Player Vendor Discussion

[Mikhaila]

Starting a new thread since the current one is a bit old and started before the release on steam which brought a lot of new players. Feel free to comment or branch off to anything about vendors.

Background: I've been playing about two months, and had a vendor for about three weeks. Personally, I'm making a lot of money, have an outlet for things i loot/forage, and many of them go much higher to players than vendors. Overall I'm fine with the increasing price of having a stall. I play a bit each day and devote a bit of that time to farming the same things over and over to put in my stall. This is a decent strategy since people always need things like saltpeter, lichen, sulfur, slabs, and some tradeskill things i make. I'm always spending an hour or two doing surveys ilmari, farming in kur or in gaz, or running a cave over and over. Then I run off and have fun.

Some thoughts:

-I enjoy doing most of this. But for another player, having to devote time to sell things might now make it profitable with the daily costs.

-A new player can't open a stall unless they have a lot of cash or work on industry.

-Limited space means you don't put a lot of stuff on a vendor. Just the items you know will sell. This does keep the quality up, but means that some stuff is never going to be seen in the Market.


Proposal: Create another tier of stalls. (The current ones stay the same.) This new tier would be for beginners, casual players, and those who don't have a lot to sell, or want to sell inexpensive items. These are inferior stalls. Think of them as the small shops at the back of the big market. For sake of ease, i'll refer to them as 'small shops'.
- All small shops would be in one room.
- A player only needs Level 5 in Industry to open one, or 1000 councils.
- A player may only have one small shop. They can also own a large shop.
- The current NPC will direct you to another NPC in the room with the small shops who will explain things.
- Cost for a small shop is static. It doesn't increase over time. Lets say 250 a day?
- Mercantile experience is far less (10%?) of what a Large shop earns you.
- The Value of items you can place for sale is 5000 councils at one time.

So now you can start selling earlier. You aren't limited to only high priced or bulk selling items. You can learn the system.

Buyers know that this room has a different type of vendor, and probably a bit different merchandise. New players looking for lower priced items will have a chance at finding what they want here.

Just a thought.

[Crissa]

I would suggest the second tier be shops that slide in when existing shops empty out, rather than a special room. The shop may or may not show up.

Basically, instead of guaranteeing a space, it would be a wait-list.

[Daimes]

I would agree with your suggestion if players were limited in renting these small stalls; specifically, if a player has the industry to rent a standard stall, they cannot rent a small stall. I have two main reasons that I would like to see my proposed limitation:

1. As I'm sure most people are aware, the stalls are not intended to be permanent fixtures for a player. They're to be rented out as long as someone has something for sale, and for as long as someone can pay the bills. Once either of those expires, a wise player would let the stall expire (although I know of a few players who are content to continue renting an empty stall because of the location of the stall, but that's besides the point). To help drive home the point that the stalls are temporary, that's why the price hike per day rented is implemented; if you want to try to make your stall permanent, you better hope you can pay quite a pretty penny per day for it. If the static price per day charge on a small stall were implemented, it would be an incentive for certain players to rent a small stall instead of a standard one to avoid the ramped up charge per day. This leads into my second point -

2. If a limitation were to not be added, certain types of markets would shift to the small stores. I infrequently rent a stall and stock food in it, which is not a sustainable money-maker once the charge per day inflates enough due to the infrequency of sales (most people buy only a few food items at once and leave for a few days, since food lasts a while compared to other items that are sold). Even with your proposed limitation of, for example, 5,000 councils, I would be able to move to a small stall and keep it open for as long as I please; one or two sales would keep me afloat. Even if somebody were to buy me out, I could easily refill the shop. In short, some item shops would move to the small stalls and push the intended new player audience away from renting the stalls.

I also don't want to sound condescending, but stalls are not the only option to sell items as a new player. I remember when I was surveying for a living as a new player, I would advertise my gems to trade chat or even guild chat to see who would buy them, long before I was able to get a stall. You can even advertise goods on the forums or some of the Discord servers related to the game. The only benefit, for me, of a stall is that you don't have to be there to sell goods.

In all, you make a good case, but I feel your suggestion could use just a bit more polish when looking at my forwarded concern.

[Mikhaila]

All good points Daimes. I could have polished the suggestion quite a bit and tightened it up more, and there are a lot of points you made that I had thought about. I purposefully didn't to see what sort of feedback I could get. Knowing that stalls aren't intended to be permanent is good info. I was struggling a bit with the idea of coming up with a system that gives newer players a limited way to buy/sell , and a way for players to sell cheaper merchandise. I'll give it a couple more weeks for comments, then make another attempt.

[Rhawkas]

Perhaps change the current player stalls so that you pay a large fee up-front to rent the space for a set number of days and then after that time expires then that player's account (account based rather than character based so people don't just cycle a vendor through their alts and lock down the stall anyway) is put on a cooldown before they can rent another stall? Possible to close a stall early and regain a percentage of your payment based on the remaining time and with a cut taken out for early closure?

As for some stuff that's needed but doesn't net enough of a profit to warrant using a player vendor, maybe some kind of merchants that just do resales? Like a vendor that buys wood and carpentry items then sells them? Has no "Buy New" tab, but a larger "Buy Used" tab and maybe they resell stuff at less of a markup than standard vendors? Players could supply these vendors and get some money and also buy items from them that they need but player vendors don't bother stocking.

Anyway, just spitballing ideas here. =)