Player Vendor Options

@gaylike21

Ahh
So it's as I expected ... you have nothing to add other than complaints about the state of the world ... so your response to the question "What do you want?" is .......... Shut up.
I suggest you retreat to your playpen and spend the day sucking your thumb.
It's probably the most productive thing you can figure out how to do at the moment.

I'm just sayin'
Sil

 

It wasn't omitted for convenience, I'm quite sure that that distinction would be completely lost ongaylike21.
As I said, if you would like to discuss the relative merits of our views on how the player driven economy should evolve, I would be delighted to delve into it with you. You've made your bones (how's that for flattery) in the forums and unlike our obstreperous friend you actually know what's going on.

 

I was explaining why I replied to you that is all, now quit replying to me and get on with your thread lol.

 

@gaylike21
Grow up.
And you may have the last word with my compliments.

 

Sadly, there isn't much of a thread anymore.

 

In the current design thinking (as stated by the devs) NPC Merchants are mostly gold faucets, public NPC vendors are a sink, player vendors are a sink. While comission free Vendor is neither since it only moves money from one player to another.

This since ordinary player vendors (not from pledges) will have a fee and a comission as well, similar to NPC Public Vendors, the big difference being placement.

 

Chowderheads aside, it seems to me that you are proposing to insulate crafters from the rest of the players. Here is how I see your proposal going down:

1. The crafter would tell an NPC that they need X materials and pay the NPC
2. The NPC would then procure the materials and give them to the crafter
3. The crafter would then play around with the materials for a while and produce some goods
4. The crafter then hands the goods to an NPC and instruct them to sell them for Y

If you flip that around from the adventurer's side you get:

1. Kill monsters, get loot
2. Sell loot to NPC
3. Buy better equipment from NPC

Which is the standard loot cycle from most loot-based RPGs. What you are proposing is to make the back end of the loot cycle manual, which sounds to me like you want to play Recettear in SOTA without the trouble of having to leave your shop. That said, if the Devs wanted to make crafting a minigame a la Puzzle Pirates, I'd would definitely back such as system.

 

Right, you are correct, I had them twisted. It was what I was thinking even with the wrong choice of words So can you explain the difference between an auction house system and a bazaar of player owned vendors that can buy and sell?

 

Time & conveniance. Plus a sprinkle of regional economy. (Also you didn't state if your Auction House is global or regional? The answer would be different depending on what you were thinking of. So give me a context and I could provide a better answer.)

A global auction house makes it simple to sort all available offers and make a decision based on the optimal offer.
So you will always select the best offer for what you want.

A bazaar on the other hand would mean you running around interacting with a bunch of vendors looking at different offers. Until conveniance takes over and you settle for "good enough" instead of "optimal".

In a bazaar then it dictates that location is key to decrease that conveniance threshold.

etc

If you have a global auction house then it is prone to market manipulation. It's a given from the start.
With regional bazaars you will see regional monopolies and such forming, but not even close to the same price manipulations.
Adding player vendors outside of the player bazaar and you can have someone easily breaking against a regional monopoly. The only ones who could then enforce such regional price manipulations would be guild POTs.

 

@Burzmali

I suppose it could devolve into that but I think a more realistic RP crafting scenario would be as follows

Player decides to become a crafter specializing in armor and weapons and sets up a shop with a vendor. Initially they do some gathering but eventually they put more and more time into maximizing smithng skills. They tell their guildmates or in game friends, or simply post here in the forums, that they are interested in buying or trading for raw materials. They set their vendor up to buy raw materials so people can bring them in when they're not at the shop.
As a master smith they are able to produce high end goods either on special order or to post on their vendor for open sale. Additionally, (and this isn't in game at the moment and may never be) they can make perfect repairs and/or modifications on armor and weapons beyond what might be accomplished with the "field repair kits". As a purveyor of high end goods and services, they become more, not less, interactive with their fellow players and a valued in game resource.

Any system can be abused, and I have no doubt that we will see it in SoTA despite everyone's best efforts. For my part, this is the vision I have for crafting and I hope to see it come to fruition.
Sil

 

The main blocker to that scenario is scaling. In my scenario, the furious clickers will amass crafting XP faster than your cottage crafters allowing them to quickly corner the market on high end goods. A cottage crafter might be okay for a smaller guild, but as high end goods flood the market from the mass producers, they will quickly score the contracts to outfit the top guilds and will have the assets to start cornering the resource market. And then you rename the EXE from SOTA to EVE and call it a day.

