Shatterblast
Dalayan Beginner
How about adding a couple or so vendors next to the coaches in West Badlands and South Freeport? I think that would be a decent idea.
Outlook for improvements to the vendor system?
- Thread starter Alicia
- Start date
I sure hope he doesn't add more vendors to Newport, it's laggy enough for me as it is; and I avoid the place like the plague unless I need to take the boat to Erudin.
My point in the matter is about the cost of vendors in other towns besides Newport. Why should a player pay the same cost for a vendor with only a percentage of the player base being able to purchase from them as compared to a vendor with most of the player base able to purchase from them? IMO, towns such as Halas and Grobb should be lower priced vendors due to the fact that not all of the player base can shop at them, and Erudin should be lowered due to less traffic from people possibly not having the time to wait on the boat.
Anyhow, it's not that big of a deal, it just seems silly because the vendors in Halas, Grobb, and Erudin will forever remain empty, or mostly empty, there are still those high ends with nothing better to waste their plat on, and still those folks silly enough to pay full price for something they don't get 100% from.
Danku
Dalayan Beginner
Another Idea. Surely this was considered at some point, but here goes. Have a percentage of the sale price be the charge for having a vendor? This would fix the (in my view) problem there is that only the ones with money can sell things via vendors. Maybe just have 10% of all sales go to the vendor itself? Would result in a sliding scale and allow everyone access to the vendor system. I think that you may also need to limit people to 1 vendor/ account if you did this though.
Tempus
Staff Emeritus
Danku said:
This is a great idea. Would make it very beneficial to use the vendors in zones other then Newport or Oggok. Maybe even adjust the percentage based on the town the vendor is in. For example a vendor in Newport would charge 20% and vendor in Grobb would charge 10%.
BeittilBonker
Dalayan Adventurer
Tsabayne said:
Lol, i can see a very annoyed bunch of ppl who WILL start to complain about this as they notice that their vendor(s) have moved off to another city... and its up to you to find out where they went =D
Another Possibility
Ideally it would be nice to see vendors in each major city. The vendor/trader/broker could be located near the bank. They would roleplay as travelling sales-people, who travel to every city and trade wares for players...or buy the items they're interested in, for a fee of course. But when people see them they are always in the same place. This creates a nice roleplay lore of a 'traveling merchant class' that connects all of the seemingly disconnected cities, without the confusion of wondering where the vendor is at different times.
The broker could be a copied-instance of the banker code. In this way there's only 1 NPC, but anyone who right-clicks on that NPC sees their own 'for sale' items in the same way people view their bank inventory. Clicking the item(within a bag would be very useful) would reveal the for-sale price, or perhaps information about how many people have viewed the item.
Buying would be more difficult to implement however. It would probably require a command-line search syntax, a query engine, a database, and CPU/disk optimal code to query the database(user 'banks') for the particular item. After the query results are returned the merchant NPC would output a standard 2 column vendor listing of what's available.
It would take some work, but it seems very doable(I admit I have no idea how difficult the spaghetti code is to work with)
Selling:
-copy/paste the banker code for each city into a 'broker' NPC, with one or two broker NPCs located near a bank in each major city.
-Make small alterations to those data structures to allow pricing information on a per-item basis, hopefully to include items in bags.
Buying:
-Item query syntax( a gui would be nice but not essential) Something like: /find weapon paladin, or /find armor shoulder.
-query engine(something that interprets the query syntax and interfaces with the database)
-optimized database(collection of player for sale 'banks')
-data returned to the vendor and displayed as a standard vendor 'for sale' display.
Naturually each sale would be charged a commission fee, maybe 5%-15% of the total sale value is charged to the seller. This percentage could be adjusted to tune inflation.
I know Wiz had mentioned concern about CPU overhead, but it's unlikely that many of the total server population will be shopping or selling at any one time. After all most of us are here to play, and only shop/sell occassionaly.
-Alicia
Ideally it would be nice to see vendors in each major city. The vendor/trader/broker could be located near the bank. They would roleplay as travelling sales-people, who travel to every city and trade wares for players...or buy the items they're interested in, for a fee of course. But when people see them they are always in the same place. This creates a nice roleplay lore of a 'traveling merchant class' that connects all of the seemingly disconnected cities, without the confusion of wondering where the vendor is at different times.
The broker could be a copied-instance of the banker code. In this way there's only 1 NPC, but anyone who right-clicks on that NPC sees their own 'for sale' items in the same way people view their bank inventory. Clicking the item(within a bag would be very useful) would reveal the for-sale price, or perhaps information about how many people have viewed the item.
Buying would be more difficult to implement however. It would probably require a command-line search syntax, a query engine, a database, and CPU/disk optimal code to query the database(user 'banks') for the particular item. After the query results are returned the merchant NPC would output a standard 2 column vendor listing of what's available.
