Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Vendor and Stockroom Issues Pt 2
Since playing the game I have taken each and every dis-heartening issue with a grin and bare it attitude and continued to play. Vendors poofing with all items (found out my shop is on a server boundary) to houses disappearing with all items, etc. Each time i was told so sorry this happened but suck it up, so I did and I kept playing and I played my little heart out, collecting all the rare items i could, traveling all over, spending lots and lots of credits and hours and hours of time, creating a nice little stock of items that have now allmost all poofed because of an intentional or unintentional bug that they are refusing to place a hotfix for has just taken the wind out of my sales (pun intended). I didnt even have the heart to log in last night to see what all i lost, I dont have the energy to log in and pull all items off my vendors, would take hours to do that on 4 vendors, I just dont have the heart to want to play anymore... if wanting to lighten the server storage load was what they wanted thenI think they will get more then they bargained for when it is customers they lose and not just their items. I dont understand why the amount of items is an issue, you designed the game this way requiring people to stock pile resources and crates of items to craft with, so buy more storage servers, it was your idea not ours that the game was designed this way, so why do we have to continually suffer for your lack of foresight?
This is a devasting bug for merchants and should have been the number 1, round the clock , find a fix issue by the devs, they should have been working 24/7 on a fix and should have done an emergency patch to eliminate deletion of items till a fix patch was ready. How can they even conceivably let this go on for more then a few hours is beyond my comprehension. Well you win, because i have 3 accounts now sitting there and no desire to even log in, thank you for ruining something i gained alittle enjoyment from.
Havoclord wrote:
Losing stock is part of any normal merchants life - even the big boys like Wallmart lose at least 5% of their stock each year through theft - mainly from staff.
People have lost 100% of their stock due to this bug..
Yeah, it's just like when the local Walmart burns to the ground. /nod
Ri'a Ocoli, Master Tailor of Keren/Naboo/Kettemoor
We trust the developers with a big chunk of our lives. To have several months worth of gameplay utterly destroyed by a bug like this is completely unacceptable. If the devs do not make good on this problem, then they will prove themselves unworthy of our trust.
I'm saying this from the standpoint of someone who didn't actually lose anything, by the way; I got the word in time.
In my opinion, if they have to take SWG down for 3-4 days to sweep the DB and restore the items, they should do it. If they have to delay the introduction of vehicles by a week, they should do it. Hopefully it can be done with less downtime - but this is an issue of trust. If SOE simply does some math, computes how much revenue they lose from dropped accounts vs from downtime or delayed releases - they will prove themselves profoundly unworth of trust.
I think the devs need to make a clear and unambiguous statement that all lost items will be recovered from the DB within a month.
I don't think that's asking for too much.
Well, this is the melon that breaks the kaadu's back.
I've accepted and jumped through all the hoops that CSR has presented to me such as
- pulling and restocking over 1000 items from vendors when I moved to a bigger house
- pulling and restocking vendors for the new 30-day timer
- pulling and restocking vendors again because the stockroom only listed items for 7 days
- receiving the standard response for disappearing items "We're very sorry but because we cannot verify the loss, you will not be compensated." This is an outright lie because they did compensate me once, after verifying the loss through their records.
In the process, I'vecreated a well-respected and the best-stocked tailor shop near Coronet on the Intrepid galaxy. I spent about 90% of my gametime in my house, restocking my vendors, but this was worth it because of all the glowing customer comments I received, and the friends I made.
But this latest bug is too much. I've lost hundreds of items worth hundreds of thousands of credits, including custom orders that customers couldn't get to within the 14-day period. Now, they expect me to go through over a thousand items, one at a time, to restock anything that might disappear within the next few days?
And to do this after I've stocked my vendors heavily to prepare for my upcoming vacation?
No thank you. I love the game but not enough to devote more chunks of my life to correcting programming faults. The game is great but the implementation is lousy.
So, I'm finally quitting. As Mogos stated, it's a matter of TRUST. And I don't trust SWG any more.
For all the good it will do, I'll write letters to SWG, Sony, and George Lucas.
I'm also toying with the idea of suing them in small claims court to get a refund of my game fees. Will I win? Most likely not. But think of all the bad publicitySWG willget, especially if all the game magazines in Southern Californiaare watching the proceedings.
Quechli
Master Tailor, Master Musician
Corellia: -99, -5836, Intrepid
Over 1000 disappearing items. Buy them before they disappear!
No, it would be like if there were global riots, and half of the stores and warehouses were burned to the ground.
AnitaSWG wrote:
Havoclord wrote:
Losing stock is part of any normal merchants life - even the big boys like Wallmart lose at least 5% of their stock each year through theft - mainly from staff.
