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

Oreogl

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.

Theo

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.   

Lord_Nythrax

I'll bet the database is just a text file and searching for strings is their only method of querying it.

Lord_Nythrax

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

Pawain

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

Lord_Nythrax

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?

Pawain

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. 

Lord_Nythrax

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.

Lord_Nythrax

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.

Lord_Nythrax

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.