Furthering commerce and trade on Zalanthas

[Lizzie]

I think clothes wearing out would be entirely Zalanthan...you wouldn't have to buy new clothes, you would just have to wear old battered clothes, which makes sense if you are too poor to buy new clothes. Currently it's pretty unrealistic. Clothes just last forever.

I think clothes wearing out is pretty unrealistic. Armor wearing out, makes sense. Clothes, not so much. My mother still has, wears regularly, and fits into, clothes she had 20 years ago that aren't so much as faded. I know, 20 years is a long time, but I played the same mud as Erythil, and the code that made clothing wear out was just awful.

The only thing I would approve of on that would be if they wore out if you went and got them cut up or just plain put them through hell.

It's been said several times before that nobles and the people with mad sid who should be wearing all the silks and fashions are generally expected to put their funds toward funding plots. How is making their fancy silks wear out quicker going to affect that?

Your mother also has regular access to a washing machine and a drycleaner, closet poles with hangers, mothballs, and doesn't spend most of her time walking around in sandstorms with no underwear. Your mother also *probably* doesn't wear the same outfit for a month before changing, without having bathed during that 28-day period.

Zalanthas isn't realistic. Be thankful for that.

[Barsook]

That's a completely separate issue and discussion. I'm not trying to upset anyone. I just think -I- find it too easy to look prim and proper. I also think that if you degrade clothing you automatically open the opportunity for more trade and commerce...which was the point of this thread. More buying and selling.

+1

[Lizzie]

We do want there to be room for independent crafters, merchants, and independent organizations.  With that said, that should not be at detriment to existing clans.  We will be reviewing situations with independents, but probably not in this direction.  If anything, there are a handful of indie crafters/merchants that make too much money without the social and political cajones (and RP) to back that up.

I think your understanding is simplistic.  I think those handful of indie crafters/merchants are the only people who can make consistent amounts of coin.

As it stands, the goal of any PC seller is to find the magic set of goods that will empty a merchant's coffers in one go.  No matter what tweaks you make to the system, that will always be the goal, to get as much profit from an individual NPC merchant as possible, and the only significant factor there is base coin in inventory.  A few players will always be well-positioned to empty an NPC merchant when their coin is plentiful, and those players will always look exorbitantly rich.

So long as you try to lock off NPC coffers with increasingly obscure combinations of goods, there will always be a player who finds a combination that will allow them to empty a merchant's coffers in one go.  So long as each NPC merchant is a lock with a key of a certain combination of goods, a player will always play that game and, "win."  This system does not distribute merchant coin among many PC buyers.

And the number of players who can win, while not a fixed number for any given number of circumstances, is fairly limited.

This is why I would love to see a totally different approach to the NPC merchant situation. I've posted about it previously but -
Right now, there's a 5-per-item limit on what the NPC will buy. Once he's purchased 5 of something, he won't buy anymore, until there's only 4 of that something.

I think instead, it should be that the NPC won't buy more than 5 of something *from each PC.* So Amos the merchant can sell 5 items to Stumpy the Swordseller, and then he can't sell anything more to that NPC for another RL week. If Stumpy has purchased 50 green-handled bone swords in total, then that's what he's bought in total. Oftentimes, a given NPC will have "many" of something to sell, even if it's not his clan's specialty. Consider the various food npcs who sell many of all kinds of stuff, in unlimited supply. Why then, do they only take 5 of each thing from PCs, if they have thousands of OTHER things - that they probably got from VNPCs? How come the VNPCs don't have a 5-per-item limit? Why? Because that's the way it was coded. It doesn't have to be coded that way, and it seems pretty arbitrary to be coded that way. So my suggestion is to set it up otherwise, for a less arbitrary reason: to allow ALL characters, no matter what time of day they play, no matter who gets there first, the opportunity to earn sids from NPCs.

It's frustrating as hell to be someone who can acquire stuff - usually from foraging, and have to carry around the same few items for many RL weeks in the hopes that you care the lucky contestant to show up JUST when that NPC a) doesn't already have 5, and b) has the sids to pay for it.

