Offline Selling
 

Ask SOE #33

Very interesting.

That's pretty cool.

I've been waiting and hoping that this would be put back in the game "officially" since they introduced the room vault. When it was originally put in game, you could sell from the vault (at least while you were in your room). I was very heartbroken when they removed the ability the next patch. All I can say is I'm anxiously awaiting to see the little note in the daily patch messages that tell us it's available again. :nana: :nana: :nana: :nana: :nana: :nana:

sorry to sound stupid, but i havent played in a while, do we currently have a room vault and just cant sell from it?

Correct. You can store things there . As it is now It's really just extra bank slots.

I am also looking forward to this change. My current problem is that with the daily reboot I'm never selling while I'm at work. If I come home from work and adventure late into the night. I am only selling for a few hours in the middle of the night until the reboot when not many people are on. Selling from the vault while I'm adventuring will help with this. As to the offline selling part I'm wondering if when the servers come back online each day, will they remember that your store was open and resume selling from it.

This has got to cause prices to drop as there will be more items listed and more competition.

LORD that is going to be nice..!!!



By the way.. Uh.. don't Collect all belongings from your house, and then relinquish owner ship, and expect to get your bank vaults! LOL..

I found this out, I moved rooms, and realized my bank vaults were no place to be found. I had to go back and purchase access to my house again, and there they were patiently waiting to be picked up!

I bugged it.

What I don't understand is the nightly server reboots. I play MMOGs so that I have a persistent virtual world available. EQ1 and PlanetSide provide this and it really rubs me the wrong way that EQ2 doesn't.

I too hope this new feature will resume selling when the servers come back up.

Quib

I am not sure where you are located Quib but the only daily resets I get are typically 6:00 AM Central Time US.
I though that they were restarting the servers at nigth also, but after doing some research I discovered it was my ISP doing maintenance work during the thier work window. They would take the ISP servers down for just a few seconds to minutes and boot my connection. So would wake in the morning to find myself booted from game with bags full of goodies and no coin! DOH!

I'm pacific time, maybe an hour's drive from SOE's base of operations. The 6 A.M. (or whenever it is exactly) reset is what I find unacceptable; the world isn't persistent if all enemies are reset every morning and all players kicked.

Quib

Well, I don't think you will find anyone that doesn't agree it's annoying as hell! I thought maybe you were getting additional re-sets in the evenings.

I would be much happier if they could just do it perhaps one time, maybe mid week, in the early AM. Daily is a bit much though! Especially when it doesn't appear anything at all was changed.

EDIT:

And let me also just take a moment to say that I was TERRIFIED that the quick search market window would be broken last patch. I can live without every other mod I have, but THAT ONE, is THE most important one.

The daily server reset is very annoying, and I don't believe Sony has actually owned up to why it's every day? I would suspect that there may be some issues with the Server Hardware, or possibly the server code, so restarting the servers each day ensures that there are not any catastrophic or less severe failures that could cause the game to be partially or completely unplayable. This reset also let's Sony do these Mini-Patches or Hot Fixes every day if nessessary. By allowing us to Offline sell out of our House Vault is an awesome Idea as many times I have Vendor mode up when the Server Reset is done :).

I think you are onto the issue here. There is some program issue. Server or client side that is easier to just reboot daily than to fix. I have a feeling it has something to do with memory leak.

I was not trying to pin point the issue here, no matter how annoying the reboots are the only way it affects me is when I have my Vendor up. I keep a running list of daily changes on my Guild's Website. One thing is for sure, they just restart the servers on Sunday's, I have yet to see an patch / updated pushed live on a Sunday.

The ability no matter how limited to do off-line selling is a boon for those that are affected by the Server Reboots.

SOE has been doing the daily server restarts with Star Wars Galaxies for almost 2 years now. They're reasoning is for server maintenance / preventive maintenance / upgrades / etc. :rolleyes:

The reality of the reboots is more likely to be the updates for the station-players site updates than for patches... as most of the time there is not any kind of patch message to state any reason for the patch.... and no signifigant files in the patch...

SWG, CoH, Shadowbane. First three other games that come to mind for daily reboots. I'm sure most companies will be using this behaviour in future games. Daily reboots ensure stability, decrease the daily lag, and help prevent failures which could result in rollbacks. It's also the perfect time to apply patchs and fixes, and do maintenance. You're just going to have to accept this as the way things go.

Oh yeah, the restart time was chosen because it has the fewest amount of active players. They're trying to bother the least amount of people they can with it. You can't please everyone.

Not really, I don't have any special attachment to MMOGs as a genre; I simply won't pick up any new ones if they have this flaw which directly defies the persistent environment concept.

