Ok, tell me it’s not just me. The player shop has been WILDLY inconsistent with searchability.

For example, today Zondeel and crafted Zondeel no longer exists. Not that the items aren’t there, but anything but the EXACT term returns a search term. Yesterday? Absolutely fine. Put in “Zon”, hit enter key, there they are.

And this sort of thing is absolutely infuriating when it comes to things like costume colors. I’m having to manually enter and look up terms, like some sort of word search, for past outfit colors. Does the outfit have a “Steel” color scheme? How about “Moon”, or “Sakura”? Looks like I have to put in “: Moon [ba]” or whatever each time to give it a look because god knows the search function forgot they exist.

Is there a reason this is the way it is? Will it ever get fixed?

Item name cache (which the "candidate search" function uses) is saved client side and it has limited space so it will purge stuff over time. Honestly, over the years, I have always found it better to skip the "candidate search" and just type in the full name of what you are searching for directly becuase you never know what will be missing from the name cache.

That makes a lot of sense. I've consistently had that issue too and never knew why.

@AndrlCh said in What’s up with the player shop search function?:

Item name cache (which the "candidate search" function uses) is saved client side and it has limited space so it will purge stuff over time. Honestly, over the years, I have always found it better to skip the "candidate search" and just type in the full name of what you are searching for directly becuase you never know what will be missing from the name cache.

That works right up until you forgot what term the game uses instead of "purple" or another color on an outfit.

And (looking at you PSO2 devs) that's a really, really terrible way to do a search function. Maybe it fits with their monetization scheme, so they kept it, but holy cow is that a problem for people trying to sell stuff on the player shop. For instance: maybe my outfit isn't selling because the price is too high, OR, maybe its just because if you didn't already know it was there then people wont ever find it.

@BronzeAgeBrain Honestly, it probably has more to do with their spaghetti code not allowing them to change the way it works than anything related to monetization. This is a game where they had to delay Color Change Passes having a one-hour grace period for Premium for over a month after it was supposed to be implemented becuase they couldn't figure out why it wasn't working right.

Here's hoping that for NGS they vastly improve upon it.

@BronzeAgeBrain I should've posted this earlier, but here's some of the resources I use when I'm stuck on what item I'm looking for:

https://bumped.org/pso2na/fashion-database/pso2-na-unisex-outfits/

https://pso2na.arks-visiphone.com/wiki/Main_Page

Because they're operated by fans, sometimes you might have to wait a bit to see some content get covered, but they provide incredible lists to reference. If you're looking for something new that isn't added yet, I like to check the prize list on the scratch terminals or the announcements on the official PSO2 site and write down the names of the items so I can search them later.

An easy way to make the item dictionary "learn" the items in a new scratch, is to check out the "Prize List" of the scratch. Once you looked at the list, the dictionary will remember all of the item names except for the ones included in a set item (the game isn't clever enough to look into the individual items in a set). Also, checking out the FUN scratch prize list after each maintenance helps to keep those item names up to date.

No wonder I never had problems searching for cosmetic items. I drool over the prize lists too much. :3

I think maybe it's just because the code is too old and nobody who worked on the code is still working there anymore. Hopefully for NGS they'll implement a better search that functions like the storage search we have now.

@Fiona-Respha said in What’s up with the player shop search function?:

An easy way to make the item dictionary "learn" the items in a new scratch, is to check out the "Prize List" of the scratch. Once you looked at the list, the dictionary will remember all of the item names except for the ones included in a set item (the game isn't clever enough to look into the individual items in a set). Also, checking out the FUN scratch prize list after each maintenance helps to keep those item names up to date.

Mmmm, yeah, but that’s not usually the problem I have. It’s stuff like never seeing Zanverse or Megiverse drop, so for the first month or so of play I just assumed they weren’t implemented yet or purchasable on the shop (they were). Also fashion hunting through scratches. I get a new base wear or outer wear every once in a while, and trying to find items to go with it is a hassle of juggling outside resources, knowing naming schemes for color options, and a good deal of trial and error. It’s needlessly difficult. It’s like the “join party on a different block” function that kicks you out of the menu when it finds out your AQ has already started, leaving you to scroll through the options multiple times. It’s badly implemented UI, and honestly it’s the single most frustrating thing about this game.

It also sucks for stuff like the swimsuit event, when what you want is an outfit that looks decent, but also doesn’t break the bank. It’s a looooooot of individual searches, one after another, one color after another, because a lot of the times the difference between white or orange on a base wear option is multiple million meseta. Even if you refresh what items you can through looking at the scratch menu it’s still a pain.

I wish there was a "blacklisting" feature for player shop searches. I don't want to click through 20 pages of Summer Kickboards when I'm just looking for a good Rod camo.

So I could just search all Rod camos by price, then click any Summer Kickboard > "Not interested" and it goes into an item blacklist that is persistent for this play session, and it will not show up in any player shop search results this session. Item blacklist is stored in memory on the client and is cleared upon login.

@kztm The min. price option when you're searching helps a lot with that, I've noticed. It used to help me sort through all the pepper stems lol

@ApollosAmour It would help sometimes. But when a new scratch goes online and everyone's dumping the ugly stuff, it can be quite annoying as the prices are all over the place, yet you still want to find the cheap deals that you didn't think to look for. So you end up skimming through pages and pages of the same unwanted items.

@kztm Yeah, I feel you. Thankfully it calms down after a day or so, but it can get iffy.