Vendor search broken always cant search for anything

as you can see in the picture below i could not be any more specific as to what i was looking for and almost everything i search tells me its too vague.... it wasn't always this way it used to work pretty much all the time even if i was super vague perhaps we can get this fixed 

it's currently experiencing issues,  doing it for me as well.  

I did a search for Powder of Translocation, it was too vague, so I shortened it to Powder, making it as vague as possible and it returned everything imaginable. Go figure.

Good to see this thread because I asked about this on discord and no one seemed to think there was a difference. 

I felt that after that forsaken foes patch went live, vendor search got really bad.  I’d search something with 3 words in the title... Too vague. Okay 2 words...  Too vague. Okay one word (more vague)... tons of results  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

Also have moments where I’ll search something really common and find nothing. Try breaking the word down but nothing works. Recall to somewhere else then go back home...repeat search... results show up no problem. 

Pretty sure this is the result of players dumping thousands upon thousands of items onto the new Commission Vendors, adding a huge influx to the search database. Items that would normally not return search results because they were on Auction Safes, or just not listed in vendors to begin with.

If you omit the Item Name field and just search by properties, you usually get a pretty fast result still (at least in my experience). Adding any text to the item name field and you have a crapshoot on whether it works or not, usually not, particularly during prime-time hours.

I'm curious if there is a max search duration allowed, and if you don't get results from the database in that time, you get the "too vague" message returned. With all the extra items now in the database the searches are taking longer, combined with more people hammering vendor search repeatedly (partly because it's not working, so they keep hammering it), the searches are timing out.

Then they need to change the time parameters to allow longer searches.  

I wanna second that it has gotten a lot worse. It was already broken at a lot of times before, but now its worse. I dont think I'm allowed to freely express my opinion so I leave it at that.

JollyJade said:

I wanna second that it has gotten a lot worse. It was already broken at a lot of times before, but now its worse. I dont think I'm allowed to freely express my opinion so I leave it at that.

Ok seriously, you're trolling multiple threads and then in your main one you're claiming you're not trolling, you should probably just , you know, stop trolling. :-)

Garth_Grey said:

JollyJade said:

I wanna second that it has gotten a lot worse. It was already broken at a lot of times before, but now its worse. I dont think I'm allowed to freely express my opinion so I leave it at that.

Ok seriously, you're trolling multiple threads and then in your main one you're claiming you're not trolling, you should probably just , you know, stop trolling. :-)

Only because VS works for you doesn't mean I am trolling. I don't check this place daily and might sometimes add my opinion a bit late, sorry for that! Apparently I am not allowed to ask questions or state my opinion here. Seems I'm on someones hitlist 🙁

Ok, thanks for the advice. I no longer second that VS got worse lately. In fact, its betautiful and working better than ever, as many before me have said as well. Sorry bothering all of you stating my experience.

JollyJade it is OK to say that something is broken but do not make it an aggressive or passive aggressive attack against the devs, moderators, or other players. Treat everyone with respect.

Khyro said:

Pretty sure this is the result of players dumping thousands upon thousands of items onto the new Commission Vendors, adding a huge influx to the search database. Items that would normally not return search results because they were on Auction Safes, or just not listed in vendors to begin with.

Yes.  LS has tons of items at stupid high prices now. Silly us we thought this would be used for the low to mid priced items that may take months to sell but are badly needed by someone every few weeks.

Like all shards, Atlantic is busier on the weekdays and weekends this time of year. The amount of items and the amount of players combine to make searching difficult.  It works well at 2 am Eastern tho.

Also, note that about 50% of the time, Item Property Display will simply won't show up when hovering over items in the research window.

Vohnkar said:

Also, note that about 50% of the time, Item Property Display will simply won't show up when hovering over items in the research window.

Do you have your tool tip delay set to minimum?.

Pawain said:

Vohnkar said:

Also, note that about 50% of the time, Item Property Display will simply won't show up when hovering over items in the research window.

Do you have your tool tip delay set to minimum?.

Oh! You got my soluce. I suspected something wrong on client side, but not that. Thanks Pawain

Pawain said:Yes.  LS has tons of items at stupid high prices now. Silly us we thought this would be used for the low to mid priced items that may take months to sell but are badly needed by someone every few weeks.

Like all shards, Atlantic is busier on the weekdays and weekends this time of year. The amount of items and the amount of players combine to make searching difficult.  It works well at 2 am Eastern tho.

I never thought it was gonna be used for the low to mid range items.  Noone wants to fill vendors with 2k runebooks and all manner of low end items in bulk when it chews through their house storage at 125 lockdowns for each full vendor.  They will generally be used for just the high end stuff to make it worth sacrificing the lockdowns.  Said this from the start but I got shouted at.  The new beaut vendors were gonna make all the low end stuff available for all the small shards people.    hmmm nope.

Pawain said:

Yes.  LS has tons of items at stupid high prices now. Silly us we thought this would be used for the low to mid priced items that may take months to sell but are badly needed by someone every few weeks.

Like all shards, Atlantic is busier on the weekdays and weekends this time of year. The amount of items and the amount of players combine to make searching difficult.  It works well at 2 am Eastern tho.

I am sure there are plenty more items at normal prices as well. There will always be idiots who overprice their items, but as the overall number of items on the market increases, the average prices should go down.
As far as the search, the number of players, if we look at yearly, not seasonal, statistics is very low historically. And the fact that the vendor search cannot handle it testifies to the problem with the search, not with the vendors.

I use the commission vendor for both hi-end and bulk stuff now. And yes, I fill them up.

On quieter shards, sometimes that bulk stuff sits for longer periods and that can eat into profits. I gauge when players are buying bulk stuff (scrolls, imbuing ingredients, resources, consumables, etc.) and stock up those vendors for those times, then let them sit empty at other times without losing profit. It is a nice way to measure the activity cycles on a smaller shard. I am willing to give up the storage for the short term (typically about 4 days every couple of weeks) for other players when they are active. The 5.25% doesn't cut into the lower price points too much, which is a decent profit on my end.

Hi-end stuff tends to sit longer but is great for other players to know it is available and can save up their gold to get it. I price it so it stays on the shard - not low (which encourages xfer to the mall shard), and not expensive to be out of reach on the local shard.

Basically, researching prices and knowing the market on the shard is what brings in the profit - not so much the type of vendor being used. If I was merchandising on the mall shard, you bet I'd be scrutinizing the use of vendor types. It would be a daily exercise on that shard.

For real the vendor search needs some kind of recoding or something.  Its incredibly unreliable and frustrating to use.  Sometimes it works, sometimes (often now) it doesn't.  Results are unreliable....the thing breaks as you go through pages of results sometimes.  Sometimes you need to go to another location and search the same thing to get results...which doesn't always fix the problem either....its really messed up.

I wonder what the solution is.  I know that on ATL, the search is having to dig through billions of items so that in itself is pretty intense....but I wonder if there's some kind of modern system for this kind of thing that could be implemented with the code.  I have no idea what the code base is like but man...it would be really nice to see this work flawlessly.

I did not think it would reach the point of too much stuff for sell but now vendor search on Pac is having the issue.  I should have used it before restocking soul binders on my vendor.

Yep.... agree with Tim. Pacific's search is not giving ANY returns, even for highly specific names. I keep getting the "... too generic..." response and this has been going on since 10am eastern time. 

@Kyronix
@Bleak

This thread is redundant. Please post vendor search comments here:   https://forum.uo.com/discussion/5077/vendor-search#latest ;