Feasability: Access to /baz & /bart info in any zone

[GrimwoodCT]

How difficult would it be to make the information from /bazaar (and to a lesser extent /barter) accessible from any zone?

No, I do not mean that I want to be able to BUY stuff while in Vald or Ashengate but at least get an idea what something is selling for when I have won a /random and wish to pick from a list of items we've looted.

[Gaell Stormracer]

I'd like this too... while I'm in the fortunate position of being able to fire up one of my bazaar bots on another account, it would still be nice to have that availabel to all. Technically, I suspect it's very easy, although the network traffic from such searches might be a factor, and it would also need to check whether you had the Luclin expansion.

(However, I think it'd be turned down as breaking the immersion factor....)

[KyrosKrane]

Actually, it's not quite so easy as it sounds. If I understand the world of EQ correctly, each zone operates completely independently of the other zones. This is why, say, the guild lobby could crash and go offline without affecting PoK, or why players who are in the world aren't affected if the login server goes offline. Any interaction between zones (such as a player zoning from one zone to another, or sending a tell to a player in a different zone) is handled through the world server, which acts as a sort of mediator.

So checking bazaar prices from outside the bazaar isn't just a matter of a database lookup; first your local server box has to find out the name/IP/something of the server box running your local bazaar, then connect to that, and then run the query. The alternative would be to expand the capabilities of the mediation server (either the world server or the universal chat server, though the latter is unlikely, since they don't want game-specific info on that -- see Tanker's recent posts). Then, your local zone would simply contact the mediation server and request a price check, and that request would be relayed to the server running the bazaar, then back again via the mediation server.

[GrimwoodCT]

Thanks Kryos. I was afraid of that but it makes sense when put that way.

[Gaell Stormracer]

It doesn't HAVE to work that way - your client could request information as to where to send Bazaar queries from the World server, get the IP address of the server running the Bazaar for your "server", then send the bazaar requests directly to it... cacheing the address of the bazaar server to use. In this case, the only real workload increase would be on the bazaar search engines themselves. (Which may well not be trivial, so that may be a show-stopper anyway )

The actual difficulty of implementation actually depends on how the queries you normally do with /bazzar or /barter work.

[KyrosKrane]

True, but you run a risk in caching the bazaar server name/IP/ID/whatever. If the box hosting a zone crashes, EQ has some sort of fallback system in place that brings another box online and activates the missing zones on it (at least I think it does; I picked this up in passing from a variety of dev posts, so I could be completely wrong). If this system does exist, then the bazaar IP address will change if the bazaar crashes, or if the box hosting it goes offline for whatever reason.

Still, compared to the load a bazaar query would impose on the server, I'm pretty sure a quick lookup on the world server to get the bazaar IP address would be a relatively low load. Which again brings us back to the point of whether the bazaar server can even handle the extra load this would generate.

As a side note, remember when the barter zone went live with DoN? The devs at the time posted that they wanted it as separate zones to watch for performance issues. After a couple of weeks/months (I forget how long), they decided that a single server could handle both functions, and they merged the two zones into one. This adds two new wrinkles into the conversation. First, it shows that the bazaar and barter functions could exist on two different server boxes. Second, it implies that there is no technical reason why there couldn't be two independent bazaars for any EQ "server" (meaning the world name you select when logging in). I doubt we'll ever see a competing bazaar appear in a new zone, but if the possibility is there, then the cross-zone bazaar search would have to account for it.

[Catweazel]

How exactly does the Appraisal AA work then, and couldn't this feature be made to work?

[KyrosKrane]

I'm not familiar with that AA. What does it do, and who can get it?

[Aldier]

Think its a Rogue only aa described as "allows you to evaluate the value of an item"

I assume though this is vendor purchase price. I am not sure. Rogue's might have some more information out there.

[Ngreth Thergn]

Well.

Bazar/barter searches are HARD on the server. Giving you access everywhere does mean more barter search which does mean more load on the servers.

And multiple zones are on each "server box" (box for short) there are 13 boxes (well 14... but the 14th is also not a box, but another farm of servers... 14 is instances) This means if the bazaar goes down, or the load starts to increase significantly more than just the bazaar will gain server lag.

This is not saying they cannot do it, just that currently it is not entirely feasible.

[Strokker]

Personally, even though I can see the usefulness of such a thing, how could this be justified in the game structure? I mean how could you a player in one zone be able to recieve instantaniously information from another zone, a Crystal ball or scrying stone? Even messengers would take time getting to you, and we have no means of telecommunications so someone could not send it to you. It, to mme at least, does not fit the Everquest model. I have no doube it could be technically done, but is it, like we used to say in the SCA, period< as in what might have been used in the time frame of adventure>?

[Unapuma]

IOW leave an alt or mule in bazaar for searching while your main is elsewhere. Many people have multiple accounts anyhow.

If you don't have multiple accounts and don't want to bother to log back and forth between 2 characters, you can always ask your guildies, friends, or even in general channel.

[GrimwoodCT]

Personally, even though I can see the usefulness of such a thing, how could this be justified in the game structure? I mean how could you a player in one zone be able to recieve instantaniously information from another zone, a Crystal ball or scrying stone? Even messengers would take time getting to you, and we have no means of telecommunications so someone could not send it to you.

To conform to that model we would have to disable:
-/tells to anyone outside of your zone
-/who all
-/shout, /ooc and /auc beyond the range of /yell

[Tanker]

Ngreth has this pretty well spot on.

Right now, the data exists only for the Zone Server that is the Bazaar (one of a several running on that one server host machine). The Bazaar is put on a host with fewer and less populous/popular other zones because it is such a memory and CPU hog. Searches are the biggest part of that CPU hogginess (sp? ).

While it's certainly possible to move the Bazaar/Barter data to another dedicated server (not the zone, just the sales data), it would be fairly tricky, especially when some players seem to make it their life's work to exploit the latency between the zone/world servers. At least half the item dupe exploits you've ever heard of had something to do with the fact that the Zone server owned the character and his inventory, but the World Server did the saving/loading of characters, and there was JUST enough time between the Zone doing something to the character and the World saving it for "bad stuff" to happen.

Put this in the "technically possible, but difficult, and probably not enough benefit to get it to happen" pile.

[Gaell Stormracer]

Fair enough, if it's already resource hog there's no point in making the problem worse