It would take some work, but it seems very doable(I admit I have no idea how difficult the spaghetti code is to work with)
Selling:
-copy/paste the banker code for each city into a 'broker' NPC, with one or two broker NPCs located near a bank in each major city.
-Make small alterations to those data structures to allow pricing information on a per-item basis, hopefully to include items in bags.
Buying:
-Item query syntax( a gui would be nice but not essential) Something like: /find weapon paladin, or /find armor shoulder.
-query engine(something that interprets the query syntax and interfaces with the database)
-optimized database(collection of player for sale 'banks')
-data returned to the vendor and displayed as a standard vendor 'for sale' display.
Naturually each sale would be charged a commission fee, maybe 5%-15% of the total sale value is charged to the seller. This percentage could be adjusted to tune inflation.
I know Wiz had mentioned concern about CPU overhead, but it's unlikely that many of the total server population will be shopping or selling at any one time. After all most of us are here to play, and only shop/sell occassionaly.
-Alicia
Well, this system reminds me of the Auction House on WoW....where the enormous amounts of players hanging out there causes extreme amounts of lag and other issuses. Of course, we don't have that many people on this server, so I don't think the lag would be an issue...however, any type of searchability on a bazaar or auction house system seems to distort the economy and cause price wars. So, I'm thinking we should steer clear of being able to compare player vendor pricing. People should sell their wares for what they feel they are worth and people in turn should buy according to what they feel the worth is. If you add searchability, what happens is, something like Frost Giant Command Staff...easy item for anyone over 40 to get, will sell for like less than a vendor pays for it, and high end items in turn become a price war for who can get the highest amount for them making them virtually impossible for 99% of the player base to buy them or vice versa. Happened on EQlive, happened on WoW, and I won't even touch the "chinese farmers" issue when bazaars and auction houses are implemented. It just becomes a total distortion to the enviorment and causes far too much bad blood between folks, and on a small server like this where most everyone knows most everyone else; that could make an even bigger mess.
I did however like the idea of a percentage being taken from every sale versuses a high cost rental fee. There should be a fee, and the fee should be according to accessibility of the player base. Hence, Newport vendors would take a much larger fee from your sales than Grobb or Halas vendors. Maybe a small deposit of say, 100p should also be implemented for the use of the space, like 100p deposit, 100p rental per week plus a percentage of sales. Not sure on the deposit, but I know for sure I'm totally against the search function, except the one you have from running from vendor to vendor and keeping track of prices
I did however like the idea of a percentage being taken from every sale versuses a high cost rental fee. There should be a fee, and the fee should be according to accessibility of the player base. Hence, Newport vendors would take a much larger fee from your sales than Grobb or Halas vendors. Maybe a small deposit of say, 100p should also be implemented for the use of the space, like 100p deposit, 100p rental per week plus a percentage of sales. Not sure on the deposit, but I know for sure I'm totally against the search function, except the one you have from running from vendor to vendor and keeping track of prices
One of the benefits of distributing the vendors across many locations is that it reduces this kind of video and zone lag.
At the moment there really isn't much of an economy because usually there's only 2 or 3 vendors selling any given item at a time. More often than not there's just 1 vendor with a particular item, allowing the vendor to price gouge. As far as price wars and distorting the economy, this is the way free markets operate. Eventually prices stabalize according to supply and demand, it's a great system...the difficulty is finding a way to gaurd against farming. Changing the commision percentage of certain items or item types could be one way to solve this. Perhaps a counter could be included in the data-structure of each item. After each sale of that item the counter increments by 1. As the counter increments, so does the percentage commision for the item. So if in any given week 20 Geomaster Axe's sell, it would increment the commision percentage of that item by (20 X fixed percentage) for the next few days perhaps, diminishing at a pre-determined rate...like 4 points a day. So the commision percentage would be a floating number based upon the number of that item type sold over a period of time...the more scarely and item is sold, the lower the commision charge, the more frequently the item is sold, the higher the commision charge. This is a 'write it once and forget it' way to nip farming in the bud.
I think the above suggestion of floating commision rates could solve that problem. The higher the commision for the sale, the more farming for any particular item is discouraged.
Since SoD has such a small player base there's little real-cash economic incentive for the kind of farming you're referring to. The floating commision would discourage it further. Also, Wiz has demonstrated that he will ban people who sell items or characters for cash. Those are 3 things that would be very effective at discouraging farming for real-world money. As for High-end items selling for a lot, that's the way it is now. Each of the high-end guilds has a selling bot in newport, and sets prices according to percieved value. Seems to work ok.
Yeah, the problem with doing that however is that the fee percentage needs to be correlated with the ammount of player traffic in any given area. Since this number is always changing, depending on role-playing elements, in-game changes etc. it would be difficult to manage. The value of a fixed commision percentage from any location is that wherever players find themselves, they are gaurenteed at all times to be on a level playing field for selling to other players.
