Merchant Archive

We await the Christmas time arrival of Santa Claus, aka Holocron, who promised in his long response thread in the the Discussion forum to look at merchant issues vis-a-vis the vendor "exploit" fix. (That these issues seemed unknown to him is simply further proof of the occasional futility of trying to get feedback to the SWG dev teams, given that we've all been talking about these issues here.) It's hard to know where to begin, on the assumption that Holocron is actually going to check in here with us. There are so many bugs afflicting this class:

1. Inability to grant vendor permissions and place vendors in structures where you have permissions--which the alleged "exploit" was a functioning workaround for...

2. Vendors that destroy items, render them unseen by customers though visible to the merchant, make items unretrievable by customers, or make the items the customer has retrieved both unusable and undeletable.

3. Vendors that don't bark ads or that bark for a little while and then stop barking; ad customization not working; planetary ad campaigns not working

4. Vendor maintenance that is either absurdly high (because it sets as a percentage of the value in the vendor) or that is absurdly low (with NPC vendors).

5. Vendors that disappear

6. Inability to place a vendor once you delete one (generally only lasts about an hour)

7. Vendor items in a deleted vendor appear in "retrieval limbo": they are not destroyed, can be viewed under the "Available" tab in the Stockroom of a new vendor or in the Bazaar, but cannot be retrieved

8. Vendor sales not appearing in the Bazaar

Now beyond that--those are just the bugs that completely break vendors in one way or the other--there are the following issues:

A. The vendor interface seems designed to torment people: inability to retrieve an entire inventory with one click, reset prices without retrieval, and so on, means that managing a vendor inventory is a horrific trial in its own right

B. Many Merchant professions skills are useless in the current game, even when they "work". See my separate thread on this topic and some suggestions for replacements

So, Santa Claus, if you cast your benevolent eye on the island, there you have it--some of the basic afflicting this profession.

I want to be a dentist!