Merchant Archive
Thread: The Sad Fate Of the Merchant Profession
It has become apparent to me now. Much like Chef and Droid Engineer, the Merchant profession is one of the most busted and ignored profession in the game. Before i decided to write this post, i spent days educating myself on merchant and see the bugs that have been reported by players and how, no matter how long the bug post was posted, they now still exist unfixed. I Also approached every vendor owning crafter as well as merchants i could find on my server to see if i am not the only one bugged in this specific bug i am going to post about right now. For the whole time i have been a merchant, my machines have been eating up maintenance at ungoldy amounts and depleting the maintenance per day for no reason that i can figure. Last week i placed $10K into each of my 6 NPC vendors. When i checked status on the radial menu then it stated that the vendors were paid up for 40+ days. Out sheer curiosity today i decided travel to my shop to check the status of my vendors. Each vendor reports that they are $2K to 3K in the hole and need to be repaired. Unless the devs are working on some weird calender date for the game, i don't see how 40+ days = Last only half a week. I have been paying hords of credits to keep my vendors maintece and reported so many CSR tickets (a fool's method of trying to get a fix it seems) and nothing has happened. This bug is still here and it still has NOT been fixed nor addressed by devs.
I thought it was just me, so i asked a series of players to think when they last paid maintenance on their vendors. Answers i got ranged from "Like 3 days ago, i paid it up for a full month" to "I paid my vendors up for a year at a time". So i asked them all to check their vendors and now see what the status is. I cannot post their responce due to all the cursing and screaming i got back. These vendors are NOT taking their appropiate amounts per day devs. THEY ARE NOT! One player, the one who paid his vendor up for a year, reported back after the endless curses that his vendors, all of them,were $4K in the hole and needed repair. I dare ask the devs how this is possible. It can only be said that this very problem has been linked to many reports of dissapearing vendors. If a player pays his/her vendor for a month, he has no need to check it constanly since he is fully confident that his venbdor is paid up for a very long time and has no need to constantly check it day to day. Now, with these vendors chewing up the wrong amounts, there is no way that this player knows his/her vendor is sinking deeper and deeper into the negative status (cause we don't get decay e-mails on vendors like we do for factories) and thus **poof** vendor goes bye bye, flames are posted on boards, and the problem is STILL ignored by devs. Players are loosing so many merchandise and so many resources becuase these machines are so bugged to a point i have contemplated quiting merchant and selling my product by hand instead of leaving them on display on a vendor.
I have read post of a new Merchant Coorespondant (i guess he drew the shorter straw) and i would like to ask: is this issue even being worked on at all?! Is it even known? I know it sure has been reported many many times by players and still, this profession is so bugged it has become unplayable at time. I have done a calculation as to how much i spend maitencing my vendors compared to my harvestors. The results are shocking. So far i have spent nearly 100K on vendor maitence. Why? Because each and everytime i re-check my vendor status the appropiate funds are NOT in there days later. I spent $60K alone last week to pay each vendor up, $10K each, and now all my efforts and well as many other players, have been utterly for nothing. We are forced to endore a busted profession and stuck to swollow it cause i have not heard of any fixes to Merhcant in responce to the disapearing vendors, vanishing items and so forth. The only brilliant thing devs have done with merchant was to extend sales days to 30. I would desprestly plead with the merchant coorispondant (who ever it is this time) to speak on this issue. It's becoming so unbarible. If this problem was just me, i would have submitted my CSR ticket and called it a day and wait for a responce that would never arrive. But now i am speaking for the many crafters who have merchant skills and us merchants ourselves have to suffer being ingored in this way. Is there any hope at all coming to this profession? Or just an endless sea of CSR tickets.
Ok..Lets establish some facts so we can talk about the problem.
1. Prior to 11/13 there were two different maintenance plans for Vendors. NPC Vendors charged like 1 cr per hour unless you had Effiency 2 and they charged less than 1 which was represented as 0 on the screen even though it really wasn't 0. The droids and terminals charged an amount calculated on the total sales of the items you had in your vendor ( I think it was TotalForSaleAmount/1000) and that was charged every 45 minutes. This could fluctuate WILDLY based on what you had for sale.
2. After 11/13 the rate for ALL vendors was changed to a base of 15/hr. This is modified by having global advertising (AD IV) and EFF II and Master Merchant with the latter two reducing your maintenance while advertising raises it.
Now given these facts. If you put money in an NPC prior to 11/13 the rate of mainteance went up by an astouding percentage..it is not surprising that you would have seen it go from 40 days to in the hole fairly quickly. You should have seen the opposite effect on non NPC's though.
What we need now is some hard facts based only on post 11/13 testing that shows that the rate is not being deducted correctly. I haven't seen that so far but I haven't paid much attention to it. Can someone give me some numbers for post 11/13 patch testing that show this is broken?
I CSR'd and /bugged this.
Two nights ago, after seeing the issue for myself, prepaid POST patch for over a week, checked my vendors 3.5 days later to find them all 2k in the hole.
I put money back in to repair the vendors, the 'repair' didn't take immediately, they just sat there at 80% or so, with a couple grand extra credit. I then left the house, waited a couple hours and went back in. Since noone had seen the vendors in the meantime, they reloaded and the repair was applied (why NPC vendors are "repaired" is beyond me though, they should just stop working, not get damaged).
Then I nuked one of my vendors to see if a "new" vendor post patch would make a difference, so I would have one test vendor from known to be post patch.
