Merchant Archive

Moving this from the correspondant thread, so we don't clutter that up.

Shadyr wrote:

"Is anyone not making at least number different customers per day * 50 xp, each day? Not items purchased, different customers shown on confirmed email. If you're not getting that, there is definately a bug. You should get more for those who buy nothing.Again, never seen any other type of XP on any merchants but it's also not described anywhere that I can find. If it helps, I've only ever usedNPC merchants."

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Okay, I'll expand on the experience thing. When I started out with a business 3 vendor, I didn't have the final premises for my shop, but wanted to get some merchant experience. So I had one of those washing machines, unadvertised, with a few things on. People didn't visit it, but it gave hourly experience. There's no way I was getting that many people looking at it for 50 points each. I could sit in my house and see the experience come in, knowing noone was there. So the regular experience thing does exist.

Perhaps it was never intended to be that way, and we were always suppose to rely on experience from actual customers. Unfortunately the maths doesn't work out.

Only every other customer gives experience, near enough(I always check if I get a buy email to see if it's made it go up). This means at 50 per every other customer I need at least 40 different customers a day to get just 1000 experience. To get a complete tree of the merchant skills at that rate takes 100 days (just over three months). Making master merchant take 400 days.... over a year.

It's true popular merchants, like weapons and armour merchants, would get more than 40 customers per day. But for a small shop, even 40 might be pushing it as an estimate. Also it seems if people arrive at the same time and look at a vendor, it only seems to count one of them.

The only reason I'm further on than that, is I did used to get hourly experience, and I've had the odd day were it seems to have turned back on. Again, I can sit and count visitors on those days, and it's never enough to justify the sudden spike in exp. It's possible you've been gaining some without realising, and just putting it down to the customers you didn't see.

I don't know what to do really... I've placed a terminal today, in the hopes that it might give me more experience. An access fee would get fewer people using it than look at the vendors, so isn't a gain. Other than paying people 100 credits to look at my vendors, I'm a bit stuck for ideas. I can only hope the experience picks up again soon. It's a bug that needs fixing, as it's very demoralising. Especially the times when I watch someone visit my vendor, look for that 50 points, and realise I didn't get that either.

It's not a major concern on this forum because it only effects a few people, but noone should be getting their experience bugged. It's the biggest killer of any profession when people find they can't really advance in a sensible timeframe. At least I managed to train some skills before it happened to me.

This issue has been perplexing me aswell... How do you gain Merchant Exp?

I am a fairly new merchant, mainly a side task to being a Weaponsmith (also newly skilling) ....

As I was bussiness 3 I placed my first "Bulky" with no stock other than 2 or 3 weapon enhancements that I STILL have.. then seemingly over night, I had 10k merchant exp and still needed to grind out bussiness 4.

well now I have 0-0-3-2 in the merchant tree and 20k merchant exp remaining to spend on effeciency or whatnot (was 20300 last night when i checked).

I know it is not being given on a customer basis, or on a item cost basis, cause at this point in my crafting career I can count the number of sales on one hand.. which by the way were made by either my other account character or a PA friend.

I would watch the exp bar, checking how I would gain it...and sure enough 50 or 100 per hour seemed the norm... Until I would take a shuttle or die or something..then the miracalulous 450, 700 or even my personal best of 750 exp spike.

What is the currect way inwhich merchant exp is gained?????

Reeno - weaponsmith to the Miners and Ranchers of the galaxy!

Scylla server

Something that might interest people having problems.... I'd noticed as said above that my original washing machine gave good regular experience. I've seen people complain about experience drops after getting efficiency two. I also started having real problems after efficiency two. So my theory was perhaps the hourly experience was linked to it charging maintence. NPCs do occassionally take some money from their pool, but don't really take much. Terminals always do.

After placing the terminal yesterday and putting enough on it to get it charging maintence, my experience has gone up. Might just be because it's a new vendor, though I've been replacing vendors every other day before that to no effect.

It'd be interesting to know if people that get more reliable experience also use terminals for a resource vendor or the like, and if the people having problems only have NPC ones. Plus if people have efficiency two or not. Perhaps we can track down where the issue comes from.