Vendors?

Yeah.. it is certainly an idea I have flirted with (making mobs simply drop money instead of garbage and increasing the cash drops of mobs globally while removing price floors on items to separate MONEY FARMING from ITEM DROPS etc.).
 
I don't feed that making all the items in the game vendor for a very small amount, like in original, is the answer. I hated the fact that you couldn't just vendor something at a descent rate to a vendor in eq. Basically vendors as a whole were rather worthless other then having to buy food and water.

Perhaps it is because I am lazy or maybe I just hate people, 90% of the time I was a main looter in citadel I would just vendor all the loot we would get other then tomes. One of the large problems was the high end groups farmed citadel so hard that the economy was saturated in all of its loot. This made people only want to pay a few 100pp more for the item then the vendor would give you for it. Even if they wanted to pay you 1000 more pp for the item that is still only ~160pp more per person then just right clicking the item. If you sold the item to a player you would have to spend time talking to them and then set up a spot to meet or use listsend for a cut of the money and the unknown of them paying for the item or not. Vendor the item was simply the easiest thing to do. It even got some of the items out of the market.

I'm not sure if there is a main problem to point the finger at in this situation. All I know is that I liked having the easy out of getting instant money for an item. I also don't think lowering the vendor price on the item would have changed much. If these items that were vendoring for 2000pp were vending for 200 then most likely I wouldn't have even looted them so I could have more room for a stack of vendor trash that sold for more.
 
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The thing is that small amount of money items vendor for can still have the same relative buying power if the economy shifts
 
Kedrin, a couple things to change would make that much easier... /cm listaccept changed so you can use it anywhere and the pp taken from your bank and dropped in the first available bank slot... maybe even /cm listaccept MyTwinksName to send it to your twink or friend.

Then /cm listunsend #, without a parameter it lists all the packages you have sent, and with a number retrieves it back to your inventory.

Making listsend work from anywhere without banker would be super bonus. no having to go back to the city because someone has to leave. you can sell all the big ticket items from the xp zone and not having to wait till the end of the group and spend 30 min auc off the crap you won.
 
The thing most people never realized was just mentioned. Buying items from players 100pp above vendor pay is basically like buying the gear for 100pp. You can buy said 3k BP from a player use it till you get a T5bp that replaces and then vender your old BP For 2950 PP. The Vendor prices do give the illusion of an actually buy and sell economy.

It sounds like we are just coming up with other uses for money and loot. Here are some crafty means of getting rid of both.

Here is a good Idea I have for keeping unused gear valuable

Some type of Army event/encounter where you have to supply troops with gear via turn in's
Perhaps gearing Gropluk soldiers (sp) up for a giant battle with Kelzulian troops. Where the exp/ raid gear would be rewarded based upon the groups strength+gruplok gear strength.

Event break down
Players meet up with Gruplok resistance force. Supply them gear to raise their fighting abilities. Players and Gruplok fight 2 different incoming waves of Kelzulians. The quality of the reward would be based on the players and the amount of exp received would be based on how well the Gruplok group did. This formula would have a tie in with how far the players progress x Gruplok progress would determine the reward and exp.

Player max wave 1 2 3 4 5
Gruplok max wave .5 1 1.5 2 2.5
Reward multiplyer 1.5 2 4.5 8 12.5

Basic idea for how the event would structure

Gearing of Gruplok gear thresholds:
Give gear a item value use to determine the benefit that the frog soldiers get.
 
First, I do not think unbinding is used very much (in fact a large percentage of the time it IS used is when people try to steal things from their friends and get banned for theft). Second, I think it is unreasonable to assume that every item that drops must always be desirable. Third, I think droppable items are already "mostly obsolete".. I mean pre-Ikisith you had a handful of desirable droppables out there like RSM Robe, HHK basement stuff, Earthshaker loot, and deep FR. The rest was mostly not that useful or desirable even stuff in those same zones you would say "Oh well, didn't get the good drop" and vendor it for 100pp or whatever. With Ikisith, the droppable market increased and, as you say, the "baseline" for desirable droppable loot went up. Fine, of course that happens when you add more of something and aim to make it better. Why is saying "Oh well, didn't get the good drop" and vendoring for 100pp now not good enough?

Also, your scenario maintains the idea that the only thing to spend money on is droppable loot and charms, but what if this was not the case?

The preikisith spots you mentioned that obseleted gear, hhk basement, deep fr etc, were extremely good about not flooding the market. You'd always see that stuff player sold, and for way more than vendor price because of an artificial restriction on supply (multiday respawns). That kept Timmy, the guy who just dinged 65 yesterday, from having the cash on hand to buy it up because prices were high because demand was high and supply was low.

The gear that obsoletes 90% of other gear today, for the most part, is off of regular xp bosses. That stuff pours in. Vendoring provides an outlet for it to pour back out and never build up in the market. If you remove the incentive to do that, you're just going to see Timmy driving around in a brand new wrx, paid for in full by his job at mcdonalds he started this week.
 
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Now with picture support.

This is what a market system looks like, for comparison purposes:

scaled.php


Now this is what me being slightly sarcastic while simultaneously being serious looks like:

scaled.php


With the number of arrows roughly representing the amount of inflow.
 
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The preikisith spots you mentioned that obseleted gear, hhk basement, deep fr etc, were extremely good about not flooding the market. You'd always see that stuff player sold, and for way more than vendor price because of an artificial restriction on supply (multiday respawns). That kept Timmy, the guy who just dinged 65 yesterday, from having the cash on hand to buy it up because prices were high because demand was high and supply was low.

The gear that obsoletes 90% of other gear today, for the most part, is off of regular xp bosses. That stuff pours in. Vendoring provides an outlet for it to pour back out and never build up in the market. If you remove the incentive to do that, you're just going to see Timmy driving around in a brand new wrx, paid for in full by his job at mcdonalds he started this week.

