Merchant Archive

this is about 50% constructive criticism, and 50% rant and its long....be warned.

for a little background:

Im a master weaponsmith. I pride myself on my product and my well stocked vendors. i keep a minimum of 10 of every weapon that i produce in stock at all times, and i restock my vendors every single night. I run 2 outfits, one on naboo and one on tatooine....

so doing the math that means i generally have over 300 weapons on my vendor at any given moment.

now..i get about40 tells and emails a day from people asking me if im going to be restocking "x" weapons soon, when i know **edit** well there are some on the vendor. they claim no....why is this?

because people dont bother to browse by type, they simply click "all" and stare glassy eyed at their monitor for a few minutes. since the bulk of them dont realize how this works, ill give a little primer:

1) there is a "next page" button down the bottom right corner...for gods sake use it!

2) browse by weapon type! Dont click "all" if you are looking for a sword. thats a melee weapon and you will find it MUCH FASTER by browsing by weapon > Melee weapons

so here is the comprehensive list in the simplest terms i can put it:

weapons you hit people with: Weapons > Melee weapons

weapons you shoot people with: Weapons > ranged weapons

for you commando and bounty hunter types, please god dont tell me you cant find that flamethrower, or that there are no LLCs : weapons > special heavy weapons

ANY ranged weapon (weapons you shoot people with) with charges: Weapons > Heavy weapons

ANY item that you buy in crates (grenades, powerups, droid batteries): Misc > Factory Crates

and FOR GODS SAKE look for that FREAKING NEXT BUTTON down the bottom.

now....why do i get this many tells about this issue? well there are 2 possible reasons:

1) the vendor UI sucks worse than monica lewinski

2) people are too stupid to shop

im going to say that #1 is about 90% of the problem. If you fall under category 2 please play sims instead. For those of you who dont know how the vendors work from the back end here are some simple facts:

1) when you browse a vendor items are displayed by the timestamp at which they were placed on the vendor. so whatever you put on there first is top on the list, and whatever you put on there last is on the bottom of the list.

2) The vendor UI only lists 100 items per page. if there is more than 100 items, there will be A FREAKING NEXT BUTTON down the bottom right hand corner of the page.

3) When you choose to sort things by item name, item type, price, or location you are only sorting whatever is on the CURRENT PAGE.

now here is where the fun starts...

because some moron decided that timestamp would be a better way to sort things...than say alphabetically..this is where we run into trouble. Indulge me in this hypothetical situation (which happens to me every day).

I put 300 weapons on my vendor...15 of which are FWG5 pistols. all is right in the world and the first 15 happy people buy one and walk away pleased. now..the next day i see that i am out of them, and put 15 more on the vendor....see where this is leading? refer to item #1,2,and 3 above...

ok..so now i have 300 items on my vendor again right? so someone comes along and browses by "all" and sees this huge gap where FWG5s should be....even tho they sort alphabetically....and why is this?

because the geniuses at soe sort things by timestamp, AND when you sort by alpha it only sorts THE CURRENT PAGE...so yes to those people who are apparently incapable of pressing THE FREAKING NEXT BUTTON AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE it will seem as if i am out of stock, when in reality there are 15 sitting there, just on the 3rd or 4th page.

what are our options here to alleviate this?

1) make the button something more like this

FREAKING NEXT BUTTON

2) or you devs need to stop smoking your post-it notes and make an interface better than something at a 2nd grade science fair.

some suggestions to the devs so you cant say im just complaining:

1) make it so when you browse by alpha, it browses the entire inventory and not just the first page. while we are at it, make it browse alphabetically by default. 99% of the people playing this trash arent coders and dont think like you do. Alpha > Timestamp for those who have lives outside of the glowing box. for the record im an IT professional, and i sort by timestamp :-P but MOST people dont.

2) make a SEARCH FEATURE. then i only need to answer questions to those who are incapable of spelling "laser" correctly...this may actually be worse considering the amount of illiteracy i see but anything is better than nothing at this point.

