may be misfiring... See harvesters, city centers, vendors issues.

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Yes I've seen the harvester issue mentioned as well.

My understanding is that a vendor that reaches 0 no longer poofs...but instead is disabled in its ability to list merchandise...I'll check on that though.

I was lucky enough to catch a vendor during a credit loss the other night. Instead of the Master Merchant rate of 10 for a planetary listed vendor, it took off 18 credits. I'm wondering if perhaps we have a combination of issues, as relates to the harvester issue as well.

Perhaps the vendors are:

1) Taking credit maint at the non-discounted rate, even though they are posted as rate 10.

2) And taking 'extra' credits off when they are exposed to the server maintenance cycle.

A test I will attempt this week is the following

I have a merchant tent with a rate of 10/hr as a Master merchant.

I have a vendor with a rate of 10/hr posted as a master merchant.

I will even out the maint levels for both, so that as of Moment X they have the same maint. (say 5k)

I will then check back at 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 days to see if they are the same. If they are not, with the exception of their billing cycle being a few minutes off, they should have the same maint levels at the end of each of those time periods.

D'Ruk of iD Co.

I haven't had much experiance with vendors yet really, but from what I have done with them I really like the maintenance. At first I was hesitant thinking that the maintenance will raise with the amount of items the vendor is holding and their price tags, as it did on Ultima Online. But to my surprise its just a fixed rate - which I like!

II'll double post this in the original thread and this one as well:

As a result of my week long test of setting a vendor and a tent to the same maintenance level.

Monday of last week I set I tent and a vendor to 2675 credits.

Approximately 1 week later, give or take an hour the maintenance levels of the vendor and tent were at the following levels:

The NPC, registered vendor which has a listed rate of 10 cr/hr had 35 credits.

The Tent which also has a rate of 10 cr/hr had 1110 credits.

This works out to about 9.3-9.375 for the Tent if I was slightly off on the hourly timing.
This works out to about 15.714-15.65 for the vendor if I was slightly off on the hourly timing.

The previous day I logged in to check to make sure that the vendor had not run out of credits, I selected 'Status' twice in less than two minutes, and during that time, the vendor went from 475 to 350.

There are definitely some HUGE inconsistencies going on with the vendors.

At the rates listed a "10 cr/hr" vendor will last 4.5 days before running out of cash if 'topped up' to a weeks maintenance. This means unless you babysit all of your 6 vendors, you could be looking at 2.5 days of your vendor being non functional because you trust the maintenance rate to be what is listed, or at least grossly accurate.

Across 6 vendors, this is at a minimum of 5544 credits lost each week per merchant per week. Now, while that is not a huge number, it is not insignificant. Also, we lose customers if the vendors fail to operate because they do not have enough maintenance in them.

Hope this helps quantify what exactly is going on with vendors.

--D'Ruk of iD Co.

Thanks Fribble, I'm cross posting this into the correspondant forum as well on a thread I have there about this issue. Thanks for your help.