Then the following day I reset all my vendors to 2000 credits at exactly the same time. Thankfully 'withdraw' at least works. 20 hours later exactly I checked the vendors. the 16/hr vendors with planetary map had 1606 credits left. the 12/hr vendors non mapped npc vendors had 1718. Even if you assume that I got debited with 21 hours instead of 20 hours, the hourly rates do not add up.
The only thing I could think of is for server maint, the servers are applying the debit right before server downtime, and when they come back as well. So instead of 24 hours in aday, you essentially get charged for 25 hours or more depending on the number of times the servers reboot.
Checked the next day, with the same level of discrepency, in general a minimum withdrawl of a couple extra hours per server reboot.
All I got from the CSRs is a tinned response that talked about the withdrawl bug.
Just a point of correlation for you.
--D'Ruk
I think we have a problem then. Like i said, i placed $10K in my vendors last week. Before last week's patch i was aware of upcoming changes to the merchant profession. So i didn't pay maitence on them till AFTER
DocSavag wrote:
Ok..Lets establish some facts so we can talk about the problem.
1. Prior to 11/13 there were two different maintenance plans for Vendors. NPC Vendors charged like 1 cr per hour unless you had Effiency 2 and they charged less than 1 which was represented as 0 on the screen even though it really wasn't 0. The droids and terminals charged an amount calculated on the total sales of the items you had in your vendor ( I think it was TotalForSaleAmount/1000) and that was charged every 45 minutes. This could fluctuate WILDLY based on what you had for sale.
2. After 11/13 the rate for ALL vendors was changed to a base of 15/hr. This is modified by having global advertising (AD IV) and EFF II and Master Merchant with the latter two reducing your maintenance while advertising raises it.
Now given these facts. If you put money in an NPC prior to 11/13 the rate of mainteance went up by an astouding percentage..it is not surprising that you would have seen it go from 40 days to in the hole fairly quickly. You should have seen the opposite effect on non NPC's though.
What we need now is some hard facts based only on post 11/13 testing that shows that the rate is not being deducted correctly. I haven't seen that so far but I haven't paid much attention to it. Can someone give me some numbers for post 11/13 patch testing that show this is broken?
Excuse the previous 2 post, some strange reason it posted while i was typing mid sentence:
I think we have a problem then. Like i said, i placed $10K in my vendors last week. Before last week's patch i was aware of upcoming changes to the merchant profession. So i didn't pay maitence on them till AFTER 11/13 patch. These funds were placed in the vendors 11/14. Meaning if when i placed funds within these vendors, they should have been followed the new maitence rate pushed in by the patch. At 15/cr per hour that's $360 creds a day. $10K should have covered me for 27 days. These vendors have no special features enabled like ad barking nor are they registered on the planet map. Andthus 27 days worth of maitence was chewed up in one week's time. Now, even for some reason the vendors took double 15 creds per hour making it 30 creds an hour and $720 creds a day, i should have been covered for 13 days, not 7. Now the fact that the vendors showed me that i was covered for 40+ days is a bug itself (if the maitence rates were changed i should have been shown 27 or 14 days, not 40 days or so). There is a bug that exist here
DocSavag. Even fribble's test of the vendors show they are taking in more amounts than they are supposed to. Given my problems, they basically tanked for days, taking in way more and sinking them into $3K worth of damage to be paid to return the status to 100%. Any idea what is causing this problem?
By the way, DocSavag, thank you for responding so quickly. This problem is affecting everyone taking hords of cash at various rates in high amounts.
Ok. I am going to do some testing myself to see what I can find out. I certainly haven't seen the type of issue you are talking about with my vendors. I might have overlooked something as subtle as 25 hours of maintenance instead of 24 but not the massive amounts you are talking about. Can you try putting in smaller amounts for a couple of days and see what the burn rate is on those amounts? For example if you put in just enough for a day or two what is the rate that is being extracted.
For accurate testing you'll need to check and double check every single figure in the status display, and then check and double check to see how they're actually performing and how that differs from what the display is telling you they're supposed to be doing. I'd volunteer to help with this, but my vendors are all broken and/or missing at the moment.
I can say, however, that my disappeared vendors seem to be unrelated to their maintenance, because everything else in my house has disappeared as well. It is possible that the maintenance rates are to blame for SOME vendor disappearances, but definitely NOT all of them, so we need to be careful not to write that problem off as simply a maintenance mistake. BOTH of these issues need dev attention very badly.
The postings about vendor overcharges is making me feel better. When the patch came in, I thought I had covered the vendors adequately. But then last night, found them needing a couple of thousand each in repairs. I hadn't paid as much into one of them, and that one had the least dammage. Of course it wasn't on the map either.
I had chalked it up to my own error, but perhaps...
Question. Are you guys seeing this maintenance rate issues just on old vendors? On New vendors (created in the last week) or both?
I'm testing with new ones and they seem to be dead on so far. (I'm going to let them run all night and see what happens in the morning)
DocSavag wrote:
Question. Are you guys seeing this maintenance rate issues just on old vendors? On New vendors (created in the last week) or both?
I'm testing with new ones and they seem to be dead on so far. (I'm going to let them run all night and see what happens in the morning)
Ok i just destroyed all my vendors and dropped new ones. hourly maitence is 9 creds (decresed from 15 due to my master merchant status). Paid exactly $8640 creds to cover me for 40 days ( $9 x 24hrs = $216 per day x 40 days). I will keep daily track of the vendors and see if the maitenance jumps adversly as it did before.