The only cash mob in FR or HHK that is a multi day respawn is Favug, every other named is a regular exp mob. Hell in First Ruins they can all be rust coded too so you see them very often. The supply of these items in the general market is low partially because so many of them just get vendored rather than sold to players and also because people simply don't spend as much time in these zones compared to others. And pretty much none of the drops from these zones regularly sell for much more than vendor prices aside from Ele Crown and one or two others.
 
All of the old-world high end exp BoE items sold for a ton to vendors. And most of it DID get vendored. There were a few of the rarer and more useful items (like scorcher crown) that would go to players, but tons of players got their supreme charms farming BoEs out of HHK and deep FR and vendoring 90% of it.

Its cool for there to be an active market, but there are just not that many new players in SoD and there are a ton of older ones adding BoEs to the potential market. I think stral brought up a good point - if we make vendor prices super low the market will be ultra flooded with all the BoE loot and fresh 65 players will be able to very easily obtain a bunch of T3-4ish gear.
 
Why is fresh 65's being better geared such a bad thing, except for the maginalization(sp) of low tier raid zones (ones that go un-touched allot anyways). Maybe then the fresh 65's will actually have more HP then a wet paper bag, so people will actually be willing to group them up and take them places, instead of stalling the group while waiting on a tier ? 65+++ toon to log in to invite. Since the newer toons will get groups, they'll be more willing to stay and keep playing. Making the game more friendly to newer players helps build up the player base, you know?
 
I dont really think it will impact group formation one way or another.

The problem IMO, is that it essentially removes a big chunk of the game. Not only low raid tiers, but as a low player I had a lot of fun just exping in areas where I might get to loot an upgrade. VE-M maps become mostly useless. I think a lot of the fun in a MMO is slowly progressing your character one item at a time. If we saturate the market with powerful cheap boe items, then all new players will be able to easily get a good set of gear. Suddenly they have no way of progressing their character other than exp or joining a raiding guild, because all the lower end content has been trivialized.

I'm not even entirely against it myself, but I think thats the best argument to be made for keeping prices higher.
 
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Wouldn't impact me at all either way. I just wanted a reason to procrastinate picking up this macroeconomics book again, and this seemed like a half decent excuse to vent out some of this useless information that's been roaming through my head. Two birds, one stone or whatever.
 
I had a big post but something ate it, so I'll just say that I think getting rid of unbinding will unnecessarily limit(remove the easiest way)the possible altruistic bent for players when it comes to helping new people.

That and that I think BOE should me removed altogether and another solution found in general.
 
Really don't think that it's such a bad thing to have more and cheaper 65 gear floating around. If you're trying to cultivate new people you WANT that gear to be available and good so they can transition into bigger and better things easier. It's already a pretty daunting task to get caught up and that gap gets bigger and bigger. I like alts, I like being able to do different things without feeling tied to the treadmill forever.
 
What about something like smashing items into consumables, rather than them having a vendor cost? It's a concept in another game I play, with a far larger market, and quite a bit more items being farmed. To further explain the concept

Item A
Previous vendor value: 500
Makes: Rank 1 consumable

Item B
Previous vendor value:1000
Rank 2 consumable

Item C
Previous vendor value 2000
rank 3 consumable

Each item on smashing provides a different consumable, the power or type of which is determined by its previous value, and possibly even the zone it comes from, or classes on it, depending on how intricate you want to get with the system. Obviously these would need fairly powerful bonuses to be utilized, but I expect if done properly it would be better than the current system. Even keeping the current system, and adding something akin to this would see less platinum being created through the vendor system.


Thoughts on consumables. Quite a bit you could do here honestly, could be something like +% xp for a limited duration (may help alleviate some concerns voiced here http://forum.shardsofdalaya.com/showthread.php?p=275474#post275474), +% dropped $ (not sure if possible), Various longlasting buffs unobtainable by other methods (a runspeed buff usable in any zone for example), etc.

Another possibility, smash item, obtain a magic essence. Combine 10 minor essences for a regular magic essence, combine 10 regular for a major. Place them into various crafting recipes. Powerful clickies with charges would be a pretty good one. If for example you could create something statless similar in effect to a taeshlin earring, with a few charges, I'd expect it to see a reasonable market. Another possibility, +% to the extra raid loot class diversification chance for each person in the raid with said buff (not sure if that would be possible, or even desirable) .

The big problem here would be ensuring that most of these items are a) desirable, b) consumable. Desirable is the one that I feel would cause the most problems, and I'd imagine that any initial rollout is likely to suffer from an imbalance between desirability and price.

Oh and on a sidenote, alts aren't the draw they once were. I highly doubt they will ever be as popular as they were pre-boe, and a few dozen $ nerfs ago among other things.
 
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Oh and on a sidenote, alts aren't the draw they once were. I highly doubt they will ever be as popular as they were pre-boe, and a few dozen $ nerfs ago among other things.

Not to mention the amount of work it takes to get your main into a good place, doing it over again seems like a daunting endeavour for sure. Most would rather adopt a friend who has quit, and continue where they left off.
 
I think it wouldn't be that bad of an idea to transition all of the droppable items into dropping as straight no drop items while increasing the flat cash/item trash cash drops in zones that you want to be farmed. This would allow people to farm charms while exping and give players an incentive to take under-geared groups into exp zones to try them out. Yes this would make it a bit harder to twink but you would still have the option of turning to tradeskill items and it would make them a bit more (artifically) lucrative for lower level players to invest in since the market wouldn't be full of really cool overpowered loot from high tier exp zones.

On a separate note the new charm ideas are very cool, the idea of expable or tier point growing charms are very neat.
 
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