 

That's a valid concern, but I don't see any reasonable way to prohibit that.
And if you think about it, is that any different than the advantage someone has that plays for hours every day as opposed to someone that might play a couple of evenings a week? Different goals, different approaches.
Yes, there is always the possibility (probability?) that there will be gold farming under contract in countries with subsistence level wages - there's nothing you can do about it so why even bother worrying about it?
I'm certainly interested in any and all ideas about how the economy and crafting should evolve, but how will anything short of prohibiting player to player transactions guarantee eternal crafter economic parity?
The option of setting a player vendor as a purchaser as well as a seller of goods shouldn't have such an extraordinarily negative effect. It's a convenience to let people sell raw materials to your vendor, but not a necessity. You could easily post times when you would be at the shop for transactions, or if you have a few regular suppliers setting up individual chests for them to deposit materials in would be just as effective.
I'm curious ... if a crafter has regular needs large amounts for raw materials ... would you want them prohibited from posting a "requisition" on the Player Marketplace forum?
The Devs are (hopefully) going to provide us with a vessel within which we can create our avatars - each in their own way. Once done, we will bear the final responsibility for making it a place we want to spend time in.
Your serve.
Sil

 

It's less about prohibiting it and more about making it trivial. In order for mass production run rampant, you need to be able to source and sell large volumes of non-NPC material with minimal player involvement. Allowing buying and selling from vendors does this.

I would like everyone to be able to craft their own legacy without having to bury their head in the sand to ignore all other users. Crafting a high-level item should be an achievement, you should be able to be proud to strut into town after spending weeks collecting (or 100Ks of gp on) materials to craft a Dragon Sword of Aneurysms without having someone on the corner shouting "DSoA, low $$$, buy 2 get thrid fR33". I don't think everyone needs to be the first, but it helps is those that are first aren't able to make it trivial.

I've played enough games to know that consistency is more important than slightly better prices. If I can guarantee that I can sell 500 units to vendor A any time for 100 each, that's preferable to vendor B that's only available 50% of the time, and often doesn't need 500 units, but pay 110 each.

I don't have a problem with work boards, "Will pay 500k for 1000 bear asses" where a player places the order and a second player reads and fills the order. I have more issues where the game inserts NPCs in between players, insulating them, which is why games like EVE are mindless grind without the corporation metagame.

 

We're really on the same page here (or damn close). The only point of difference really, is based on the way it appears that crafting is going to be implemented. Let's assume that your Dragon Sword of Aneurysms requires not only production level 50 skills and 3 of the 4 branches of the smithing tree fully allocated points, but that it also require special rare resources that only a level 50 gatherer with a fully allocated mining tree can find in the most hellish PvP region on the map. And let's further assume that a level 50 alchemist is required to successfully fashion the special weaponized gems that the sword requires. Unless the Devs ultimately plan on letting the skill trainers blithely recreate us at will for a few token gold, there is little or no chance that a single individual, regardless of mouse skills, could ever make the sword. It will take collaboration. And it's likely that it would only be created on demand. So you might see a pot in the forums advertising the fact that you COULD make it, but I doubt you'd every see "attention Walmart shoppers".
Granted, low and mid level stuff will be probably be commodities and heavily discounted, but probably not the good stuff - and for the serious crafter, that's the Holy Grail.

I haven't played many games, mostly UO before and then once again after the worlds split, so please forgive my rose colored glasses.
Now just to be clear, are you advocating for Vendor A or Vendor B?
Sil

 

Depends on the economics of it. if the sword is high end gear, the demand will be high so smiths will send out NPCs with demands to buy boatloads of the special gems, which high end alchemists will see and will begin mass producing. If the harvesting area is dangerous, a guild will camp it.

I'm not suggesting that either is better, but Vendor A will have far more business than B.

 

So you do think that a group of vendors in one spot that can buy or sell is like an auction house. The minor difference is that you have to walk a couple steps to each vendor. Possibly not even that. Now on another thread they talk about a website selling items on it that shows all items globally. If you use that website in conjunction with bazaar buy and sell vendors you got a pretty good min/max auction house economy tool that creates a global economy.

 

Not really, since such a site would need to track several bazaars in several regions.
Conveniance again. One wouldn't travel to a new region just to get a discount on mandrake.

 

they would if they had trade associations with other regions. Also websites can do live vendor updates all the time. Look at uo and how that has happened.

 

I for one see the personal vendors as "vendors", not personal "factors" or "merchants" that buy low and sell high in your absence.

I could see one restricting their vendor to just sell to guild(s) members, so as to sell mats low to guild crafters. Or set to public, and have the prices set higher for profit instead.

I foresee simple choices for the vendor as far as economic settings.

I am more interested in knowing if we get to customize the appearance of the vendors and servants. (Gender, perhaps simpler face and hair choices, game clothing that can be applied and changed as desired)