TC Vendor Intricacy...

[Orbit Storm]

So.. this is a curious question I'd like to pose for everyone..

What exactly is the length of the required restock period for TC vendors?

I've had one disappear on me before, for not being restocked after 10 days.. seems fair.. and considering I wasn't online much for those 10 days, I was unable to restock it.

But now, after 2, maybe 3 days maximum.. I've had another deleted!? I tend to have slumgum on my vendor on a constant basis, as it seems to sell pretty well. But I'm not going to harvest minimal amounts of it, on a daily basis just to restock my vendor daily..

Okay.. 5k a week isn't much.. lets face it, we kill a bally and we got our weekly vendor rental. But to go through all the hassle of setting it up, organizing, etc.. then to have it removed after 2-3 days.. seriously?

I think I'm going to open up an 18x18 vendor rental for 1/2 the price as TC with a monthly lease.. then people don't need to fear having their vendors deleted.
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After a quick survey.. i found eighteen (18) vendors in TC with the same 2-3 day ratio as I had, still there..

And another 23 vendors with 4-13 day ratio.. and 3 at 20, 21, and 23 days!?

There's a total of 76 possible vendors, with 44 of them having 2 days or more between the most recent restock and today.. that's roughly 58%.. On top of it.. of those 44 vendors.. some of them have just empty packs, some with 1 or 2 packs with an item a piece.. and 1 or 2 with nothing at all.

Now I get that if your bag is empty.. it should be removed.. but when it's only been 2-3 days, versus someone with a vendor.. with the most recent restock being in december...

Heck, there's some vendors owned by the same person..

I think a real "policy" of some sort needs to be written.. because there are some vendors that have questionable status (i.e. superfluous items, a bunch of empty bags, or just a few random mediocre items), and I've had mine removed twice now..

I won't even begin to offer my theory on this.. intriguing issue..
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And yes I paged.. but oddly enough.. there is apparently no staff on. I'm typically a night owl (shard time, wise) and so.. I rarely see staff online. But it's kinda unbecoming to be on mid-day (shard time), and see that still there isn't any staff "available". Hopefully, with these new staff positions, some of this vacancy will be taken care of..

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Oh.. and one last thing.. if anyone recognizes their vendor as being part of the 58%.. I hope I didn't offend you.. I apologize if I have..

I'm not trying to mark any one person, but after having 2 of my vendors deleted.. while some others have remained there for even longer than both of mine put together, without a restock, it tends to.. worry me.. if you get where I'm going..

[+Colibri]

There's several ways for your vendor to disapear:

- Not enough gold on him to fund his daily salary. Here i suggest having more than just 1 day's worth on it.. I'd suggest you keep at least 50k on him (well, depending on what he's selling)

- Not enough gold in your bank when it renews, or the contract set to not renew. You can check the contract by single-clicking your vendor and selecting "contract options" i think, here make sure that it's set to Renew.

- If your vendor has gone long without a restock, it will be moved to Excelsior Halls (it's listed under Custom on the world teleporter). The time of non-restocking on your vendor required to be moved, varies... Depending on how busy the place is (whether it's summer or winter, more or less players), I move out vendors that haven't been restocked from anywhere between 10-20 days. I might go below 10 days, to 7 perhaps. The problem is that even with so many spaces at the town center, when cleaning out those that haven't been restocked for 10 days and more, there's still only 3-4 vendors that get moved out.

I do this manually every week or two.


As for a single player owning multiple vendors, I am aware of that... but I need to first script this rule into the chair in and then also make myself a tool that will reveal vendors that are of the same players.

If anyone has more vendors than allowed, then all but one will be released (with it's items going back to your bank box). It's cheating, and therefor you won't have a say in which vendor you want to keep.

[Orbit Storm]

Well I appreciate your duly response, +Colibri. To make a few things clear, however:

-I had plenty of gold on my vendor. I had well over 5k on the vendor, and received a bank check from him, nothing else. His daily charge couldn't have been much more than a hundred gold or so, therefore he was well paid in advance.

