Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Test Center Update Notes Mar 5, 2004
Commodities Market/Vendors: Fix to no longer allow people to sell bags that are not empty on vendors.
Concrete suggestions
...based on (a) what the rumors say you're trying to fix and (b) what's likely to work from a database/programming standpoint.
1. Don't allow a character to remove a light saber or SE Goggles from a container unless she/he is a Jedi or SE account respectively. This will prevent people using backpacks to trade or vend these items, at least in any useful way. (What good is it ifit's stuckthe pack?) I know it's hard to scan contained items, but you should definitely be able to "catch" and test at the point of removal.
2. Make backpack contents count towards the overall vendor item limit. This will prevent people from evading the limits and ballooning the database, while allowing the convenience of armor-set and special-order grouping, which is an important part of the economy.
Unless there's something else you're trying to prevent that I haven't heard about, these two changes would be better than removing the ability to vend and trade nonempty packs. Please consider this substitution!
aibo220 wrote:
So how about instead of taking outfilled bags on vendor,how about you "developers" actually DEVELOP and make it where the "Guranteed Attributes" lists the items in the bag.
Well, im going to play the bad side of the coin for a moment. Dont flame me much on what im about to say. Im only coming up with a fewideas on a work around that might work for the bag issue.
Ok if merchents cant use bags to place many items in them the items would have to be all placed on a vender. So lets try this:
Since most venders have multiple houses, i would like to say that one should be just for special orders. Have the house lock out ppl that are not on the invite list(as in a private house, and only invite your special order customers). Inside the house, have your venders hold the special orders for the ppl you are dealing with. Plan out the day that the person is going to pick up the order so you can have there name on the house list to let them in. The only problem i could see with this is, if you make the house private, can you use a vender inside? If you can, then ppl that want there special order can without having the fear of someone taking the order(unless you have many orders being picked up at a time, but you still have that problem now having sets placed on the vender.
Or
The old fashon way of seting a date and time for pickup.
I know this is not much, but it might help or it might not. It is just an idea.
Subject: Lost Inactive Citizen!
A citizen has been removed due to two weeks inactivity. If they return, they can rejoin the city by redeclaring at their residence.
Citizen Name: XXXXXXX
[quote]I presume that the bag - vendor issue is to prevent the use of vendors as mass storage devices?
I will not debate the issue of wether this practice is right or wrong (I do it). Rather... just wanted to be sure everyone knows that it will have this effect.[/quote]
This has nothing to do with storage. You can still use vendors for storage with this change, just putting individual items up. In most cases, I put individual items or crates up, anyway, because when I'm retrieving the item(s), I use the store filters.
Anyway, here's the deal...
There are a handful of scammers selling empty bags with names that would indicate that they are non-empty.
This causes Sony's clueless CSR folks to get more tickets. Like the recent change forcing players to the completely useless Sony knowledge base, which is unlikely to provide any useful information for any person who has been playing the game for 3 months before, before getting to a clueless CSR who won't understand the game systems well enough to be able to help with the problem, it shows Sony's last priority is customer satisfaction.
First of all, what Sony needs to understand is that most of their CSR's have never actually played the game. They can protest this all they want, it's painfully clear when you talk to a CSR about a bug in a core game system, and they don't know how the system is supposed to work, that they are not playing the game at all. Repair tools are currently occasionally issueing a "You repaired the item with minor blemishes" message, but then corrupting the item instead of repairing it. It required opening four separate customer service tickets to find a CSR who understood how the core game system worked well enough to get an acknolwedgement of it being a bug, and even then, the CSR was unable to reimburse the item.
This is why you're getting so many tickets. We have over 20 zombies -- accounts that are suspended, cancelled or closed -- that still have citizenship in our city. This means that when our mayor decided he wasn't going to play anymore, we had to overcome these votes. This is a major effort when the zombies are votes you cannot sway in any way. In some cases, we have players who no longer have buildings in our city, and who we know have residence in another city who are still showing up on our citizenship roster (which shows really poor design in the city system from a database standpoint).
Until you fix the root problem, you're going to remain inundated with tickets.
Anyway, this is what sony's CSR are telling them. "Why can you sell non-empty bags? People use this to scam, and if you just take it away, we'll get a lot less tickets." Their CSR's are who are driving this decision, and not the players. The same people who don't know how repair tools work, and don't know how most other game systems work are the ones who are driving this decision.
The bags, in their current form, are the only way of securely delivering special orders of more than one item to a customer without being logged on and in the same physical location in the game world at the same time. Moreover, the anonymity of the bags is something that crafers who do not yet have stock piles of materials that have dropped only once or twice in the entire lifetime of the server, the single most populated section of the artisan community, depend upon. In many cases, I have 1k or less of certain materials. I have to depend on finding people who re selling the materials, which happens rarely, and then pay 30, 50 or even 100cpu (credits per unit) for the materials, since they are so rarely in cycle.
So what happens is that if I make 3 or 4 reallygood items for someone, throw them into a bag, and put it on my vendor with their name, they can come and pick up the item. Because I don't scam, and am trustworthy, people don't need to see the contents to know they aren't being taken advantage of. I really would rather not people be able to examine the contents of the bag, because then people other than the intended recipient can see the order, and since anyone can buy it from the vendor, I might have someone "steal" an order that I can't replace.
Again, this is coming at it from a crafting standpoint.
What would be better would be a system like paypal in the game. When a player buys an item, allow them to return it to the same vendor for a week, provided that they've not "used" the item. They can examine the item, they can look at the contents, but as soon as they take an item out of the bag, they can't return it.
This will provide the goal of eliminating the CSR requests related to the bags, while not requiring the contents to be on display, preserving the current anonymity of special order items. More importantly, it will cover for other bugs such as buying a mislabeled item, etc. in some cases.
It's like returning a CD or DVD to the store -- once the "shrink wrap" is broken, you can't return it. This would be the same thing for vendor items.
Sounds like a nice patch...
I just don't understand about the bags not being able to be sold on vendors unless empty. How does this make any sense? This is SUCH a used ability.
And you can no longer TRADE a bag that is full, either???
I'll learn to live with this one, if you can increase the space limitations inside houses. Have youever tried to move a shop with vendors full of items? Try it without a vendor... I spent five nights moving my shop which had a total of 1,178 items. Five nights. And that was using the vendor to sell bags full of items while I organized everything.
Please take this change out before it goes live... this one is extreme, and ridiculous.