Should or could offline traders remain or return as they were before a zone crash or after a server outage? As it is on a patch day when servers go up a lot of players who rely on certain products to play, pet toys or other things they must wait hours or a day or two for most traders to return.
Should they? Yes. Could they? Yes. Is this going to happen? Signs point to no. This would take quite a bit of coding to do. The hardest thing to get done in EQ is coding work. "The List" of stuff to be coded is huge and there are only a few programmers. The EQ code is more than 15 years old and is a mess of spaghetti. This would require that the shut down process for EQ to lock all traders (rather than just kick them out as it does now), then record their status. Then when the server is doing the start up process, they have to be reloaded back in and their status read back, before the server actually opens. Now, the way that off line trading is set up is a hint that it is something that was added onto EQ and not designed from the start. You can't have another character on at the same time. Which means you are actually logged into the game. So during the start up process, the server would actually have to log in each account one at a time. Logging in people is actually handled by the Login Server, which then hands off the information to the Game Servers. Logging in is a separate process that involves checking the credentials of each account to make sure that the user name and password are correct, that the account is not banned, pay status (Free, Silver, Gold), and all sorts of things. Now the above is just for a planned shutdown. A crash of the server or zone does not allow EQ to properly lock and record this information. This is just a listing of some of the issues. NOTE: I am not a programmer for SOE and I only know extremely little about how the game actually works, I'm just basing this off of years of reading posts by SOE on how things work. TL;DR: Possible? Yes. Likely? No. Reason: Very difficult to program.
I think the real reason they won't do this is because they don't actually send database updates every second to the server. There is a reason why rollbacks happen when a zone or server crashes. Its because your character didn't get updated just before the crash and it rolls back to the last update they received. Just think about the items lost or duped from a zone or server crash in the bazaar and all of the problems that CS would have to work out afterwards.
When you log out an account, to offline trader mode they would just have to add that character to a list. When you log out, not when the server or zone crashes. And if you log in another character remove that account from the current list of offline traders. Then when the zone or server is restarted, it would just have to cycle through all those accounts and characters from that list to log them in as offline traders and return them to the game world. Or they could set it up so there are no actual traders, just use the bazaar window to buy things and if you are inside the bazaar zone set it to not charge you extra to receive the items via parcel vendor. Then set up a new shared bank slot that you can put up to 100 items in and set prices for. Anything in that bag with a price set is put into the bazaar window. Or if you must require players to go to the bazaar to post trades, make that part of the bank only accessable from the bankers in the bazaar. And another 100 slot container to post barter purchase offers. Having separate characters on each account and needing multiple accounts to buy and sell things in the bazaar is way too complicated. Make it simple.
