Global Item Search

@Chris wants to implement a local town search, which doesn't solve any of the current problems.

C'est la vie.

 

I actually think Town-Based vendor search is a good place to start. The search could easily be expanded to Regional once Town-Based is working well.

 

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However, I would prefer a vendor search system with both Town-Based and Regional search.

Here is my favorite design for a fun vendor search system:

--- Town-Based Vendor Search ---

- Load into the town you want to search, and go to the Town Crier.
- Click on the Town Crier to access the Town Crier UI where you can search all the player vendors in that town.
- The Town Crier UI in each town lists all items for sale on player vendors in the town (including prices), and all purchase orders in the town (also including prices).
- Items can be filtered by category, word search, etc.; and sorted by name, price, etc.
- From the Town Crier search results, choose an item to purchase or a purchase order to fulfill.
- Select an item, and set a Compass Destination marker to the player vendor that has the item for sale.
- Follow the Compass Destination marker to the player's vendor.
- Purchase the item or fulfill the purchase order from the vendor the same way as it is currently done.

--- Regional Vendor Search ---

- A Regional Crier is located in each region's main city.
- Load into the main city in the region you want to search, and go to the Regional Crier.
- Click on the Regional Crier to access the Regional Crier UI that has a list of all the towns in the region.
- Select any town from the list to access the Town Crier UI for that town, with all the same functionality that the Town Criers have.
- (Even better would be if the Regional Crier UI allowed searching all items in the region at once, but that may be harder to implement).
- Select an item, and set a Compass Destination marker to the player vendor that has the item for sale.
- Go to the town where the player vendor is located.
- Follow the Compass Destination marker to the player's vendor.
- Purchase the item or fulfill the purchase order from the vendor the same way as it is currently done.

So every town in the region can be searched from the Regional Crier without having to load into each town, but players must still load into the town and go to the player's vendor if they want to actually make a purchase or fulfill a purchase order.

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Novia regions
https://sotawiki.net/sota/Novia_regions

Category: Regions
https://sotawiki.net/sota/Category:Regions

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As mentioned before a town search does not allow all vendors from all towns included in this game. If someone has a vender based town it is fine for that but it does not even solve the issue that we aren't including everyone in all towns selling. Some may not be a vendor town but may have just a few vendors. Let those be seen also.

A global item search would do that. It would say who all has this item and which town they are in, And ta-da everyone is included, no favoritism about it just facts for all to see and deal with. @Chris, @Elgarion

 

Chris does not play the game in any meaningful way, so he has no idea what we are talking about. He has never created his own gear or created anything and try to selling on the market. He does not know how to find out the price for things he might make or need.

He also does not know how to travel town to town to find items to buy. When he goes to a players town he is mainly steering at the ground or the sky. He has no idea at all how a player plays the game so taking he comment into consideration is just pointless.

For me to accept he point of view about Global Vendor search he has to have a character that he much fully equip himself without using his GM hacks.

 

What we need a global vendor search through your own vendor, a public vendor and maybe a Crier.

You search for your item and purchase it.

You then travel to the location and pick up your item.

Simple and not complicated. And YES WITH PRICES LISTED.

 

Just my 2 cents, but there are pros and cons to all the approaches, whatever system is in place, some people will try to exploit it, and it will benefit some and put some others at disadvantage.

I personally do not like easy solutions such as global search, because we have whole POTs build in order to sell you gear you need, and with the complexity of crafting, it is rather hard to know what you search for in the first place.
And if you put in an extra effort, you can find hidden gems elsewhere, where you can buy especially cheap or reliably. It feels more personal and there is not one shop to rule them all, so to speak.

I agree it can be frustratingly hard to find a specific item sometimes... I agree it would be nice to have an alternative item to Fyndoro's tablet of finding for market, you could search for a specific item once a day, and perhaps get a list of towns where you can buy it.

On the other hand, while I do not think that global search or market would break the game completely, it is not something I would prefer, it is a reasonably fair solution. I still like looking for an item and finding it eventually myself, or with friends, I think it can be a fun gameplay and I would somewhat miss it, and I often find a lot of items I would not look for in the first place. And I get to discover and to know new towns. But since I do not live in any of these towns, it would probably be much easier to actually sell stuff myself, though I would have to keep adjusting the price so people would actually visit.

 

Mark these words:
Item search with full disclosed prices will cause a HUGE price drop. It's a race to the bottom.

I'm not sure, however, if said price drop will be either good or bad for the economy.

 

If they dumb it down to search only within a town then you and I both know that it will never go beyond that. Like I said, it doesn't solve any of the current problems, so why bother? [that's a rhetorical question]

 

This is the biggest issue. Global search would help create a real, thriving economy and I really don't understand why people continue to argue against it.

 

Having a global item search that requires visiting the town to purchase would help connect us. We are so separated in our little worlds.

We need every option to know others are out there not just the 'Amazon's or 'Walmart' big guys (towns full of many vendors). These are very well done but as in Real Life it makes the under dogs (IE single vendor in a town to a few or so vendors) invalid or totally missing out on selling.

For myself I do advertise a little in the trade window but still it's a bit clunky feeling don't you think? Especially for a game where ability to have your own vendors should be a fun, interesting and a satisfying thing to do.

Please give us A feature full experience. One where we can sell our cute little bags of goods on our vendors like sets of armor, 8 pc living room set, song sets etc. All in one bag. Please finally let this happen.

I also like to shop if I want to when I don't know what I want but sometimes I don't have time or want to shop for a certain thing, I just want to know where to get that particular item for the project I'm doing. So town searches won't fulfill that need, well or fulfill the want.

