Posted by Counselor Poe on November 02, 1999 at 12:27:30:

This is something I was going to write for some time, but someone beat me to it *grins* I thought: why write it anew if you can copy it....

Thanks to an unknown player for this small Essay

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I have had players ask me about this problem as well as seeing it posted on the message board, so hopefully this will answer your questions regarding losing items off of your vendor.

Several people have been reporting a vendor stealing bug on the message boards recently, so I thought I'd send in a note to explain what is going on, and how people can protect themselves. Essentially, people are finding that expensive items contained with bags/pouches/boxes on their vendor are disappearing, along with the container itself, and the vendor doesn't receive payment for the price of the items inside.

There's actually no stealing bug here, but people are losing these items because of simple carelessness on their own part. When you are stocking items within a container on a vendor, if you forget to enter a price for ANY of the items, then the vendor will automatically assign a default price (and usually a very low one) to the container itself and all its contents. For example, you might be selling power weapons in one bag. One day, you throw in a quarterstaff of power, and forget to type in a price or absent mindedly hit the enter key too quickly. Now, all of a sudden, anyone who comes by can buy the entire bag of power weapons at a very low default price set by the vendor. Even though all the other items in the bag may carry individual price tags, the bag as a whole will carry one that is much lower. What's worse is that even if you remove the item you forgot to label, the bag will still carry this price.

The only way to correct this problem, if you catch yourself making this mistake, is to remove both the container and all the contents from the vendor, and then to replace them all, labelling them properly the second time round. This can be a real pain, so I thought it would be best to
warn people to be careful not to make this mistake.
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