People have lost 100% of their stock due to this bug..
Yeah, it's just like when the local Walmart burns to the ground. /nod
Ri'a Ocoli, Master Tailor of Keren/Naboo/Kettemoor
SoleilTailor wrote:
Solace1 wrote:
Ummm..I have over 300 items on my vendor. going thorough each one to see how much time is left is not going to cut it.
I have 4 vendors, and I agree with your statement above precisely. Unfortunately, that is what you have to do to be a merchant in this game now.
aye... I caught this far too late to make any type of recovery effort... Seems like the Database is reall up poop's creek...
I already have a full time job..I don't need to pay 15bucks a month for a second one.
Other important issues (Lacking payment)
There are several instances where a vendor doesn't pay you credits. I was testing yesterday and most of the purchases that were made were credited to my account... but not all of them.
Even worse was when someone offered an item to my vendor for 350k... I bought the item.. the money was subtracted from my account... but not credited to his.
In another instance I bought 300k worht of stuff off someone elses vendor.. they didn't receive the cash.
So pretty much whether or not you lose items... you aren't getting 100 percent of yer credits from the vendors.
Talk about a great built in money sink
I've concluded as of late that the CSR's jobs are to never play the game so they have no idea what they are helping people with and follow thier 10 commandments that are totally bogus and are for the most part just put in place to give them an excuse to not help if it would take some time and effort on thier part.
TH can you please slap those guys into shape? I have to say that once in a blue moon I have found a helpful CSR that after 5 have passed me up this one good csr comes to help the game player lying beaten in the road. I think that statistic would reflect most players experiences with the CSR system. My lastest adventure with the CSR involved getting a date of when my PA hall was put up. They first said it violated rules by giving me info that would effect a player dispute. Then they told me they dont have that info. I know both are wrong to a certain degree cause when our pa hall blew up back in the first month of the game they gave us a log of what happend to it up to the second.
Sorry for this rant but I'm a little ticked that they arent refunding the items lost in this massive bug. (if they have changed policy at this point to refund lost items)
On a little side note, yesterday I reported that I had only lost 5 or6 items, because I thought I'd beaten the clock and even this morning I reported that I'd dodged the bullet. I just realized that I was wrong. 
At the last patch I did two rounds of stocking, first I put a lot of new builds on the vendor, and then I reoffered a lot of things that had been on the vendor.
But I noticed that the reoffered ones didn't go into those neat new categories about a day or so later, and I reoffered everything to the vendor so they'd all be listed as they should be. It's the smaller number of 80-100 items that survived. I canonly guesstimate how many other items were lost, so since CSR will demand that we give them social security numbers, fingerprints and DNA sampleson all lostitems before they check the DB.... those things are gone andforgotten .
I only realized this when I was chatting with a friend of mine just now about putting a Striker Pistol up on my vendor for a customer... when those on the vendor to begin with hadn't been selling at all.
Bah. Silly Optimistic Eola... BAD PLAYER! BAD!
Havoclord wrote:Guys, this is like running a shop in real-life, trust me!
Losing stock is part of any normal merchants life - even the big boys like Wallmart lose at least 5% of their stock each year through theft - mainly from staff.
Just imagine that your vendors sold it to their mates on the cheap and pocketed the proceeds!
Do what they do - just bump the prices up a litte
Not even close.
If this was real life, it would be like you open a store, "GRAND OPENING"!!! then on the 14th day you go to your store and open the door and entire store is empty.
Every single inventory gone.
Now imagine if that start to happen to EVERY store that open since two weeks ago.
If THAT happen in real life people will say
"Oh well, just normal merchant life"
Where do you do your business? Twilight zone?
Actually, Havoclord is right but wrong at the same - if you lose a week's worth of stock, that is 1.9% of your annual stock. It is normal to lose stock, but 5% is high. ShopsDO burn down. ShopsDO get raided. Just imagine that theMummer Thugsraided you and grin and bear it! I once had a shop, but we got flooded and had no insurance so I just to give up - at least in the game it is not real!
SunflowerD wrote:Actually, Havoclord is right but wrong at the same - if you lose a week's worth of stock, that is 1.9% of your annual stock. It is normal to lose stock, but 5% is high. ShopsDO burn down. ShopsDO get raided. Just imagine that theMummer Thugsraided you and grin and bear it! I once had a shop, but we got flooded and had no insurance so I just to give up - at least in the game it is not real!
Right, but it happen to very few out of millions of shops. not even .00001%
Imagine if ever since 2 weeks ago, EVERY shop that opened get burnt down on the 14th day. EVERY SINGLE ONE.
Is THAT normal?