Again giving us town searches only accomplishes a very basic and insufficient fix as we see over and over. Again the easy way out happens, not a proper full featured fix but cheapest, easiest and disappointing, as happens way too often in this game.

Edited

 

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From Atos (Chris) Q&A with the BMC Guild today:

Atos joining the BMC guild meeting for some Q&A!
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/940915411

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20:52 Echondas: [talking about how players may have difficulty finding farmed crafting ingredients if they are removed from NPC merchants] vendor search would fix that

- Atos responded about 00:21:25, and said:
Yes, and that's actually one of the things we're looking at. I do have a new coder on the project who is super gung-ho and excited about being on the project. And that's, he's actually looking at things, we're going to have a meeting on Monday, I'm not sure if he's watching this, but we're going to have a meeting on Monday to discuss some plans. Because we're looking at a lot of UI stuff including things like vendor search and some other things. We actually already have all the server support and the client has all the knowledge it needs to do vendor, ah client side vendor searching within a town, and so the only thing really limiting that right now is the UI work to do it. But we're gonna discuss a big change to the project which is having the new guy come on and learn a UI system that is five years old, versus moving, starting to do things in the newer UI system that Unity provides. My gut is we're going to go with the newer UI system, just because it has much better performance. It doesn't suffer from a lot of the problems that our current UI system works on. For those who remember, for those who... [distraction from chat] But anyways, but yeah, our performance, UI performance is pretty horrendous. So, it is actually the limiting factor in big combats and other stuff. Which you can actually find yourself just by turning off all UI elements through F11 or F9. But anyways, the plan is to get some of those, the vendor search stuff in, but right now the current holdup is "Do we completely ditch the old system and do everything in the new one, or do we try to patch, you know, fix up a few of the old ones?". And I say that just because vendor search would be one that is, wouldn't be that much work to tack onto the old UI, but I think right now we're leaning towards "Ditch it, do everything on the new UI that's more maintainable".

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- About 00:25:10, voice question from a player:
Is there any chance that we can get some API insight to vendors at all - sales, whatever?

- Atos responded about 00:25:20, and said:
Ah, adding, so there's actually a couple little steps to take along the way there. Adding some, I was planning on adding Lua hooks so you guys could actually call some, you guys could actually call into http stuff which is pretty much all you need to be able to query our public API and expose some of that stuff, or even make hooks to your own website. That's one of those that is not that dangerous in my opinion, and opens up a lot of possibilities for you guys. So, I'm hoping to get that in there, and that'll free you guys up to do whatever you want to. Again I expect somebody'll have a wrapper, you know, it's probably only twenty lines of code to get a wrapper around that to query API, or to query the public API.

Player:
Well, what I'm getting at though is that the, at least last time I looked, the API didn't have any kind of vendor data in it at all.

Atos:
Ah, that part of it. Yeah, and that's one of those, there's a lot of these things where we've had talks in the past and some people, whether legitimately or not, believe, you know, there's some risks that come up with that. Some people don't like that. I know probably especially with the BMC there's guys who you're, obviously you're very public on how you run things and the price setting and all that jazz that other people might want to keep secret. There's some people that want to keep that stuff secret, but I don't know that we can really justify that. I'll take some more public appeals from people to see if they have more concerns on it. I know the last time we talked though there were too many people who were concerned about exposing vendor stuff. And just the fear I think is a little bit that it might, you know, everything turns to, if you can get on search, see what people are selling stuff for, then now immediately everybody on the entire server is going to be held to the exact same price standards, because it'll be so public to everybody. So, that is a fairly legitimate concern. I just don't know if it's something really that's worth protecting that. My belief is still, again, a lot of this stuff is, as long as we delay it by at least a day or something, you know, as long as it's not an instantaneous thing, I don't know that it's that dangerous to expose that. But again, I know you guys have slightly different priorities than some of the other people, and are very open and public about your stuff, which is awesome. But, so the answer is "Maybe". We will reinvestigate it now. Especially since we have a couple of players since last time we talked, but we have a couple players who are on the dev team and have, can more privately argue for one thing or another.

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Somebody send this to the new guy:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Fmre-08uMn7RBMdhj_d-m93TzAsdKsffKEFfE70v2xc/edit?usp=sharing

See you next year.

 

I agree. Devs, please take your time and use the best tools available to make an awesome vendor search system. Even if it takes longer, I would prefer to wait for a better vendor search and UI.

 

We actually need to send this to the new guy so he can have insight not only just copy it but to get an idea of what issues we are facing in the game. Also for him to have his own original idea as I believe that he used to be player that I suspect writes LUA codes for us before and may still be doing it for the community.

 

Also please I beg of you take your time, I cannot stress this as I might want to, we have waited years for this, so please take your time, take all the time.

There should be a new phase with Shroud now. Right First Time, Right All The Time.

 

And, as we all know - there's NO substitute for being truly able to see the "Player Perspective" .
If he needs to "tutor" under anybody, I might nominate... oh, say.......... @Elgarion
One excited guy showing the excited new guy the "ropes" .

 

I won't need to teach him any ropes about the game. He knows the ins and outs of it better than I and certainly knows Unity more than I do (but I'm drinking milk!). I think you all will be very impressed with his work, and even only one week in, he has fixed some peculiar and head scratching bugs which certainly shows how quickly he adapts to a new environment and his impressive skills with programming.

 

Are we going to get an introduction soon?

(Though, I have a suspicion as to who it is... I can only think of one person who I've seen regularly engage with Chris both here and on Twitter about super insider details of the workings of Unity...)

 

Wow these are nice words to read!