Make Your Own Patch Day Equivilent...

[Kaz]

You know, something I've done in order to get foraged hynid and cragbeast meat in Natimbi was to simply buy up all of the cheapest non-infinite items clogging the vendor. This leaves empty slots, which often got filled with foraged meats, in Natimbi.

There's really no reason one could not do this all the time. Imagine, for a few hundred plat one could clean out quite a few vendors of their cheap finite items, and have a chance of making hundreds of thousands of plat in return.

Is there a reason why that isn't common practice?

I mean, the reason patch day makes a difference is simply that there are open slots, so the valuable things which people are CONSTANTLY selling to vendors actually get listed, right? And the reason this doesn't persist is a form of natural selection, where the non-valuable stuff always gets left behind, until it takes up the whole vendor.

So just clear the non-valuable stuff off the vendor, and wait a while...

[eqNichola]

Sure, but how many slots can one person with finite resources actually clear in this way? There's a huge number of trash items which get vendored and are then offered back by the vendors at prices that are simply too steep for it to be worth buying them out to clear the slot. For example, consider Fine Steel weapons. These (or their equivalent, by expansion) drop off mobs, players sell them to NPC vendors for 5-10pp each. But the NPCs then ask 50-100pp each. No one is going to pay those kind of prices to clear out a vendor of Fine Steel Daggers, or whatever.

That's why patch day is so important - it clears ALL the non-fixed slots on ALL vendors - and it doesn't cost vendor-divers a single copper.

[Bobaten]

The other (easier) way to empty a vendor is simply to kill them. This method doesn't work for all vendors of course(PoK for example). But there are some that can be very lucrative (Druid in Lavastorm).

[mewkus]

The killing the merchant method is how I do the restock the HQ Ore quest. A wizard with disintigrate can do the restock with a single spell cast, hehe.

[YurienStonebow]

actualyl you can vendor dive and still turn a profit buying items out. perfect example....ruined pelts. buy all fo them then go turn into PW armor. you end up making about a gold per combine but it will get teh emrchant inventory free and you can sell the armor to a full emrchant or give to noobies. thats what i always did when i went to halas. i made more money off farming the pelts on emrchants then i did farming the pelts themselves