Change to buy/sell system?

[Kaysha Soulsinger]

I hope I don't need to tell the people who are interested in this that one of the most important "beacons" for buy/sell prices is the peridot.

What we know is that ...
- buying is 10500 cps
- selling is 9524 cps

At best charisma/faction, of course.

Yesterday, however, I was baffled ... I was in Plane of Knowledge, restocking my Peridots from the Erudite vendor in the building at the Pottery Wheels, when I noticed I could buy his Peridots for 10499 cps each! :shock:

Now this is just a cp on the price, but this may be significant. I always thought the multiplier was a rock-solid 1.05; yesterday proves it was not. I'm going to re-check him today, as well as other vendors who sell this, and check their sell price.

[Kronepsis]

Doesn't mean the multipler is wrong.

For all we know, it could just be x * 1.5 -1 now

[solecism]

similar results

In yesterday's cost checking of new items I found, I had similar inconsistencies. Specifically, I found that owlbear feathers are bought for 20.999 pp. I found it particularly strange, as in all my copper counting experience I had never ever seen something has that missing copper from the ratio (1.05) of a whole number value. That is, never the X.999 that we're so used to IRL (items priced at $19.99 for example).

(off subject...)
Not going to impact much, but I thought it was part of the bazaar vendor bug I discovered. Yesterday at least, you could buy a full bazaar vendor (not trader) out of an item, then sell him something cheap to fill that slot, then select and buy the cheap item and pay the cheap price but apparently receive the item just below their visible inventory instead. I paid 1 sp for a flawed emerald which I sold for 47 pp or so in this manner, until another player came and shifted the vendor's inventory with a purchase or sale somehow. After experimenting (no, not exploiting ) I reported the bug. I'm sure something like that will be fixed soon. I'm unsure if it just applies to vendors in bazaar, or everywhere. Havent played my odds elsewhere yet. If it is consistent, you could load up a remote empty vendor with junk, then sell a diamond (or other high value item) as the item next in line, then exploit the hell out of it repeatedly. I dont reccommend that, but if you're a gambler you could try. Any way, it's public now so I'm sure it'll be fixed.

-=\=- Solecism Nolastname -=\=-
61 Ench <Exile> on Brell

[KyrosKrane]

I don't know about the exploit bug, but by and large, it seems most items that cost a plat or more now have a best price of 1cp less than before. Prolly a bug, but could be due to rounding somehow ...

[Kaysha Soulsinger]

Checked and verified with several vendors, on several items. All worth a pp or more show this behaviour. Things like Flask of Water are unaffected.

Even though it's not earth-shattering, it's annoying, imho

[Lunariel]

Nasty little bug

I ran into this bug yesterday and it's far from an exploit. In the example above with 1 sp for the flawed emerald, the client lied to you. The actual cost of the emerald was deducted from your purse.

It looks like some of the merchant code is client side and have some synchronization problems since the patch. My guess is that the client gets confused after selling an item into the slot you just cleaned out. It will tell you the correct price when you try to buy it back again and it will also calculate the assumed total cost and show it to you after buying it. But it will send the wrong slot number to the server. So the server gives you that other item instead and naturally charges you for it.

So don't go vendor farming with too much cash until they fix it.

Lunariel

[OberonMiM]

yep everything seemed to be 1 copper off when sold by a vendor

I thought it had something to do with their fix to not make those newbie items sell for 1 copper (remember they had something about this in their patch message)

[Morani]

I remember reading something in the patch message about vendors no longer offering 1cp for items that they won't buy (like newbie starting gear). Maybe it's just coincidental but this is a shift in the opposite direction. MIGHT be related. Has anyone confirmed that the price is ACTUALLY 1cp cheaper when buying it rather than just being told that it is? (Of course trying to get into the Attorney General's office in Shadowhaven is IMPOSIBLE these days... )

[Kaysha Soulsinger]

Yes, I bought 10 Peridots for 104pp 9gp 9sp, saving me a whole silver!! :P

[solecism]

youre right, no exploit

I was mistaken about that bug, you are correct. later i checked and it took actual cost of item received, but client states cost deducted as item selected. No exploit there, just loss.. but be careful if buying things from a vendor when merchant farming so you get the right thing.

Back to subject..
Since the prices to have an order to them as we can tell so far, i.e. 1 cp less if price is over 1 pp, I will modify the cost formulae by those coppers (maybe 6 cp off at most) on the cost pages in my next update. Thanks for bringing this to our attention, and thanks again for finding the 1 pp cutoff point.

A question:
I could just try this myself, but I'm at work and can't check it. If you are buying something over 1 gp but under 1 pp, does this copper less appear when buying 10 of the item? For example, one flask of water costs 0.010 but a stack costs 0.210, so the system retains fractions of a copper and rounds to nearest when buying stacks. I'm thinking it would be similar to hold the fraction of a penny less when buying more of an item.

