Dear Developers,

So I stop one of those wandering frieghters and they offer to sell me things. I am busily making purchases and they suddenly close up shop and fly away in the middle of actively transacting business. What merchant is going to walk away from a paying customer who is actively making purchases? OK, so reality/lore/immersion is not as important sometimes as game play. Well, this also makes for a poor game play experience. I am trying to purchase items I need in the game, and the danged interface not only closes, it runs away from me! This is a problem with the wandering crafting people in Memory Alpha as well. I don't know who thought making them mobile was a good idea, but they were wrong on that point. We, the players, hate it.

The ideal solution from the player's standpoint would be to make these NPCs stationary. Perhaps there are reasons you do not wish to make them stationary. In that case ...

Would it be possible to set things up so that once we open one of those interfaces with a wandering merchant/crafter/whatever that the interface stays open as long as we are actively working with it? The npc can go on about their wandering if need be, but let us keep the interface open until we have finished working with it. Perhaps the interface can remain open until one of a few conditions occurs. (1) There are no mouse clicks in the interface for 5 minutes, or other appropriate time period , or (2) we choose to close the interface, or (3) we move our character (not to be confused with being moved by someone else bumping into us).

Thank you for your attention.

oops, wrong thread