Traders - How do you refill your vendors? (Poll and survey)

Correct - it is one of my easy fixes with minimum dev time for decent effect. A split a pile into stacks feature.

Just wanted to confirm first that I'm not being a stupid oldtimer who missed something obvious like an alt-shift command somewhere.

 

Its currently a complete pita to trade on vendors. I've been doing it consistently for a long time now and i wish they just gave us some better options. Vlad spent a ton of time and effort putting together a proposal for the devs to read over that would greatly improve trading in this game. It was sent directly to the devs and a lot of traders like me backed him on it. Haven't heard much of a response about it from them, but i assume it's something they plan to update at some point.

Im starting to get burned out. Also my wife just delivered twins 2 weeks ago so im having trouble finding the time to do the 80 million clicks it takes to keep things restocked. If they just implemented a few of the key ideas he wrote up in his proposal it would do wonders for trading in this game!

 

That's what I meant. The problem for large sellers is the result of compounding a few different problems, some of which only affect large sellers. But the first problem at the root of it affects us all, and improving that would help large sellers as well as the rest of us. Then it would be easier afterward to isolate and evaluate what problems remained.

 

There is no fix that I can think of for split drag that helps with listing, unless you specify and "Always split to X size" option or something. Which is obviously not super helpful, as you'll always be having to change that default value, or base everything off that one specific stack size.

You could improve the clunkiness of it by automatically putting the cursor in the split drag dialog, and having Enter work, but you're still going to need to split drag specific amounts.

That's why we need more intelligent UI design. Sell partial stacks, which vastly cuts down on the number of listings needed. Astronomically.

Save vendor state and refill a previous item with a single click, that removes the need to create the same listing over and over and over and over and over.

Scroll through cells as you would a spreadsheet, so you can edit stack sizes, prices, etc, in a worldwide accepted method.

/snark But it's not like the economy is an important part of the game. Certainly not important enough to put developer time into our primary window of such unimportance. Totally not important and they should work on higher priority items. Make stack splitting better, that should be good for the next three or so years./endsnark[/QUOTE]

 

Agreed.
If we now do 10 clicks to perform X task, then if a cheap & short dev task can reduce that to 6 clicks, then that is a 40% reduction in time, compounded with product volume.
So my thought was to suggest things that would take less than a dev day with a minimum of bug vectors that aims at reducing such unnecessary clicks. Which is why I just wanted to check first if people do it differently than I do.
Where if those suggestions could reduce the overall time to refill per item by 20-50% then that is a real victory compared to waiting and waiting for a major overhaul that gets pushed and pushed. Not that such an overhaul isn't necessary but rather that it is unlikely given the track record of the project.

You are conflating two different things here.

Yes it is very frustrating that they don't put in the effort to make vendors easy to use. Like the buy part of pile listing. (And the quest journal ui, and the inventory ui, and the dialog ui, and the pot ui, and the ..... etcetcetc). It is also frustrating that great suggestions with broad player recognition isn't picked up by the devs. Fully agreed.

However reducing clicks and time waste is a noble goal in itself regardless of the outcome of larger overhauls. If done correctly then such features/improvements would still have value in its own context and would still have value even if we get the spreadsheet vendor.

For instance the split pile function we have now is very very clunky. Regardless of its other uses then making that efficient or fit-for-purpose is a good thing in its own right.
So it is enough that we recognize that sometimes players need to split piles and that the current split pile function isn't fit-for-purpose. That is all that is needed for us to wish to improve that.


Then if one could get three such time reducers in then that wouldn't remove the pain but it would reduce it somewhat. Like taking a headache pill when you have a broken arm. It is still an improvement and totally worth it even if it doesn't solve the root cause.



To take an outside of gaming example, Windows multi-rename function sucks and for the longest time they didn't have one. Where multi-renaming with prefix suffix and numbering in old hacks like Total Commander is a breeze because they recognized the value of small mini features making small tasks simpler.

 

How would you redo split stack?

 

I still think the easiest solution (read: simplest, not sure about implementation effort) would be to just add as many as you want to sell, set a price per each, and let buyers buy what they will.
It would work exactly like NPC vendors work.
The only argument I ever heard against this was this edge case about someone wanting to list little stacks with slightly different prices to identify the cutoff point when people would stop buying. A kind of pricing research, if you will. And there's no reason you couldn't still manually do that, if you wanted to - so it'd be win win.

I'd like to open up the vendor and press a "refill" button next to a designated listing and have it pull all the ones out of my inventory and add to the stock. That'd be fun.

I get that we're looking for low-effort quick-fixes to band-aid the problem, but I dunno, I'd like to dream big here. If we're going to overhaul fix it, lets FIX it, instead of just half measures. I would have absolutely no problem if they spent an entire release or 3 overhauling the vendor UI - it'd be worth it.

