Easier Shopping

[JFKH]

I personally have no problem using the @WS command, but it seems like there are some people who do have issues with it.

IE showing the wrong item or not showing the item at all.

My suggestions is why doesn't heRo have a Ragial type feature? There are other servers with it just curious why not here.

Also why not have a dedicated vend map? It could just be a blank flat map where people have to vend, free to warp to.

The only problem I see is an empty prontera.

Side question, what happened to green baby doll? What is the combo now (if any) without it? Quah-Nomag Gloves + Kauvra Boots + ? = -50,000,000z (this is a joke pls laff)

[The Roger]

I personally have no problem using the @WS command, but it seems like there are some people who do have issues with it.
IE showing the wrong item or not showing the item at all.

Items's names must be written perfectly and in their fullness or @ws wont find them. So abbreviations doesnt work. Example: "@ws peco peco egg" doesnt work, while "@ws peco peco egg card" works. "@ws Green" doesnt, "@ws Green babydoll" works. "@ws green baby doll" doesnt work because its not spelled correctly.
the response "Nobody is selling it now." means you spelled it correctly and there arent in vending.
"Not found item with this name" means you spelled it wrong.

My suggestions is why doesn't heRo have a Ragial type feature? There are other servers with it just curious why not here.

Market activity and population is too scarce to get reliable data. Also it requires a site for it and need to be developed and mantained; a lot of work for basically nothing useful out of it.

Also why not have a dedicated vend map? It could just be a blank flat map where people have to vend, free to warp to.

The only problem I see is an empty prontera.

It is a valid suggestion, with sense behind it; but prontera is like the central hub, where many people gather and afk, so its natural to also have shops there. To me happens from time to time to receive questions if i have to S/T> certain items, which i do and those are displayed on my vendors (which i put them easily recognizable and all are called Roger-something), with each vendor ordered by a number so one can go through the lot of them keeping easy track of which they looked and who still not, that tells me that even if the shops are under their nose, 10 steps away from prontera's spawn point, they dont open and look at them.
You can well imagine if the shops were even in a different map!

Side question, what happened to green baby doll? What is the combo now (if any) without it? Quah-Nomag Gloves + Kauvra Boots + ? = -50,000,000z (this is a joke pls laff)

I dont even understand the joke, for what am i supposed to laugh? :o

[GM-Ayu]

Building on top of Roger's response as I think his answer matches GM's viewpoint for the most part.

Regarding Dedicated Vending Map:

It was definitely under consideration but ultimately it was discarded as "not that useful" in solving any actual problems. If we have a vending map, the spots closest to the entry point will be first filled, just like how it is for Prontera right now. It is just as hard to find shops and you'll still have to use commands to match the coordinate of where you are, vs coordinate of what whosell is telling you. We thought about enforcing some sort of organization of what you can vend in which "row" of the vend map, but then it limits people who may not want to make that many vending merchants, and prevents newer players who can't setup dedicated shops of "only consumables" or "only cards" or "only equipment" and they may end up not vending altogether.

To us, it seems like it just moves the problem from Pront to another map and doesn't solve anything, so we decided to just let it be.


As for Green Babydoll, it still forms the same combo with the same pieces, but the combo itself has recently (as in, few months ago) changed. You can view the info here:
http://www.pandoraonline.net/heRO_wiki/i...rcus_Gears

As for price of related items, it's not really GM's place to put limit on item vend price. For most part, market takes care of itself: good deals will be gone first, and unwanted deals will be left to sit in vend until the end of time/when autovend expires.



If heRO ever wants to change the rules about vending, it'll be targeting those annoying troll shops vending red herbs, potatoes and other misc items that's not used in anything and serve as nothing but cast heRO in a bad light as if it's using merches to boost population count. It's technically not breaking any rules so GMs can't do anything about them, but it's infuriating to see them every time a few "particular players" set them up for no good reason.

[The Roger]