Many of these items are things that PCs just plain don't want to buy. So you're expected to carry them around - and how about in 3 days, when I acquire 3 more interesting things that I know that no PCs want to buy, but an NPC would if they didn't already have 5 and had the sids to pay? Now I have 6 different things in my pack. Hopefully they're not too heavy, because if they are I"l have to just give one of them away, or junk it.  I might have just one log, one studded collar, one head-sized chunk of alabaster, one spear, one sandcloth facewrap, and one bandage. But if I can't ever find anyone who wants to buy any of these things, I could very easily be stuck at the bar, not moving, not being able to afford anything to eat or drink, and not having enough strength to go out and get more stuff, all because I can't find an NPC who doesn't already have 5 of each, or the sids to pay for more.

[Delirium]

While we're at it, please do away with that "I am closed" script, it's nothing but annoying.

A better solution would be to switch out the NPC desc if you absolutely had to give those shopkeepers lives, unlike say, Tarkon, or Clint.

[Barsook]

While we're at it, please do away with that "I am closed" script, it's nothing but annoying.

A better solution would be to switch out the NPC desc if you absolutely had to give those shopkeepers lives, unlike say, Tarkon, or Clint.

+1

[Lizzie]

Another idea, similar to my idea in the above post:

Allow all characters to sell up to 10 items total per NPC merchant per week - but no more than 2 of any given item.

So you can sell 2 logs, 2 facewraps, 2 arrows, 2 sapphires, 2 diamonds to the NPC junk-shop owner - and then you're done selling to that specific NPC until 7 days from now.  You'd have to include timers into the code to accommodate people who aren't selling all 10 items in the same visit - so if someone sold 2 things 4 days ago, and 8 things today, then he's got a total of 10 items and can't sell anymore - but in 3 more days, he'll be able to sell 2 more items because the first 2 of those 10 items were from 4 days ago - and 4+3 = a week.

Edited to clarify: I mean 7 REAL days, not 7 game days.

[Barsook]

That would be better, actually.  I dig it

[Maso]

Higher caps on lower value stuff. Nothing more annoying than only being able to sell 5 twigs for 1np each.

[Fredd]

While we're at it, please do away with that "I am closed" script, it's nothing but annoying.

A better solution would be to switch out the NPC desc if you absolutely had to give those shopkeepers lives, unlike say, Tarkon, or Clint.

Agreed. Especially when you can go to the same clans shop, one room over, and they are open.

It's like "WTF?"

[Barsook]

Higher caps on lower value stuff. Nothing more annoying than only being able to sell 5 twigs for 1np each.

That too.

[Dalmeth]

Here's my idea :

Create a list of generic shopkeeper NPCs representing the various traveling cultures of the Known World.  At least 15 for each space.

Create a list of shopkeeper "personalities," consisting of stocks and an associated list of items they will buy.  Try to keep these related so players can know what to sell.   At least 20 are advised.

Designate a generic bazaar space in each city of at least 6x6 rooms.   Every three or four days, populate this space with at least 20 shopkeepers with personalities chosen at random from the list, and assign each a random amount of coin (minimum and maximum values are advised).

Red Sun Commons and the Bazaar of Allanak are already suitable for this kind of use.

The best thing here is you can use current shopkeeper mechanics.  Rather than making values more obscure, you add random factors that force players to do their footwork when selling off their goods, and there is a good chance they will be able to sell off their goods if they do their footwork.  It ain't a bad way to go about things.

[Maso]

Plus invite PC's to join the gathering and set down their own rugs! Full circle.

[Twilight]

I'd like to see the armor repair skill changed to a general "repair" skill, that worked in conjunction with crafting skills.

Take out NPC tailor ability to repair damage to items up to full, and instead only let them repair to like 80% of current maximum.

Armor would damage like it does currently, except rather than have to hit a % of being damaged, every time it is damaged there is a small chance that the maximum is lowered (ie permanently damaged).  Take the current way permanent damage is displayed out, add to assess -v with however many (5?) different states.  The more damaged something is, the higher this chance.  Armorcrafting + repair skill to repair, up to the current maximum.

