Player Vendors

[Chrys Ellis]

I know we had player vendors on V1, and I thought that was a pretty great system, as it allowed us to make and sell items, but not have to spend all our time behind a counter as a sales clerk. 
  I know the vendors had problems, namely that too many people sold things to the player vendors, thus bogging down the server.  Was this the reason they were removed?  If so, what about simply not having it be possible to sell things to the player vendors, as with all the store merchants? 
  Or, to limit the number of player vendors, could it be required that they only work out of a shop? That is, as far as I can tell, shops can only be opened by owners of guildhalls, and it's a pretty long process before a shop can be opened.  The Orc Bashers are the only ones with a shop now, right?  Could shop owners be granted a persistent player vendor, as part of their store, with a monthly salary paid by the shop owners?

[ZeroVega]

  Honestly I remember the whole vendor system being buggy.
    Can't tell you how many times I heard Rufus say he payed his vendor for 200 days and came back a few hours later to find his clerk not selling because he "needed pay." Or how many times Tolinar lost his weapons cause his vendor "ran off with em." Or how often vendors started randomly swapping contents. Or how laggy the Merchant halls were.
    That's just what I remember anyhow.

[Chrys Ellis]

I do remember the vendor salaries being a bit buggy, too, but it was more than made up for by the fact that they were persistent, meaning things could be sold whether I was logged in or not.  Just wondering if the bugs were insurmountable.
    Xiao Lin

[EdTheKet]

Chrys Ellis - 8/16/2005 5:53 PM   Just wondering if the bugs were insurmountable.
   

  They were  It would require a complete rebuild from scratch.

[Talan Va'lash]

There have been some good suggestions on putting player vendors back IG, but I doubt its going to happen any time soon.

The player count (and number of chars on west at any given time) has gone up a lot lately, and anything that adds a substantial amount of lag is going to be felt sharply at high traffic times.

Also, a lot of things are being done by players to substitute for player vendors.  The leilon arms market on fridays is the most recent of these.  If people make an effort to make these player events work (by going to them to sell and buy things) I think they could really work out in a cool way, and a way thats a lot more RP driven than NPC player vendors.

-TV