-I currently have over 500k in raw gold in my bank.. at least 200k when he disappeared. And the contract was most definitely set to renew, in fact.. I never even opened that gump up. Not after the last time.

-Just like the last 2 times.. he was not moved to Excelsior Halls. One of which you're familiar with, which was by my mistake. However, this time and the other, was something entirely different.
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As for vendor removal by you.. by my rather accurate account, there's 13 vendors with 7-13 days since last restock.. and 3 with even longer periods. Ironically enough, after taking heavy precautions to ensure my vendor had ample money and that his contract was set to renew.. mine appears to have been the only one removed. As I mentioned above, I never even opened the contract gump, so I am 110% certain, that there are only 2 possibilities as to what happened to my vendor:

1) Staff involvement..

or..

2) Some sort of glitch, maybe similar to the glitch that was happening before..

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The wonderful thing is, there wasn't any merchandise on my vendor to have to worry about replacing. So my real issue here is; is why do my vendors keep magically disappearing without any involvement from me? (excluding the time I somehow mistakenly set my contract to not renew).

[+Colibri]

You can PM me with a time and date of when you last saw your vendor there, and also tell me where in TC it was (so i wont have to go check all of them until i find yours)

Finding why a vendor disapeared is somewhat easier because I have a much better idea knowing what backups to look at. So I am willing to look into this situation to check if there might be a bug.

[Rune]

5k on vendor as fee isnt much,id say its much safer to give him about 100-200k
atleast that rules out the possibility that they poof because of fee
thats what ive done in my time here and my vendor have allways been safe

[Orbit Storm]

Well I appreciate your duly response, +Colibri. To make a few things clear, however:

-I had plenty of gold on my vendor. I had well over 5k on the vendor, and received a bank check from him, nothing else. His daily charge couldn't have been much more than a hundred gold or so, therefore he was well paid in advance.

-I currently have over 500k in raw gold in my bank.. at least 200k when he disappeared. And the contract was most definitely set to renew, in fact.. I never even opened that gump up. Not after the last time.

-Just like the last 2 times.. he was not moved to Excelsior Halls. One of which you're familiar with, which was by my mistake. However, this time and the other, was something entirely different.
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As for vendor removal by you.. by my rather accurate account, there's 13 vendors with 7-13 days since last restock.. and 3 with even longer periods. Ironically enough, after taking heavy precautions to ensure my vendor had ample money and that his contract was set to renew.. mine appears to have been the only one removed. As I mentioned above, I never even opened the contract gump, so I am 110% certain, that there are only 2 possibilities as to what happened to my vendor:

1) Staff involvement..

or..

2) Some sort of glitch, maybe similar to the glitch that was happening before..

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The wonderful thing is, there wasn't any merchandise on my vendor to have to worry about replacing. So my real issue here is; is why do my vendors keep magically disappearing without any involvement from me? (excluding the time I somehow mistakenly set my contract to not renew).

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In response to your most recent post Colibri.. To be honest with you.. I think the last time I saw my vendor would have been last night or the night before. I don't keep track of these things, simply because I figured with not even opening the contract gump, and keeping enough gold for a months supply on him, he'd be fine.. So it's entirely up to you if you decide to look. As I said, I took all the precautions so I'm positive that its server side/staff related.. who knows. After 2 poofs and 1 goof on my part, I'm pretty well fed up with bothering with TC vendors. At least if my house vendors disappear after the same precautions were taken, then I know somethings up..

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Rune-
5k may not be much.. but as I said, he was completely empty as I hadn't restocked him. Today I was going to throw some PS's, slumgum, and some other assorted items on him but he was gone when I recalled in. So, in short.. he had plenty of gold on him. I left at least a month's supply of gold and made sure I had raw gold in my bank for contract fees..