Merchant Archive
Thread: Vendor Issue: Accelerated Maintenance
mmaughme wrote:
Dunno, Doc. I haven't found any pattern, which is why I brought it up here. I was hoping somebody else had seen it happen, and might have an idea what's going on.
Yea I am basically hoping others will respond as well. The more people affected by it the more chance we have of finding the issue and getting it fixed. I haven't personally seen this but I don't pay that much attention to it. I'll start tracking it more closely.
Here is the rundown of the test I did between 2/6 and 2/12.
On 2/6 - removed all maintanence on my vendors and depostited 5k in each of them - result should have been 20 days, 20hours. (500 hours) Test started at roughly 11:13 am on 2/6 and ended about 7 pm on 2/12.
2/6 - 20 days 20 hours - eta on 0 - 2/26 (500 hours credit in)
2/7 - 19 days - eta on 0 - 2/26
2/8 - 17 days - eta on 0 - 2/25
2/9 15 days - eta on 0 - 2/24
2/10 13 days - eta on 0 - 2/23
2/11 11 days - eta on 0 2/22
2/12 9 days - 9 days 16 hours eta on 0 2/21 (232 hours credit left) Should have spent approx. 127 credit hours in this interval - spent 268
Now - a days fluxuation I can see based on odd hours - and time of day checked (although I tried to be fairly consistant about when I checked) but notice how it keeps slipping on days. This pattern held true across all my vendors equally - no matter if they barked or not - or were listed on the map - or not. Somewhere in this week I lost a cumulative141 credit hours or 5.875 days of maintanance somewhere. If they aren't working on 24 hour days, this may account for part of the slip, but all the numbers I ran based on say - 45 min 'hours' - they all still come up short on time. Without knowing exactly what they consider an hour interval I'm in the dark to account for the apparent missing funds. They seem to be running at a 2.11% rate in this test than they should have been. But even so - internally I'd think that whatever 'hours' are - they should balance.
Some of my vendors were placed LONG ago - some have been replaced after hitting master, yet they all showed the exact same pattern. At first I thought maybe I wasn't getting the master discount on older merchants based on my skill when I placed them, but that doesn't seem to affect anything.
Feel free to triple check my math - it's early and I haven't had my first pot of coffee yet - but something don't look right here to me.
Ok. Wire3k has worked up an Excel spreedsheet that details her experiences with the maintenance. She has 2 vendors listed and tracked over a few days in February. If anyone wants to help with the research grab a copy of this file at www.swgbio.com/vendor.xls and use it to track your usage. The only things you have to really change is the Date information and the remaining time shown each time you check it. The spreadsheet should do the rest.
I am going to try to do a couple of my vendors as a test to see how my maintenance is doing.
Message Edited by DocSavag on 04-20-2004 04:43 PM
I ran this test myself yesterday and my results are consistant. I paid for about 35 hours in the last 25 hours.
I urge everyone to run this test for at least one day and report their findings as well. If this is true and it is miscalculating the time then we need numbers to get the dev team to look into it.
I too am experiencing this problem. I ama Master Merchant and my vendors (5 of them)are in a merchant tent that is NOT in a city. The vendor status window states my maintenance is 10 credits/hour. But for the last 2 weeks or so? (when I began to notice it), they were consuming maintenance at a rate higher than that.
So I decided to conduct some tests. My merchant tent is also 10 credits/hour (after discounts) so I used it as a base. On Sunday night I loaded my tent and merchants up with 1770 credits each, which worked out to be 7 days and 9 hours. When I checked back on Thursday, the merchant tent was still on schedule, but all the vendors only had 45 credits left (that's 4.5 hours! and 3 days short of what it should have been). At that rate, the vendors were consuming maintenance at a rate of around 18 credits/ hour. 10 credits/hour above what is stated on the vendor status window.
I submitted a CSR ticket and yesterday a CSR said he was going to go to my vendors and check out the situation. I gave him the location of the vendors and he went to check them out. He asked me the usual questions, City Tax, Planetary Ad & Ad Barking costs, etc. and said that all those could contribute to the different rate. I told him that was true. But the vendor status window states my rate is 10 (after all the charges and discounts have been applied). And that they are not consuming at that rate. He told me to wait while he checked my vendor logs.
When he came back, he said something wasn't right and he didn't know how to proceed. You see, the vendor logs all showed maintenance being pulled out of the vendor's at a different rate. One log showed it taking out 30 credits/ hour. Another showed it taking 12 credits/hour and so on. Basically, it made no sense...as if the number being deducted was random. He told me he didn't know what to do and suggested I conduct some more tests, seeing if number of items/dollar amount of items could be affecting the maintenance. I told him I would, but said that no matter what, the rate should still be fixed...not random as it appeared to be.
So that is where I am at now.