Merchant Archive

Just like on the bazaar every item only lasts 7 days on your vendor. After 7 days you will get a flood of e-mails from all the items you had for sale on your vendor saying Auction Unsucessful. Now I understand for the bazaar this makes sense, because A. Items should sell within that time limit otherwise their price to high B. It helps keep the bazaar less filled up and C. With only having 25 items to put on the bazaar you cant afford for items to take 7 days.

Now for merchants this makes absolutly no sense. Most merchants just stock their vendors with the same item all at once. Examply would be instead of making one of every item, they will just make 5-10 of one item, then go to the next item make 5-10 and keep doing that till their vendor has all their items and a good amount of each. Now since player cities arent in and modes of good transportation isnt in, it's extremely hard to sell all your stocked items all at once.

The 7 day rule just doesnt make sense. It just gives the merchant an extra hour of work every day or so working with a bugged system trying to get their items out and then just putting them back on and reselling them. It does nothing to benefit the comunity and only adds boring and tedious work to the merchant. I could understand a X amount day rule, but that number should be like 30 days atleast, because its rediculous to put everything up for sale again on your vendor.

Please post coments, and hopefully Merchant Correspondant will send in a demand to change this meaningless rule.

/sign

This annoys me too, but I'm not going to lose any sleep over waiting for it to be fixed, because I'm 99.99999% sure that this is a database issue that serves a useful techincal purpose.

In a lot of time-sequenced data files -- like, e.g., mail files in Microsoft Outlook -- removal of an entry (an email) takes it out of the data structure, but does not take the SPACE it occupied out of the data structure. So if, say, each email takes 10k of data space, and you initially had three, deleting the middle one leaves the total file size at 30k. But now there's 10k of data, followed by 10k of no data, followed by 10k of data.

(This is why it's good to use the "compact database" option in Outlook from time to time.)

In SWG's case, the database for vendor items is likely massive. And since the game is never down, it's unlikely that there exists the technical ability to compact it periodically. If items could be left on the bazaar for an unlimited amount of time, the database file could wind up beingliterally unlimited in size. (If an itemstays on a vendor for a year, you couldhave an entireyear's worth of empty data in the DB file between that item and the next-oldest item.)So having everything expire (and be eliminated from the vendor data structure) ensures that the DB is kept at a managable time.

I would expect that periodically the DB is copied from a point slightly greater than the 7-day limit, or whatever the max limit is, and the "old" version is deleted, cleaning up the empty spaces. Or, the "head" of the data file is chopped off. But, not being privy to how SOE manages their DB, I can't say for sure.

But in any event -- I expect this won't be changed anytime soon, unless they adopt a new way of handling data.