Merchant Archive
Thread: The Final Blow. A Merchants Last Request for Order: This Profession Must Be Fixed!
Ok, now I am truly disgusted and done with this profession for good. The Merchant profession has been one of the most over looked and bugged profession we have in the game that has NOT been given special or partial treatment for the hords of bugs that is making this profession unplayable. 2 days ago I posted a post relating to how vendors are chewing up more maintenance than they are supposed to. Now, I am addressing the most critical hard hitting problem I for the last time am being victim of: the vanishing vendor. On the 11/13 publish, only changes to the profession were:
Vendor ad barking and planetary map registration now persist, so you won't have to reset them after a server restart. Note that you'll need to re-enable ad barking one time for this to start working on your vendor.
Vendor maintenance is now enabled. Vendors now cost about 15 cr/hr to maintain. Maintenance of droid and terminal vendors has been fixed.
All vendor types now have proper rotation controls prior to initialization. Initializing the vendor will remove the rotation options.
Will now allow vendor/auction multiselect for both retrieve & withdraw functionality. Added 'Pets / Pet Supplies' and 'Medical Supplies' categories to vendor planetary map listing and area barking. Increased sale timer from 7 days to 30 days for player vendor sales.
And this was ALL they did. For weeks hords of players have been reporting issues with vanishing vendors and for the last 2 patches there has been NO FIX. Merchants are forced to swallow and take the bugs this profession has and sit back as it is ignored. CSR tickets for lost items are replied with the always the same “We have no way of telling if your items were lost” response. This is answer they’ve been shoveling down our throats for months and never sat down to FIX the problem. For the last 2 large monthly updates, merchant has been given no fixes, just facial upgrades to vendor screens and nothing else. WHERE ARE THE FIXES?! HOW MANY RESOURCES AND MERCHANDISE MUST WE LOOSE BEFORE THIS PROFESSION IS FIXED?!
Why am I so angry today? Well, in my last post about maintenance bugs, our correspondent suggested I drop a new vendor down and keep track of it’s progress. I did that. Today I decided to drop a 2nd own down and use for my business. I placed the vendor down, initialized, paid maintenance and placed ALL my structures I had for sale on it so customers could pick them up. I am an master architect and I specialize in harvesters and houses. I placed more than $1.8 million dollar worth of harvesters, houses, and player city structures on the vendor. Left to go to my factory to get completed products to come back (not even 5 minutes passed mind you) to see my shop completely EMPTY of ALL vendors! Yes, I did the log off, reconnect, no vendor. Log off completely to desktop, load game, do full scan, reconnect, no vendors. Turned game off, turned off computer, came back 20 minutes later, NO VENDORS! Everything I owned, all my merchandise, all my structures GONE! This was a FULL day’s work, crafted more than 20 heavy to medium harvesters, city halls and so forth. And now forced to swallow this because devs REFUSE to even comment on attempting to find a solution?! This has been going on for months now and not ONE patch note addressed this profession in terms of vendor fixes such as vanishing vendors. I had a fellow resource merchant who used his vendors as a source of operations loose 3 million worth of resources (not cash value mind you) because his vendor decided to go **poof** as he went to place more items for sale. What response did he get to his CSR ticket? “We have no way of telling if your items were lost” We’ve been peddled this auto-response to this problem for months now. When are get going to get a fix?! When is one dev going to pull their arses from giving BH, commando, and the other professions special attention and leave Merchant in the dumps like the do with Droid Engineer, and Chef.