-=\=- Solecism Nolastname -=\=-

[Dunthor Warsmith]

Hypothesis: They wanted to "fix" the odd stack prices (like the aformentioned water flasks). The initial "fix" seemed to aggrivate the problem (more items cost extra per stack). The fix for the fix might have been to simply subtract a fixed value (say, 0.5cp or somesuch) from all items.
This would change the water flasks traditional price from 0.0105 to 0.010, making a stack 0.200 instead of the traditional 0.210, and more logical. This could also affect more standard items, depending on how the rounding system previously worked. If, for example, a peridot's former price was 10.4999 (although stack prices deny this) and it was rounded up for single purchase, with the 0.0005 deduction the price would now be 10.4994, which would round down. For items ending in 0.0000-0.0004, the 0.0005 reduction would not effect their individual price, assuming rounding.
Flaws: Any 1/10th of a copper would be shown in stack purchases, which for some items with known changes (peridots) was not present. This theory depends on rounding, and rounding is rare in EQ, excess digits are normally truncated.

I know this theory has flaws ... but maybe its at least in the right direction. Any thoughts?

[Lunariel]

New formula

Water flasks used to be 1 silver for one, and 2 gold and 1 silver for a stack. Now they are 2 gold for a stack. The reason for this was that the quantity was multiplied before anything less than a copper was thrown away.

I think the old formula was this: (Assuming best price and ignoring buyback factors)
= trunc( quantity * base price in copper * 1.05 )

I think Morani is absolutely right. This is a result from the change where merchants don't offer 1 copper for items they don't want to buy. And they really did a quick and dirty fix. They now subtract a fraction of a copper before doing the truncates. It's probably half a copper, but could be even smaller.

I think the new formula is now:
= quantity * trunc( base price in copper * 1.05 - 0.5 )

This formula allows them to have a base price of 1 cp and get a sale price of 0 cp. Which is probably a work around to avoid messing with other parts of the code. They also took the time to move the quantity out from truncated part while they were doing these changes.

Any item at base price 1 cp: Old formula is 1 cp, new formula is 0 cp.
1 Water flask, base price 10 cp. Both formulas are 10 cp.
Stack of water flasks. Old formula is 210 cp, new formula is 200 cp.
1 Peridot, base price 10000 cp. Old formula is 10500 cp, new formula is 10499 cp.

Any item with a base price without any silver or copper parts, will end up with no copper fractions after multiplying by 1.05. Subtracting the new fraction from that will leave a price that's 1 copper less than before. Which is why all items worth one gold or more seem cheaper, while some of the rest seem unaffected.

Lunariel

[KyrosKrane]

Your formulae seem correct, Lunariel, but I think you missed a stage somewhere inbetween. You see, for a few weeks before this last round of patches, they had fixed the prices so that the total price really was Q * (quoted single price). They even mentioned in the patch message that they had fixed vendor pricing this way. So if a vendor quoted you 1sp on a water flask, you paid a total of 2gp (exactly) for a stack. Then, with the last round of patches, the odd one-cp discrepancy started appearing on the more expensive items.

My guess is that for that interim period, the formula became:

= quantity * trunc( base price in copper * 1.05 )

With the last couple of patches, they added the ( - 0.5 ) at the end.

It still somewhat boggles my mind why they did so. They have had zero-cost items being sold at least since PoP made its debut -- think of the zero-cost books in the library in PoK. Hence, it's unlikely they added the -0.5 change just to get the zero prices on things.

On a similar note, are we sure that it was trunc() and not round() that they used?

Any thoughts?

[Lunariel]

Ah, I missed the changes in quantities from the earlier patch.

I also made a little blunder using the 1cp price as an example, since I was showing the price when buying from merchants and not selling to them. Still it seems suspicious that this fraction change and the announced patch change came at the same time.

As for round vs. trunc, I'm still not sure. The sale prices to merchants seems rounded, so maybe the buy prices are too. For rounding off, just change the fraction to a value > 0.5 and < 1 instead.

I digged up some old info I had on the prices. Not sure if all of it is valid anymore, but let's try these formulas instead:

Selling to a merchant:

= quantity * round( base * min( chafactor , 20/21 ) )

Buying from a merchant:

= quantity * buybackfactor * round( base * max( 1 / chafactor , 21/20 ) - fraction )

fraction: A number > 0.5 and < 1.
chafactor: =(modifiedcharisma+135)/250 * faction * greed * junk
modifiedcharisma: =if(cha>=61,if(cha<=75,65,cha),cha) :shock:
cha: Your charisma. If the merchant is the same race as yourself, you get a +11 bonus. Any racial illusions are ignored.
faction: 25/28 if apprehensive, else 1.
greed: 1 for normal vendors, less than that for greedy ones.
junk: 1 when the merchant spawns, decreases as the merchant buy stuff. Increases back towards 1 again when selling to you.
buybackfactor: An integer, normally 1. Higher on things SOE doesn't want you to vendor farm, like Fine Steel weapons :P .

Lunariel