God I hate Dead Vendors

All good ideas. The vendor towns already exist and have probably sprung up as a work around to this issue.

There hasn't been a lot of call for "if you haven't logged in in 90 days your vendor goes to the bank" but I would advocate for that.

• It's not hurting them for it to go to the bank, by 90 days the vendor is empty of anything that is going to sell
• It's actually doing damage to their lot and neighborhood to leave it so long, as people stop checking it and eventually the surrounding area out of frustration
• It's damaging the game, one of the big features at the moment is player vendors, make people dislike shopping in an area and that area is no longer visited

 

The game would be a better place if after a certain amount of player "inactivity" - everything just drops into your bank and the lot is available. Regardless of tax free or not. Just my .02. IDOC UO etc. Bring it back.....let active players run the sandbox...not dead ones.....or else the box is dead...

 

I love that you said you started to 'date' your vendors as well. That was really cute even if it was a typo, or maybe it was and maybe it wasn't My vendor is not my type *sighs* but perhaps when we can customize them he will be

 

Brightening and darkening vendors? Tooltips with idle notices? Last activity dates. Seriously guys... Sometimes I think people view this as more like a Usenet browser or chat room than a game.

How about just having vendors bark out what they're selling randomly from their list of wares for sale. "Sapphires for 200 gold!" "Chairs for 50 gold!" Or even without the sales value, something like "Sapphires!" "Rubies!" "Diamonds!" Then they could also if necessary bark out things like "New items for sale!" or "New items this week!" based on player activity with the vendor. This would all be managed by the game automatically.

Personally, I would have liked to see a bit more realism around vendors, which would have helped, too. What I mean is for instance, lets say vendors required a bed in a house and some sales counter or cart, that they'd go to on a schedule. When they would go to their counter, it would fill with visual representations of what they were selling, so you wouldn't even have to talk to them to find out. A vendor selling armor would fill the top of the counter with armor, as if he was taking it out of storage and displaying it for sale.

 

Unless I've missed something recently, this is how it works; however, the larger the lot, the longer they can be inactive without being evicted.

 

Tax free they can AFK forever though right?

 

No, taxed get booted after failing to pay taxes; tax free get booted after so much time not visiting the lot as far as I know. I think it starts at 3 months for row lots (someone feel free to correct me here).

 

Depending on when the lot deed was purchased. I've seen really old original taxfree lot deeds give up to 399 days. So that is a hint to how old the lot deed is. Like newly minted coins, there is a difference depending on purchase date or minted date

 

LOL. What can I say, he's always there for me, never argues or leaves, and is a great listener. A bit on the quiet side though.

 

No, you just have to log in to the game to reset the timers on your tax free lots. I think other players can reset the timer if they move or update something in the lot (if they have permissions) but I've never tested that.

 

LOL; if you click on my vendor link in my sig, you can see that I have active roleplay with mine (yes, very sad, I know).

 

Uhm?
This is how it is already working.
The default is 120 days of inactivity and it all goes to bank.

Check out the Player Instructions.

This is why there is such a brisk 'sell the lot' market. If you double click a claim sign/stone then when it expires.

We have at least three players who has this as part of their business. When it expires they will be there to claim it.

 

I will actually be interested to see what the lot distribution looks like in a year.

The reason the inactivity hasn't set in yet is the high proportion of high pledge tiers who have longer timeout on their tax free deeds than the default - or so I seem to recall.

 

So they log in, log out. Now another 120 days go by where their vendor has ruby's for sale for 1500g apiece, because they don't give a damn (or even know) what it is doing to the other players. Other players get frustrated and stop shopping in an area, other vendors get frustrated because the players aren't shopping, and now the town dies.

Also, some peoples claims are over a year. So you are going to have 1500g rubies on that vendor for over a year, maybe multiple years if they logged in once during that time.

And meanwhile, players went through thousands of time and checked that same vendor and had their time wasted. These guys are really dead weight at the moment, when we're all trying to swim.

 

I can just imagine the amount of Spam filling up my journal(not to mention the screen) with Ads for everything under the sun!

 

Another point on the lot claims, I don't believe that the long claims hurts us very much. They got their house up, it sits, no harm no foul. We've got empty spots cropping up anyway, so generally there are places to place in most places.

But dead vendors negatively impact other players, and have the ability to do it many times a day, for months and years.

 

Dunno...even on public vendors I see outrageous prices on items. Don't think there is much of a way to stop people from Over/Under pricing items. They either figure it out or they don't. Maybe there could be a way for players to set a Block for vendors that have been inactive for certain amount of time. Like a Game option that allows you to click a box and select 'Don't show vendors inactive for: <player chosen days inactive field>'

 

You mean your log, not your journal? For your screen, you'd get as much as you get now unless you turn off nameplates while cruising through player housing, because players have been giving their vendors advertisements (and date stamps) as names. But would be much better to do this through barks than names, though, since it would be more immersive and give players better info. And then vendors can be given real names, and that could be encouraged by the devs by following the same name discovery rules that quest NPCs have.

 

It's not overpricing that is a problem, it's stagnation. That ruby has been overpriced since August. Eventually it frustrates shoppers because when half of the vendors have the same thing (or nothing, quite a few have been totally cleared out) listed they eventually say "screw it, I'm not shopping there anymore."

Well, overpricing IS a problem, as it's what made me only check the PV in OH, almost never the surrounding vendors. But active players can change their ways at any point, can get together and do some advertising that they've entered the competitive price arena, etc.

Dead vendors just stand there and get eyeballs that would be better served looking at a vendor for someone who still plays.

 

"Dead" anything will kill a MMO hard and fast. 120 days is sorta silly. Nerf it. UO was 5 days? And that was before broad band, cell phones and social media....and we all survived LOL

This game needs people playing. Bad. Right now it's pretty much the same 100 people selling things back and forth to one another? Create some sort of constant land rush due to inactivity and I think it would motivate a lot of people to log in and play.