The stupid thing is, merchant is used by about 80% of the crafting community. About 5 out of 10 crafters have skills invested in merchant to get vendors, discounted rates on sales and so forth. So why is it STILL ignored and we are forced to basically gambled on placing products on these vendors because not one dared to find the solution. NOR are we even attempted to get compensated for our loss. We’re peddled some auto response, patted on the shoulder and get 30 day sales date extensions with new monthly publish instead of a **edit** end to this bug that has plagued this profession for MONTHS. How is it that this profession is so ignored in this way? Devs are just basically asking us to be patient. For what?! Towait a few more months for one Dev to place his thinking cap on and realize “Vendors are still disappearing?” I looked on every patch note there was for the game and not one was addressed towards the merchant profession with the words “fixed” and “disappearing vendors/items” in the sentence. More than half the time the merchant profession wasn’t even listed in the updates. Who care about having a cleaner display when accessing vendors or grouped options! I rather have my products ON the vendor when I place them and NOT have to keep worrying about using vendors. Bugs that have been plaguing vendors are:
Funds not being received for sales: This bug has been here since DAY 1. And no where has there been any fix for this till this day
Items vanishing from Stockroom: Once you withdraw an item for sale the items go **poof**, not kicked to the stock room and not still listed on the for sale list
Vanishing Vendors: Don’t get me started.
Initialization Problems: When dropped, vendors are initialized and we get the correct message. When we actually attempt to use the vendor, the “Vendor Not Initialized” error message pops up no matter what you do. Not even creating a new vendor helps because the problem re-occurs on the newly created ones.
How long are we force to loose MILLIONS of dollars worth or resources, products and crates of items before this profession is FINALLY given a overhaul?! Devs have time to nerf the crap out of CH 2 times, nerf down every weapon in existence on this game, completely reorganize professions from the ground up, and not take the equal time to FINALLY FIX this BROKEN profession. They've done nothing but throw Merchant to the bottle pile of priorities, give us face lifts to the option screens and think that is going to keep us happy and force us to choke on these problems that have been here since forever! WHEN IS THIS PROFESSION GOING TO GET FIXED?! How much longer are we going to get hit with emotionless auto-responses to our CSR tickets for lost items and vanishing vendors and not have Devs take the time to sit down and find the source of the problem. And please, don’t tell me, “We working on it” You and the other merchant correspondents before you have been peddling us that one line response for months. Why is it even worth it to even be in this profession when the cost is so great. I basically lost a day’s worth of crafted orders non stop, a weeks worth of harvested resources just to do these orders forcing me now to close my shop and business cause I now have not the ability to do any orders at all for another week. I am not the only viticm here. There are so many of us, is it not even worth it to get a response from the higher ups in the Dev chain? I had a fellow arch who left his shop filled with more than $3 million worth of merchandise for one second to hit the bazzar, come back and see his entire shop empty of everything but the furniture and his bags. Aslo a fellow armorsmith who filled his vendor with freshly made composite armor and other merchandise to come back after logging back in from brief break to an empty shop. Both submitted tickets and both got hit with the emotionless slap happy “We have no way of telling if your items were lost” auto-response. Both have left the game because the lost totally crippled them. When is this mistreatment going to stop and finally get an answered delivered to it? Or is this profession clearly not even worth the bother.
I agree its being overlooked big time. I had several vendors vanish all the time then return. Alot was due to the number of items I had in house. Merchant Xp and vendor bugs should be fixed. As you said dang near every crafter has some type of vendor. How do the devs think all this stuff is getting sold. And as you said its not fixed. Prob the most used part of the game and its not getting any attention.
Sigh 
Luckily I have never had to deal with problems of this magnitude.
Shoved a pack full of stuff through a wall one time. But vendors have just been acting stupid sometimes. Not losing stuff or poofing.
The sad thing is, they finally get these few minor fixes in, that appear to be pretty simple to most of us, after so many months have passed. And we're happy just to get them.
REALLY, how hard is it to change one number from 7 to 30???
I know as a programmer that sometimescomplicated problems can be hard to track down. But the trend seems to be that ALL problems are complicated and hard to track down. And ALL bugs are hard to fix and can cause more side effects than they fix.
That, as a programmer, is not a good sign.
Plus, whoever designs most of the in-game UIs for SWG is just not very good. Many of the interfaces are just terrible: harvestors, insurance terminals, bazaars, vendors, etc. It's like they're intentionally designed to be as cumbersome and awkward to use as possible. And every time they try to "improve" the bazaar and vendor UI it just gets worse. They badly need to bring in a usability expert.