Curse

Plague · Apr 01, 2006, 06:03 AM // 06:03

This goes hand-in-hand with Factions' new city-capture system.

The idea here is that in addition to NPC Merchants, each town has a Guild Merchant that sells items for the Guild that currently holds it. The prices would be slightly lower than normal NPCs, possibly settable by the guild within a certain limit.

The merchants would sell items provided by guild members. What's the benefit of this? For players, it's slightly lower prices, although I'm sure they'd be bought up quickly. NPC Merchants offer regularity and consistency in provision of items (as it should be) and Guild Merchants offer decreased prices and also can stock in-demand items. This would be limited to materials, obviously. Weapons and armor are trade-house items.

The benefit for the guild is an immediate advertisement to every player that visits your NPC. Rather than spamming channels or trying to go through the auction lines (assuming that's an option upon release), your materials are actually sought for by the player.

How exactly you harvest funds from this, I don't know. Perhaps you visit the NPC and ask for the funds. Perhaps it goes straight to your Guild storage. Perhaps to your own storage, depending on how many of your own items sold. (But whose ingots or parchment are being bought? Yours or someone else's?)

Potential problems are obvious.

Players may go to the NPC, but how often will they even have anything to sell? Every player in America, Europe, etc will be visiting your NPC. You certainly won't have enough for even five minutes. After an hour of farming, offering up 1,000 wood isn't going to cut it. Few people would bother visiting your NPC.

Even if this worked very effectively, some guilds may not want the trouble of selling through NPCs anyway. Players would be out of luck, and end up rooting for Guilds that are heavy in supplies.

If you made it simple to have a steady income of supplies to your NPC, it becomes unfair economically to that Guild. If you complete a quest or capture several cities in that region that cause the amount of supplies (or cost) to become more favorable, you're essentially getting free money.

So... I like the idea but am unsure on how to make it work appropriately.

Perhaps it being a Weapons trader only would indeed be better, but then, you don't want to visit the trader and find a bunch of crummy weapons. And that's just the same idea as the trade house, but less effective.

Any ideas?

shardfenix · Apr 03, 2006, 11:38 AM // 11:38

Expansion packs are your friend

fiery · Apr 03, 2006, 01:49 PM // 13:49

You mean STAND ALONE GAMES, how many times do people have to say Chapter 2 and so on, are stand alone. Expansions MAYBE, we don't know what's to come but they are completely diffrent.

Stand alone game- completely new content.
Expansion- add ons.

Wireless Ironfist · Apr 03, 2006, 05:39 PM // 17:39

/signed

awesome idea but i have a few changes that might help with the problems you pointed out.

like you said the money spent could go directly to a special "guild storage" so this npc merchant would stock the normal cheap items that merchants stock. but, for a guild merchant, like you said, when you sell something you will get some money but he will charge slightly more to sell it back to other players thus adding economy to your guild.

it would also be available to your guild and be housed at your guild hall. but if you invite a guest or something like that they could also buy something.

again its a great idea.