Merchant Archive

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Stop placing blame and flames on people who just are asking questions. The guy asked a simple question. Sad thing is, he obviously has read the merchant boards enough to know that he was very likely to get flamed by you all. Perhaps you all should work on a new image for yourselves. I know when I go to other professions boards I can almost always get good information and not have to worry about being attacked. Yet, how many posts can we see in the merchant folders that start out with some variation of "can I get some answers without being flamed?" lol. That isn't right. Perhaps the moderators should be coming down just a bit more harshly on you all until you learn how to post in a civilized manner.

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theonebountyhunter wrote:

I don't even run that big an armorsmith business compared to most other armorsmiths. there are currently two options to ease the storage problems.1.) vendors 2.) cross server lot trades. at the rate people do cross server lot trades for houses and harvesterseventually the worlds are going to be covered by them. So basically your saying its better to fill the world with houses or factories since they offer a higher return in storage compared to houses then to use one vendor for storage???

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You're missing the point, the Devs never intended for lot-swaps, never expected people to use the input hopper of a factory as a place to keep things other than the ingredients for manufacturing, never expected venders to be used for anything but selling. The point was they didn't want people to have more stuff stored than the maximum of 960 items stored, with no factories or harvesters, and i suspect they expected most people to only have 360 to 460 and use the rest of their lots for factories and harvesters, or not at all.

If people can't keep their vendors stocked because people keep buying the stuff thenup the prices, sell less and leave more room in the market for other crafters to sell stuff.

It isn't cheating, and until you show a post from a DEV saying it is exploiting the vendor system, stop bringing it up. The vendor system is working as intended when it comes to storage. The items can still be bought, so there is absolutely nothing to back up your claims of an exploit. You keep crying about this, yet where is your proof?

Even in the link that you posted, Thunderheart never once mentioned vendors being used as storage or even vendor poaching as a reason to lower the limit on the number of items. Here is his post again. Maybe if I keep posting it you will actually read it:

"The second item has to do with Vendors. Currently, there is no limit to how many items can be placed on a vendor. This causes technical issues, encourages monopolies and actually hurts sales in many instances because most players don't "drill down" through all of the vendor pages to find items. We want to solve the technical issues, discourage monopolies and make vendors easier to use. An item limit is going to be placed on vendors and that limit is intended to be placed on 150."

Do you see anything in there that says vendors being used a storage is a bad thing? an exploit? as a reason for them putting an item limit on vendors? No. So don't tell me I am making excuses or that I am cheating. I am doing neither. I am using the system as it stands.

I will agree that vendor poaching could be argued as an exploit -- a very minor one -- but yes, an exploit. But to try to claim that storing items on a vendor is an exploit(regardless of skill points invested or not) is just not using your head. Especially since they will never be able to prevent that from happening unless they completely remove vendors from the game or nerf them to the point they might as well not be in the game.

And it really makes you a hypocrite Songe, in my opinion, for you to say that vendor storage is bad, yet factory storage is okay. They ARE different matters, yet by your definitions, you are making them out to be the same thing.

Blah blah blah I want to see a post by a dev saying it's an exploit instead of using my common sense. Or instead of just admitting that you using the system as it stands is just exploiting its failures. As far as I'm concerned, players using vendors while dropping the skills and/or as storage are one of the big reasons why the database is overloaded and merchants will be nerfed, period.

wow. I actually agree with dingoboi to a certain extent -hands him another beer so he doesn't scare people by not flaming them-

I will totally agree that people storing items on vendors might add to the 'technical issues', but how many people can you point to with 500+ items stored on several different vendors in one mall? And, how many people can you point to with 500+ items for sale on several different vendors in one mall? On shadowfire at least, you can go basically to any town in the game and find at least one mall like that, if not several, and the majority of the vendors you see, will be legit 'true' merchant vendors with items up for sale, not storage.

Anyways. "blah blah blah" is such a good arguement Songe. Very impressed. The common sense is that it is not an exploit, and that it has little/if anything to do with why the DEVs are going to add an item limit to vendors.

Also, was wondering, why don't vendors take lots? Wouldn't that fix some of the problems with vendor poaching? And maybe if you had skills invested in merchant, the hiring tree(since it has so little use right now) could add a skill like, "lots +1". Which would also be nice in general, because then even if you didn't want to have max vendors out, you could gain extra lots to be used for harvesters. -trying to come up with more ideas to make merchant a viable profession to encourage people to keep skill points invested -- since I constantly say that is the problem.-

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DragonScout wrote:
wow. I actually agree with dingoboi to a certain extent -hands him another beer so he doesn't scare people by not flaming them-

I will totally agree that people storing items on vendors might add to the 'technical issues', but how many people can you point to with 500+ items stored on several different vendors in one mall? And, how many people can you point to with 500+ items for sale on several different vendors in one mall? On shadowfire at least, you can go basically to any town in the game and find at least one mall like that, if not several, and the majority of the vendors you see, will be legit 'true' merchant vendors with items up for sale, not storage.

