Merchant Archive

Makarha's Estate

Report on new Imperial Merchant Edicts (otherwise known as Publish 10)

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The week before, I waited impatiently, working out on paper every last detail I would need to make -ME- mesh with the changes as smoothly as possible. Restocking some vendors as delayed, items left in factories for a few days more than normal. As well as listening to one of the slaves panic over the loss of 40 bio-engineered pets out of his stockroom that he was leaving there until the changes, (in other words, past seven days). Apparantly, he did not know that there was a time limit on the stockrooms.

(How my real life husband who runs that half of the vendors with his 'slave' character could not know this, I have no idea. Chocolate was involved to sweeten my temperment, since my alt was the BE that died multiple times getting various DNA samples that went into those creatures.)

Two nights before the new changes, the Estate was in a panic as two vendors suddenly up and disappeared. One of them being the vendor that carried the high end collectibles and aprons. After a few deep breaths, and a bit of research we discovered that it was a known that they suddenly take vacations if they are worked too hard.

(Known bug on server boundries, CSR ticket submitted, live CSR contacted us not two hours later to help us resolve the issue. Vendors had re-appeared during that time. However, said CSR said that should this happen again, the work around for it was to go 500m out and back again to reload the area. CSR said that this should work most of the time. I asked if this would also work for disappearing/reappearing items. He said it should for any non-stackable. I haven't tested this out yet, since everything I tend to want to move between server lines in our player city are resources or crates.)

The day of the changes. Some of the old vendors were re-assigned, and several new ones were hired. This change-over in staff and inventory started at 1:00 pm my time, and I finally had enough after midnight to call it quits and finish up the rest the next day. Noted that the vendors were not listed at all anywhere, and checked up on it only to find that many merchants were having this trouble. The next day the sudden black out forced us to close our doors early (early server reset, presumably for hotfix). I went into panic mode hoping that the strange force would not cause me to have to redo everything again.

(Please, no server roll-back, not after moving several thousand items.

Speaking of moving several thousand items, here are a few tricks that you may or may not have known to make the process of moving or restocking vendor items go a bit faster. First, make sure your personal inventory is empty. Next, access vendor. Click on the first item, scroll down to the bottom item and Shift+Click. This will select all 100 items on that page. Click withdraw sale. Repeat until vendor is empty, and all items are in the stockroom.

Now, this next bit will only work if your like me, and have large groups of items all set at one price. In the stockroom, rearrange by price. Using Shift-Click, select 60 items that are price the same, or whatever you inventory can hold. Click Retrive Item. All 60 items will now move to your personal inventory. Move over to your new vendor, and put everything up for sale, or if it's the same vendor, put everything back up for sale. Click, insert price once, sell. Click next item, price is already there, sell.

Also note that you can have your sales window open, and the stockroom open, at the same time. No having to open or close windows, just click between the two of them. Retrive items, put them up for sale, retrive items, put them up for sale. It saves a lot of clicking and hassle. If anyone has a better way, please let me know.

Now, as for the hiring, because I am very specific about what sort of vendors I will use out of the ones that I am given, having six more vendors to do hiring with was a godsend. I simply create numberous vendors at the same time, with the same name, using the copy/paste options for the name. When I'm at my max, I look over the vendors to see which one I like, and if necessary delete them all and do it again. Vendors that must look within a predefined range are done first, vendors that I care less about are done less.

Which brings me to a suggestion. In addition to Image Designers getting the ability to make over our vendors, I'd like to propose something when it comes to making vendors.

Picture the Image Designer UI. Now, picture all our windows where we make our selections, instead in a UI like the ID's have. One window opens, you select terminal, npc or droid, the sex if NPC, the race or type. In the window where you'd see your customer during an ID session, a visual display of the vendor in question appears. So far, except for the name, exactly the same as the sets of windows that pop up to create vendors, but all in the same interface window. As for the name, have it be able to be typed in at any time, in the same UI window as the rest of the selections. Then click on 'hire' and bam, it's in your inventory. I can't say how many times I've wished to have put a different name when I finally see what's in my backpack. Decent looking vendor, if it was for the resource vendor, and not the tailoring (aka fashion model), but alas, the name is Velvet -ME- Tailoring.

This one UI change alone would be nice, but here is where the rest of the proposal comes in. A 'next' button. Don't like the look of that vendor, click next to get the next utterly random selection - before it's created in your backpack. You get one you like, but want to change the name now, no problem. Just retype the name in the UI. Like everything? Click 'hire' and you have yourself a new vendor with slightly less hassle than before, and a much easier to work with UI.

Since many of us, and the ID's also want the ability to make-over vendors, putting the vendors on the same sort of UI make facilitate this ability.)

Day two after the new changes, has me overseeing the other half of the vendors managed by my slave. (Actually, has me logging into my husband's character to do all the inventory and vendor stuff, because I'm extremely picky about my vendors.) During this time, the vendor listing are also fixed, and low and behold, an old issue that I had filed with the Imperial Business Commission, was also fixed.

(A set of goods that was put up on a vendor, which during a recent roll-back on Bria, had caused the vendor to disappear but the inventory remain on the ghosted vendor, /and/ in my own inventory. I couldn't pull it from the stockroom, nor could I relist the items. CSR worked with me for two days trying to see if we could get it resolved. We tried everything. As a last resort the CSR asked his supervisor if he could credit me the credits for the product and just delete it. It was denied and the issue was then sent to the devs. Low and behold, after almost a month of having to look at those ghosted, unmovable items in my stockroom display, after the vendor hotfix, it was fixed too! I jumped for joy.

As of today, sales are picking up again, inventory is being stocked constantly. I'm not even at the 2000 item mark for my half of the vendors, and my husband's half of the vendors with his Master Merchant character is not even to 300 yet. We will definitely be able to sell the goods from our guild of crafters /and/ sell non-guilded as well should the opportunity come up.

The only worries I've had so far was the fear that when they shut down Bria early one evening, was having to redo the second set of vendor stocking if it became a roll-back.)

With business back to normal, hours of over-time put in, I think I am due for a vacation.

(I don't know about you, but I spent nearly 16 hours, 10 of that in one session where I think I moved from my chair three times, to update my vendors after Publish 10. 16 hours of moving items, relisting items, creating and deleting vendors. Oi! With everything settled, time to just go kill mindlessly a few days with my combat alt - semi combat alt, she's also a Master BE and CH.)

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Timedatestamp 09.03.2004 22.23 hours...

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Kyphi Makarha

(I appologize for the long-windedness. I tend to get that way. In case it was not clear, both instances in which I had to use CSR were favorable and pleasant.)