The days after server reset

[Kinil]

Rejoice! An abundance of goodies that most people sell as vendor trash. Happy happy dance!

The weeks after... Merchants flooded with unusable trash. All the good stuff lost since we can't see past a certain amount of trash. Didn't merchants at one time show an endless list?

[Gorse]

Rejoice! An abundance of goodies that most people sell as vendor trash. Happy happy dance!

The weeks after... Merchants flooded with unusable trash. All the good stuff lost since we can't see past a certain amount of trash. Didn't merchants at one time show an endless list?

I don't recall them ever being unlimited, shown, but you used to be able to "dig" through the sold back items (buy an item out to open a slot, leave vendor and go back into vendor and the next item in the invisible list would show up.

Anyway, I would suggest going down to the primal scream forum, there are some apporpriate threads there dealing with the good and bad side of this topic.


Gorse

[illovich]

What about changing the vendors so they only show "usable" items and not stuff that's meant to be cash loot? I think that's a reasonable compromise and it would make merchant-diving a lot more fun.

My guess is an "unlimited" list is too dangerous as it would put to much load on the back end.



What would be more interesting even still would be if the merchants sold items based on what's in the bazaar in opposition to current market prices - i.e. if there's something scarce on the market being sold for ridiculous prices the merchant would always show any it had in inventory for a mean price between the bazaar average and the merchant value. On the other hand when things were common and selling for nothing, the merchants could inflate the price above the bazaar, thus prodding people to go buy at the bazaar.

That's just off the top of my head, but I thought I'd mention it.

[KyrosKrane]

There's been a few discussions over the years about whether and how to modify merchants.

One option, and the most popular as far as I can tell, is to create a "rolling inventory" system, usually referred to as "rotating stock." When you sell an item to a full vendor, it currently destroys the newest item -- namely, what you just sold. This proposal would be to destroy the oldest item in the merchant's stock, so that he keeps the newest items on his list.

With the advent of the tradeskill and quest flags, another proposal became possible. In theory, any sellable item that has a use (other than selling for cash) should be flagged with one of these two. So, the proposal is to have merchants destroy any item that lacks either of these flags. That would leave the merchant free to stock only "useful" items. The problem with this method is that many items lack the proper flags (particularly items used indirectly in quests, such as keys or items used in quest combines, as opposed to a direct hand-in). It would also require the devs to review ALL items very carefully to make sure they have appropriate flags, which is quite time consuming.

[Kinil]

'used in tradeskills' works for me! I do run a buyer in the bazaar, but 99% of what I am buying gets merchant foddered.

[Ngreth Thergn]

With the advent of the tradeskill and quest flags, another proposal became possible. In theory, any sellable item that has a use (other than selling for cash) should be flagged with one of these two. So, the proposal is to have merchants destroy any item that lacks either of these flags. That would leave the merchant free to stock only "useful" items. The problem with this method is that many items lack the proper flags (particularly items used indirectly in quests, such as keys or items used in quest combines, as opposed to a direct hand-in). It would also require the devs to review ALL items very carefully to make sure they have appropriate flags, which is quite time consuming.

Actually.

I am not sure how much of a concern that "useful" unmarked items are kept. Currently there is a decent chance for them to go poof anyway if people sell them to a vendor. We would of course take player feedback on unmarked ones to mark them But I would not hold up a change like this on getting all items "properly marked." The hold up is code time and priorities