Merchant Archive

There's been a bug in the game for a while now, since the last big publish, that has caused me and probably lots of other people no end of grief, but today I finally recognized it for what it really is.

Have you ever had a situation, where you either picked up items from your house or other building, only to find the items vanished when you get 10 steps outside the house? Or items that you dropped in the house 10 minutes ago that vanish after you leave the house and come back?

It appears the buildings are 'rolling back' to the state they were in either before you took those actions, or perhaps to the state they were in before you logged in. I've noticed this before on a house of mine on Tatooine, where I pick up a bunch of items, run out of the house, and not more than a minute later, the items are gone from my inventory. I run back to the house, and the items are still there in the house, BUT they cannot be picked up or manipulated in any way. They are 'ghosted', neither existing in the house, or in your inventory. If you logout or go away from the house for enough time, the items will appear in the correct location.

Today, I ran into this problem while dealing with items that had been restored to me:

I went to my merchant tent to sell some items on my vendors, to get myself down to a capacity where I could actually pick items up again. To help with this, I initialized a vendor that I had placed but not initialized a few days ago, then proceeded to load it with items. I noticed that the prices were not being affected by the sales tax in the town, which I thought was odd, but I didn't really think about it. I then dropped some of the items into a travel pack in the tent, and left the tent to use the bank just 10 FEET from my tent. After I dropped some items into my tent, and picked up more items to be stocked into the new vendor, I went back into my tent.

I noticed a small flood of messages in my window, which you see sometimes as client get 'delayed' messages, which again I just discounted as normal.

I go to use the newly initialized vendor, and I get 'vendor not initialized'. Nothing I do gives me access to the items that were previously placed on the vendor. I go to look in the other vendor in the tent (previously initialized before this day, and operating normally), and I find that the items I put still exist, and are still in the region. Furthermore all the items I added to this properly functioning vendor are still there. I check the travel pack that I added items to, and not only are the items I dropped into it gone, but the items I took out are back (though I did not try to pick them up).

At this point, in desparation, I attempted to re-initialize the uninitialized vendor in an attempt to get to the items lost. This did NOT work, and I think it caused even WORSE problems. I submitted a ticket, and resigned myself to wait for some help, and went about doing other things away from the merchant tent.

Later on, I decided to go back to the tent, just to see if I got lucky. Sure enough, the state of the travel pack was restored, and all the items I put into it, and items I took out were in their proper states (i.e. items I put were there, items I took out were correctly gone). However, the vendor was still empty, though it was initialized. While I think the system 'caught-up' somehow to the operations I did earlier, the attempt at reinitializing the vendor after the 'roll-back' caused it to lose the link between itself and the items I put up the first time. I currently have a ticket with comments to hopefully get those items back.

Bottom line: If you seem to lose items after manipulating them in your house, either putting items down, or picking them up, DO NOT PANIC. Do not delete and recreate vendors, do not reinitialize things, etc etc. Submit a ticket, and LOGOUT. Come back in 20-30 minutes, and it will probably be restored. Doing anything else in the meantime will only aggravate the problem. Yes this is a bug, and I TOTALLY HATE IT, but crying about it won't get it solved. Work within the problem until it is solved, otherwise you'll just end up causing yourself no end of grief.

I hope people see this, and take the time to read it, as I think this is an important problem that needs to be fixed ASAP. Feel free to send it to anyone you think might recognize it as important, and submit it as a bug ticket if it has happened to you. The more exposure this bug gets, hopefully the faster they can fix it.

too much to read.........ill complain if it happens to me ...........

Sigh, isn't that typical.

If the post isn't 1 or 2 sentences, most people just go, EH too much to read. Until something happens to them, then they are OMFG FIX THIS POS GAME!1!1111!!!1

If people actually gave DETAILS to the problems, things actually might get fixed, ya think?

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Zalmun wrote:

Sigh, isn't that typical.

If the post isn't 1 or 2 sentences, most people just go, EH too much to read. Until something happens to them, then they are OMFG FIX THIS POS GAME!!!!!!!!!!!