I think if farming is discouraged then a search by cost option wouldn't suffer from the side-effects you were referring to. Selling would simply be a way for players to benefit from the stuff they find along the way in their adventures, rather than a calculated re-interation of killing the same mob in the same zone over and over in order to maximize profits.
It would be nice to see a fair and balanced selling structure that's useable enough so that almost anyone can participate with buying and selling. Something that offers ease of use, relative indepedance of location, and independance of faction, level or wealth.
Danku
Dalayan Beginner
On EQLive the search function caused prices to plummet for everything not rise. If people can search through items then the cheap ones sell first and no one wants to pay more so they wait for mroe cheap ones. I have no idea about WoW, but if that is what happened there then that was very weird.
I have to agree I like the sliding scale of percentage charge per sale. Like in Grobb/Oggok you only have evils while in Halas you only have goods so have the fee be 1/2 of the newport fee. If you have a deposit on top of the fee though then you go right back to limiting accessibility to those with funds. Isnt the point of selling to make the money to upgrade?
I have been thinking about the fee to charge though. I had originally said about 10% when I first posted this idea but that would be far too high. If you sold 1 item for 1k then you would be paying 100p a week. Most people with 1 expensive item have more and you would be really sticking it to them. Maybe have the percentage around 2% for newport and 1% elsewhere.
That is about it for my brain on this game :10bux: subject
I have to agree I like the sliding scale of percentage charge per sale. Like in Grobb/Oggok you only have evils while in Halas you only have goods so have the fee be 1/2 of the newport fee. If you have a deposit on top of the fee though then you go right back to limiting accessibility to those with funds. Isnt the point of selling to make the money to upgrade?
I have been thinking about the fee to charge though. I had originally said about 10% when I first posted this idea but that would be far too high. If you sold 1 item for 1k then you would be paying 100p a week. Most people with 1 expensive item have more and you would be really sticking it to them. Maybe have the percentage around 2% for newport and 1% elsewhere.
That is about it for my brain on this game :10bux: subject
On EQLive prices were very low at first, until the plat bought online started flowing in causing prices to be way way too high. I think the reason WoW prices were high was because the online plat purchases began when the game began. We don't have this issue on SoD, so I suppose the usual supply and demand will take place, only thing that worries me is /ooc getting spammed with 2 year old fights while supply and demand takes place. I.E. I don't wanna see: /ooc Soandso You are sooo friggin gay, Whoever, charging 100p for that Frost Giant Command Staff. /ooc Whoever Your such a newb Soandso, Frost Giant Command Staff ftw /ooc Soandso Well Ima gonna sell 10 of them for like 20p and no one will buy yours cos your gay lolol...INC
/auc Sosandso FROST GIANT COMMAND STAFF ONLY 50p CHECK OUT MY VENDOR NOW!!! and on and on and on, til the bickering becomes just name calling or off topic all together and you just don't wanna play anymore or pray a GM comes on and boots Soandso and Whoever. INC all the /ooc Take it to tells!! spams. And you don't want to leave the /ooc channel because in between this bickering is some really good info you try to catch between spams =/
And I'm not sure Alicia's floating commission rates will work, have no clue. Really, considering supply and demand, the people with the most ease and quickness to supply the item will rule out every time. Hence, once a week at lvl 65 make a quick sweep of all the newb drops and bam, you got yourself about 1k plat or so even with commissions. So even if 10% of the lvl 65's are the only ones bothering to do this, that will prevent lower ends from actually being able to loot those items most of the time. Who knows, maybe that won't happen, you would have to just wait and see. But I tend to think that greed sets into most humans and even with a high commission, it pays to go grab and sell the stuff because all it's costing you is a lil bit of time, so the amount you get for it really wouldn't matter. However, it would suck to be you if you just got to the level high enough to sell that item but you don't make much on it because 12 level 60+'s already are selling it. Not to mention you are still fuming because some jerk just went and stole your kill because they have the pop timed and don't care if you have been waiting for 2 hours for it now and it would make a really great upgrade for you. Oh well, guess you end up buying it from them with the mind intent of ripping off all the low ends once you are their lvl.
This is just examples of what I see to come with a search system, commissioned or not. The only thing I can think of that would rule out the greed is making green mobs impossible to loot, you can kill them, but you get no loot and no xp. And this would suck for people that need items dropped from greens for tradeskilling. They would be forced to purchase them and hope there are lower lvls out there willing to sell them. Doesn't seem like there is a happy medium for any of it, maybe someone can think of something else??? Having both high end and low end chars, I'm trying to come up with something that would work for all, but it appears that you just cannot keep everyone happy all of the time....and your lucky if you can make some of them happy some of the time...