Not Knowing What I Sold is Hurting Trade

[Kourage]

How am I supposed to know what is selling and what to make more of when half of my sales have a generic uninformative message?

 

I craft a lot of items that are only different in which class they are for and their stats, and I list them for the same price. For example, I make several Armoring 22s, Commando, Reflex, Skill, Guardian, etc. When someone buys all of the Commando Armoring, I need to make more to list on the GTN because odds are, there's no more available.

 

What you have here is the equivalent of making Home Depot employees take a manual inventory everyday because they can't track what they've sold. Way too time consuming.

 

I'm a hero. Crafting isn't heroic you say. Well guess what? Doing inventory and checking the GTN listings isn't heroic either. This issue has gone on way too long and you have not even commented on it.

[Sengar]

It's even worse when you sell items for other people. My wife makes artificing items for me to sell (she hates the GTN), and I don't know which items she sold when this bug occurs. Makes it hard to give her share to her.

[JRastenn]

Not a perfect solution but you could try selling them for slightly different amounts. For example, Commando armoring for 10,001, Reflex for 10,002, etc. That way you can tell what you sold even if the notification doesn't list the name, and you're not significantly messing with your pricing scheme.

[downface]

Not a perfect solution but you could try selling them for slightly different amounts. For example, Commando armoring for 10,001, Reflex for 10,002, etc. That way you can tell what you sold even if the notification doesn't list the name, and you're not significantly messing with your pricing scheme.

 

This would not help much. You are still required to do a bit of math to figure out what the selling price was. The bugged messages give absolutely no specific info at all. The only price info you get is the amount of credits you receive which is the selling price + (deposit - fee). It is easy to get an idea what might have sold by glancing at that number, but if you are only differentiating by a credit or two you will never figure it out for certain in a reasonable amount of time with just that information.

[Kourage]

Time to do my heroic inventory count.

[Sithhelmet]

This only occurs for me when there's a server shutdown (maintenance, patch, steroid injection for the hamsters, etc.) The aforementioned price laddering is how I manage, but luckily most of my current auctions are for a spectrum of heavy/medium armors and it's easier to search my auctions by sorting by level or price and seeing what's missing. This is one reason I stopped selling mods/armorings (the other is the 50 limit and having to go through the list on an alt THEN making/mailing and reposting...) I broke down and found an old steno pad so now I have a list of items in ink and use pencil marks to mark what needs to be replaced.

 

Mods and stuff that are the same price I found easier to pick through by sorting by name, if that helps.

[GnatB]

Yep, anything put up pre-patch that is sold post-patch has no name in the e-mail. I suspect it's some safe guard in case the object is modified or something trying to find the name doesn't crash the game.

 

That being said, yeah. Annoying as heck. Best bet if it's *that* annoying is to try to time your sales so they expire during the downtime.

 

Additionally, from the crewskill window, you can drag the crafting button from the top area to a quickslot. Open the GTN, close the inventory, then open the crafting window.

 

That way you can compare what you have for sale vs. what you can make at the same time.

[scootle]

Yep, anything put up pre-patch that is sold post-patch has no name in the e-mail. I suspect it's some safe guard in case the object is modified or something trying to find the name doesn't crash the game.

 

That being said, yeah. Annoying as heck. Best bet if it's *that* annoying is to try to time your sales so they expire during the downtime.

 

Additionally, from the crewskill window, you can drag the crafting button from the top area to a quickslot. Open the GTN, close the inventory, then open the crafting window.

 

That way you can compare what you have for sale vs. what you can make at the same time.

 

yeah this seems to happen every week to anything you post prior to the maintenance that is sold after maintenance. it's annoying, but not exactly game-breaking, imho.

[Relith]

severs came down this week tuesday/wednesday/thursday at the very least (if memory serves), making this week one of the more annoying ones with regards to this problem. I always kind of thought it was annoying, but now, even moreso.

[Khayoss]

This happens to me all the time, not just on server downtimes. If I sell 20 items overnight, when I wake up in the morning usually 5-10 of them are generic messages. I've had it happen on sales while I was logged into the game as well. It is a major pain in the arse for me because I constantly have right at my max 50 items on the GTN.

 

I have to keep a spreadsheet open on the other monitor and make lists of items missing from my GTN lists in order to keep my stock current.

 

And when the game does get the info right it doesn't include the complete name of a crafted item, so I still have to track down which one sold in some cases where I sell multiple variations of the same thing.

 

The whole thing absolutely sucks if you ask me. When selling, the GTN needs to remember what you sold that item for last time and for how much so you don't have to set your price every time. It needs to let you sell more stuff at once - 50 isn't enough. It needs to let you put items up for a longer period of time too... maybe up to a week.

