Quality of life — shopping improvements

I have some gold and I like stuff. Sometimes I spend entire evenings waundering from town to town shopping. Many times I am looking for a specific item that seems to be uncommon. Dozen towns later and many hours spent, most times I return home disappointed.

I would love it if there was a better way to shop. Some black market (global search), town cryer town level search, something to improve the results and reduce the effort.

I thought of a creative search tool..... npc character shopper. I tell him what I want, he goes off for a day or two and comes back with the information. Still make me go to the town find the vendor and buy it. The npc would just do the search for me. The time delay balances the usage and saves the servers. Plus.... port could sell the npc for 30 cotos.

 

Sounds like an AMAZING use for the Baron/Lord/Knight Servant!! Start there and create the NPC Functionality which could be built into this new sell-able NPC. Basically a Query Bot.

You could specify Town, Region or World. 1 day, 2 days, 3 days of NBT or whatever it breaks down to. Information can be dumped into a player book

 

a global search would ruin the economy... but a servant that scouted a town or a few towns looking for one item at a time, sounds like it might be helpful without hurting trade. it would take time for servant's to get there, scout, maybe 3 towns and then return. would probably cost gold depending on the servant's time (not for baron/ lord / knight ones. for new ones that would be needed to be added into the game so more people can use them) then the servant can come back and say hay I found one over in town "A". then you go to town A and buy it. or maybe he stays there and you get a letter hay found one. so you have to go to your mail and find out how much. maybe he can then buy it for you. but the important thing is he doesn't give all the information about all vender's. only looing really for one thing at a time. I also would not allow him to look for coto's, non rare materials, and some other common things. this would only be used for hard to find items.

 

Agreed... I like the idea of the servant. Making the knights servant useful would be a wonderful bonus. It could be a starting point for other npcs that help you in other ways.

There are ways to balance everything. Black market global search would not have to be a grid and be 100% complete ..., Shady npc May only be regional and may not know everything. Only return 50% of the records. Also, make us take a virtue hit from using the black market. You hang around shady npcs.... then maybe you are a bit shady too. Balance the usage. Make each search cost 100 gold. Maybe you pay more and npc tells you more.... 500 gold returns 80% of the records. Limits usage and preserves the economy.

I am sure port could find a way that it is useful and does not kill the game.

Thanks

 

Hang on next thing will be that people will be suggesting that Port scrap any notion of regional economies. Oh wait...

 

When they eviscerated any chance of regional economies, making the bank global, opening up the checkpoints, zone teleports... at that point, what more harm could be done? Why leave this one last thing to obfuscation and difficulty? Why isn't a global market search not a QOL item?

 

Because people just *LOVE* to shop in areas outside the Brittany Region... Spending hours searching remote towns for a needle in a haystack is a mini game we all love.

The whole point is not to remove what is available in what area or bring in a global pricing structure - its about bringing into the game a way to move information about product availability. As Trevour said, there are many ways to balance it out, but I would certainly prefer an in-game method of advertising to Discord Spam. Perhaps you can pay to "advertise" your stock out to the NPC's that are gathering data. If you want to be known, advertise!

Lets get really crazy here and say does it matter if the price is listed? Or simply that the item is available in that area? Perhaps the price the NPC gives, if any is an approximate cost. This kind of tool will just help players know where they can shop and not be a waste of time.

Just trying to say, lets enhance the use of in-game methods to keep us informed, allow us to ALL participate in the economy regardless of distance from the main hub towns and keep us from needing to exit the game to discord to find or place advertisements.

 

Sorry I was being flippant unnecessarily as am feeling pretty disillusioned with the game. I actually agree with the idea and many others that have been suggested over the months and years for improving the game time experience from the previous "if it isn't tedious and frustrating then it has no place in SOTA" school of thought that held sway until really quite recently and has not really gone away in many ways.

 

Oh, I totally got your message. Just adding to it! Cheers!

 

I'm all for anything that improves the shopping experience. Right now running around looking for a particular item takes an incredibly long time. It took me a whole hour looking for a type of wand JUST in Novia Market. This is why I don't bother buying things. If I have 5 hours of free time a week for playing this game, I don't want an hour lost to looking for an item.

I'm all for a global search, but I realistically don't think that's going to happen. OP's idea of a servant that will give location + price would be much better than it is now. As a bonus, this servant can be a small gold sink, which in turn will benefit the overall economy.

 

How do you tell your servant what type of wand you are looking for? This is important, if your servant is a once per three days thing, you don't want false positives, that will anger people even more than not having the functionality to start with.

 

Because it would basically be a Query Bot, I don't see why there could not be an interface built off the buy orders system for example. Essentially you could start with what item you are looking for, then options, i.e. Material, +, Bonus/Effects applied or maybe even a range. Pretty much like query builder in a database, only keyed in with actual item names from the game.

This would also require that people make multiple requests, and not simply look for every weapon out there.. It should give more specific hits.

 

It kind of already exists in the form of shroudoftheavatar.net except it only lets you search reciepts for items already sold that people submit themselves.

Even so, ive used it successfully to find vendors selling obscure things i need. Now i always check that first when im looking to buy something, saves a crapton of time

 

Hey Jeeves, scour the world for a Constantan 10.2 WD chain chest with 13str and 10int

 

I kind of like the idea. Reminds me of the "mineral drone" in Starflight 2

 

There's absolutely no way that having people be able to find your goods would ruin the economy.

 

yes it would. it would drive down the prices of most stuff to the point that collecting things would be a waist of time. it would kill the slew of people who shop all day looking for a sweet deal (people who educated them selves on current prices and take chances that the price they think they can sell it for they will) resell it on their venders. Currently people who manage there venders well get more business because they have the goods they are selling and restock often. a global system even at 50% or what ever that was would reward people who just posted stuff willy nilly and have no idea nor care what things sell for. this would only help the people who want things fast and don't want to earn them. if you're looking for gear like a +10 wand, and can't find what your looking for hire a crafter and have it made. if you need help join a guild, maybe one with avid shoppers and ask them to look out for X for you.

 

A global system would also devalue land/vending space that people payed money and time to acquire. a system like that would make any land adequate.

 

Knowing which vendors have the item you're looking for will not effect the price unless you're gouging people (and I suspect that your argument is precisely to protect this).

 

I'm not sure I'd like a global search unless we had a chance to opt out as shop holders (I'm not interested in maximizing profits with my shops as they are more convenience/reward for those who consistently visit or live in the area of the shops). The other options like town crier level sound a bit nicer. Unfortunately if the aforementioned global search was exact, every single lower priced resource would be snapped up immediately by those handful who live to make a few fast coin by reselling. It will push those prices higher and make things a bit drab/uniform across the board but maybe good for the very casual player in some regards (aside from the possible resource price hike they would be hit with). But anyway not to sound negative....some cool ideas by the OP.