Merchant Archive

I'm sure this has been suggested before, but I know the most frustrating thing for me is when I go around to find something only to run across empty vendor upon empty vendor -- and all of these are appearing on the CTRL+M and CTRL+V maps. Why can't a simple change be made to the game where the map advertising feature will only work when there is a minimum number of items in a vendor? For example, if a vendor has less than 10 items, map advertising is automatically turned off by the system. Or, more importantly, if a vendor is empty... why the heck is map advertising still advertising the vendor? It doesn't have anything to sell. This would cut down the map clutter to only those vendors that actually have goods to sell. I'll bet well over 50% of the vendors would disappear from the map if a change like this was implemented. Empty or poorly stocked vendors only hurt the merchants who keep their vendors stocked nicely. I cannot tell you how many times I stopped at a place with 20 vendors inside, only to find that most of the vendors were empty and then I didn't bother looking at the rest of them -- when maybe there was a vendor in there that was new and fully stocked.

Maybe an Ebay like system could be implemented where the map advertising is color coded or gets an indicator based on how many items are currently stocked in the vendor. A plain white tag for less than 25 items, green for 25-50... and so on. This would tell the buyer how well stocked the vendors are at the location they are about to visit.

Any thoughts?

Totally agree. Unfortunately you are preaching to the choir here. I believe this issue has been raised many times but as far as I know the devs have never addressed it. Who knows maybe if we keep complaining they will answer us.

The funny thing is that empty vendors affect all players equally, it's not just a merchant issue. You would think there should be more visability to the issue.

-----------------------------------------------------------
Barbo - Master Shipwright, Master Weaponsmith, Master Artisan
Mayor of Wassabi
-----------------------------------------------------------
Weapon, Ship and Artisan Vendors at 952 6043
Planet Lok in the wonderful city of Wassabi

I agree that it isn't just a merchant issue. I can't tell you how many times I've wasted a whole afternoon trying to find something only to find empty vendor upon empty vendor... or vendors filled with an item or two that doesn't even match the vendor description.

Empty vendors on the map will be addressed in a few weeks from my understanding. Color coding or putting numbers on them isn't currently planned but it was something that was mentioned at Fan Fest and GreenMarine (the dev that wrote most of the vendor code) was open to something like that.

----------------------------------
Chataka Windae
Rifleman/Combat Medic
CEO, Windae Enterprises
Mesric Sanctuary Founder

I think the color coding is a fine idea, nice application of the K.I.S.S. principle

Federated ResourcesHork Haggis, Retired