So I noticed that with the (new?) Fall Store Permit, you can sell 24 items instead of the traditional 16. While this is wonderful, permits run the risk of disconnection (losing your spot/missing out on sales if you're idle at the time) and hinder your ability to play that character since it has to be AFK in order to have the store permit up. I suggest making/altering one of the hired merchants to allow for 24, or even 36 items to be sold. Obviously the price of these merchants would need to reflect that ability just how the Fall Permit is more expensive than the normal store permit. This does a few things: reduces the need for people to use multiple characters/purchase multiple hired merchants, reduces the amount of stores in the FM (more convenient for browsing and for finding a good spot) and creates a more convenient way to sell over 16 items. With this said, I am unsure if this is possible (I would assume so due to the fact that it is possible for permits), or if it would require an excessive amount of time/work to achieve, but if it is possible without being unrealistically challenging to implement, I cannot see any downside to including it.
I don't see the downside to this idea, but more of a "why?". Risk of disconnection doesn't seem to be a strong justification imo.
Most people who engage in merchanting utilize multiple hired merchants due to the large volume of items they have to sell. I, for example, have to buy 4 hired merchants total (4 separate characters) and they are all full. If the item cap were, say, doubled, I would only have to buy two for the same amount of items. That is a lot more practical. It is the same reason that the Fall Permit was created--to allow players to sell more items in one store opposed to having to open multiple. Having it limited to only permits doesn't really make sense--why NOT have both? People obviously prefer Hired Merchants for their practicality opposed to having a character locked into a FM spot to sell their items. The risk of disconnection, especially on this server where it is notoriously unstable, is absolutely a valid reason to prefer hired merchants over a traditional store permit. You would have to be against hired merchants entirely for that stance to make any sense, not just hired merchants with more slots in them. Further, it will create more FM store openings as some players such as myself who would otherwise take up multiple spots will not be doing so. e.g. I would only be taking up 2 spots opposed to 4. This allows other players to potentially fill those spots that I would have otherwise been in. tl;dr: why? the same reason hired merchants were created to begin with. practicality and convenience. this suggestion simply adds to that and makes them that much more efficient.
Who has enough energy to scroll down a list of 48 items? I would get bored after 16. Honestly thought, it's a good idea I guess. But are you sure that so many people are actually using multiple stores? Personally, I just have a few valuable items and then I fill out the rest with trash I find in my inventory.
Appreciate your input! Some people do, especially those who merchant and/or compete for the bottom 6 rooms. I'm nowhere near a top merchant and I have 4 stores filled with items that are of value (not 5-10m junk). I even see people in CH2, FM22 and such with multiple stores/merchants set up, so it does extend beyond those who are invested in the "higher tier" FMs as well. While I do understand it may not benefit everybody, that can apply to things such as the Fall Permit or Hired Merchants entirely--not everybody utilizes them, or has interest in using them, but I don't see that as a reason to prevent those who would use them/benefit from them from having access to it.
Some permits having more slots than merchants is intended to give Player Shops some sort of bonus over Merchants - as you are utilising a character rather than being able to play the character while being able to sell items. The comment about the server being notoriously bad for disconnections is quite extraordinary... We have probably the most stable source code, as well as some of the best servers and DDoS protection (which hasn't let through any attacks in as long as I can remember). I'd honestly bet money that we are the most stable server currently around. Player Shops have a limit of 24 items (16 normally, but some permits let you put 24 items in). The client has a fixed-length array of items that gets created when the player shop UI is created. That length is 24, and this cannot be easily changed, if at all. Therefore the idea about increasing the limit above 24 is not very feasible.
I did not say that it isn't better than many of the other servers, if not most/all of them. However, it isn't anywhere near as stable as one would need to keep a permit open from SC to SC without ever experiencing disconnections. We see people getting disconnected in large amounts despite their internet not going out on a routine basis, and being in the FM frequently myself, I've seen first-hand players with permits open in the bottom 6 FMs disconnect in bulk numerous times. Lag is also quite common, which can result in disconnections. A permit just isn't practical for somebody looking to retain a high demand FM spot through the week(s) on multiple characters. I do agree that the DDoS protection has seemed very good, and I don't think that the disconnections are source code related either. The Russian servers though..... My suggestion was for a hired merchant to be raised to 24 or 36 items (and the NX cost to reflect that), but since you said that 24 is the cap, couldn't it still be set at that? Currently there are no merchants that go above a 16 item limit. 24 would still be better than nothing at all. I understand that your initial goal in implementing the permits with greater capacity was to incentivize their use or provide a benefit that cannot be attained with hired merchants, but realistically, players who have 24+ items to sell are seldom going to be using a store permit to begin with. How many of these fall permits are even active in the FM right now in comparison to how many hired merchants are? Ultimately, a 24 slot hired merchant would get FAR more use than a 24 slot permit does, and would benefit far more players than the permits do.
