Merchant Archive

the shouts are excremely annoying and lags me to death everytime it happens. i seen one guy spam his message 5 times in a row. all i saw was his message. he must had a finger twitch problem. i will have to start using the ignore becuase i myself will not purchase from someone like that. if they didn't shout and just said there little spill every 2 or more minutes, it wouldn't bother me, but there is so many people and spams that i can see where i am going and i can't communicate with anyone else because there message is behind 10 spams.

to me, it isbad business practice. they need to pick up a little skill in business teir, get a vendor, and then start shooting things till they make some money.

i been told its their only way to sell, for me, they undersell themselves and all around them so they make little profite from their work. raise the price, sell less, you make as much and you don't have to spam people to death. i sell very few items a week and i make decent enough credits to take care of all my needs.

Well spam shouting has the opposite of the desired affect for me. If I see someone spam shouting I will not shop at there store. Generally these people have very little to offer anyway. If I am in a overly hostile mood I will either save the WP that they are shouting and change name to don't shop here, or if they are AFK sometimes I will rename my pet boar "(player name)-is-a-spamming-tool" and I will set them on a patrol around the spammer. This usually earns me a nasty email which makes me laugh.

I agree that folks who blast the same thing out multiple times per minute is a real pain.

And I agree that there should be a cap, to help hold down the "noise pollution".

Frankly, I think once per minute is still too liberal. If you're trying to advertise a shop sale (and I've done so at the starport), then I see no reason why people should need to repeat the same message more than once every three minutes.

Three minutes is the minimal "acceptable" timer that I've seen in various chat rooms (some set a minimum time between ads at 5 minutes), as it allows plenty of normal conversation to take place between/around the ads, and no one person's ad dominates over other people's (part of the problem is one of escalation... someone starts advertising more frequently, and that floods the other player's ads off the screen too quickly, so they increase their frequency, and it just gets worse and worse.

I understand the desire to "get your message out". I do it myself. But since some folks can't seem to exercise restraint when doing so (multi-repeats of the same message in a few seconds), I think we need a system to help control it, and limit shouts to once per three minutes (or once per five) in lag-sensitive areas like the starport... especially since people are FORCED to go through there.

3 minutes seems like a long period of time for people who DON'T abuse the feature.

I shout sometimes, and it's an integral part of face-to-face sales (DE).

But I guage my shouts to the surrounding crowd.

If I see a bunch of new people coming into the area, I might shout more than once/minute.

But not usually more than that.

Usually I take something along to do while I'm waiting - like crafting or something useful.

When I see that traffic has shifted or cycled through the area, I'll shout again.

But there are some people that get down right obnoxious.

We were in the med center one time and some guy must have leveled one of his medic skills and started to repeatedly spam "TRAIN ME, TRAIN ME".

For me, if I don't get a response to a request like that after the 1st or 2nd try, that means there's no one around that can help me. People are usually pretty helpful in this particular game, which I find refreshing from some of the other games I've played.

I got healed and so I left, partially due to this idiot.

But then he comes outside the med center and starts running up and down the street screaming "TRAIN ME! TRAIN ME!"

It's like I couldn't get away from him - wherever I went, he was there screaming.

So finally I told him to "SHUT UP".

He became a little upset at that and started screaming at me "F you I healed you plenty of times".

And I explained "Thank you, but that doesn't give you the right to be an ass to everyone else in the game - no one can train you. And right now, no one probably WANTS to train you".

After a few more exchanges OTHER people started chipping in and telling him to shut up.

If someone is spamming, ask them to stop it.

After letting all the explatives slide off your back, and if they persist,insist that they stop it or you'll report them for spamming.

You CAN report people for spamming.

Just explain to them that they are affecting everyone elses enjoyment of the game, and if they don't stop, SLAM them.

I'm sure alot of other people in the area will pitch in and put them in their place......

rightSOE go create a market square...all players outside of that square will not be able to hear the /yells etc

if i wanna buy somthing ill go into the square and read the matrix in its purest form...

grrr should add...all yells to be disabled out of the square

yesssss this will be a pita to people who want training for skills...especially lowbies but it might encourage them to use the search button

Sadly, it's the people who log on in the morning, set up their spam macro and go to work that are most annoying...the ones who give you afk msgs all day long when you try to give them a tell...these are the people I have reported and put on ignore on two different servers. They should all be buried alive in ferile bantha dung!

I can't for the life of me figure out why this is even an issue when SOE has the rights to the "auction" channel. Make an auction channel and allow us to ignore it if we so choose. People that choose to ignore that auction channel are easily put on the ignore list. IT works great in EQ and even allows people to walk through those crowded bazaar areas if they are not currently looking for anything. It also allowed people to sit in those bazaar locations and see what was being sold.

/shrug

When I used "spam" to advertise my business I kept it to one shout per 5 minutes. Anything more in my mind is just annoying. I don't know how you would do this to prevent spam but not limit spatial conversations.

SPAM WORKS!!!

I hate that it is true, but it is. Also it is the most true to life part of Merchant, ever been to a carnival or bazaar?

I used a string, of 5 diffrent ads, similar, but 2 1/2 were about my museum and 2 1/2 were about my vendor.

they were macroed to bark a ad every 60 sec, with a 90 sec pause at the end of the string. So if you were really unlucky and missed the shuttle by 'that much' you had to listen to my each of my ads twice, a total of 10 ads. Yes, I did it AFK, but its more effective to be there to answer tells and Emails. I got tons of questions about where did I find this or that loot. But merchant is soooo passive, this week I almost gave up and moved on.

Spamis the ONLY way to really legitimatly boost business at a real vendor before (and after) you get on the map. It would be very sad to limit the ability of real merchants to get their product information out.

I say spam, as much as it is annoying, should be allowed to florish.

I don't think Spam is worth crying over too much. It helps artisans sell, and it's not as if people don't stand in the street selling their wares in RL.

I think all the area around the starport should be a NO-SPAM area.People HAVE to go through that area to use the shuttle.They just need to use an area of the city that people dont HAVE to go there. These spamers are FORCING this crud on me, causing great lag,and making problems for my enjoyment. Just take your spam to another area of town where people dont go...then those that want to read your spam can go and enjoy it to there hearts delight.

I for one think the spam should be allowed but should be more controlled. I like the idea of an auction channel. As far as preventing someone from shouting a particular message more than once per minute, that is easily avoided by simply modifiying the shout message slightly and using several macros at once.