Merchant Archive

Simply DISABLE the /say , the /shout commands in the macros.

Change Barking Droids to have a timer that makes them bark ONCE every 5 MINUTES (so as to not find a dozen droids creating the same spam we have now).

Once the starport spam is gone, it will FINALLY be up to those with MERCHANT skills who own BARKING droids who can benefit from advertisement, not any idiot that types a macro up and leaves his AFK character spamming /shout crap every second.

It gives the MERCHANTS their JOB SKILL back.

DO IT DEVS!!!!!!!

I don't support limiting my abilities to use say and even WHISPER in order to fix spamming at the starport. The auto afk thing should be removed I agree. That isn't useful there is no valid reason for me to idle and not go afk. (I don't think this will solve anything on its own becasue there are a number of ways to avoid the auto afk timer withut turning it off)

I don't see how removing spammers will benefit the merchant profession all that much. MOST of the spam I see at spaceports is for vendors somewhere else. They are barking for their own vendors..they ARE merchants. How does removing them help your business?

Something I want is an intergalactic phone book that shows a number beside the vendor. This number represents how many items are on that vendor at that time. This way if the vendor is not stocked enough, people can see it before traveling there.

I would also like to see some way to change the timer on the barker droid to 2 minutes or something.

And of course, after spending 1 hour creating and deleting vendors to get one that looks decent, I want some way to control the appearance of my vendor. It doesn't even have to be any more elaborate then the one used for character creation.

docsavag, the issue is twofold.

First the very annoying spamming in the starports HAS to go. It creates an ungodly amount of lag, both from the constant chat spam and from the huge amount of afk macrospammers sitting in the starport area.

Second relates to the merchant proffession itself. As merchants you have tools to advertise...by registering vendors in the map and by using droids to bark your ads.

Now, if you would take the time to actually read the starport chat spam, you'd notice half of it is not even related to merchant stuff... half of it are people barking that they are selling high level loot stuff (NS lances, force crystals, etc) and dont even have a vendor:

'SELLING NS LANCE MIND DOT 80% POTENCY!!! STARTING BID IS 2 MILLION AUCTION ENDS SATURDAY! SEND ME E-MAIL WITH BID!' ...

is a good example.

Then you get people who arent even merchants. Just artisan bussines 3 gets them a vendor ... and so we get:

'BUYING CURRENT SPAWN WOOLY HIDE DROP IT AT VENDOR X,Y,Z 100 CPU' (you go to coords and its a single bussiness3 type vendor)
or the most common, from the buff-docs...

'BUYING AVIAN MEAT yada yada ydaa DROP IT OFF AT X,Y,Z' ..and you see the doc's proffession lists he's a doc/rifleman masteries, you go to his house and its the good ol' bussiness3 type vendor.

I bring these examples up because its this kind of spam that makes the merchant proffession pointless. Why do you spend dozens of skillpoints on advertising branches or on making your vendor look pretty when all you need to do is afk macro-spam in a starport? The merchant proffession is irrelevant save for putting more vendors thanks to the spam-barking.

If SOE removes the /say and /shout (and any command in a macro that makes your character speak) ..or if they remove recursive macros (which wont work because of 3rd party tools will be used anyway), the starport spam , the cantina spam will be gone.

Merchants will be the only ones who can truly advertise. All the droid-advertisement should go into the AUCTION chat tabs (perhaps best if the barking droid is left in the owner's house but he barks the advertisement in the auction chat and players would only need to do a command like /get(droidname)wp and you get an e-mail with that droid's owner's shop waypoint..this will also prevent coronet from being lagged to death by several thousand droids just standing there).

I simply don't find the spam at the starport that offensive most of the time. To me a certain amount of it is a good thing. It adds flavor areal spaceports would probably have merchants selling their wares in the street. In SWG we can't do that yet becuse of limitations on mobile vendors but if we could the Merchant Vendor with a Barker Component would be a fun thing to see.

There does need to be a way to reliably ignore that spam for those who care not to see it. But I don't buy that it is seriously harming business for most merchants. When people want specific types of items they don't go hang out in Coronet until someone barks an ad at them they start searching using traditional advertising outlets. We need more advertising in the game that much I agree with.

---

DocSavag wrote:
(I don't think this will solve anything on its own becasue there are a number of ways to avoid the auto afk timer withut turning it off)

---

Running almost any looping macro will dodge the auto afk timer. For auto-AFK and auto-logoutpurposes, the game doesn't distinguish between at-the-keyboard commands and macro commands. (I used to have a macro whose sole purpose was to keep me from being auto-logged out while I went to fix myself dinner.)