In that case, the word notorious was probably a bad choice of words then, as that basically means we are famous for being unstable which is something I strongly disagree with. It is entirely possible that regional disconnects seem more prevalent simply due to us having a larger pool of players compared to other servers, but that (in most cases) can't really be helped. Connection stability is and will always be our highest priority, as it should be for an online game like this, and we put a ton of effort into ensuring that we can provide the best connection that we can. The Russian servers you speak of do not actually have any affect on the channel servers since some backend changes were made a couple of weeks ago, so whatever problems they might have caused should no longer be an issue. If there are still any issues whatsoever since that change, then we want to know about it, and we want to fix it. But for now I believe there haven't been any issues caused, and latency has reduced substantially for most of the playerbase due to the new network routing. As for hired merchants being set at 24, yes they could be, but then that entirely removes the bonus slots that come with certain Player Shops. Charging more could offset this, but the cost would need to be fairly substantial to keep the merchants which allow fewer slots to still be used, did you have any prices in mind that you are thinking of? I don't have numbers regarding player merchants to merchants, and checking that via the database would be fairly time consuming to do if we wanted an accurate result. I definitely don't disagree that Merchants outnumber Player Shops by a large margin, however making Merchants better than they currently are would only increase that margin. So if disconnections are the crux of the issue, then that is the issue that should be focussed on, rather than working around the issue. But we of course need to be made aware about any issues so that we can look into them. So if you are experiencing issues (especially in the past couple of weeks and moving forward) then please let us know about it with as much detail as possible.
FWIW, I am routinely standing in a store on my character for >12 hours at a time. Can't speak to whether it helps sales or not but I stick out from the crowd for sure.
I've done it too! And that's the way I always did in GMS too because I couldn't afford anything else with the little NX I earned from selling stuff in the "TRADE"-thing. I've done it here in Royals too. +1 for nostalgia. However something tells me it's not healthy (for the computer) to stay on all days 'round.
I'd like to see 24 slot merchants. I'd recommend pricing them at twice the price of normal merchants, so that the extra convenience is at a cost. Yay for NX sink! Could even consider having a system where you pay mesos to extend it to give a mesos sink. I agree with this! The server doesn't do random DC's anymore, the only DC's are major ones that affect everybody and that prevent anybody from connecting or graphical glitches in some bosses (another issue entirely). Full server outages are very rare. I've never seen such a rock solid Maplestory server. It has clearly been coded well, handling minor failures gracefully and recovering rather than sending out an SoS to make everything crash in a dramatic ball of fire. It's one of my favourite things about this server. Some ISP's might be throttling maplestory traffic, I had that problem back in the GMS days with my ISP. That's not the fault of MapleRoyals though. I suspect a lot of people are getting that issue. Computers also try to go into power saving modes when left for a long time. It's very difficult to disable every last little bit of this.
Pricing wise I think you should not make it cost anything less than twice that of a normal 16 item merchant. Having slots for 8 extra items is a HUGE convenience upgrade. Fall store permit cost 80% more than the standard regular store permit. Given the hired merchant also protects you from disconnects and you don't need to leave your computer on, I think you need to charge at MINIMUM 100% more. So for the 24 item merchants should cost at LEAST: 4k 1day 14k 7 day 24k 14 day
I agree, i have 3 merchants and it gets annoying, especially with all these candies that need to be sold
more slots on stores please, i always sell so many things and i cant leave the computer on all night...
Bump, this would still be a great addition for many of us with a high volume of sales/items. The disconnections aspect isn’t much of an issue any longer (go Kevin go), but I still feel only allowing permits to hold more items is a poor approach and there is zero benefit to the server by “incentivizing” permit use over hired merchants. Nobody gains anything because a permit is used over a merchant, not the player nor the server, so it shouldn’t be seen as a bad thing if less players use permits because it doesn’t make a difference. It would only bring an upside to have more people using hired merchants as they are a greater NX sink than permits are.
