Merchant Mining

[sarsnick]

After doing some quick tests on an empty merchant confirming that it was not just me I need to bring up the the fact that the merchants are not mechanically accurate of how buy, sell, and show items to the player. Mainly, the way it is implemented now disallows the tradeskill-favoring ability of merchant mining.

To explain merchant mining, it is best to imagine a merchant only showing you the 30 topmost items, or on-the-counter, and the rest of it's inventory it doesn't show you being consider under-the-counter

In live, you would be able to tell if a merchant had a certain item under the counter by selling a test item of what I was looking for. Let's say, in this case, it is a High Quality Bearskin.

I would go to commons and be shown 30 with-quantity items which are things that players sold (I will forget the exception of the very rare cases a merchant spawns with a finite amount of items). It is all junk, but I could check to see if there were any HQ Bearskins under-the-counter by selling a bearskin. You do this by buying a single item to bring the count to 29 visible and then sell the bearskin. This leads to two results.

The bearskin appears as the 30th item: This means the skin you sold was the first bearskin the merchant attained to it's inventory and it has no more; you buy it back.

The bearskin disappears: The merchant had, somewhere under-the-counter, at least one bearskin already and has stacked your sold skin with it. You would then "mine" into the merchant buying all the cheap stuff and reopening the view to buy even more junk. Do this until you see the HQ Bearskins and now you have got back your test skin along with the skins that it stacked with.


The merchant view is based on a very strict FIFO stack (from what I can see) which, in general, the old game did EXCEPT when selling something the vendor did not have any of where it show you stuff you sold it right away if there was a free on-the-counter slot in your current view. The old game reset all the time so this under-the-counter inventory usually never was populated except for the popular ones (outside dungeons, that lady in the next room over from banker lady in highkeep) or newbie vendors. I think the reason the developers did this was if you accidently sold an item you did not want to sell you would be able to by it right back as long as you didn't close the merchant window.

To the developers: Man, I can just imagine implementing a dynamic view like this will be super rough and I apologize. The other thing is the weird nature P1999 where this would help tradeskills immensely but would tank the prices of the things they sell (handmade backpacks for sure) in the end but it would help people recharge items even on a crammed vendor.



As prove merchant mining was a thing here is an EQtraders article I used back in the day to get an idea what it was. Note that Paineel merchants don't use this logic.

Thanks for a great game and the vast attention to detail!