Merchant Archive

Just some observations in irregularities from my vendors post-patch. I've now tested this to some extent.

It appears that some (possibly related to when they were created) vendors are chewing through maintenance at twice normal speed. So instead of 12/hr as displayed they are consuming 24/hr from the maint pool.

This creates the second issue, which is that when this happens and you've prepaid for a week, 3.5 days into your payment cycle your vendors will be getting damaged. I confirmed this as well. So unless you're checking each and every vendor whereever they are, you might have damaged vendors.

This then leads to the third issue, is that when you see that you have vendors that are damaged, and they tell you '1234 credits to repair', and add 1234 credits to your pool, the vendor is not repaired. In fact they do not appear to repair themselves until they 'unload/reload' in the world.

So essentially you have to do the following to make sure that your vendors are working. Make sure they aren't chewing through money faster than you thought (again could be based on vendor creation time), that they are not damaged.

If they are damaged, make sure you pay them the correct amount plus whatever you need to pay them for the week/month at the correct rates. Then hope noone visits your vendor for the 10-60 minutes until the vendor 'deloads' from the world. Then return to the vendor to confirm that they are now 'repaired' and have a decent maint pool.

I'm guessing here, but vendors probably don't generate Merch XP while damaged. So, if people aren't checking status of their vendors since they prepay a week or two at a time, and just use the 'Use Vendor' radial, then they may have damaged vendors. Damaged vendors == little or no merchant Xp, possibly only vendor refresh and building access experience.

It does appear that you can use vendors fine while they are damaged, which seems rather off. Also, it seems odd to me that NPC vendors can be 'damaged'. Why don't they simply stop working when they have no maint pool instead of becoming 'damaged' NPCs are not buildings!

Just some observations... hopefully other people have clarifications or know better than I. This new merchant XP rate thing is irritating. I wouldn't mind the change, but we had no notification of these changes, nor what EXACTLY these changes are, or if they are the usual SOE bugs.

--D'Ruk of iD Co.
Corbantis -> Corellia