Hmmmmmm

[Palarran]

This reminds me of a bug I stumbled upon during the Luclin area. I'll test if it has resurfaced, using something relatively harmless like flasks of water.

Edit: Nope, that wasn't it.

[Unapuma]

I haven't seen any strange number of rare items in various merchant I visited so the bug or exploit may have been fixed. I'm wondering if it's related to SOE's attempt to rotate "under the table" inventory?

[Aleksandros]

I wandered around Felwithe caster's guilds early this morning before work, doing a little scrounging before RL intruded. Found several hundred Diamonds, Raw Diamonds and Flawless Diamonds on most of the vendors in the zone, and several of the vendors in the other half of Felwithe as well Always the same 3 types of gem each time this morning, though.

[Qaladar Bragollach]

Servers have been up for 31 days now... hard to say if its still a problem until merchants get reset.

[Syuni D'zpecyzczn]

I haven't seen any strange number of rare items in various merchant I visited so the bug or exploit may have been fixed. I'm wondering if it's related to SOE's attempt to rotate "under the table" inventory?

As far as I'm aware, with the new(ish) merchant system, there is no more under the table merchandise.

[Tiroon]

Up to the last patch Blue Diamonds were still very much in demand on Stromm.

Now there are three vendors in bazaar with 500+ of them plus plenty with smaller quantities.

Possible that supply satisfied demand and then outstripped it that fast? Yes maybe, but unlikely since I am yet to see any unusal quantities on "the-usual-suspect-merchants" in PoK, CR, etc. just the steady trickle that was always there. I still smell a rat here.

[Ngreth Thergn]

And there really are more dropping. It is one one of things on many of the drop tables in TSS.

Code has not been able to spend much time on it and has not seen anything they could reproduce yet. So we are basically on a holding pattern to see if something reproducible comes up.

[Nolrog]

And there really are more dropping. It is one one of things on many of the drop tables in TSS.

Code has not been able to spend much time on it and has not seen anything they could reproduce yet. So we are basically on a holding pattern to see if something reproducible comes up.

I haven't noticed anything strange on The Combine yet. If they show up in quantities like that on that server, then you know it's a problem.

[Tiroon]

And there really are more dropping. It is one one of things on many of the drop tables in TSS.

Code has not been able to spend much time on it and has not seen anything they could reproduce yet. So we are basically on a holding pattern to see if something reproducible comes up.

The last thing I want is sending a dev team on a wild goose chase. Still, let me make my point a bit clearer, as always from the perspective of the server I'm playing on:

Blue Diamonds used to be vendor trash between GoD and DoDH. Demand for them reached a peak when JCM became available to all and up until about a month ago were a sure seller in bazaar if you could only get hold of some. Just to be clear what I mean with in demand: selling them in a matter of days rather than hours or minutes was rare.

I can see your point about them dropping more often but for an item that is in such demand, and with people knowing that, the drop rate becomes pretty much irrelevant.

Why? People will sell primarily to a very small number of vendors. Anything useful on those few, select NPC merchants will be picked up quickly and within hours of a patch their inventory cannot hold anything useful anymore. So for useful drops to enter the economy it's not very relevant how often something drops but how often zones with those in-demand vendors reset, which for the last two months has not been very often.

So anything a vendor diver would possibly look for, mostly goes poof on those high traffic merchants. The point that makes me smell a rat is when I start to think about how many BD's must go poof on those vendors for the hundreds of BD's to show up on out of the way merchants.

Enough to send coders to drop their work and take a serious look? Probably not. Enough to keep this thread alive with reports in the hope of finally seeing a pattern emerge? Yes I think so.

[Cerpicio]

When these show up on vendors, what else is on the vendor? Nothing but the default stock? Or are they fully loaded?


-- C.

[Maevenniia]

TAke Rivervale as an example, on teh day I discovered the gems, there were

Diamonds
Blue Diamonds
Flawless Diamonds
Raw Diamonds

at LEAST 20-30 each, many time more, on almsot every single merchant in Roivervale, even the low traffic/low visibility merchants that are usually not sold to.

Sure Diamonds and Blue Diamonds may have been dropping more in TSS, but not teh Flawless Diamonds - those are from Velious. And the Raw Diamonds are from Planes of Power.

So, nope, I do not think there is an innocent explanation.

Now, I will say that lately I haven't seem enormous/suspicious quantities of these gems on merchants as I do my vendor-diving, just the usual 1 or 2 BDs here and there, but maybe the exploiters got wind of this thread and decided to lay low, or decided to sell to full merchants so that the gems would not be visible in a merchant's inventory...or maybe it's because Quellious has crashed 3 Saturdays in a row...

[Bobaten]

...or maybe it's because Quellious has crashed 3 Saturdays in a row...

When I read that, my first thought was, "I wish my server would crash that often, think of all the vendor diving resets."

[tnexus]

When I read that, my first thought was, "I wish my server would crash that often, think of all the vendor diving resets."

I was thinking the same thing too. All that we ever get to crash is our Anguish instances...

[Ngreth Thergn]

I was not trying to "close" the thread. Just giving a progress report of basically no progress :/ Nothing has been reproducible.

[kekenewah]

still a problem

I was gone on vacation for a week. Today in both areas of Felwithe I found several thousand more raw diamonds, flawless diamonds, and diamonds that were not there when I left last week. There clearly is a problem that SOE is not able to track down or fix. SOE, hiding your head in the sand will not make it go away. These gems are from different expansions so I doubt they are being farmed as some have suggested. I have never in the past seen so many raw and flawless diamonds on NPCs.