Vendor search is a broken feature in active need of repair.

Search 15 HCI. 15 DCI, +20 bushido. Get results. Search the exact same thing but swap the bushido out for LRC, search takes too long to complete. There's just no logic to this trash whatsoever. I guess I'm off to mouse through jewelry vendors by hand, this piece of crap game doesn't actually have a vendor search feature.

Believe EC vendor search drop down menu allows you to search on all three of those parameters without typing anything into the vendor search text box.  Think UO limited vendor search text box strings to just three terms.  For your type of search I usually use the drop down menu.  Agree vender search rarely works consistently two days in a row, but generally find using the drop-down menu to work pretty well for this kind of search.

• Equipment: Ring
• DCI any amount
• HCI any amount
• DI any amount

Merlin said:

I use Vendor Search dozens of times each day (sometimes hundreds!) - and I simply do not experience any of the problems of the OP...

Personally I've experience some hiccup and wtf moment... but try for example to go on ATL and search for good 30% talisman.. the only 30% talisman showing off; the vendor need to type it in text 30% in the description..

If u try to do very specific research using the in game tool; i can understand the OP problem.

Lord_Nythrax said:

Seriously, anyone else on Atlantic go try to search... say...

• Equipment: Ring
• DCI any amount
• HCI any amount
• DI any amount

And tell me whether it goes through or not. This times out 100% of the time for me.

Yep pretty much this. Tried 10 times searching this and then i add Swordsmanhip and it instantly pops up. Definitely some type of issue with this.

Yeah it's busted, it's screwed, it's non-functional. This isn't some trifling bug they can keep ignoring for eternity, this is a significant game system that just does not work.

On your search, UO does not look for 15 HCI.  It searches first for every 15 regardless of what letters precede or follow it.  Then it does the same thing for letter grouping HCL.  It does that for every letter or number grouping in your search string.  It’s a non intelligent primitive way of searching that is probably all that was available in the 90’s.  The drop down search menu in EC has the capability of limiting its search to 15 HCI.

Bro I'm not typing "15 HCI 15 DCI 20 DI" into the text box. I'm using the buttons. Also the guy above us just got the same negative result using the EC. Seriously WTF are you talking about?

Arnold7 said:

On your search, UO does not look for 15 HCI.  It searches first for every 15 regardless of what letters precede or follow it.  Then it does the same thing for letter grouping HCL.  It does that for every letter or number grouping in your search string.  It’s a non intelligent primitive way of searching that is probably all that was available in the 90’s.  The drop down search menu in EC has the capability of limiting its search to 15 HCI.

i also put nothing so it would show 0 in the search box (as in 0 dci) Same results. Nothing showed until I put a skill. There is definitely an issue 

Victim_Of_Siege just tried this search just like you have your’s setup except without the weapon skill on GL and it worked just fine.  Either they fixed it, or it’s simply one of the game’s quirks.  It worked without the word ring too.  If I typed in the word ring it also brought up splintering weapons.  I also tried using lower reagent cost instead of damage increase without the word ring, and it brought up rings and bracelets that met the criteria.  Really odd it works here but not there, but that is UO.

Lord_Nythrax said:

Yeah I hopped over to another shard and everything works okay there, presumably because the database of indexed items is so much smaller everywhere but Atlantic. It's possible that if searches were allowed to go on for longer before timing out, things would work on Atlantic too. It's also possible that if searches were allowed to grind on for ten minutes each, the volume of them would collapse the system. Who knows?

All I know is that this is a fat sack of crap. All I want is to search for gear using the game's interface for doing exactly that, but I'm not playing a professional piece of commercial software or anything. If I were playing one of those, the game's primary economic interface being utterly broken on its largest server would be a low-key emergency worthy of ramming through a fix for.

No, I'm playing Ultima Online, a semi-abandoned game with like maybe two actual programmers left. So I'm going to have to stink up the forum more or less indefinitely waiting for someone to eventually notice, hope they even possess the technical capacity to fix the problem at all, and then wait god knows how long for them to get around to it.

I miss search sites. At least they worked.

