Merchant Archive

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BillDir wrote:

It appears to be another example of SOE saying one thing andmeaning something else: They say that the Merchant should check their vendor or it would be deleted, but THEY apparently MEAN if the vendor is not accessed byOTHER players in a very short time, the vendor will be deleted. That is what appears to me to have happened. It sure would be nice if we could get some clarification on this.

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This is an interesting problem, then. If the measure of an active vendor is having it accessed by other players, then how do we, the merchants, do that? We have no practical way to get people to come to our stores and access our vendors. I refuse to sit in the starport and spam my store, the barker droids run out of battery power too soon (plus the griefing that goes on, of other players being able to "lure away" my droid), and the planetary map gets broken so often that I know I can't depend on it for advertising. On top of that, what if there is just a period of time when people aren't interested in visiting my medical vendor? Maybe everyone has bought enough stuff to last them for a month! I sell stims in 50-count crates, and they are good stims, so people probably don't have to buy them more often than once every two months. It doesn't help that I am located right outside of Kaadara, and Kaadara is really just a ghost town. My only customers tend to be people that already know that I am there, and I appreciate those three customers very much.

Sony, are you perhaps losing track of WHY people play games? They play games to relax and have fun. I realize that this may be an odd concept for you, but SWG is rapidly becoming NOT FUN AT ALL!!!! When you change the rules, and don't tell us what the rules have changed to, IT IS NOT FUN!!!! When I follow all of the rules, as I understand them, and I get punished for a rule that I didn't even know was there, IT IS NOT FUN!!!! I have never had a vendor, without having the skill points to have that vendor. I have played by the rules. I have changed my play style to fit new rules. But as soon as one of my vendors disappears, and they all have a minimum of 120 days of maintenance paid on them, and they are all supported by full skill points for owning them, but as soon as any one of them disappears, so do I, taking all of my five accounts.

If vendors disappear, through no fault of my own, IT IS NOT FUN!!!!

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Vaelorn wrote:

Well, I just logged in, and I have TWO vendors that had at least 200 weapons stocked on them, both completely gone. I am absolutely positive that they had at least 25 days worth of maintenance left in them, because I have two other vendors that are still in game. I haven't logged the character in for two days. I logged in today and noticed that I had ZERO emails about vendors, either people purchasing items from them, or notices about the vendor status, so I ran next door to my shop to see what the deal was, and the two vendors are just gone. Out of the 4 vendors I have, the two that are missing were the MOST used vendors; my powerup terminal, and smuggler supply vendor in the back, were both rarely used by players, but my weapons vendors usually got a few hits every day.

I'm not terribly terribly upset about this, because like I said, I only had maybe 200-300 items on those vendors, they were all factory-run weapons, and my weaponsmith / merchant has become a side project anyway, but it still makes me angry that my vendors and all of my items would just vanish for no reason, without any notice.

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DocSavag wrote:


Did you receive email warnings about this vendor being deleted at all? Were there sales from this vendor within the past two weeks? Did you access the vendor to put merchandise up in the last two weeks?

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Here's the thing Doc,I have received email warning for one of my vendors. That vendor has sold items both before and after the warning. I have updated it's stock since the warning. I have not received any notifcation that the vendor is no longer scheduled to be deleted. No vendor has been deleted yet, but I have no way of knowing what to do to prevent them from being deleted. The only official CSR report we have is that non-empty vendors won't be deleted; don't worry about it. Recent posts to this forum are showing this to be false. Non-empty vendors have begun to be deleted.

In any case: there are a lot of problems with the way the developers are handling this situation in my opinion. But the most blatant and ridiculous mistake that has been made is that the patch notes state that abandoned vendors will be deleted. but nobody has been told what "abandoned" means. That's plain incompetence on SOE's part no matter how you cut it. You don't set up a new policy regarding the deletion of vendors and not tell anybody how it works!!!!

We need to know:

1. how it is suppossed to work


2. whether or not it is working as intended at the current time, and if not, what we can do to work around the problems

and we need to know this now. speculations about what might be going on and what might help alleviate it from you and the CSR's is well intended. butis itnot sufficient.

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DocSavag wrote:


Did you receive email warnings about this vendor being deleted at all? Were there sales from this vendor within the past two weeks? Did you access the vendor to put merchandise up in the last two weeks?

If you haven't reported this to CS already please do so. If you have please keep us informed of their replies. I have already asked a number of times for a response on this issue. I don't have one yet.

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The last time I received warnings about these vendors was a couple days after the patch went into effect; I didn't log on that very day, but the second or third day when I did log on, I got a dozen duplicate emails about the same vendors and the warnings should not have applied anyway, because the vendors were stocked and moving items every day or so. I deleted those "faulty" emails and that was that. These two vendors have absolutely sold items in the past two weeks; in fact, these two weapons vendors have sold more items more frequently than my other two vendors (the two that vanished were melee and ranged weapons vendors, the two that remained were powerup and slicing tool vendors that didn't get hit much). I have absolutely accessed both of those vendors to put merchandise up for sale in the past two weeks, because in the past two weeks many of the items had expired and I had to relist them all from the stockroom.

I'm not going to bother to report this to CSR using the in-game tool, because that inanely stupid search function hangs on me almost every time; it has actually caused my game to crash to desktop in the past while searching. I want to post a damn ticket RIGHT NOW, I do NOT want to wait for some search that is completely irrelevant to me reporting an issue with MY VENDORS AND ITEMS. In my experience with MMO games (going on 6 years now, and 90% of the ones I've played were run by SOE), trying to contact CSRs is a complete and utter waste of my time, because 99.999% of the time I will receive a cookie-cutter reply that means absolutely nothing to me, and the other 0.001% of the time they don't know what the answer is, so I'm *always* much better off just dealing with the issues myself and moving on with my life. In this case, that meant emptying my *other* vendors and closing down my shop; it wasn't my main play character or server anyway, and being a side project it was already too much of a hassle without this kind of BS happening. I still have harvesters mining rare resources for my stockpile, and I still occasionally check for new resource spawns that I need to mine, but after this fiasco I'm disgusted enough with it to just shut down and not bother for a while.

I will not use this new CSR report tool that is currently in-game. Forcing me to wait for an indefinate period of time, on a search that may or may not find anything, and is likely to crash my game, before I can even report my issue is absolutely infuriating and I will not deal with it again.

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Cafa wrote:

Well I know my vendors are accessed almost daily and I'm pretty damn scared to login when I get home from work.

Fivo Asia

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