Merchant Archive
Thread: Should a Merchant have the ability to delete items that aren't theirs?
5 starred merely because I think this is a serious issue that should be fixed asap.
TheWalt2 wrote:
This is an issue I have just become painfully aware of recently:
When a merchant deletes a vendor, it deletes all items in the vendor INCLUDING outstanding offers to the vendor! Items that the merchant has not purchased yet and DOES NOT OWN!
I recently won an online auction, and through a mishap, the items were offered on a guildmates vendor instead of mine, and my guildmate, unaware, removed his vendor, which deleted all the items I was intending to purchase.
Should not the seller of the items have the opportunity to retrieve the offers before they get deleted?
Has anyone else experienced this yet?
Thanks in advance for the discussion-
Yea but we can't have the offers screen any more useless than it already is. This is a problem that needs to have a solution as soon as possible.
A question and an answer...
I know that if a sale fails on the bazaar and you don't retrieve the item within a certain timescale the item(s) disappear. If a merchant rejects an offer on a vendor do the items disappear if not collected in the same way?
If they do then great, my idea below will work, if not then change it so that rejected offers disappear after a certain number of days (same as un-retrieved items on the bazaar?)
My idea:
Lock vendors so that they cannot be deleted if they still have items offered to them, or rejected offers waiting to be retrieved, add the functionality to set vendors to not accept offers.
To delete a vendor, reject any offered items you don't want, set the vendor to no offers, wait until either all the rejected items are collected or disappear, then delete the vendor.
It will make deleting a vendor take longer if you have unwanted offers, but is changing vendors that regular an occurance anyway?
TheWalt2 wrote:
You're right, it's a tricky issue...
Or, move the items to the 'Available Items' at the nearest Bazaar terminal (again with email notice)
lisasdarren wrote:
A question and an answer...
I know that if a sale fails on the bazaar and you don't retrieve the item within a certain timescale the item(s) disappear. If a merchant rejects an offer on a vendor do the items disappear if not collected in the same way?
If they do then great, my idea below will work, if not then change it so that rejected offers disappear after a certain number of days (same as un-retrieved items on the bazaar?)
My idea:
Lock vendors so that they cannot be deleted if they still have items offered to them, or rejected offers waiting to be retrieved, add the functionality to set vendors to not accept offers.
To delete a vendor, reject any offered items you don't want, set the vendor to no offers, wait until either all the rejected items are collected or disappear, then delete the vendor.
It will make deleting a vendor take longer if you have unwanted offers, but is changing vendors that regular an occurance anyway?
Another good idea. But the timeframe is 7 days I believe. I think is might be considered griefing that a merchant has to wait up to 7 days to remove a vendor when there is a offer on it.
This may not be so bad if theMerchant's vendor slot iscleared when the shutdown occours. And they can place a new vendor without waiting the7 days for the old vendor to clear.
JTGAlpha wrote:
Well it depends on HOW hard it is to code. I mean, you're not exactly always in the same spot. It has to find you and put all the items in your inventory. And what if your inventory is full? Ya see? It's not always so cut and dried. There are NO existing mechanics for this right now that even come close, which is what leads me to believe that it's a technologically difficult issue.
Actually, there are mechanics in place for this. Remember the bags full of lost items, reimbursementsfrom when vendors were silently swallowing items at the 14 day auction mark? They didn't handle the "inventory full" condition all that gracefully, but they did handle it.
Remember the Christmas presents? It doesn't seem like they had that much trouble "finding" us to put those in our inventories.
Moving items from one place to another in a game world is as simple as dragging files from one folder to another on your desktop. It's all just manipulating data. It shouldn't be that hard.
lisasdarren wrote: [snip question, yes it works that way]
Lock vendors so that they cannot be deleted if they still have items offered to them, or rejected offers waiting to be retrieved, add the functionality to set vendors to not accept offers.
To delete a vendor, reject any offered items you don't want, set the vendor to no offers, wait until either all the rejected items are collected or disappear, then delete the vendor.
It will make deleting a vendor take longer if you have unwanted offers, but is changing vendors that regular an occurance anyway?
Some people do change vendors fairly often because that is the only way to rename or move one. If that were fixed, your idea might be feasible.
I think I have noticed that rejected items on deleted vendors still show on the bazaar "available items" list. Why not simply make them retrievable there (any bazaar terminal).
karuza wrote:
If you pay attention to the patch notes they fixed this.. all items purchased from a vendor go directly to your inventory
It doesn't have anything to do with offers you don't want to buy though. They stay on the vendor forever (and it's 30 days because it's on a vendor, not 7).
Haruspex77 wrote:
lisasdarren wrote: [snip question, yes it works that way]
Lock vendors so that they cannot be deleted if they still have items offered to them, or rejected offers waiting to be retrieved, add the functionality to set vendors to not accept offers.
To delete a vendor, reject any offered items you don't want, set the vendor to no offers, wait until either all the rejected items are collected or disappear, then delete the vendor.
It will make deleting a vendor take longer if you have unwanted offers, but is changing vendors that regular an occurance anyway?
Some people do change vendors fairly often because that is the only way to rename or move one. If that were fixed, your idea might be feasible.
I think I have noticed that rejected items on deleted vendors still show on the bazaar "available items" list. Why not simply make them retrievable there (any bazaar terminal).
My understanding is that there are tecnhical issues with transfering items across server boundries like that.
DocSavag wrote:
My understanding is that there are tecnhical issues with transfering items across server boundries like that.
Update on the original situation-
I heard from the seller yesterday that the CSRs did not help him recover his lost resources.
This I can't understand. Something needs to be done about this issue (and this individual's case)
I think this might be the best solution. All items on a vendor are part of whats called the "vendor database". Each vendor is a "window" into this database. It seems reasonable that when a vendor is deleted, any items that were offered could have their attributes shifted so that its location shifts to the "available items" at the local bazaar.
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Yes, it could work exactly like this. And the coding already exists in the game. Think about player city banks. When one of those is gone, safety deposit items still exist in the safety deposit area of the nearest NPC city bank. Vendors will then be unable to be deleted until all items up for offer are rejected. They could then shift rejected items to the nearest NPC city bazaar terminal in the same manner as PC banks.