Vendors sitting on ground - is this new and how do I change it?

Well, this subject has come up before.

I've personally always been in favor of a vendor bark system, which would work like in Ultima VII.

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When you'd come close to them, vendors would bark out what they're selling randomly from their list of wares for sale. "Sapphires for 200 gold!" "Chairs for 50 gold!" Or even without the sales value, something like "Sapphires!" "Rubies!" "Diamonds!" Then they could also if necessary bark out things like "New items for sale!" or "New items this week!" based on player activity with the vendor. This would all be managed by the game automatically.

Other players suggested the vendors sit down on old/empty stock. And for whatever reasons, the devs decided to go with that.

But I think there are some bigger issues in the game that incentivize sellers to put their vendors outdoors, and I think there are a lot of assumptions about how the economy is going to work that shapes a lot of suggestions for the game.

So, for example, I would like a game where I could go to a town bulletin board and look up advertisements for various things, including advertisements for shops selling certain goods. You could also look up shop names on Town Criers and on the map. When I found a shop that interested me, I would go directly to that shop. Vendors would have names on their nameplates, not advertisements. There would be restrictions on how you could name vendors which would ensure that players wouldn't use their nameplates for spamming players. Shops would be encouraged to be specialized to a certain trade, so I could identify a blacksmith's shop, and I could drop him a note, "Hey I want this particular longsword, can you make it for me?" Or, "I need this shield repaired, can I contract with you?" There would be enough diversity in shop signs to make them sufficient for identifying what you could buy and sell. Etc.

On the other hand, the game is right now oriented around door-to-door shop-hopping, and a lot of the vendors are "junk" vendors with no specialties, they just have a bunch of random items. I usually can't even find what I want. Its no wonder people want global vendor searches; but its usually because nobody is even making what I want. Shop-hopping is sometimes fun, but I don't know why the game experience should be built around it ? The only reason vendors sitting down is a particularly good cue is because you can see them from far away, which is good for shop-hopping but not necessarily for anything else.

Long term, I would have liked to see a bit more realism around vendors, which would have helped, too. What I mean is for instance, lets say vendors required a bed in a house and some sales counter or cart, that they'd go to on a schedule. When they would go to their counter, it would fill with visual representations of what they were selling, so you wouldn't even have to talk to them to find out. A vendor selling armor would fill the top of the counter with armor, as if he was taking it out of storage and displaying it for sale.

I understand why this isn't in the game, and I don't expect complex things like that in the game at the moment.

Right now, though, I would hope that the devs consider that shop-hopping isn't the only game experience; and not create mechanics for shop-hopping that make it more difficult for players trying to do things in the game outside of this.

I haven't put up a shop since pre-persistence, but I'm planning to again, and like I showed in an earlier post, the whole point was setting it up so you could always see the vendor through the window. Its hard to do this now because of the shutters on the row homes. Its doubly hard if that vendor sits down below the counter, because you won't only see him outside the window, but you won't see him inside either.

I also plan to put up some vendors for role-play purposes like giving out items for quests or keeping certain items in stock. I would hope to constantly have to fill up their stock, but isn't my expectation.

Anyway, at the least, I think the vendors need to be allowed to sit on a stool or something if one is available.

 

If I moved my vendor inside at the cost of a few sales, I'd never have any sales.

 

I would very much like to see many of those suggestions.

I really think an easy win would be letting players name their lot and having that name show up on the Town Cryer. The signs on my building read Moonglow Tailoring and Tia's Things. It'd be awesome if I could name the lot that and have people see it from Town Cryer.

Bulletin Board postings would also be nice. Limit of one per player to prevent board hogging, and pair it with a two week decay timeout so your flyer is automatically taken down after two weeks. You could repost it from there.

 

Yea, I believe the devs have something like this planned, and I think its a good step.

I think they need to take care, though, to think about how to set this up in a way where people don't just use the shop names in a spammy way like they do for vendor names.

For example, maybe,
- Separating shop name from shop description. People could always advertise in the description, while putting a real shop name in the field for the shop name. (Providing other means to advertise like a BB system would help in this regard also).
- Showing the type of shop signs on the lot somehow in the listing, and providing more types of shop signs so this can vary a bit.
- Taking the shop name from the name on the shop signs.
Etc.

I'd also prefer that you could replace the player name with a lot name or shop name. So if I'm setting up a POT and have an abbey, I would have the name of the abbey instead of my player name, or if I'm setting up a garden, I'd have the name of the garden instead of my player name. And then, all of these lot names could then be ported over to the in-game maps, too, eventually.

Now, if only Town Crier's loaded their lot listing a little faster...

 

Cash registers are merely a vendor skin. But at least they've got no body to sit down.

There seems to be a bug when you place a vendor now, it never stands up again. I replaced a house yesterday, and thus the vendor too, and it was sitting down all day, with 20 items from that day, even after multiple instances. (This is in Westend, not a high-traffic place that keeps an instance open for hours.)

Ugh. Points for knowing ISO date format, but that is just way too immersion breaking. You want your vendor inside, but you're okay with all that hanging over his head?

A relative number like "5 days" would be less bad. Especially in a tooltip. But remember you have to localize it too! Something with shades of grey (avoid color changes like green to red because of color blindness!) or size or position would be even better. We got change of position as the first iteration. Most of us should know by now that nothing good ever works well the first month it appears, if only because the consequences couldn't be predicted at first.

And I was thinking that the name should only go grey when empty (right now it is strictly linked with sitting down), but then I remembered you can turn off nameplates.

 

At the very least, vendors should be "activated" simply by clicking on them rather than removing or adding materials. It is an insult to have someone pay up front to list an item for sale and then have to pay again 7 days later when the item is removed and replaced just to get around this sitting issue. I sell beginner items at 20 gold. The commission for adding those items to the vendor is 11 gold. I net 9 gold. If I have to lift that item up and replace it, it costs 11 gold again losing me 1 gold on the ultimate selling price. I realize that to activate the vendor I just have to move an item every seven days and could use the cheap item over and over swallowing the loss, but this is insulting. There has to be a better way. I pity all those who have to use commissioned vendors as the whole mechanic stinks and now it stinks worse.

 

Really, I had no problem with the old way. Was just trying to find compromise with people who claim it is an important feature for the buyer to know at a glance how long ago the merchant was updated. The extra text tag can be toggled with nameplates, thus looses less immersion because the folks who want immersion can toggle the names off.

But yes, as a software developer who has worked with both timestamp dated files and databases that inexplicably stored timestamps as strings instead of datetime objects, I defend the ISO date format as superior and advocate for it's wider adoption whenever possible!