Clothing would damage when cleaned for blood, sweat or mud.  Small chance of permanent damage.  Clothworking + repair skill to repair it, up to the current maximum.

Weapons would damage in combat.  Very small chance to damage, small chance when that happens to inflict permanent damage.  Strength increases chance, damaged items break easier.  Whichever relevant weapon craft skill + repair to fix.

[LauraMars]

I like the idea of stuff wearing out, too, but it shouldn't be to the OOC inconvenience of the players.  I'm not sure there's a way to do one without the other.  Personally, I love it when my clothes become tattered in game, and there are legitimate ways this can happen, but I'm not sure how you'd code clothes falling apart due to homelessness.

I guess I'd rather see food start rotting before silks start wearing out, but that really is an entire other thread.

While we're at it, please do away with that "I am closed" script, it's nothing but annoying.

A better solution would be to switch out the NPC desc if you absolutely had to give those shopkeepers lives, unlike say, Tarkon, or Clint.

+1

Aaaaand this.

[Dalmeth]

Plus invite PC's to join the gathering and set down their own rugs! Full circle.

Scheduling is everything.

[Gilgamesh]

Yeah, I think it would add to the experience. Genuinely. Those rich indie characters...why are they so rich? Because they have nothing to spend their money on and they have no room for anything else in their apartments.You set yourself up once with a lot of things, and then you never need to buy them again. Make poor people look poor. Stop the indies in the 'middle' from getting stupid rich by giving them a reason to keep spending. Let nobles and GMH family members be the only one who can afford a clean change of silks for every day.

I wanna see more dirty clothes, more tattered clothes. That crafter with the silk dress who got fired from Kadius and has been sleeping in the slums at the back of the Gaj in her silks every day...should now be wearing tattered silk.

If it happens too quickly, sure it would just be irritating, but the clothes would still be wearable, they'd just look more appropriate for your station. It adds flavor. And grit.

It'll also allow the armor repair skill to be used more often. I'd be happy with clothes getting dirty from day to day use, too.  It'll help separate those rich enough to have nice clothes, and those rich enough to have nice clothes and keep them nice.

[Nyr]

We do want there to be room for independent crafters, merchants, and independent organizations.  With that said, that should not be at detriment to existing clans.  We will be reviewing situations with independents, but probably not in this direction.  If anything, there are a handful of indie crafters/merchants that make too much money without the social and political cajones (and RP) to back that up.

I think your understanding is simplistic.  I think those handful of indie crafters/merchants are the only people who can make consistent amounts of coin.

Well, you're close to right, but not quite.  We do have tools to identify that, which is why I said what I said (there are a handful that make too much money without the social and political stuff to back it up).  Everyone else is scattered in enough of a range that I don't see cause for alarm.

There are valid points here--if one learns how the system works and exploits that to a great extent (and I would say that it is exploitation in most cases--people just hoarding things and selling them and crafting things and selling them solely to make money for some reason that seems vague to observing staff), some people will end up making that particular "part" of the game (selling to NPCs) more difficult for other PCs that want to dabble in it.  Those few that abuse that system and flaunt their indie wealth by hogging more than their share of apartments and spend their idle time spamcrafting into the wee hours of the morning to eke out sales all the day (while you, a much better roleplayer, can barely find a place to sell your single crafted chest) can just plain piss you off.  Here you are trying to eke out a living with your PC playing a concept that you enjoy...and this asshole (whom you assume is there, you know it 'cause you see them out there being a jerk, and if they're doing it and you see them, well, there have to be others) is just piddling away.

So these few people can and (as far as we can tell based on experience and review) do exist.  They exist in other areas, too, and we put restrictions on them.  There's people that abuse the roleplay around getting hurt--you've seen their PCs here and there sleeping off a completely critical wound out in the field, not RPing it, and then you see them popping up about 5-10 minutes later to say "im okay sarge, put me back in the front."  There's something we can do in those cases, and we have taken action to implement it so that they can't simply ignore wounds in the future.  We don't put it on every PC because the majority of players are handling their roleplay just fine.