I "like" EQ2 enough to keep it despite this problem, but it's mostly because I have an all-access pass and I LOVE the EQ2MAP project that I continue playing. Originally I thought the daily resets were temporary and were gonna go away.

Has anyone dug up any additional info about this topic posted by SOE devs at the EQ2 forums?

Quib

Quib,

I'll try and see what I can find on the Official Forums, I remember one of the GM's when we had those Massive Patch / Extended Downtime senarios state to someone in the Chat (maxed out at 1000 users of course), that they physically restart the actual Server Boxes and not just their server code. The GM would not go into any additional details than that. And also back when they had the 40+ Hour downtime several months back, they did state that some of the servers would be experiencing additional downtime while they got the Hardware Vendor out to look at some issues.

Eep, shoulda been more clear. I really appreciate that info Humudce, but I meant had anyone heard anything else about the offline trader mode. When I said "this topic" I had meant the main topic of the thread, not my stupid little rant.

Quib

Thread hijack time...

I think sony does it just to save money. Its much cheaper to not have to support all those traders while people are at work. The downtime is what...30 minutes? Do it at 12:00 CST then...still few people online and that way people dont get screwed.

Make it so you can pick which server you want to play on based on its daily BS reset time so you dont get screwed being booted off constantly.

Who knows if it will matter at all after this online selling deal...but I really hope it is perpetually selling and not something I have to update constantly.

Also - can I sell from all my characters houses vaults? if so that will mean 100% of the market will be on at all times and prices will drop HUGELY.

Test Patch notes and discussions at Dev Tracker say that you can only sell from one of your character's vaults at a time. Once you activate selling on the second vault the first one is turned off.

And they are going to be making all quest rewards No Trade . retrocatively to existing items as well to reduce the number of items up for sale. This was taken from a State of the Union Post from CAO.

From the test notes
 

Pro: Offline selling will continue even after the ridiculous daily reboot.

Con: Offline selling will only be active for one 24-hour period. As in, you have to re-enter your house every 24 hours to keep it going.

Currently items located in bags stored in your house vault will not stay on the market when the seller logs off. They will remain for sale if the seller is outside his or her home, until the point of logging out.

This issue will be addressed in a fix scheduled for tomorrow morning, at which point the offline component will work as stated in the update notes. We apologize for the inconvenience.

===========================
Moorgard
EverQuest II Community Guy

Daily server reboots in the middle of primetime is a bad thing :(

There was a huge backlash from Australian and New Zealand players when they changed the reboot time from 7am to 4am PST (especially as daylight saving times were changing too moving it further into our primetime)

On an up note, SOE's VP of Customer Service (George Scotto) has said that this should be changing in a couple of weeks (see this thread: Australian: update on down time - news from SOE )

well.. as per reading the patch notes today, it said that server restart won't affect offline selling, you'll justh ave to visit your inn or house or whatever within the next 24 hours. I'm nots ure about when there isn't a server restart though... I didn't see anything about having to visit it then.

Actually, as I understood the patch notes, all you have to do is log in, not visit your house.
However, to grab the coin the sales generated and to see the sales log, you will have to visit your house. If you sold anything while out of the house, coin will be automatically transferred to your inventory and the sales log will pop up.

Lower prices in the economy resulting from more sellers: Hell yeah! I just picked up an artisan refining 4 for 25s, because I was too slow to snatch the one for 20s. Cheapest I had seen before was 2g, cheapest I had heard of 1g.

Makes me wince for the 10g+ I spent on books before this influx of goods, but that's far outweighed by the "Yay! I can refine rares and it only cost me 25s!" factor. :)

actually i found a variation shortly after servers came up.... I loged in an set mine up and i was in the enchanted lands fighting when i heard the coin sound and recieved 1g from a Enchanted Blue Maple Leaf that sold... i do not know if this is the way is supposto work SoE says your supposto get a window when you enter your house with a list of stuff you sold and a collect your coin buttion on the screen but i recieved neather (but i did go reopen the store window from the bulitenboard and it showed in the sales log that i sold it)

Would be a bit annoying for those who sell many items since you can't buy a stack from player merchant, recently while I was in merch mode I got spammed by catching! sound x 40 : it was someone who was buying 2 stack of antonica bean :p

I don't doubt that's what it's doing, but I am not sure that is the way they intended it to work, Having the Coin Sound everytime you sell something out of your vault will become very annoying very fast indeed. I would feedback the issue and maybe they can fix it in one of their daily patches. Or give us an option to shut off the Coin sound when in the field.

Eh I don't think so. But it's just like mail, you get the icon in your effects window. I think that's super cool ;) If they would just fix the stack problem/issue/whatever-you-wanna-call-it, then I think it would be great to have the sound when you sell something.