 

When buying, you need to be able to search by item name without filtering first. You need to be able to filter by slot or stat - searching for new armour is cruel and unusual punishment right now. Whoever thought putting ALL armours in one big pool to sift through would be a good idea was a *******. And that "Usable by me, companion" etc. filter is absolutely useless. I can use all medium armour, that doesn't mean I want to! I just want stuff with the specific stats I am looking for and I don't want to browse through 17 pages of crap to find out there's nothing that fits my search criteria.

 

The GTN in this game would have been great in a game launched in 1999. In a game made here and now it's absolutely shocking how useless it is.

[Kourage]

Well I posted this yesterday, Saturday, after receiving a bunch of payments with no information. I had to of put the auctions up Wed night, Thurs morning, or Friday. There was a patch then? Edited March 18, 2012 by Kourage

[Sithhelmet]

Yes, servers were brought down Thursday around noon for 1/2 hour to alter something on the server hardware itself "to make the upcoming free trial weekend go more smoothly" whatever that means.

 

I got the 15 minute warning about the time I finished posting the unmarked returns of items I put up Tuesday morning before the emergency fix to the Imperial Fleet multi-phases and kicking players to character select.

[Kourage]

Well then, they oughta fix it so it doesn't erase the info since they take them down so iften.

[XaddaX]

The whole gtn interface is pretty weak imo. I don't remember WoW's being bad, and coming from CoH the auction house interface left nothing to wonder about. You knew all about supply and demand for every item going through.

 

Being the latest gen mmo, I expected a lot more than what we have.

[downface]

Yeah well, EA realized that you can't continually raise the bar. So they just lowered it. A lot.

[Orizuru]

I won't call my idea a solution, but it is a work-around.

 

Create a spreadsheet of the items you list on the GTN. Check the GTN daily and mark the spreadsheet to indicate which items are still listed.

 

At the end of each day, the items left unmarked on the spreadsheet are the ones that sold.

 

It's a bit of work, but the data produced would be sound and accurate as long as you remain diligent and keep the spreadsheet updated every time you create new auctions.

[scootle]

You can also just code your auctions with the last two digits or something as a specific item so you know personally what each sold amount indicates. I know several people who do mass auctions seem to price things at weird numbers... likely for this reason.

 

Use your brain if this is a big deal. The "feature" exists for a reason within the game engine it seems to prevent problems within the DB after a maintenance.

 

I don't even recall if WoW told you in mail what was sold or not from auction proceeds... it's been so long!

[Joonbeams]

Yep, anything put up pre-patch that is sold post-patch has no name in the e-mail. .

 

Good pickup. This is happening to me.

[Kourage]

I won't call my idea a solution, but it is a work-around.

 

Create a spreadsheet of the items you list on the GTN. Check the GTN daily and mark the spreadsheet to indicate which items are still listed.

 

At the end of each day, the items left unmarked on the spreadsheet are the ones that sold.

 

It's a bit of work, but the data produced would be sound and accurate as long as you remain diligent and keep the spreadsheet updated every time you create new auctions.

 

 

Man that's a lot of work for almost no reward. I can just do dailies or sell raw materials for more credits.

[Elderhound]

Haha i like how someone said the system looks like it was from 1999, Maybe we should go back a little farther in time because this trade system blows. Edited March 22, 2012 by Elderhound

[Carbonated]

Heres what I do, I click the loot all button in the mailbox so i dont read any of them, then I go to gtn look at whats left up there from me and restock whats missing.

 

reading the gtn is same as reading your mail.

[Erevan_Kindelar]

I have been using a spreadsheet since my SWG days - initially I did it as a live exercise in Excel spreadsheet setup, and it grew quite a bit - sale volumes, material cost, profit & loss, profit per hour, etc.

When I moved into EVE, the spreadsheet was rejigged and significantly expanded, and now with SWTOR it has come over and been significantly simplified.

But that is what I still use, and the "workflow" is to check the email to see how many items have sold, check GTN to see what is left, and check the spreadsheet to see what is missing (and then increment the sales figures for the sold items).

For sure, it is more complex than is required for SWTOR, but the process is embedded into my gametime and takes 4-5 minutes. It also gives me a few pointers about what items I should make - high margin stuff that sells slowly or low margin high volume items that sell quickly.

[Spero-Mcgee]

Heres what I do, I click the loot all button in the mailbox so i dont read any of them, then I go to gtn look at whats left up there from me and restock whats missing.

 

reading the gtn is same as reading your mail.

 

The idea behind reading it up is so you know what of your items sell the best, sell the most and what kinds of amounts are considered reasonable by your ptential buyers.

When you know this, you can immediately start crafting and restocking these items, to keep a steady profit. Because just randomly crafting stuff and putting them on the GTN and then not selling any would mean a loss of credits due to deposit fees.

And this adds up if you try and sell several kinds of things and it might also be troublesome, because there could be the risk that you get undercut.

So the workaround and making a spreadsheet like a poster mentioned before is very smart thinking and is certainly the way I would go about it if I were to GTN regularly.