Merchant Mining

[sarsnick]

After doing some quick tests on an empty merchant confirming that it was not just me I need to bring up the the fact that the merchants are not mechanically accurate of how buy, sell, and show items to the player. Mainly, the way it is implemented now disallows the tradeskill-favoring ability of merchant mining.

To explain merchant mining, it is best to imagine a merchant only showing you the 30 topmost items, or on-the-counter, and the rest of it's inventory it doesn't show you being consider under-the-counter

In live, you would be able to tell if a merchant had a certain item under the counter by selling a test item of what I was looking for. Let's say, in this case, it is a High Quality Bearskin.

I would go to commons and be shown 30 with-quantity items which are things that players sold (I will forget the exception of the very rare cases a merchant spawns with a finite amount of items). It is all junk, but I could check to see if there were any HQ Bearskins under-the-counter by selling a bearskin. You do this by buying a single item to bring the count to 29 visible and then sell the bearskin. This leads to two results.

The bearskin appears as the 30th item: This means the skin you sold was the first bearskin the merchant attained to it's inventory and it has no more; you buy it back.

The bearskin disappears: The merchant had, somewhere under-the-counter, at least one bearskin already and has stacked your sold skin with it. You would then "mine" into the merchant buying all the cheap stuff and reopening the view to buy even more junk. Do this until you see the HQ Bearskins and now you have got back your test skin along with the skins that it stacked with.


The merchant view is based on a very strict FIFO stack (from what I can see) which, in general, the old game did EXCEPT when selling something the vendor did not have any of where it show you stuff you sold it right away if there was a free on-the-counter slot in your current view. The old game reset all the time so this under-the-counter inventory usually never was populated except for the popular ones (outside dungeons, that lady in the next room over from banker lady in highkeep) or newbie vendors. I think the reason the developers did this was if you accidently sold an item you did not want to sell you would be able to by it right back as long as you didn't close the merchant window.

To the developers: Man, I can just imagine implementing a dynamic view like this will be super rough and I apologize. The other thing is the weird nature P1999 where this would help tradeskills immensely but would tank the prices of the things they sell (handmade backpacks for sure) in the end but it would help people recharge items even on a crammed vendor.



As prove merchant mining was a thing here is an EQtraders article (http://www.eqtraders.com/articles/article_page.php?article=g145&menustr=040010000000) I used back in the day to get an idea what it was. Note that Paineel merchants don't use this logic.

Thanks for a great game and the vast attention to detail!

[loramin]

pretty sure you will have to buy everything over 30 items to start seeing his under the counter stock

the item you want will definitley not bump to the first available slot it goes by the time in which it was sold

It sounds like you're describing current P99 behavior, which is what OP is saying is wrong .

OP I think you put this in the wrong place. I don't know why they keep these Velious bug forums around to confuse people, but Velious development is done, so all bugs should go in the main "bugs" forum.

P.S. I would not just trust EQTraders, because it's based on Live EQ, which has changed. I think your bug will be better received if you can use something like the Wayback Machine to find information about merchant mining from a source that's from 1999-2001.

[sarsnick]

It sounds like you're describing current P99 behavior, which is what OP is saying is wrong .

OP I think you put this in the wrong place. I don't know why they keep these Velious bug forums around to confuse people, but Velious development is done, so all bugs should go in the main "bugs" forum.

P.S. I would not just trust EQTraders, because it's based on Live EQ, which has changed. I think your bug will be better received if you can use something like the Wayback Machine to find information about merchant mining from a source that's from 1999-2001.

Sorry I am new to the forum and I saw the rule on the bug forum to put merchant problems here. I wanted to be a good poster! I will repost when I can find something about it elsewhere.

[Aalderon Crystafire]

The bearskin disappears: The merchant had, somewhere under-the-counter, at least one bearskin already and has stacked your sold skin with it. You would then "mine" into the merchant buying all the cheap stuff and reopening the view to buy even more junk. Do this until you see the HQ Bearskins and now you have got back your test skin along with the skins that it stacked with.



I don't understand - this is already how it works on P99. Vendor mining is already a thing -- I do it all the time for my faction-questing. The 'in-the-know' folks that do this for tradeskilling always leave 1-2 left of whatever item it is they need so that more can 'grow'. Sometimes I would even compel the vendor to kill themselves to reset their inventory and plant the 'seeds' of whatever I was trying to get on their first page... I call it vendor gardening.

[sarsnick]

I don't understand - this is already how it works on P99. Vendor mining is already a thing -- I do it all the time for my faction-questing. The 'in-the-know' folks that do this for tradeskilling always leave 1-2 left of whatever item it is they need so that more can 'grow'. Sometimes I would even compel the vendor to kill themselves to reset their inventory and plant the 'seeds' of whatever I was trying to get on their first page... I call it vendor gardening.

Your method is just the first page thing which the name suggests. It is vulnerable to a random person coming by and taking it all. If you want to find a certain thing that might be on the vendor and not buried within it's inventory, you need to buy it out.

Read the part of my post that tells of the way you can tell if a vendor has an item or not. That is the main diff and not how it works (as someone else has already pointed out)

Killing vendors ? And kill the supply? Harsh dude lol

[Diogene]

Sarsnick got it right. The way he described things is not how it works here on p99. You cant guess what is under the counter before buying a bunch of crap.
I dont know if it classic or not but that would be truly awesome for tradeskillers.

