Merchant Archive

Ok, i can see you're pretty upset, and i can only assume you're a holocron merchant. If not, then my apologies

I believe i can provide some answers for you:

re. 1) Access fees will more than likely always go to the owner of the house, not the admin. This is to prevent a grinding exploit that will potentially allow you to be the admin of hundereds of houses, and gain merchant xp unfairly. This way, you can only benefit from access fees on a maximum of 10 houses.

re. 2) We believe that vendors are only giving XP when they exist. I.e. when someone has spawned them (They don't get spawned when there's no-one in the room), and yes, this is the most annoying thing ever.

re. 3,4,5) Not experienced, sorry.

re. 6) Do you have ad barking? The vendor moves to face the customer. I hate that too.

re. 7) Another potential exploit stopped.

Hope this helps!

I am sitting in my house now and dont get exp from the vendors . Any tips how to fix it ?

---

kobald2 wrote:
I am sitting in my house now and dont get exp from the vendors . Any tips how to fix it ?

---

Use your vendor to make sure it is initialized. We now know that experience over time is dependednt on two things. They must exist (ie someone must be in the house) and they must be initialized (used one since last came into the universe). The last part is tricky, because vendors now only "Exist" if someone is in the house. Each time they come into existance someone must use them for them to start giving experience over time.

Hi Lasalas,

Well that explains some of the stuff...

So (1) and (7) are exploit stoppers. I can see this, although I still think that it is lame, in principle.

(6) is a result of barking... that makes sense too.

Now this still leaves the following problems...

(2) is definately a bug. We shouldn't be required to actualy be logged in 24/7 in order to get xp from our vendors. Although I'm not sure on this one, because in the past, I have gotten vendor xp without anyone being with the vendors or online for that matter.

(4) has been happing to me quite a bit. Gets the customers really mad.

And the biggest problem right now is (5). Of my 6 vendors, 3 just poofed out of existance. No idea where they are. The system says they're there, but I'm not seeing anything. Hopefully it's fixed, now that the server's been reset over the night... time to see...

Sorry if it seems that I'm ticked off, but yes, I'm a holocron merchant. I don't have any artisan skills, so I've had to put tons of work into this merchant thing (buying and reselling items, etc).

I've gotten used to the idea of merchant xp being slow, but it's very upsetting when what little xp I do get is bugged and when my vendors keep getting bugged to high heaven. The final straw was last night after placing 6 vendors and checking on them 2 minutes later to find 3 gone.

-- A6

Well thanks God... it seams the server reboot did the trick.

I now have all 6 vendors again! One less problem to worry about.

Now if they'd only just fix it so:

1. Vendors gave xp every hour regardless of if you're logged in or not (as they're supposed to)

2. Items on the vendor didn't go poof

3. Phantom items didn't appear on the vendor.

(2) and (3) don't affect xp, but losing goods cost money and phantom items can cost customers - you know, those mean ones that send you hate mail.

(1) does affect xp... which stinks because this was supposed to be our guaranteed xp to help get us through this class.

-- A6

I've been playing a merchant for almost the last two weeks, and I have to say this is the buggiest profession I've ever played.

Does anyone even bother to test any of the code before releasing it?

First, XP is extremely slow and difficult to come by as a merchant. This is compounded by the extreme amount of bugs in the profession. The following are problems that I'm running into.

1. Access fees

If someone gives me admin to their house and I place an access fee on it. The owner or the house (not me) gets the money from the fee AND the merchant xp from the fee. This is my access fee... shouldn't I be getting the merchant xp? Right now I have a non-merchant BH friend running around with 2000 of MY merchant xp.

2. Auto vendor xp

Each vendor is supposed to give you 150 xp every hour that it is initialized... yeah right! I logged off for 11 hours last night with 6 vendors. I should have had 10k xp when I logged back in. Nope, I had 3k, and who knows how much of that was really from the vendors... could have been from my access fees for all I know.

3. Dissappearing vendors

Of my 6 vendors, currently 3 of them are AWOL. Each of these had 10,000 credits of maintenance on them. I can't create new vendors because the system says I still have them. This is definately not the case because they're not there. I even tried destroying one of the houses and replacing it. It still says I have my max number of vendors out there. There goes a good portion of xp for me (when auto vendor xp actually works).

4. Phantom items

My vendors list items that it then claims are not there after they've been purchased. Either it is listing items that are already sold, or it is losing my items. Either way, I lose. In situation one, I get players calling me a liar and an exploiter. In situation two, I lose an item and get no money for it.

5. Dissappearing items

Put your item up for sale. Check back later. It hasn't been sold, but it isn't there. Fun.

6. Moving vendors

Why won't my vendors stay put? I place them so they're facing forward then initialize them. Come back later and it's facing sideways or facing a wall.

7. No sales xp

XP is too hard to come by. We should get xp each time we sell an item. We used to get xp for this, but we don't any more.

As you can see, this class is plagued with bugs. Of our 3 ways to make xp (access fees, auto vendor xp, vendor looks), 2 of them are bugged. To make matters worse, I'm now missing half my workforce and 30,000 credits in maintenance... good thing I had no items in those vendors!

This is just crazy, the class is completely broken. Does anyone even bother to test the code before putting it into play?

-- A6

I agree number two is a pain, and there needs to be a better way to do it, but it's not a bug so much as a DB saver. That vendor and alllll the stuff on it takes up space, so I'm assuming they tried to save space by only having them "exist" when there's someone to see them (like your refrigerator light ). I'd imagine the disappearing vendor trick is somehow tied into this (no one was there for a while, and they never reinitialized when someone walked in). It's still annoying, and does need to be fixed, but the profession passes should be on the way (/me crosses fingers and hopes hopes hopes).

I was able to jumpstart my merchant xp twice by taking down a vendor and putting up a new one. By the next day I was getting xp again. The third time I had to use a terminal vendor, but I would think they'd all work now that all of them cost maintenance. Hope it works for you.