Can you mention Halloween contest winners every time you post 

Arnold7 said:

Victim_Of_Siege just tried this search just like you have your’s setup except without the weapon skill on GL and it worked just fine.  Either they fixed it, or it’s simply one of the game’s quirks.  It worked without the word ring too.  If I typed in the word ring it also brought up splintering weapons.  I also tried using lower reagent cost instead of damage increase without the word ring, and it brought up rings and bracelets that met the criteria.  Really odd it works here but not there, but that is UO.

It works fine everywhere except Atlantic. I'm assuming it's due to the large inventory of items for sale on Atlantic, making the Database time out as @Lord_Nythrax stated. It's just odd that searching it just as they stated it fails, but adding that skill quickly fixes it, likely due to there being less items with a skill but who knows.

Lord_Nythrax said:

*snip* It's possible that if searches were allowed to go on for longer before timing out, things would work on Atlantic too. *snip*

I do know that the search continues on past the point that you get the "failure message" Many times on Atlantic I have gotten the timeout message and then 2-5 minutes later i get the results i was searching for. so it last's longer than what it appears to, but not long enough to find that search you put in. at this point I'll just "It's Atlantic" and wait for the Devs to figure it out.

Victim_Of_Siege said:

at this point I'll just "It's Atlantic" and wait for the Devs to figure it out.

Lord_Nythrax said:

I miss search sites. At least they worked.

I don't.. how many time I spotted something good that was already sold (the site was refreshing every 4-6 hours) or bug items that would have been sold months ago.

It was brit bank, luna square or advertise vendor for me, mostly.

The site was good to know the value of things, more than anything, imo.


PS: for your last message.. I totally feel you but.. this is "the" day.. the dev team of 2 been very busy on NL.. but yeah.. even ATL with NL release going to be on ice for a couple of weeks/months... years? -.-
Your timing couldn't be worse.. the best we gonna have in 2024 on prod. is what a GM can do.. like vaping NPC's

I can confirm the VS for this specific search is broken. 

Even adding SS it timed out multiple times before i gave up and went about my day. 

Also confirm it's blazing fast on Origin.

Conclusion: VS cannot handle the sheer amount of sh!t for sale on Atlantic. 

KroDuK said:

Your timing couldn't be worse..

True enough, but now that they've given in on "let us use a real client" I have a lot of forum crank energy that's suddenly been freed up.

Lord_Nythrax said:

Victim_Of_Siege said:

at this point I'll just "It's Atlantic" and wait for the Devs to figure it out.

Not me, I'm the crankiest of forum cranks. I'm going to fart up the board about this until the team acknowledges that the game's primary tool for economic engagement is totally borked on its largest server, and tells us that they're planning to fix it with the high priority such a problem deserves.

I'm waiting to upgrade my gear, devs, make your game work.

Also give the Halloween contest winners some prizes already. Like a pumpkin that says "God whatever, just stop bothering me!" when you click on it. That'd be fun.

I get it, and support you in this endeavor. it is an issue that needs addressed.

Are were going after Boardsword studio bad design?

                                    

If they can't optimize their way out of this mess, they should just let it run longer. Have it throw up a minimized notification when it pops, which you can open to see the results. That way you can do other things while you wait without being suddenly blinded when the window pops up.

So anyway, it's still impossible to meaningfully search for jewelry or equipment on the game's most populated server. Maybe someone should look into that.

I can't even do simple 1 word searches on VS currently. I know the dev team is busy with NL and the new live event launch, but VS needs some love soon.

Yeah this isn't just "it's a little slow if you search too many properties" or "it times out now and then at peak times" or something. It's totally borked. People effectively can't shop jewelry or armor on Atlantic.

At least for the commodities and items that stack in general there should be a central exchange. It takes an absurd amount of time to search simple ingredients. A 16th century Italian merchant had an easier time buying commodities than i am in this game. A central exchange with bids and offers for non unique items should not be too diffucult even with the resources this game has.

Since there aren't search sites indexing Luna anymore and vendor search is broken on Atlantic, we're actually worse off in terms of shopping for armor and jewelry than we were before they added anything at all.

Just stinking up the forum some more because both myself and a friend of mine are trying to overhaul suits and it's a complete nightmare trying to make this thing work.