[Rygar]

I have found in era evidence supporting sarsnick's claims to how merchant-diving should work (I think his link showed a created date of 2003). Not sure if possible with Titanium client, but here you are...

Merchant-Diving Explanation (5/10/01): (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/alt.games.everquest/%22merchant$20diving%22|sort:date/alt.games.everquest/reKYLyuSZCg/a-chGrTpqSUJ)
I've pulled 40 silks out of them before, and that was before I knew about the merchant-diving technique to get stuff that was off the bottom of the inventory list.
Do you mean buying the junk at the end of the list to get more things to pop higher or some other trick?
Sort of.

You will need one (1) of the items that you're looking for.

What you do is find something in the visible inventory that you can easily
deplete, either because it's cheap, or because you think there aren't that
many in stock, and buy them all. This leaves an open spot in the merchant's
inventory.

Then sell the thing that you're looking for (spider silk, HQ bear pelt,
rune of rupturing, whatever).

If the merchant has none in stock, it will appear in the open slot. Buy it
back and move on to the next merchant.

But if the merchant has some in stock, the open spot will remain empty,
because the thing you sold was placed with the existing inventory off the
bottom of the list.

Then you have to start depleting the merchant's inventory until the stuff
you're looking for pops up from the bottom.
Ahhh, that's a nice improvement on the way I'd been doing it - I
didn't know the "sell one and watch the slot" trick. I've been just
crossing my fingers and buying all the junk from a likely merchant,
and hoping for the best.

[loramin]

Sorry I am new to the forum and I saw the rule on the bug forum to put merchant problems here. I wanted to be a good poster! I will repost when I can find something about it elsewhere.

It is not at all your fault (Velious was released awhile ago but for some reason they still won't delete the Velious forums), but whatever you saw was probably also in a Velious forum (and thus incorrect). If you look at https://www.project1999.com/forums/showthread.php?t=19 (a sticky in the "real" bug forum) you'll see:

All bug reports should be posted here

As for ...

I have found in era evidence supporting sarsnick's claims to how merchant-diving should work (I think his link showed a created date of 2003). Not sure if possible with Titanium client, but here you are...


https://i.imgur.com/R71tzdM.gif

[Rygar]

I know you always tell people not to post here Loramin, but I do see Nilbog making updates based on bugs from this section, so it isn't necessarily a wasteland (I think your mention from Rogean was created before the Velious Beta section was created). I would argue that Velious is technically still in Beta, so maybe there is a goal to leave these open. In the end, I don't know what Nilbog prefers.

To your point though, merchant mining is not an issue specific to Velious, so I do agree it was better placed in the general Bug forum.

[loramin]

(I think your mention from Rogean was created before the Velious Beta section was created). I would argue that Velious is technically still in Beta, so maybe there is a goal to leave these open.

Rogean's post is definitely older (it's from 2009 and appears to be the 19th post ever made here), but I don't think Velious is still in beta. There was a very clear beta period when Velious wasn't on Blue, but instead had its own server, and you could literally "beta buff" yourself on that server. These forums were added when that sever was released, but now that it's gone I think it's safe to say that the beta period is too.

In the end, I don't know what Nilbog prefers.

Ultimately I think this is the issue. Everyone wants to post stuff in the most helpful and accessible way possible for the devs, but it's just unclear what that is. They could fix that by either ...


eliminating the Velious forums (seems best if they just want a single "funnel" of incoming bugs)
renaming the Velious forums and eliminating the "Bugs" forum (seems best if they want bugs sorted by major category)
using stickied posts in all relevant forums to make it clear that Velious-related bugs go in the Velious forums, and the rest go in the normal forums (seems best if Velious bugs are so different they're worth separating)

[Rygar]

I don't think Velious is still in beta.

Well, I meant technically, as in I'm viewing Blue server as an extended working Beta... it is not yet the classic museum piece it strives to be. I feel like Velious was added to the Beta.

I really don't know what defines a Beta, or if there are Beta 2.0 things or whatever.

[Aalderon Crystafire]

Your method is just the first page thing which the name suggests. It is vulnerable to a random person coming by and taking it all. If you want to find a certain thing that might be on the vendor and not buried within it's inventory, you need to buy it out.

Read the part of my post that tells of the way you can tell if a vendor has an item or not. That is the main diff and not how it works (as someone else has already pointed out)

Killing vendors ? And kill the supply? Harsh dude lol

Ah, ok I re-read your post. It's not that merchant-mining doesn't work here -- it does. It's that there is a missing mechanic where you could 'test' to see if the vendor had the item by clearing out one of his slots and before closing the shop window -- which would just put a new 30th item in his slot -- sell him one of the items you are looking for.

As for items being on the first page it as always worked for me here since most of the items I am after are items no one cares about ... since they are for newbie quests/factioning and unlike bone chips don't give great XP. The killing of the vendors is just so I can secure one of those items on page 1 so they can accumulate -- it works.

It would be nice to see the mechanic you mentioned implemented though.

[Rygar]

Keep in mind you are vendor gardening with an unclassic 40 item purchase window, should be 30