Merchant Archive
Thread: Stockroom 24 hours only =(
Just for clarification... This issue has never been in the patch notes.
... and player should not have to read the forumns to keep up....
I too now have to log on every day JUST to first, make sure all of my vendors are still present and second, to see if anything is in the stockrooms and salvage them before they disappear.
It seems to me that we are getting all of this stress becausebehind the scenes SOE must be having a big issue with database expenses.Everything that I see happening seems to be aneffort on SOE toconstantly limit the number of items that we have in our possession.If this is true, it should nto be our problem. If they had previously miscalculated their expenses then come out and tell us. If they need an extra buck or two a month from me so they can afford the real database costs then I am willing to to pay it! I certainly would be willing to pay a little extra and look forward to a pleasant gaming experience each time I logged on then worry about what new issue I was going to be faced with.
Well, my girl and I were away on vacation. Her vendors came due on Sunday.. We got back yesterday, and we got to play for a bit today (Friday). Items in the stockroom were fine earlier today.. As of a little while ago.. Gone.
More then 24.. more ethen 72.. about 4 days, still less then 7.. (And neither of us had heard or read of the 7 day limit..)
Now.. was it stealth changed again? Is there some massive stockroom bug going on eating items? Are items even suppose to be disappearing? It is not documented anywhere.. there's no warning.. and apparently it's changing or being changed.
So my take... Very, very, very important thing acting random, having the portential to completely and utterly crush some players gaming experience, with nary a word on it anywhere?..
I say it's a bug.. and a bad one. And they Devs better be working on the fix for it..
~TL
Well, here's how I'm going to deal with this problem. This is how I deal with every problem both in games and RL. Documentation andpersistence (rhymes with "stubborn").
I will be documenting exact times. When I receive an email that my auction failed, I will /write down on paper/ the exact time of the email. I may not be able to keep every email I get but I can keep the exact timing. If I get multiple emails, then I'll keep a time range and number. They're usually within a few seconds of each other. This gives the CSRs exact moments to investigate. That's one of the tools they need to work with in their limited environment. The more vague you are, the less they can help.
When I retrieve or relist the items for sale, I'll mark on my notes that there was no occurrences this cycle.
If I do lose stockroom items, I will record the exact time. That's really all I can do to help the CSR, now it's their turn to help me.
Be stubborn, armed with this exact information they have no choice but to treat your ticket seriously. You've done your part. If they claim they cannot help you, request that the ticket be escalated. AFAIK, most of the in-game CSRs are simply hourly employees of SOE following directions on their screen that mean nothing to them, the non-player. I call these people phone-jockeys in all my RL customer service dealings. Be stubborn, yet polite. Be persistent, not annoying. I will refuse to delete any ticket that I'm unsatisfied with. I know what they are and aren't allowed to do. I also know theyare rewarded for /fast/ turnover, not happy customers.
I'll be sure to post any encounters I have on this board. I am a rabid record-keeper. Details are my love. 
Ruda, Doctor, Naritus
It's not 24 hours. I still have over 200 items I'm planning on letting rot in my stockroom and they have been there since Monday afternoon. I checked last night and they were still there.
It sounds like it works this way: Every 4 days or so, a process automatically deletes everything in the stockroom that's been there over 24 hours, except sometimes it doesn't (I've heard people speculate that it's a longer time for things you put into the stockroom than for sales that have expired). That's the only way to explain why items sometimes last a day, sometimes three days, sometimes seven.
And for clarification: This has never been in the patch notes. It's not in the manual. It's not in the online help. This is totally undocumented, and a very, very bad way to handle things. It wouldn't be so bad if the stupid uninformative email you get whenever something expires just *told* you "You have X amount of time to retrieve this item, or it will self-destruct." This is, for chrissakes, a matter of adding TEXT to two messages (the "Auction Unsuccessful" message, which is exactly the same regardless of where you sell something, and the "Auction Won" message... yes, things you've bought and paid for will poof without a trace too, if you don't pick them up fast enough). The text may be hard-coded into the server software, but for crying out loud, it doesn't take a programmer to put stuff between the quotation marks. And heck, it would take so little time, you could afford to pay a programmer to do it.
I played EQ for almost three years, and got called a VAK many times for being so ridiculous as to point out that Verant wasn't out to get individual players, and didn't hate any class. I've always been very generous and fair in my judgements of these guys... coding and running an MMOG is a monumental task, and still largely uncharted territory. Verant/SOE seem to do it better than anyone else if you look at the numbers of players. But this is a bit ridiculous. They disabled items staying on your corpse because players were losing items... can't they TYPE a single SENTENCE to save them countless CSR tickets and p'd off players?
This is just stupid. I understand why they auto-empty the stockroom, it's to keep you from actually using it as a stockroom to store stuff (I bet the original intention was to let you store stuff there indefinitely, but that they scrapped that ideawhen they started having database issues). That doesn't explain why they just don't get rid of the 7 day limit on private vendors and let stuff stay on there until it sells!
This is ridiculous that I can't leave the game for more than 24 hours or I risk losing massive amounts of credits! Even if I know in advance that I'm going to be gone, I can't just empty my vendors, the stuff that's on them wouldn't fit in my house!
I just lost 750,000 credits worth of weapons from my vendor because of this stockroom eating them thing when I couldn't log in for a couple days, and man, it's about the most disheartening feeling to see months of work go away so suddenly and unexpectedly, that it makes one want to quit this game. I can't believe they expect to keep customers this way, giving us this terrible alienating feeling about them, refusing to replace the loss, purposefully screwing us from our hard work or whatever could be the goal of such a short time limit. Hey Sony, you must change this or people will quit.
Zebulon