Quality of life — shopping improvements

An ingame trade tab could solve some of these issues ...a place where people can spam what they sell or what they want to buy .

I also think newspapers can be a great addition to the game . Add a tab for press near the window selector ..that takes you to all available newspapers ingame..add some sort of rating. Allow people to subscribe to them. From there its all about the publishers they can take adds from other people and post em in theyre newspaper . Buying this or selling this in X town ...and why not all sorts of news/ events that may be of interest to sota community.

 

no i'm not in fact my prices are quite low and the reason I sell stuff all the time is because it's so low. and if every vender always knew what i'm selling my stuff at then they would all have to sell at my price to move there stuff. I like there higher prices. makes people remember where they bought my stuff and get's them to remember where the good vender are. the problem is people don't want to take the time to find the good venders they just want that they want as fast as they can.

 

that would be interesting, because people would have to advertise and it wouldn't include ever vender.

 

shopping in this game is an adventure. you explore lands and venders all over in hopes to finding perhaps one or 2 items. along the way you may find something cool that you were not really looking for but now you want it.

 

shortly after the game went persistent I had a vender. wanting to make a shop I chose one thing, gems. so I learned the prices of the different colors. I set up my vender with 3 single gems of each color and 2 stacks of 5 gems of each color. different colors had different prices because of supply and demand. and the stacks of 5 had a lower price per gem on them to encourage people to buy more at a time. as a back up, I always kept a bag next to my vender with enough gems to fully restock my full vender at least once. if I logged on and saw that some sold, I would restock it. if I didn't have enough left over to restock it again, then I would go mining till I get enough to have for back up.

now if you looked at my vender any one day, or even any one week, you might not see any sales. but if you looked month to month you would have seen steady sales and often repeat customers. because they learned that I would have them at a fair price all the time. I would be rewarded for my consistency.

if all prices where to be viewed globally and people saw that I sold my rubies at say 400g. the first person that saw it (and wanted to sell theirs) would now sell theirs for 375g. the next person would see that and sell his at 350g and the next 325g, then 200g then 195g and probably even lower because they are not paying attention to the market and never thought to look that you could have just sold it to the NPC vender for 200g. so the mindless selling from global checking actually made you lose gold. and tanked the market for gems because you can now buy them at lower then what they should go for. so no one sells any except the people losing gold.

repeat for all other commodities.

but yes it would help some people find that one eluded rare item that they tried one time for 2 hours and could find it.

 

No, the problem is that people don't want to spend their precious gaming time searching for hours on end for the item that they want. If you have that item on your vendor and people see that in a search then they can go to your vendor and get it without having to go around to each vendor, double click, wait for it to load, scroll through the list of crap, discover that the vendor doesn't have what they're looking for, close the window and move to the next vendor. This is an extremely frustrating, time consuming and completely stupid exercise.

 

of course that ignores all other problems with such a systems.
what can't you find that you need this system in place to better your gaming ?

 

What "other problems"? Perhaps you can elaborate?

 

Genius. Global Search no, Black Market search yes

 

did you not read any of my other posts ? I pointed out a few.
here is one more very big one...
if a global market system showed everyone what is for sale and where, then a supper rich wale can pick a market and corner it. buy up all say fleet flutes and mark them up and sell then at an inflated price. because his would be the only ones available you will have to buy his or go without.

 

From the perspective of Eve Online, where you can know where everything is for sale... yes, that happens. But,

1) Good luck selling them. That's an investment that may not pay out.
2) That's an opportunity for someone to undercut that person.

So basically, the only-vaglue-works-in-games free-hand of the market.

Edit: You may be able to make that case for rares, or expired items (which also happens in Eve). Yeah - ridiculous prices. That hardly crashes the economy, though. Then again, Eve is a consumption model.

 

There are people already who spend countless hours scouring remote locations with poor exposure to buy up resources and put them in a more convenient location for a modest markup. This is part of the market atmosphere the current system creates and they would be another casualty of a global system. You can call them price gougers if you want to, but they are providing a service for their markup.

 

Yup.

 

that was only one of my points : (

 

Well, it can remain the same and people like me will just do everything themselves, because it's less of a hassle than trying to find items, or they can implement something to make it easier to find what we're looking for.

 

you do know that there is a player marketplace on the forums where you can look for stuff and ask for stuff and not shop in game, right ?

 

...that very few people actually use and waiting for days to get a reply is also not fun.

Thanks but I think that I'll just craft/gather it myself.

 

I'll just put it out there, and this is not a veiled threat, but if an Auction House or some other form of centralized vendor search with prices is implemented IN the game or if the API is made available so that it can be accessed outside of the game I will sell my account and leave.

I cannot stand having to undercut the lowest prices on items and it completely destroys the immersion into this type of society.

How do you find stuff? Look at the trade channels here on the forums, in Discord and ask around. Or, this is a crazy idea, go shopping and explore.

How do you sell stuff? Advertise in the forums, on Discord and be alert to people asking for your wares. Be creative. All the same rules that apply to retail in the real world essentially are here too. Advertise on NBNN and Avatars Radio. Network with other merchants and towns etc. Make a small web page for your store and link it in social media and the forums. The possibilities are endless.

I had someone leave Immortal City (which is nested until EP2) because they put a vendor out and expected to sell stuff. They blamed the town being nested. I got news for people that think that way. You can put your vendor in a town that isn't nested but if you don't let people know its there, you're going to sell very little. Just like in real life.

You reap what you sow. Auction houses are a lazy, sloppy fix to a problem that doesn't actually exist.

Edit to add that we do need a Trade Chat channel.

 

Nobody was suggesting including prices.

 

Still unnecessary.