Merchants: Evidence merchants should be immune to charm

[Jimjam]

I've seen a few complaints about players charming merchants, and a few responses to those complaints that nobody remembers merchants being charmed back in the day.

I have found a couple of pieces of evidence that support the argument that merchants should not be able to be charmed, certainly by Velious at the very least.

The first piece of evidence I found was in the official patch notes:

Originally Posted by Patch note:

August 15, 2001 3:00 am
------------------------------

** Spell Changes **

- Restored "charmability" of most NPCs (merchants will remain
uncharmable) in Kael due to fix of combat AI bug listed bellow under
Miscellaneous Changes.

The above describes a bug that made all of Kael's NPCs uncharmable, it is noted merchants remain uncharmable after the fix. To me this implies merchants were not able to be charmed before this bug took place, and also generally across all of Norrath.

I have found collaborating evidence which suggest it is not exclusively the Kael merchants which are uncharmable, indeed it is a broader restriction:

Originally Posted by An Allakhazam comment

I know as an enchanter you can't charm vendor NPC or other npcs pets I do not dare to try other NPC as I like factions, on a PVP sever all factions help.

https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/...05886580282145

Individually these comments might be too circumstantial ("perhaps it was only Kael merchants that could not be charmed" and "the post is a year or so outside our timeframe"), but put together these quotes strongly suggest merchants should not be charmable at some point in our timeline, if not throughout.