Anyways. "blah blah blah" is such a good arguement Songe. Very impressed. The common sense is that it is not an exploit, and that it has little/if anything to do with why the DEVs are going to add an item limit to vendors.

Also, was wondering, why don't vendors take lots? Wouldn't that fix some of the problems with vendor poaching? And maybe if you had skills invested in merchant, the hiring tree(since it has so little use right now) could add a skill like, "lots +1". Which would also be nice in general, because then even if you didn't want to have max vendors out, you could gain extra lots to be used for harvesters. -trying to come up with more ideas to make merchant a viable profession to encourage people to keep skill points invested -- since I constantly say that is the problem.-

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Oh dear lord, It's the 9th sign of the apocalypse. I actually agree with dragonscout

I like the idea *almost* of lots to an extent. Many have thought merchants should be allocated additional lots as part of our skills.... although that hasn't shown up in postings in some time. That would be a TRUE bonus to the profession and, in part, might solve some storage issues.

Contrary to popular belief, I do agree the merchant profession is 'underskilled'. We DO need more skills and usefulness. Where we disagree to a point is that I feel the demand won't really come to vendors are restricted to merchants only. I think if the vendors are more restricted to merchants only, there will likely be a bigger demand for features from the masses. Now, we have the masses sorta content with being able to have their vendors, so there is little/no outcry about how this profession sucks skillwise (OMG did i just say that?)

I think we all agree there are many issues and improvements needed. We just differ on how to go about them and what to implement first. /grouphug.

I understand why some 'poach' and if I wasn't a merchant as my main profession, I'd probably be very tempted, kinda like the vehicle shuttle bug fix. I've used it. Does it make it right? No. Can I sorta justify it? Yes. (in this particular instance because they never fixed the bug where vehicle reverts to decayed stage even after fixing it.. but that really is apples/oranges)

Let's all get back on focus about improving the profession.

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theonebountyhunter wrote:

"But yes i got up to business III and then dropped it."

"and ok atm I do have business III but vendor is still for storing items. so your still saying i am exploiting."

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DragonScout wrote:
Anyways. "blah blah blah" is such a good arguement Songe. Very impressed. The common sense is that it is not an exploit, and that it has little/if anything to do with why the DEVs are going to add an item limit to vendors.

The common sense is that as a Vendor is a machine / NPC designed for selling items, so using one as a storage facility is not playing within the spirit of the game, maybe not exploiting in the truest sense of the word but still wrong. However I agree that this has very little to do with any reasons to implement an itemlimit on venders.

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Picking up on a number of points from elsewhere in the thread:

Being a successful armoursmith with only 360 items stored (applicable to other crafting professions):

Turn on your harvesters and harvest the best available of each needed resource (i make this under 100 resources allowing for multiples of the same resource for different armour types) never mine more than 100000K of any one resource for any one type of armour. This gives you a maximum of 100 stacks to store.

Make the armour:

Week 1 make say50 suits of one type of armour that you have the resources for, moving made components from output hoppers to input hoppers as you need them, so your 360 storage is untouched by the making process.

Sell the armour:

Place the armour on your vendor (or sell it to your merchant partner) so it retails at a price that means it will not sell out for a month.

Repeat in weeks 2-4 with a different type of armour then repeat the whole cycle.

Where is the storage issue? Oh do you want to hoard hundreds of looted shards and layers? Want to keep 2,000,000 units of that real nice resource? All sorts of other arguments i can see can come out, but these are either just excuses for hoarding or a sign that you want to run a business that is too large (which will drive other newer smiths out of the emarket and create a monopoly or a number of almost monopolies.)

Whatever your excuse for it using venders, factories or lot-swaps as a place to store stuff is mis-using them. They were not designed for those purposes and just because they can be used for those purposes doesn't make it right.

However until the Devs state that any of these things are exploits, or until such time as they fix them so they cannot be used in this way I suggest you feel free to use your available storage to whatever extent you like.

Note also that the Devs have said that using a vendor without the pre-requesite skills is wrong (though i don't believe they used the word exploit) and that it will be fixed so anyone still using a vender without the skills is on thin ice at best.