Cleaning up the merchantlist table

eq4me · #1 01-10-2007, 01:57 AM

As most of you are aware there is lots of stuff on the merchants that is not supposed to be there. Mostly it is newby area crap stuff but there are quite a few good or rare items people had sold on EQLive when the zones merchant lists where grabbed.
With the low population of most Emu servers this is mostly not a bad thing to have some hard to forage/camp tradeskill items like spiderling silk and basic equipment like cloth/chain/bronze armor on the merchants but is is not ideal to have that scattered around like it is now. So I propose that we strip the merchants down to their original items and add basic but hard to come by items in an more controlled fashion.

To start the ball rolling I punched up a small script that reads out all available itemids on the merchantlist table(but not the temp table) and do some statistics on em. For now I checked what name in the items table the id matches. How many merchants have this item, how many mobs drop it and how many tradeskill recipes exist to create such an item. Please be aware that there is no checking if the mob, recipe or merchant actually exists or spawns

The list is based on the last PEQ release but should be mostly the same as peq-luclin-rc1 and Angelox's DB.

http://80.237.220.68/files/items_lis...hantlist_table

There are quite some entries and my first step would be to bulk strip all obviously not for sale items bevore going into details. On first glance there are some strange things like a recipe for Evil Eye Eyestalks. =)

Any help and comments would be appreciated.

EDIT: I am not 100% sure if the tradeskill recipes part of the statistic is right. I'll check this after work.

mwmdragon · #2 01-10-2007, 07:14 AM

This is exactly what i was refering to when I wrote this post. This would bring the database back from being a split of 3 DBs.

The post i am refering to ...

http://www.eqemulator.net/forums/sho...3&postcount=43

**cavedude** · #3 01-10-2007, 03:17 PM

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 This would not be exact as Ally may be missing or have wrong/outdated info but I certainly think it would give us a great idea of items that do not belong on vendors.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 · #4 01-10-2007, 07:48 PM

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 · #5 01-14-2007, 04:40 AM

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 · #6 01-15-2007, 11:14 AM

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