The troll/fake vendors unfortunately are really hard to counter in an automatic way. Becase the system will certainly hit alot of false positives; this is a job to be done manually using the human dicernment by a Moderator tasked to periodically go through all the vendors and evaluate them. And i dont think we have one to do this.
And the other option of an automated system will be damn huge and still not perfect. Needs to contain all the items associated to a highest minimum "fair" price preset into it, scanning all the autotraders periodically like, once a day? Hmm once a day seems reasonable. And log out those that has certain prices indisputably high for that particular item.
Example: red herb set price in the script at 2k max. First, its a fixed cap price set arbitrarily from outside the market, and thats not really good always. Plus the trolls would just put Red Herb single vendors priced at 1999 Z.
But for red herb its easy, what about other obscure, niche, items, that maybe one day will spike for some reasons unknown yet but could not be vended at higher price because there the script set lower?
Also, the main problem: is it really possible to build such system in first place? Are there some values able to read, like, are we technically able to retrieve the vended item's ID and relative set price for it on certain vending merchant character? I have no idea about this.
Since the population is small atm, the best route imho would be a human Market Moderator that goes around and logs out vendors not passing its evaluation of fairness. But then, Will he/she kick a vendor selling a piece of equipment at a really high price, but that "really high price" its subjective for him/her because he/she doesnt at that time know really and etirely the possible true utility of such "seemingly Overpriced" gear? Like, i can make 10 more vendors and display on them 12 green babydolls and 12 kauvras at 20M each. Currently sometimes one or two gets sold at 10m, so are those 12 vendors with items double the current price fair or are 10 troll vendors? How and who will or can judge that?
Its impossible in the abence of a fixed market, with a fixed list of all the items and fixed priced assigned to them, as reference. What if that list "lists" green babydoll at 2M zeny? I wont sell GBDs ever again! People will then always say "9-10m? but the suggested official price is 2m, you are trying to scam me! Sell it to me for 2m or nothing." Well, boy, it is you that needs this GBD so, cough up 10 mils or good bye.
Prices are usually obtained from: difficulty of obtaining, rarity in chance of obtaining, how much useful it is, how much strong it is, how many classes and builds can use it.... and, last but not the least, how easy is to farm raw zenies.
And the ability of farming zenies varies from player to player relative to mainly the gears they have, and minimally knowing where are the best places they can farm zeny.
So if the population is composed of generally players that can not really farm raw zenies efficiently (or obtaining them is fairly difficult), the Currency will have a high value and prices could be numeralically low.
If instead they are easy, the prices will be high because of the high inflation.
But also we can have high prices in low farming zenies environments, simply because theres scarcity of that good on the market.
People used to complain with me alot about "prices too high!" but its always subjective; high for you, not for others or for me.
Even more: prices should be higher than are now, just because if you can and know how to, farming zenies its not hard. Personally its what, 2 years or maybe even more, im not farming raw zeny with that only end goal, but if i want, just to bring an example, i can farm ~7M zeny/h. Without Beewings. If i really want i can pump up 45M a day.
And i dont do it. I wont do it. That'll help only at increasing the inflation more. And that kinda bad.
But the currency injection into the market is also regulated by the time players actually have or can invest into playing to farm raw zenies.
Because it doesnt matter if people CAN farm huge amounts of zenies: if they dont do it, the injection of currency into the economy will be low like the scenario in which making millions of zeny farming is hard.
Also items's prices are a mix of "how much time do i need to obtain the item directly, compared to how many zeny can i raise if i farm money for the same amount of time needed to directly obtain it?". For me, obtaining a GBD is easy, but doesnt mean i have discount it, because of the subjectiveness of the good: for many others its hard to directly obtain it so for them its value is higher. But killing monsters for small amounts of zenies its always easy so everybody can just repeat that process and one day raise the amount for the gbd.
I could go on rambling for longer but all this walltext to kinda provide some basis to my argument of "Why a regulated market on RO its a bad idea" and how difficult will it be to even attempt moderate it partially on the low side because nobody really knows whats the real price of an item.

[JFKH]

I see, I dunno it was a random conversation over main a couple days ago about vending and how it was difficult to find things.

About green baby doll, I actually get an error message saying this item is no longer in use and literally cannot equip it. So I assumed that the item and combo got changed or doesn't exist as well. Maybe a blue or red baby doll replaced it?

About troll merchants, I've come back for a couple months now and see the same people selling the same stuff and was under the impression that yes some of them are to inflate the current population numbers. I mean I get it, no one really wants to login and see like sub 100 player count even though its mostly merchants.

I also get people can sell at whatever price they want too. However, for people like me (people who left for a long time and come back) and new players who have no idea the value of things may get taken advantage of or mislead by vendor prices.

For example, a "tree root" gets vended at 5,000 it is an easy to farm and is vended so high sounds too good to be true. However, this is one of the charms of heRO is that you don't know what ETC items are used for in quests. I think in this case it isn't used for anything but a vendor sells at a high price anyways. At least these people tend to vend in specific spots which I now avoid since they will never actually vend anything of value.

It appears that there are a lot more newer players here these days. Maybe because its summer vacation but its nice to see more people online these days, even though it may never reach the numbers that I remember back in the day.

TLDR yes Roger regulated markets are bad!

[The Roger]

Also, a lot of Good Vendors even with good stuff in them has to stay vending for loooong time before seeing any sells, often. But at least those are recognizable by the good quality or utility items they are selling, its just theres no buyer or market for those at that moment.

PS:
In the past, GBD changed itemID so probably you have the old one. Contact a GM to have it replaced (try looking at its description: it should mention that).

[GM-Ciar]

About green baby doll, I actually get an error message saying this item is no longer in use and literally cannot equip it. So I assumed that the item and combo got changed or doesn't exist as well. Maybe a blue or red baby doll replaced it?

When you equip the item it specifically says that item ID is no longer in use and to contact a GM for a fix.