Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Vendor and Stockroom Issues
Fixing the bug is important.
But we also need some assurance that we'll be compensated for our losses. I lost about a million credits worth of stock. But this is just an educated guess (actually on the conservative side) based on what Ialways stock, what had sold lately, and what was missing. But I had no detailed records on my vendor stock, I trusted my vendor enough to think that I'd never really need to keep track of that.
This is a huge financial setback for me, and for many others. We deserve compensation for that, even if we can't provide the CSRs with details of every single missing item. Your code messed up. Don't punish us for it.
I believe the Trade Federation is behind these evil doings. They still hate they lost against the people of Naboo and will stop at nothing to make the entire galaxy pay.
Wasn't there going to be a big vendor/bazaar redesign or did I miss that some how?
Since a lot of the Cats on the vendor list is not even used, I think a redesign is way over due.
Ok. Lets recap. For the past two days in the merchant forum we have been getting increasing reports of disappearing items from vendors. These items from all reports are from the for sale tab and with few exceptions the reports state that the items have not been recently resold from the stockroom. The Underlying theory that has come about is this:
Put an Item in your vendor for 30 days (most did so in the week after the 11/13 publish where we were given 30 day auctions)
Wait 14 Days
On the 14th day your items will be gone from the for sale window without ever having gone to the stockroom. They will just vanish. Items that were placed on sale after that will remain until they reach 14 days. Items that were pulled into the stockroom and left there will vanish too aparently no mater how long they have been in the stock room but based on their having reached 14 days since they were put on sale.
Some Quotes from the Merchant Forum Posts about this (My thanks to everyone there who posted about this )
After the last update I pulled all items off my two vendors, into my inventory and then relisted them to get the 30 day listing time. If I had to guess I'd say I did that on Friday evening, 11/14. I know I did major restocking on the 15th, and that was *after* I relisted my current items. When I checked my vendors mid-afternoon on the 29th I noticed my stock levels were much lower than I expected. Unfortunately I can't check to see if any items had survived past 14 days, because I pulled everything off and moved them to new vendors. It does appear that the older items I had (some things in odd colors that I didn't really expect to sell) were what was lost. I do track my sales in detail so it's easy to see if the blue and pink camos actually sold (they didn't).
There are some pretty heavily stocked vendors in my neighborhood. I'll take a look around tonight and see if anyone has any items with less than 16 days remaining (30 - 14).
Ri'a Ocoli, Master Tailor of Keren/Naboo/Kettemoor
Almost the exact same situation as explained above. Created new vendors after the patch, re-stocked them. Suddenly I have gone from 700+ items on all my vendors to 315. There are NO ITEMS that have less then 16 days remaining. I lost close to, if not more than 2 million credits in medicines and krayt weapons.
Not to mention that when you sell items from the stockroom they only fo up for 7 days.
I thought Merchants were getting some love from the devs, but it looks like our nightmare has just begun.
I restocked items over several days atfer the last patch (for a total of 400 items roughly). Everything that was on longer than 14 days so far has vanished. I have several items with 16.5 days left (thus 13.5 have passed), and I guarantee that by tomorrow they will no longer exist if not sold. This theory seems to be backed up by large numbers of players on the general forums.
14 days is the key here. Once the 14th day is over, the items delete.
We placed 20 lighting cannons, and 20 crates of cryo grenades 16 days ago. Yesterday the remaining 12 unsold ones went poof.
15 days ago i placed 100 misc med supplies on a vendor. Yesterday i had 35 left. Today the rest went poof.
Whats happening is after items reach 7 days ..somehow a timer simular to the stockroom timer is triggered...anter another 7 days (14) total the time runs out. At the moment the 14 days runs out ...the items are being deleted.
If my theory is correct..i should lose about 200 - 700 items today, and close to 400 items tomorrow.
Jhava Bein - Master Merchant - Master Artisan - Master Architect
JhavaCo Holdings Grp. & Mercantile
Well, I found out I was still a couple of hours away from the 14 day mark. So, as the annoited hour approached, I watched my vendor (after delisting everything but a few droid batteries). Sure enough, on the very second that 14 days had transpired, the batteries disappeared and they did not go to the stockroom.
Fortunately I had taken my most important items into my personal inventory, but I had left a few minor items in the stockroom after I had earlier delisted them. It turns out they disappeared too, shortly after the droid batteries. So the bug also affects anything you delist and leave in your stockroom.
I put everything back up on my vendor; I'll just have to remember to relist them all every 13 days. Hope this gets fixed soon.
Slim Vargo, Corbantis
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Rori Outtfitters, a general goods store, south of Narmle at -4483, -2676
It seems like items vanishing from vendors is a growing problem. Given that I noticed items starting to disappear from my vendor over the last few days (11/27-11/28), I have an idea of what may be happening.
The 'big patch' which allowed for 30-day item sales on vendors was implemented on 11/13. Under the old system, an item would be on sale for 7 days, followed by (I believe) another 7 days that you had to retrieve/resell the item before it was automatically deleted. This means a 14-day windows existed on vendors before items were destroyed.
My theory is that there is still logic in vendors to clean out items after being in the vendor for 14 days. I know I restocked my vendors on 11/13 and 11/14 to take advantage of the new 30-day sale window. This means the 14 day cleanout period started 11/27 and 11/28.
All items I lost were of my original 30-day stocking back on 11/13 and 11/14.
This is just a guess, but a guess based on previous behavior of vendors. So for the time being I am going to make sure I remove/restock all my vendor items before they hit T-16 days.
