Does inventory have to always popup on NPC merchants?

It feels kind of awkward that your inventory pops up when you talk to an NPC merchant. It's not really required since selling items to a merchant is done through their trade window. This seems like leftover code from when selling items required you to drag and drop from your own inventory?

 

it doesn't do that if you have skip checked
settings > interface > skip conversations with merchants

 

but then you can't talk to quest-merchants

 

yep. there's a tradeoff there.

 

That's not a very good trade off IMHO. I don't see any reason why it should open up at all, or merchants shouldn't be quest givers. Seems like that shouldn't be a hard fix (says the non programmer guy).

Thanks for the info though on the interface settings. I wouldn't have run across it otherwise.

 

You can "skip conversation with merchants" and it won't happen. When this was new, I wasn't happy with it, but the reason is that much of the UI is disabled when the NPC chat window is up, in particular the "i" key. I still have no idea when you would need to have an inventory window (since the vendor sale window has a pane for your inventory anyhow), but it was apparently needed for some situations with merchant chat turned on, and was done as a response to those folks complaining.