What causes vendor buy and sell price bugs?

Buy and sell prices are computed inconsistently, allow buy-low-sell-high exploits, or do not account for modifiers, so players exploit vendors or see wrong prices.

How do I catch this when it only happens for some players?

Capture it automatically from the player's device with the full stack trace, the device and OS, the build, and a breadcrumb trail of what they did. That turns a vague complaint into a specific, reproducible issue you can fix without owning the hardware it happens on.

How to Fix Vendor Buy and Sell Price Bugs

Quick answer: Compute prices consistently from item value with clear buy and sell margins, prevent profitable buy-sell loops, and apply modifiers server-side.

Vendor price bugs are inconsistent or exploitable pricing. Here is how to fix them.

How to fix it

1. Compute prices consistently

Derive buy and sell prices from the item's base value with defined margins, applied the same way everywhere. Ad-hoc or inconsistent price math produces wrong prices and confusing vendor behavior.

2. Prevent buy-sell exploits

Ensure a player cannot buy an item and immediately sell it back for profit. The sell price must be below the buy price (and reasonable) so there is no infinite-money loop through the vendor.

3. Apply modifiers authoritatively

Apply discounts, reputation, and other price modifiers server-side in multiplayer, so prices cannot be manipulated client-side. Authoritative pricing keeps the economy consistent and exploit-resistant.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.

The errors you never hear about are the ones quietly costing you players. Visibility turns them into a worklist.