Lord_Nythrax said:

Since there aren't search sites indexing Luna anymore and vendor search is broken on Atlantic, we're actually worse off in terms of shopping for armor and jewelry than we were before they added anything at all.

I have wondered too why it takes such an incredibly long time to use vendor search on Atlantic.  I assume it’s the quantity of items it has to search for vs other shards where I have zero issues getting a prompt response.

I agree with much of this thread here.  

First - Vendor search is incredibly useful when it works. It has reduced the need to have a luna house for vendor sales and anywhere in UO you can have vendors and people can find your items.  

I do agree the searching is suspect especially on atlantic where they clearly don't have a technology that can handle the volume of items.  That volume of items is really not that much in data terms however.  My guess is the setup of these is very poorly implemented.  There are a lot of text string searching going on which is very slow in database terms.  It doesn't seem like they split out the items into different categories very well.  It really needs a re-implementation.  

If I were building search:

I would break all vendor items into several categories  :

1. Gear (Armor/Jewelry/Weapons)
2. Scrolls (Power/Alacrity/Trans)
   
3. Bods (bod books, bods for sale in books, etc)
   
4. Commodities (ingots, wood, jewels, bandies, etc and all commodity deeds to go with)
5. Other Items
   

When searching you select which of these categories you are searching for and each of these would have their own tables of items (as the mods and info is similar within those categories).  Most times you can separate the database down by selecting one of these categories.  I mean if you put 'Animal Taming' in you are usually after gear with Animal taming or scrolls for animal taming but not everything in the database with Animal Taming on the items.   

From there in the gear category Id have a column for every possible mod and index them so when you do a search on hit life leech - its hitting an index.  With an indexed DB results are super fast.  Across millions of items.  Super fast.  However, if you added the mods in one by one or have them in text string its going to be slower and more resource intensive to run.  

When you search and get results from things that are multiple quantity I would give an option to sort by 'per unit'.  Like trans scrolls or say commodity deeds of ingots - You can have a .5 magery deed for 500k and a 1.0 magery deed for 900k.   The .5 will always show cheaper at the top but you need the 500k/.5 = 100k/.1  and the other deed is 900k/1.0 = 90k/.1.  Its like the grocery store labels where they show the 'per ounce' cost.   Its very hard to sell 5.0 deeds as they always sort very near the bottom because of the cost.  When doing deed shopping you end up with a calculator manually trying to figgure out the lowest cost for ingots etc.   Those items need to be sorted on a per unit basis.  

Thats my .02 as a data guy.   I realize its alot of junk with a billion different properties but by segmenting down the types of items for sale and having people pick a category for search first - you could really cut down the number of objects the search is acting against making it much easier to generate results.   Many times I like to look for well priced legendary gear and when I search for 'legendary' i get legendary repair deeds in my search and there are hundreds sometimes. I don't want that.  I just want to pick 'gear'.   There is no way to just select 'gear'. I could select helm. Or Arm. Or ring.  But I want to search across all 'gear'.  But nothing but gear.   

Bump. You still can't buy equipment on Atlantic unless you spend eternity mousing over item after item like the old days.

What exactly you looking for?  Maybe I can find it and buy it.

Pawain said:

What exactly you looking for?  Maybe I can find it and buy it.

What's the matter, couldn't think of a reason why vendor search being a trainwreck is actually awesome design that proves the developers are geniuses? Don't want to tell me how good it works on some shard with three people on it?

Lord_Nythrax said:

Pawain said:

What exactly you looking for?  Maybe I can find it and buy it.

What's the matter, couldn't think of a reason why vendor search being a trainwreck is actually awesome design that proves the developers are geniuses? Don't want to tell me how good it works on some shard with three people on it?

Works great in NL.  😂  No just seeing if I could find stuff for you. 

Obligatory bump until someone involved in the game makes it known that they're aware of this issue. Being unable to search for equipment on the game's overwhelmingly largest server is not a trifling problem.

Another obligatory bump. It's still nigh-on impossible to effectively shop for gear on the game's largest shard. Seems like the kind of thing that ought to be fixed, or at least publicly acknowledged.

I'd still like to buy equipment, and I still want some acknowledgement that you can't actually do so on the one populated shard.