Cleaning up the merchantlist table

[cavedude]

I know I couldn't do this, and that it can be done as that's how we get faction, loot, etc but I think the ultimate solution would be to create a script that compares our merchantlist to the information found on Allakhazam. This would not be exact as Ally may be missing or have wrong/outdated info but I certainly think it would give us a great idea of items that do not belong on vendors.

[eq4me]

I had a look in lucy.allakhazam.com and the itemid's from the eqemu item table(and thus 13th Floor) and lucy match. Strangely everquest.allakhazam.com has other item id's.
If you look close lucy lists merchants selling that item under "Drops from". Unfortunately the npc id's are not compatible but with a bit of time I could punch up a script that tries to match the name.
It would help if I could have a look at the currently used generation scripts and learn from them.

[eq4me]

I pondered If I could fill the merchant list from scratch but decided against it for now.

As a first step I will identify all not-for-sale items then I will see if Merchants are missing items they should have for sale.
Hopefully I will have the first step done tomorrow.

[eq4me]

Damn,

it seems that the sources I have used so far are quite incomplete. Uppon generating the list of items to be removed I detected quite some stuff that should be on vendors. Mostly tradeskill items but quite a few armorpieces eg. from shadowhaven. I fear I have to incorporate more sources.

Edit: Here are my preliminary results.

http://80.237.220.68/files/preliminary_list.txt

[site3op]

Something to ponder while cleaning up merchant lists...
I've been messing around with a necro on the LotR server (currently at around lvl 36.) The current merchant lists on this server are quite helpful to me in gaining spells. Quite a few necro spells are researched which means many "words" to collect. For one pet spell, I spent roughly 400 plat in combining words until I got lucky. Without this abundance of words spread across many vendors, I would have to wait for the particular drops.

So, a cleaned up vendor listing would mean a necro would go without many important spells for a long time. This could potentially kill any aspiring necro population on servers where populations are very low to begin with.

An alternative would be to create vendors for the various casters that have to research or gain their spells via raiding. I don't think many would even mind if the price is high on said spells...

I've had a couple drinks, so this may be slightly random and off topic...

[eq4me]

Originally Posted by site3op

Something to ponder while cleaning up merchant lists...
I've been messing around with a necro on the LotR server (currently at around lvl 36.) The current merchant lists on this server are quite helpful to me in gaining spells.
[...]
So, a cleaned up vendor listing would mean a necro would go without many important spells for a long time. This could potentially kill any aspiring necro population on servers where populations are very low to begin with.

All I want to provide is a baseline to build on. The first step is to be as close to EQLive as possible. Then we can customize for a low population. Right now we have a clutter of crappy to excellent items scattered over all vendors.
My first though would be to put all research only spells, some usefull tradeskill items and lowby armor and weapons on new vendors. I mean stuff that is usually given away or sold for a few pp on Live and is considered mandatory for any low level char.

[John Adams]

Originally Posted by site3op

An alternative would be to create vendors for the various casters that have to research or gain their spells via raiding. I don't think many would even mind if the price is high on said spells...

While I can agree that making things harder for people might cause them to lose interest, at the same time, we're talking about the base, core Emulator data here - not custom, low-pop servers. I personally believe it should be as live-like as possible - at the core - then each server op can add bots or merchants that provide anything lacking (like buff bots, or spell vendors).

Why even bother with Researching skill, then? Just put the Researchable spells on a vendor...

[eq4me]

I finally have enough data to compile a list of purchasable items.

http://80.237.220.68/files/allowed_vendor_items.txt

This should be enough for now to clean up the existing merchantlist table. Unfortunately I can not do this myself due to a lack of time in the next days.
Hopefully someone other has the time and uses this data to shrink the merchantlist table down. While simply grepping out all valid entrys should be done in a matter of minutes I guess you also have to recalculate the slot id for each vendor.
As soon as my time permits I will start to write scripts to generate the merchantlist table from scratch. On a first glance there are quite some merchants missing or the npc's are not flagged as such.

EDIT
Do the items in merchantlist_temp show up on the merchants? My understanding is that this table is dropped on an restart?
The loot_it seems to start at 10 and not 1 for each vendor.