New players buy from vendors. Back in the early days of UOSA as well as OSI, there was a steady influx of new players. NPC shopkeepers were used for both selling and buying. Now, on UOSA, we don't have new players. Most of the people I see on a day to day basis are vets. Most NPC shopkeepers are strictly used as trash cans. Money goes out, none comes in with the exception being provisioners and mages/achemists because everyone buys bags and regs. Blacksmiths, armorers, jewelers, etc are hardly ever selling their inventory. If you want to sell your junk, you better hope you get lucky.
This is era accurate to some degree. Accurate as far as the vendors did have a limited amount of gold (do we know how much for certain?), and they had restock timers. However, as a returning player who came back to nothing, I'm essentially a new player, and I feel like with an average of maybe 50-70 IPs on at any given time, I am struggling way too hard to sell items to NPC shopkeepers. I'm not someone has been playing for 8 years and looking to offload my hoard of 60k diamonds over night, I'm just trying to sell a few hours worth of items. The problem is I can't. New players can't. When this happens those 40-50 gems you gathered that day but can't sell turn into 100 gems the next day, 150 the next, etc. Same for magic armor, weapons. The option becomes hoard or trash it. As a new player, it stings a little bit to trash items of value.
That said, can we revisit this now? I stumbled across this quote by Derrick:
The information that's missing currently is the restock code, so we're going to do our best to approximate it on the basis of reasonableness, and on player feedback.