Question on Vendor diving

[HaelonTT]

I understand that Vendors can only show a limited amount of stuff in the sell window, but they may actually have quite a bit more on them than what is shown. The usual method for getting them to show the so called "under the counter" items is to buy out some cheap item from them, thus freeing up a visible or "over the counter" slot.

My question is, if you sell the vendor an item that isnt showing, but which they do have "under the counter", will that cause the item to move above the counter?

Example: You look on vendor_01 and see he doesnt have any blue diamonds for sale. You then sell him 1 blue diamond. I know his most recent purchases will show up. Will doing this move any "under the counter" BDs to the top along with the one you sold him?

[Xenephex]

There's no vendor mining any more. There are no hidden or under the counter items on vendors; that changed a few years ago. (and I really miss it).

[Aldier]

Vendors no longer store items "under the counter" as you put it. They destroy any items given to them once their item slots are filled up.

[Ngreth Thergn]

I think it was causing a memory leak (sorta obviously...) so they had to truncate it.

[Aldier]

Vendor diving can still exist in that instead of camping a drop, or purchasing it in the bazaar, you can check around at commonly sold to merchants in PoK, Lobby, Bazaar, and look for tradeskill items that othes may have sold to them.

Also, if a merchant has not yet reached its item limit, you can plant an item you hope to collect more of to hold its spot as one of the first 100 items and then any others sold will stack with it, but there is a chance someone could come behind you and buy the item out.

[Shadrok]

80 items

What aldeir said, except only 80 items. I just counted a vendor to make sure.

And if a vendor is full, you can buy an item that he has few of and replace it with your spot holder.

[Xenephex]

I think it was causing a memory leak (sorta obviously...) so they had to truncate it.

I never knew that. I always thought they removed it intentionally because they didn't like it or something

I know this was before you were an SoE employee Ngreth, but I can't tell you how much I wish they would have made the effort to find and plug the memory leak instead of changing the mechanic.

I think I was one of the earliest vendor miners on my old server and I really missed it a lot for all these years. Of course now there isn't really all that much good stuff to mine for. I guess I wouldn't push for it to be brought back now; I probably wouldn't bother doing it any more - it's pretty rare for me to even search vendors nowadays.

[Ngreth Thergn]

I never knew that. I always thought they removed it intentionally because they didn't like it or something

I know this was before you were an SoE employee Ngreth, but I can't tell you how much I wish they would have made the effort to find and plug the memory leak instead of changing the mechanic.

I think I was one of the earliest vendor miners on my old server and I really missed it a lot for all these years. Of course now there isn't really all that much good stuff to mine for. I guess I wouldn't push for it to be brought back now; I probably wouldn't bother doing it any more - it's pretty rare for me to even search vendors nowadays.

well. By definition unlimited inventory space it is a "leak" of sorts. There are 100k different items in eq. Now sure, many of them cannot be sold... but if you don;t put SOME limit on what a vendor can hold... the array just gets larger and larger... holding more and more data... and in a zone with as many vendors as PoK, that can continue to get to be a larger and larger amount of stored data... and then each "box: has multiple zones... each which might also have vendors, which again... with no bounds... gets larger and larger... etc. Sure, there are programing methods to help with this, but it still gets to be a larger and larger amount of stored data that has to be accessed fairly often... and even if storing on disk, imaging lots of people opening lots of vendors that have an "unlimited" space at the same time on the same box... that information will need to be in memory instead of on disk... so it can lead to an untenable amount of data in memory (imagine also all the other things that also have to be in memory... especially when a zone gets crowded)

Putting a cap on it just makes sense when you deal with the numbers we have to deal with.

I also could be absolutely wrong as to the reason

[Xenephex]

It's been a long, long time but if I remember correctly, the vendors never held an infinite number of items, even when some were hidden. I'm pretty sure there was still a limit, but I could be wrong about that.

I'm also pretty sure that they expanded the number of visible items on vendors when they made the change (or sometime afterwards). But someone with a better memory than mine will probably be able to state that more definitively.

[Ngreth Thergn]

It's been a long, long time but if I remember correctly, the vendors never held an infinite number of items, even when some were hidden. I'm pretty sure there was still a limit, but I could be wrong about that.

I'm also pretty sure that they expanded the number of visible items on vendors when they made the change (or sometime afterwards). But someone with a better memory than mine will probably be able to state that more definitively.

That may be it. It may have always been 80... and it showed 50 or some such smaller number and they just expanded it to 80.

[Bobaten]

Basically they wanted to be able to offer more "base stock" items on the vendors. They used to display 60 (I think) items, but have an additional 20 unseen slots for items. The change allowed for increased vendor (and bazaar trader) stock.

[Nolrog]

There was talk, a while back, about making the vendor stock rotating, so when they were full, and you sold something, the oldest item would drop off and your new item would replace it (/em waves at Tanker). That would make the vendors have an ever rotating stock of items, so you could continue to visit them and perhaps get lucky.

I don't know if they ever made any inroads to that, bit I'm guessing they looked at it and found it to be too much code time to change (code time is always at a premium.)

[Ngreth Thergn]

We just have felt other matters have priority.

Also we considered only keeping items flagged as quest or tradeskill, everything else (cash loot mostly) just gets deleted when sold.

[KyrosKrane]

I remember discussing this with Absor at a Fan Faire back in 2003 or 2004. He was the tradeskill dev at the time. He claimed that vendors had always shown 80 slots but kept some stock under the table. However, I'm absolutely positive that player tests showed that vendors stored exactly 80 items while displaying 60. This being the secretive old days, he didn't elaborate much, let alone discuss memory leaks.

[Ngreth Thergn]

I remember discussing this with Absor at a Fan Faire back in 2003 or 2004. He was the tradeskill dev at the time. He claimed that vendors had always shown 80 slots but kept some stock under the table. However, I'm absolutely positive that player tests showed that vendors stored exactly 80 items while displaying 60. This being the secretive old days, he didn't elaborate much, let alone discuss memory leaks.

Since it is the past we will probably really have a confirmed answer. I am now expecting it was always 80, but only showed 60... but who knows for sure.