If people actually gave DETAILS to the problems, things actually might get fixed, ya think?

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Haha! Too true! Too true!

It's 'The Nintendo Generation'.

Thanks Zalmun.

I had noticed this happeneing once or twice before, but didn't put 2 + 2 together.

It makes sense now that MY character was rolling back, while the rest of the game world continued to move forward.

Since it was through direct manipulation on my characters part, I think the other items warping was an attempt by the game system to right itself.

Sounds like it was a known bug that they tried to compensate for.

How far back has it existed?

Let's fix it.

Bump, I'm still waiting for a CSR to restore my lost items with this problem. I know the CSR can't fix the underlying problem, but they should be able to give me back my items, no?

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Zalmun wrote:
Bump, I'm still waiting for a CSR to restore my lost items with this problem. I know the CSR can't fix the underlying problem, but they should be able to give me back my items, no?

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They usually only give you either credits to compensate you for the loss or resources to make the items again. They almost never return actual items to you. (the recent restoration was a very rare event)

The thing is, the items are not lost, they are simply in 'limbo', meaning I can see them from a vendor set to region/planet/galaxy, but I can't access them.

It's not like the items were deleted, just access to them is lost somehow through some bug. If they have no way to retrieve these items, then their own tools for managing this MMO are pretty lacking. I'm beginning to suspect that this is the case.

Have you tried setting up another vendor and using the region screen to withdraw the items?

I am having a similar problem. I dropped a pack in my house to make room for other things. Go back to pick the pack up and it says I can not "see" it. I can see it to target it but not to pick it up? I have emptied the house of all other items and tried the about worthless find missing items thing and nothing happened. I have submitted a ticket with no response as of yet. What makes it worse is all my resources for tailoring are in this pack. /sigh ... NERF THE CSRs! They can't get much worse! *grin*

Just some closure to this:

I was finally able to meet a CSR in game about this problem, and here was the result:

- The items were 'ghosted', in the sense that they are in the system, but not linked to the vendor I had originally put them on.

- The CSR offered to reimburse me the sale value, or resources used, of the items I lost, for which I had a fully itemized and priced list for. Because I had all that information, they were prepared to give me back what I lost, or at least the value of what I lost.

- While discussing this with the CSR, and deciding what to do, I decided to try to withdraw the 'ghosted' items from sale, and retrieve them, from the OTHER vendor I had in the same region. Well, to my surprise, this worked. I informed the CSR of this, and he said to contact him if I have any more problems on this. I asked him, 'If the items are truly ghosted, and disappear on the nightly server maintenance, can I still be reimbursed?'. He said, yes, just send a list of the missing items and I would be reimbursed as he was originally going to do.

- The items have not disappeared, and I've setup my new vendors successfully since.

So the end result was that I really didn't need CSR intervention, but of course I didn't know that at the time, nor did I want to risk screwing things up. The CSR was patient and helpful with me, and willing to compensate for any further problems. Of course, losing the items would have sucked, but it appears they do not have the capabiliy to 'dig' into the system to reach items that become lost or ghosted. At least not at that CSR's level of access.

All in all, I'm happy to have the problem solved. It did take a week, but the CSR did arrange to meet me (on a Sunday yet) in game, and try to get the problem solved.

Of course, the bug that caused all this to begin with has not specifically been addressed, but it hasn't happened to me again since, so for all I know it could be fixed behind the scenes.

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Draznar wrote:
Have you tried setting up another vendor and using the region screen to withdraw the items?

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I saw this originally, and was tempted to try it, but I wanted to talk to a CSR first before attempting it. Once I confirmed the CSR's help, and had him standing right there, I tried it, and sure enough it worked.

I guess I shouldn't be so scared of making things worse, and try things that might logically work. It's a hit or miss though, I think.

Zalmun, thanks for the info. I have not experienced this problem but am still glad to have info on it. I also want to give you kudo's for the professional manner you had during this endeavor. A very rare trait in these trying times.