Merchant Archive

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LadyGrey wrote:

1) Have to have the skill points to keep your vendor

2) Amount of time left on sales on vendor are now visible on vendor window

3) Amount of time left for item to be in storeroom now visible on vendor window

4) Empty vendors now disappear (slight bug got from TC to Live where legitimate vendors sometimes disappear also. Consider it part of your immersive gameplay experience)

5) Buildings with vendors in them cannot be transferred to someone else using /transferstructure (ongoing discussion of this, not sure if intentional or a bug)

6) Items should remain on your vendor for 30 days before going to storeroom

7) Some reports that NPC vendors are less likely to be ugly, old, fat, oddly colored, etc.

8) Master Merchant can have 12 vendors, and 4000 items (items can all be on one vendor, or spread across all your vendors). Other skill levels have various numbers of vendors/items available.

9) Planetary advertising needs to get "reset" every day, by someone looking at your vendor (ongoing heated discussion of this. Seems to be intentional, but only because it is difficult to change the programming)

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#5 is a bug. Waiting on any word as to when it might be fixed. Bribing Tiggs with promises of turning her into a minor deity if she gets it done.

#9 That isn't a recent change its worked that way since like publish 5 or something. It isn't intentional but the code that causes it is. They changed the way objects inside structures load into buildings (a LONG time ago) and the result was that the vendors don't load properly unless someone goes inside the building where they are. This forces them to go thought their initialziation routines which put them on the map. The code that changes the way objects are loaded wasn't done for or about vendors it was done to increase server performance and to reduce the server load time. It works and has helped the server be more stable right after restart. It has also gimped the advertising. But before the change we had to reset it every day .. now anyone walking into the room will get it back on the map. Its better than it was before but its not done yet

Message Edited by DocSavag on 09-29-2004 09:02 AM

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LadyGrey wrote:

Doc, was thinking about the house loading stuff. Couldn't they make the merchant tents just load every day along with the servers? Could be an added benefit towards having them, since they serve the purpose of having a vendor inside of them? And there aren't nearly so many of them as there are houses, and they can only hold a maximum of 75 items, since they only take up one lot.

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They could but that would leave out anyone with vendors not in a tent.

The best suggestion I have heard from a dev is the possibility (read WILD SPECULATION OVER DRINKS!!!) of marking certain object to load on startup. Vendor would then be one of these objects and would load immediately and everything would work properly. Now that change is likely to be a pretty big one and might have implications beyond what is obvious at first view of the idea. This idea isn't planned..approved..scheduled..or anytihng else it was merely a discussion that I had with someone in a social setting.