Merchant Archive
Thread: Strange little vendor bug I haven't seen mentioned before
Here's the typical scenario. I've got someone in my shop, and I make a custom item for her. Let's say it's a pair of Uniform Boots, in white. I always rename items with my brand and the item's color, so when I craft the boots, I call them "Kicky Uniform Boots - White".
Then I say "I'll put these on my vendor, so we don't have to deal with cash, or the secure trade window." And I put it up, and the customer buys the boots from the vendor. So far so good.
The weird part is in the e-mail notification. Normally it'd say something like "Your item Kicky Uniform Boots - White was sold to X for 800 credits" or whatever. But in this particular case, it often refers to the item only by its "base" name - "Your item Uniform Boots was sold to X for 800 credits".
I'm guessing it's some sort of database mismatch that only lasts a short while, but can get triggered with this sort of "quick craft/sale" scenario.
I've been noticing it pop up more and more, and not necessarily with "new" items. It's a somewhat non-trivial irritant, because I keep a spreadsheet of my sales, and simply knowing I sold "Muscle Shirt" doesn't tell me much, since I don't know which of the dozen or so colors it was sold in.
It doesn't seem to happen very often, but it's annoying when it does.
Osmol wrote:
The whole idea of the base name remaining a part of the item was implemented in order to avoid people screwing other people over in sales. For example, renaming an item that is not very good to the name of an item that is good. There were complaints about it happening on the bazaar, so the base names were kept in the sale. The fact that it is going into the emails you receive is probably just due to the fact this fact.
Yea but there doesn't seem to be a pattern to it. It happens sometimes and sometimes it doesn't. In my case it happened two or three times out of a dozen of the same item which were Factory made so they were identical.
It is related to the base name fix but it is a bug somehow but I don't have a clue what triggers it.
I see this at least every other day as well, sometimes it happens in two or three notifications in a row.
I depend on the customized names (coloring forclothes)to restock, so base name creates a huge inventory headachefor me as I have to search vendors to see what is missing.
However, the emailsalways fix themselves after a few hours or a day. So I simply wait till the customized name replaces the base name in the email, then do inventory/restocking.
As for a pattern...
Every time I get multiple emails in a row that are bugged, they are from items purchased by the same individual. i.e. someone purchases 3 items, and those confirmations are all bugged.
However, I do remember cases where an individual bought, say, 3 items and only two of the three confirmations were bugged.
Don't know if that would helpwith any resolution.
Yep! How much says we see a redesign of the email systemin the coming months
I have seen this in other games before, where they redesign it so emails are saved locally (but this design likely would not fix the emails later in the case of this bug 
).
I do think it probably has something to do with multiple sales to the same person. Until the other day, I'd only noticed it in sales of stuff that I'd *just* placed on the vendor per customer order. (And so it wasn't that big a deal, as the transaction and item were fresh in my memory for recordkeeping purposes.)
If the e-mails change with time, the trigger might be "very very short time period between mail received and opening the e-mail." For me, the context is often opening the mail within a second of the notice, for a buyer who just purchased something from my vendor, and I'm right there myself.