 

They could always sell a smaller stack with the different price. So having a large stack with a higher price. Then the smaller stack with a lower price.

Maybe?

I don't see a reason why it couldn't be done.

 

@Sentinel2
That's what I mean. There's no reason why you couldn't add another "line item" of the same item if you wanted to sell it in larger batches at a discount, or whatever. But you'd just have to manually add those, as you do now. I'm sure some people would want to do this to get the pulse of the market, and that's totally fine. For the rest of us, who are going to repeatedly sell / offload consumables at the same price every week, it would be nice to not have to go through the clickfest every time if we're not going to change anything and don't really care how many someone buys at once.

If I list 5000 teleport scrolls, and someone buys them all out ...FINE! I've made my money, and now I have a quest to go make more and restock it. More likely, people will buy 5 or 10 or however many they want (as they would from an NPC vendor) and I wouldn't have to mess with it nearly as often.

 

Very much agreed, that would be lovely.

But when I look back on the track record of vendor changes then...

I mean we got player vendors back in hmm R19 something, then it was buy orders in R26.
The first promise to look into the buy X out of a listed pile was a telethon around R34, but when R41 rolled by it was deemed low prio.
Same thing with the sell container with multiple pieces in it, like a set of armor parts in a bag. That I think even made it into a quarterly at one point, then low prio later on.
The thing where vendor sits down only happened because Starr and Richard themselves wanted a change since new players complained about the cloned vendors everywhere with no inventory. Where the implementation we got wasn't really what players had requested.

We did get the vendor skins though, that was a big improvement. That was tied to store sales though so made sense from a financial point of view.

etc

I think that @Vladamir Begemot 's list that he made was great and had a huge backing of traders.
What did that result in? Did he even get a response?


So even while I would prefer all of those things, then the track record shows that those who ask for small things have a much higher hit rate. Hence I will hedge my efforts by supporting things like the Save state and spreadsheet etc which I think would be great for the game and the in game economy, but also myself add some quick fixes on the side with value in themselves as a compliment to those larger requests.
Kinda like spreading your bets in roulette or stocks.

 

Some things did happen, you can check at the bottom in the spoiler. I might need to touch it up again, haven't looked in a while since the UI redo I did basically took all of it and merged it into a visual design doc.

After a few changes went the wrong way I didn't want non-merchants coding the changes without a ton of information at their fingertips. In other words, a one line request is not enough information for the developers to make informed decisions.

But it's always easy to find that thread: http://tinyurl.com/sotavendorrequests

 

But your COTO exchange network is a valuable public service. It saved my butt numerous times.
Great public works are always time consuming. Please don't forfeit and give up on this endeavor.

-Dai

 

I've got to say the biggest annoyance for me is the sell/buy windows and the fact that the tab key does not work in them. The biggest problem is having to continually switch my right hand back and forth with the mouse to click on tiny targets, especially if I want to enter numbers on the keypad. I've tried to suggest that here in the feedback forums a few times before, all with the usual complete lack of response. And it's a feature that should be doable in just an hour or two of work. Most of the needed changes can be cribbed from the login screen, which does support the tab key.

1: start the window with the first input field selected
2: if there is more than one input field, the tab key should switch to the next one (if there is only one input field, making it do a "select all" would be appreciated)

That's it, and this would make things so much less annoying.

And of course I would love to see a "selling partial stacks" feature that I can wait until episode 2 for. It would be nice if you could edit an already listed stack to add more identical items from your inventory, or to change the unit price in response to market changes.

 

And they wouldn't even need to keep track of it on the server, just have the client remember the last price used. The big win is selling more than one of the same item, not what you sold it for yesterday. But it would need to somehow account for you typing in the quantity first for stack items. Or just screw that and fill in the last quantity entered too! If I'm selling stacks of 100, I will probably want to sell more than one stack of 100. If I switch to stacks of 1000, then I'll probably keep doing 1000s.
But supporting the purchase of partial stacks would still be the biggest win.

This.

Ugh. They should have made it so it simply bottomed out at 10 letters or so, to keep it from looking stupid with very short names.

Just put up two stacks at different unit prices. I can tell that buyers currently get confused when you put up 10 at one price and 10 at another (to account for sudden price changes, usually with COTOs), it would be less confusing if they saw only two line items at different unit prices. (the unit price would already be the one displayed, and it saves ME from having to use a calculator to deal with 2x and 5x stack prices!)

Getting tired of restocking vendors is why I took a 2-month "vacation" from the game back in July/August. I just couldn't take it anymore. I mean, I was still opening the mail and recording what I sold for later restocking, but it was simply too much of a chore to actually restock.