Merchant starting skills....

[DesertT]

There a way to get these altered to where they make sense for your starting city?

A newly made merchant with lumberjacking, fletchery, and tanning is going to be hardpressed in Red Storm and Allanak, if they want to make it on their own that is.

For Northern merchants, leave those skills the same, but for Southern, make it something like stoneworking and tailoring.  I realize that those two skills are supposedly steps up, so perhaps just two starting skills instead of three.

This would be -very- helpful

[Rindan]

You can use subguilds to start off with the skills you want.  Granted, it means that Notherners not only get useful starting skills and a subguild while Southerners only get the useful subguild they pick.  That said, I don't think I am divulging anything too IC when I say it is pretty common knowledge that Southern folks are significantly more bad ass then those pampered Northern folks who are served the world on a silver platter.

Joking aside, starting an independent merchant in the south is a hell of a lot harder then starting one in the north.  There is a lot of stuff you take for granted in the north that the south just doesn't have for IC and OOC reasons.  In the north, the shops are filled with meat and hides, while in the south non-cooked meat is almost non-existent, and untreated hides are relatively rare.  Hell, not even the Allanaki butcher shop sells more then one piece of uncooked meat per reboot.  If the problems with NPCs were not enough, Allanak has a drought of hunters.  Finding a hunter to provide a steady supply of hides and meat is damn near impossible, while in Allanak the hunters will practically give away the pile of hides they are loaded down with.

None of this would be a problem if there was a lot of PC trade between the north and the south, but PC trade in raw goods to non-organizations is also extremely hard.  It would be one thing if you could bring a load of hides to Allanak and store them somewhere that is safe (like a warehouse).  Then you could make multiple trips and build up a large supply.  Each time you came up, you could look for buyers.  As it stands though, if you come up with a load of hides you need to find a buyer ASAP, as you are holding your entire inventory and have no place that is even vaguely secure to dump it.  This creates a chicken and egg problem.  You won't want to start someone the deals in tanning hides and making leather if you can't get supplies, and no suppliers want to make the trek if no one is dealing in tanning hides and making leather.

If I could make a wish list to help independent merchants, I would want the following:

:arrow: Secure bulk storage at least in Luir's in the form of Kuraci warehouses, if not every major settlement.

:arrow: Allanaki merchants should start with stone working and cloth working instead of fletching and lumberjacking (for obvious reasons).

:arrow: More small game around Allanak that your average Joe n00b ranger can take on.  I am not saying make Allanak a warm and fluffy place, just throw in a few smaller critters on top of the OMGWTFPWNED critters that inhabit the southern deserts.

As for your problem DesertT, your best bet is to join a Merchant House.  The south is not an easy place to learn how to play a merchant on your own.  You can certainly do it, it just isn't as easy and straight forward as it is in the north.

[Sholdyn]

Just to be a prick, the one problem with your storage idea, Rindan is that if you were to store raw hides in a warehouse, they would rot and make an aweful mess. Not code-wise, of course, but realistically. But you tan the hides, it sorta defeats the purpose.

I do like the idea in general though. Maybe you could just buy an appartment and use it like a warehouse.

[DesertT]

Just to be a prick, the one problem with your storage idea, Rindan is that if you were to store raw hides in a warehouse, they would rot and make an aweful mess. Not code-wise, of course, but realistically. But you tan the hides, it sorta defeats the purpose.

Not that carrying them around in your backpack is any better, heh.

As for your problem DesertT, your best bet is to join a Merchant House. The south is not an easy place to learn how to play a merchant on your own. You can certainly do it, it just isn't as easy and straight forward as it is in the north.

Right, but that does limit your role when you're pretty much forced to take that route.  Replacing lumberjacking, fletchery, and tanning with stone working and tailoring could be an easy fix for the Southern merchant.

I should've made this a poll.  

[Sanvean]

We've talked about making merchant skills differ according to starting region and it's one of the ideas on the list.  If you have ideas for how this might be done, feel free to email them to me.

Please, though, don't post lists of skills or descriptions of how they branch on the GDB.  Some people may want the thrill of discovery, and that seems like a definite spoiler to me.  Thanks!

[mansa]

Please, though, don't post lists of skills or descriptions of how they branch on the GDB.  Some people may want the thrill of discovery, and that seems like a definite spoiler to me.  Thanks!

I posted the list of crafting skills that I thought existed from the help files.  I guess I wanted to have a broad discussion of how it will branch logically, without thinking that there was new people around.

Shame on me, I'm so old I forget about the mystery.