3) make the page list more than 100 items at a time

4) make a more refined tree to browse by...not like i can convince anyone to actually USE it but if you broke down "ranged weapons" into pistols/rifles/carbines it would make a world of difference.

so in closing between educating the populace about THE FREAKING NEXT BUTTON and the devs who will actually do something constructive, we will end up with a better game, and i will retain what little sanity i have left.

heh, or make the "next page" button appear in neon pink or baby blue, no matter the UI skin that is used. Maybe if we get enough people to complain about the "glaring button", a few might take notice of it.

Ryeun

Seriously, I think the vendor interface - both from the customer's perspective *and* the merchant's, is (apart from "disappearing" bugs that I've never personally experienced) the biggest issue for merchants right now.

This post describes the "buyer-side" problems pretty well, but there are a bunch on the sales side too. Thankfully, the absolute worst, the 7-day limit, is getting fixed, but a lot of small annoyances remain, and add up to one big problem. As many people have pointed out, it's obvious that the developer in charge of the vendor interface has never actually played the game, or at least not as a working merchant does. Sure, if you're only listing 5-10 items on a vendor or somesuch, you can fight through its limitations, but not on a well-stocked real-world tailor's vendor.

Other stuff:
- column sizes default to some bizarre choice that no user would ever willingly select, and changes are never saved.
- relisting of expired items is much more of a chore than it needs to be. It's good that we only will have to put up with this every 30 days from now on, but it's still a major annoyance. An "automatic relist at same price" option would be great. Better still, "automatic relist, including text information." Even better than that, "automatic relist with multiple selection" so that we don't have to do the same thing for each of a zillion items.
- you're only notified of offers to your vendor if you happen to be online at the time the offer is made.

when are they supposedly fixing the 7 day issue?

With the next "Big Patch" apparently.

Couldn't agree more! I still think the biggest issue facing the merchants is putting your vendor on the planetary map everyday but the organization of the items is a very close second. Every morning when i place my 6 vendors on the planetary map I always "use vendor" just to take a look. I am always amazed at the absolute mess that is my vendor. I'm the guild merchant. I build the artisan goods and weapons but then also list my other guildmate's goods. So, I always have at least 200 items up for sale, if not more, in all 6 of our shops. When i take a look at my vendor i always put my head in my hands because the display is an absolute mess. I have guns mixed w/powerups mixed w/droid batteries mixed w/armor.. and so on. I have enough items that it would be okay to use the category listing on the left hand side, but we all know that people don't do that... i don't even do that.. so, i went ahead and decided to fix that problem by having my vendor "bark" to customers suggesting they use the category listing. Not only is it an absolute pain in the neck to relist the "bark" and planetary ad everyday, i started to get complaints that i wasn't selling the same goods people had come to expect. A lot and I mean A LOT of people that are not crafters have problems understanding that mass produced items do not appear in their respective catagories.. Just organizing the vendor screen by alphabetical order would solve a lot of problems. K-I-S-S.....

1. Keep planetary ads up for more than 1 day (any solution has to be better than what we have now)

2. List items alphabetically

3. Put items that belong in a category, in that category..... Factory Crate does not count!

It's been my experience, in RL and in games, that people are stupid.

Crackes me up - how do these people know how to read a book without turning the page???

Highlighting the Next (and Previous so they don't get lost) button would help alot.

Items are listed 100 at a time so it doesn't take forever to generate the listing. People would complain about slow response times, esp if they chose the All category.

Actually, there's two really, really basic UI things that are pretty much mandatory with a paged listing, that are missing from the vendor interface.

- It says "Items 1-100" but, but the "of 487" is missing after that.

- There is nothing to indicate you are on page # of ##.

If they added those two items at the bottom of the screen to cue people into the multiple-page nature of the listing, I'll bet the number of inquiries about not finding items would drop dramatically.

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Xelene wrote:
Actually, there's two really, really basic UI things that are pretty much mandatory with a paged listing, that are missing from the vendor interface.

- It says "Items 1-100" but, but the "of 487" is missing after that.

- There is nothing to indicate you are on page # of ##.

If they added those two items at the bottom of the screen to cue people into the multiple-page nature of the listing, I'll bet the number of inquiries about not finding items would drop dramatically.

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This is great. We need this added to the UI. Once the patch comes live, I will load my vendor with tons of power-ups. I will need this.