New Bazaar Rant...

[Liwsa]

Another problem is sometimes when I execute a trade the old fasion way hand something to someone I crash straight to the desk top. The game says it crashed.

[Maelina]

Crashing on MANUAL Trades

I have had the same problem when attempting to transfer items between my bazaar vendor and my main character. A regular old-fashioned trade window trade makes my vendor lock up and requires a hard reboot of that PC.

Wonder if this is a related bug?

[Arista]

I've had the manual trading bug happen quite a few times, and after some testing, this is what I've found:

1) If both characters put up at least one item each in the trade window, then a crash can occur on one of the characters when the trade is finalized (items still go through OK).

2) If only one character puts up items on his/her side of the trade window, while the other character does not put up any items, then the crash never seems to happen.

3) Coin exchange does not seem to affect this, only items.

So, if you're trading between friends or your own characters (so there are no trust issues), and both people need to pass item(s) to the other, do two separate trade transactions instead of one. In each transaction, make sure only one character puts up items in the window. Coins can be added to the trade window by the other person, but not items. By following the above rules, I never crashed again during a trade.

EDIT: Reading Ndaara's post below, it appears to not be the same for everyone. The above reports my experiences only, your mileage may vary. Every single one of my crashes so far happened during a two-way trade. Since switching to doing one-way trades only, I haven't crashed a single time over the course of many trades. Whether or not it actually helps, I will continue to do one-way trades only until they fix this, just in case it does lessen the likelihood of a crash. I use two accounts so I end up having to trade stuff around quite a bit, usually between my bazaar mules.

[Ndaara]

Arista, my most recent bazaar tradewindow crash was me handing over some food to my husband. he put nothing in the window, was just me feeding him. and i crashed. and then got 1018 error for 20 minutes for the second time that day. /sigh

I did do a trade successfully yesterday, both of us putting stackable items in the window (a few bricks of ethereal energy in exchange for a few ethereal sheets of metal). So it doesn't dump me every time at least!

Also the first time this crash bug happened, coming back in and moving the item she handed me, into the stack in the bank, caused me to crash again. That was icky.

So I'm not doing tradewindow trades in the bazaar any more. if someone wants a "special deal" they can meet one of my other mules in one of the other banks and i'll pass it through the shared bank spots. Down with 1018 errors!

[andaerice]

This morning on Brell was the same way, 500+ traders and everyone who typed /baz crashed. I had the window up from earlier and was minimized reading web pages to come back to see the /ooc filled with people complaining about it. I didn't even attempt to put up my trader alt because of it.

On the plus side, since I was the only person in the bazaar who could find anything I made a few plat being an errand boy for a while, either picking up items for people or having them /follow me to the person selling it.

From my experience as a developer, this appears to be a client-side problem. The zone seems to have no problems handling the number of traders, but the array storing the trader names which fills the drop-down box in the search window is limited to 500 entries. An attempt to open with 500+ causes a buffer overrun and a hard crash. I would guess (but haven't tried) that if you opened the search window at 500 or less, then clicked the "Update Traders" button once it was over 500 that the same crash would occur.

Update: I accidently hit the Update Traders button at 500+ (oops!). And yes, it crashed hard. This time the dialog asking if I wanted to send the error to SOE wasn't visible, and it took me a moment to figure out to just press the Enter key to get back to the desktop.

[GraemeFaelban]

The last few days now, it's been hitting over 500 on EMarr, I guess they backed that limit back off shortly after putting it back in place. You would think that they would fix the problem first, rather than make the bazaar basically useless as noone can use /bazaar to find anything.