I had some items vanishing yesterday and today, and as far as i remember they were all "old" items, i.e they had been on my vendor for 10-14 days. I will let one of my less valuable items "rot" on the vendor to see when it vanishes.
Happened to me as well more or less excactly after 14 days, I guess weapons worth about 1M just went poof...and I guess the helpfull CSR who will contact me *soon* will tell me something about "works as intended", "it doesn't show in out logs" etc...
This is consistent with what happened to me. I put up a vendor with some informational things in it in my city's hall and those items just dissappeared sometime this weekend (right around the 2 week mark). My other vendors have had a few things for about a week now and have been fine, but I will be relisting them soon to make sure.
sounds about right here too... 80,000 credits worth of spices on my vendor, stocked 2 weeks ago, all vanished last night
I just checked my vendor and sure enough the ones that were 14 days left were all gone. All my weapons built using special resources gone... [sniff, sniff, cry, cry]...
That is a representative sample of the information posted by many merchants over the past two days. Thanks again to everyone who posted calmly and clearly the facts as they experienced them.
Thunderheart wrote:
Some of you are having problems with disappearing items from Vendors
So until the next Publish (the vehicle publish), please do either of these two things to avoid lost items:
This should be a hotfix. If you cannot return the missing items the CSR are going to be working overtime to fix this. I haven't even started tabulating what I lost. I guess I'll find out how much I really stocked on my vendor.
To everyone. This issue has been in discusion in the Merchants forum since yesterday. (14 days after last publish) Currently there is no true work around. Other than to remove all items entirely from the vendor and then relist them every 13 days or less.
I understand you guys don't want Vendors becoming infinite storage space for junk in house. Have you ever thought of binding the stockroom to sales? I.E. You don't have things fall off the for sale sign, but all that you can put in the stock room are factory crates of items that are on the vendor.
Plus, when an item sells, if possible it would fill the order from the crate, so that the merchant doesn't need to load 100 of the same item on his vendor to keep from running out. Obviously one-of-a-kind items could still be sold by putting them up on the vendor too.
Would be simpler for us, you wouldn't need to worry that we'd be using the stockroom to hold our widgets and whatsits, and it'd be fairly easy to check for items that are exorbitantly priced and not actually for sale if you suspected people were abusing it. I can't believe it would be much harder now than all the timer code that you have working that is obviously buggy in the extreme.
And even better there wouldn't need to be ANY code in place that ever DESTROYS items on the vendor, so that a failure to QA a code change wouldn't be quite so gratuitously violent. About the worst we'd have to worry about is an item not restocking automatically.
Dear TH, Dear Devs, Dear all in SOE:
WE WANT A FIX AND WE WANT IT NOW!!!
Oh man, I'm programmer and tester too and if I provoke such a big crash in one of my products I would have to work 24hors day till I fixed it...
Neroir wrote:Dear TH, Dear Devs, Dear all in SOE:
WE WANT A FIX AND WE WANT IT NOW!!!
Oh man, I'm programmer and tester too and if I provoke such a big crash in one of my products I would have to work 24hors day till I fixed it...
Oh, not SOE. You see, unlike most products that come with warranties of some sort, they have this EULA that basically says “we can do no wrong”. Tough crap if we break the game, delete your character, introduce character killing bugs, or make your gaming experience a miserable living hell, we're protected by our EULA. The only choice we have is to walk away and cut our losses if we don't like it. It must be nice to produce a product, sell it and then not have to live with ANY accountability for it.
I don't understand why they won't hotfix this. They seem to hotfix combat issues all the time.
Jabber, on Wanderhome
Made it into the game yesterday in time to save about 600 items our of over 1000. Unfortunately, I don't keep detailed records, because this is a GAME and not a JOB! Even though apparently we have to be online every day and do our research on at least these boards for fear of losing everything we've already achieved.
At this point, I don't care how complex this game is: If they continue talking about new content and bugs like this (and the hundreds that have been in existence since launch!) are still in the game 6 months in, someone's got their collective heads in their collective arses.
Thunderheart...it's getting REALLY hard to post positively and be a supporter. Scrap all new content plans for the next 3 months and fix the bugs already. "Wipe them out....all of them."
What's the status of compensation for loss due to this bug? Most of us care about that as much, if not more, than actually fixing the issue. We can shutdown shops until you fix it, but we can't recover our losses.
Many merchants don't know exactly what was lost. Some lost 500 pieces of clothing, some lost huge stocks of various stat weapons, others lost large numbers of resources for sale from long ago shifts, but most merchants seemed to at most track their sales, and assumed their vendors would track their current stock. How do you compensate the tailor who lost 500 pieces of random clothing and bio engineered cloth, but can't list them in detail? That's what we're all wondering.
We'd like to know what kind of logging system you have on your deleted items, and if you can recreate everything vendor deleted over the past week. If not, can you roll the characters/vendors/etc back to the end of last week? Or at the very least, can you track roughly what was lost and try to compensate in some other manner, but consistently between all merchants? To ask us each to list things we know in a in game ticket is not going to work at this scale.
To players, your items, your equipment, your in game property...are just as important to you as your stats, skills, and character. They represent what you've managed to collect and create over your time in game. To a merchant class, this is doubly important. It's what our character focus upon. Can you imagine the outcry if all combat class characters lost all their weapons and armor and CHs lost all their pets? And then imagine that outcry when they've heard nothing about returning their items days later. That's what you're hearing from the crafters of SWG now.
omg! i had no idea this was going on.
i had recently noticed that my full vendors were a little sparce but i didnt think much about it.
i have 6 vendors and its hard to keep up with what's what. i figured the items had just sold.
well this really stinks!!!!
GNG-Sammie