I'm looking into why the items aren't showing up in shops, that was likely do a recent change in the way that items are counted in shops. Instead of being separate rows, they're all one row. Better for speed and simplicity, but apparently it caused a problem :)

Otherwise, a lot of problems with restocking have been fixed. I've seen item amounts leveling out and the price of items staying above (generally) the shop price. Also items that have been "shelved" (removed for 7 days) have been regaining value much faster than before, and it means that other items in the shop have a chance to restock and maybe even get a bit saturated which isn't a bad thing.

You could just ask me if you were curious about the Atebus shop. xD We have no immediate plans to close it. With how well monthly themes are going and how much attention we've been able to focus on places, we might not end up closing it (especially since we have other things on our plate more important than the stargazer changes we were hoping to make). I posted on the "too many wearables going out" thread that I'm not against doing a proper Atebus themed month, and if we did it like December/January (I say this because we already have like the next 5 month themes planned), we might actually get stargazer updated without killing the shop. There is a board in Suggestions & Ideas about expanding the pool for Alexanders quests, you can post suggestions you think would help quests there. :) Because we want the item to be 'super rare'? The other versions of that shotgun that someone posted is going for like 750 and 1500 (or something like that for the BHH one) wizard tokens. Making it a 'common' restock is silly. It's not like we make every new item in the super rare range.

Hey guys - we aren't ignoring you. It takes us a week to collect data on changes, we can't just keep making tiny changes and then closing our eyes and hoping it fixes the problem, we have to actually wait and see how it changes the site.

A: I'm going to send out another feedback form on this (because we tend to get a lot better responses in that way) but basically it seems like a lot of people on this thread have one of two problems. The most recent changes made it so that items sitting in the shops get removed fairly quickly, shops clear every night, etc. This means that people who do buy items from the main shops and put them in their shop make a profit because of B. B: On the other hand it means that if you're doing a quest, you are far less likely to find the items for that quest in the shop search, meaning you have to buy them from another user and sometimes a premium.

I've made some more tweaks to the system and just pushed them, but like I said, don't expect anymore sudden changes until we can collect the kind of data that we need to make further changes. People in the forums threatening to burn down the site do not equal a portion of the system. We need to be able to see how the prices of items change (in the most recent changes, they've started shifting upwards), how many quests are quit instead of completed, how many quests are completed with items entirely from the NPC shops, etc.

RE: Me talking about torching the site, posts on this thread do not reflect the tickets and anonymous messages we get on tumblr.

I've reverted the system back to pre-changes while I sift through the data and opinions on this thread to figure out how we move forward with restocking.

This entire change has been the result of changes from a survey, and also listening and watching feedback from users but ALSO looking at data and item prices and making choices based on that. The survey was posted after listening and taking feedback from a brainstorming thread. Users were involved in the entire process, and from day one all of the changes were made based on things that users had asked for. Obviously some things changed (and broke) along the way, but all of the changes were made to make the site easier and better for users. Both questers, and restockers.

I'm sorry if it comes off as rude when I say that threads like this give us a little piece of the information that we need to make choices. We're trying to be more data driven which means taking into account every user on the site, if they are buying more items after we make a change, how many quests are being done when we make a change, and the value of items up/down after we make a change. Feedback on these threads is important and fundamental but just a piece of the puzzle. In the past I would have just kept making small changes but now I'm trying to actually wait for the data to roll in before making those changes.

And yes, I see that flipping the switch to the old system didn't quite work :)

I've just pushed some more changes, as well :) The feedback form will be coming out via event to users later today!

Specific Changes

1. Items shouldn't get huge stocks anymore. I realized my mistake here which was resetting the amount in stock for those items... but then still going through the loop to add more. Now it'll stop when it finds out those items are in stock (and if there are a ton of them slowly deplete the amount). This was a small piece of coding in the much larger scale that I totally missed. Hopefully this solves that.
2. I changed the scale of items going into the shop, so hopefully we end up with more diverse items in each shop now. :)

So, just updating, my push from earlier is actually pushed now. I just realized the crontab (which is what hits things like the restocking script every x amount of minutes) was hitting the old script which was pointing to the new script, and last night in my effort to make the old script work, I took that out. So the old one has been running all night.

Changes pushed :)!

The cavern is a really hard shop to fix because it's got so few items :( Like I said, we're working on getting more items for it (especially soon :)), but I also just pushed some a few changes to how shops with really small stocks restock! I ran through the shop a few times and items restocked each time, so hopefully that makes a difference.

Okay, just pushed so shops should be restocking a little more frequently!

This is actually still the new script :) It turned out the old one didn't really work (because I've made a lot of backend changes to the shops since then) so I had to keep forging ahead with the new restocking.

Hopefully it keeps up today, if not please let me know!

Oops.

SHOPS WHY DO YOU DO THIS TO ME. Looking into it, thanks !

Sometimes that'll happen :) It doesn't matter how big the shop is, sometimes items just don't restock or that shop goes awhile without being chosen. It shouldn't ever pass 30 minutes.

Some weird things happened because of that day there was no restocking, I've just made it so that all of the items should start trickling back in again :)!

Hey guys, you're not being ignored. I pushed a fix a few days ago and didn't have a chance to look at the data to see if it actually resolved the issue. Looks like it made a difference, but not as big of a difference and I (and you, obviously) had hoped.

I'm making some more tweaks today, hope to see it improve over the next few hours.

Yeah, that glitch made things really bizarre and off, because it meant that items weren't restocking for a few hours. I basically did the equivalent to hitting the 'reset' button but that meant a lot of items that were otherwise blocked from restocking got put back in and meant that the chance of a rare item restocking was significantly less.

Should be getting equalized now, though!

Sorry guys, it takes a few days for items to get filtered out. Right now there are still a lot of items in the pool but it's decreasing every day. There isn't really anything I can do to resolve that.

Because we don't keep a copy of items "restock times" and purchase counts and things like that. The cron problem caused items to not restock, which made the system think they were unwanted and removed them from restocking. I reset the system but that means all items are back in, including ones that had been removed (from the pool).

It worked well for you. I'm happy with what has happened with the economy since the changes and have seen pretty positive changes overall. I'm sorry if that means that you don't get as much profit from restocking, but it has been an overall positive change for the site.

And I'm seeing different trends. I'm seeing more quests completed week over week, I'm seeing an increase in gold accounts purchased in June over June of last year, etc. I think it's easy to look at your part of the site and assume that it's informing how the rest of the site is doing, but that isn't always the case.

I'm sorry that you're frustrated, and we've been slowly tweaking the system. But just take a look through the feedback on threads like this. Restockers want more rare items (to restock), but don't want the value of rare items pushed down from elsewhere (quest rewards or vending). They want less cheap items (to leave more items for them to restock) but don't want those items to increase in value too much because it makes questing hard. This is a balancing act and any change makes ripples through the entire site, so I've stopped making sweeping changes and instead am looking at data and how it actually changes the value of items, number of quests started/completed/quit, etc.

And, vending changes are incoming.

Like I said, it's really complicated. We got yelled at for making changes too often and I agree that was the wrong approach. Now we make small changes, watch, and if it is successful we leave it alone and if it isn't we make more small changes.

The new restock system is smart. It removes items from the pool automatically, it rises newer items to the top of the queue, it tries to get a wide variety of items. Unfortunately, we've got tens of thousands of items now and so it means getting rid of the "junk" takes awhile. I'm going to lower the timeline on items being removed a little bit, but not significantly.