Maybe we do need to step in and restrict what these few folks are doing; we can look at that and see if a coded/scripted restriction on a few is better than an overhaul or revamp for all.  There are also a couple of automatic jobs (just two of them that I can see) that could use an updated quota; that is more a matter of having time and resources to code an update than the desire to do so.  Still, we're monitoring all of those automated jobs, we know who is using them and who is not.  There are some other economic-based of the game that could use a look by staff as well.

In the interim, though...would it kill you to not make as much money as you or your PC desires by selling crafted stuff to NPCs?  That's what it looks like this is boiling down to.  You can make money in various ways in Zalanthas and only one of those ways is to sell crafted stuff to NPCs; there are many other ways to make 'sid in Zalanthas without worrying about quotas in shops or quotas with regards to a certain script or two.  You can't buy everything you want whenever you want to; you can't sell everything you want whenever you want to.

Lastly, building hundreds of new NPCs and hundreds of new shop files is definitely not the solution for shops--holy cow!

[Riya OniSenshi]

...We do have tools to identify that...

[musashi]

+1 to pretty much everything Nyr said.

[BleakOne]

On the clothing issue, I think it would be neat if the clothes never totally wore out, but over time while beign worn they eventually became 'worn' and then 'ragged'. I wouldn't mind seeing commoners wandering around in worn shirts and ragged shoes, after all.

[Morrolan]

I'd like to see all clothing classed as really lousy armor. That way, when we get whacked with a sharp stick, that nice silk shirt gets damaged. No more brawling in your nice clothes!

(Or we could just not brawl in our nice clothes?)

[BadSkeelz]

I'd like to see all clothing classed as really lousy armor. That way, when we get whacked with a sharp stick, that nice silk shirt gets damaged. No more brawling in your nice clothes!

(Or we could just not brawl in our nice clothes?)

remove frilly.silk.shirt (tearing it off over head) [throwing it down at %dude feet in challenge]

say (Bellowing) It's on!

-----

I actually like this idea.

[Quell]

We do want there to be room for independent crafters, merchants, and independent organizations.  With that said, that should not be at detriment to existing clans.  We will be reviewing situations with independents, but probably not in this direction.  If anything, there are a handful of indie crafters/merchants that make too much money without the social and political cajones (and RP) to back that up.

I think your understanding is simplistic.  I think those handful of indie crafters/merchants are the only people who can make consistent amounts of coin.

As it stands, the goal of any PC seller is to find the magic set of goods that will empty a merchant's coffers in one go.  No matter what tweaks you make to the system, that will always be the goal, to get as much profit from an individual NPC merchant as possible, and the only significant factor there is base coin in inventory.  A few players will always be well-positioned to empty an NPC merchant when their coin is plentiful, and those players will always look exorbitantly rich.

So long as you try to lock off NPC coffers with increasingly obscure combinations of goods, there will always be a player who finds a combination that will allow them to empty a merchant's coffers in one go.  So long as each NPC merchant is a lock with a key of a certain combination of goods, a player will always play that game and, "win."  This system does not distribute merchant coin among many PC buyers.

And the number of players who can win, while not a fixed number for any given number of circumstances, is fairly limited.

This is why I would love to see a totally different approach to the NPC merchant situation. I've posted about it previously but -
Right now, there's a 5-per-item limit on what the NPC will buy. Once he's purchased 5 of something, he won't buy anymore, until there's only 4 of that something.

I think instead, it should be that the NPC won't buy more than 5 of something *from each PC.* So Amos the merchant can sell 5 items to Stumpy the Swordseller, and then he can't sell anything more to that NPC for another RL week. If Stumpy has purchased 50 green-handled bone swords in total, then that's what he's bought in total. Oftentimes, a given NPC will have "many" of something to sell, even if it's not his clan's specialty. Consider the various food npcs who sell many of all kinds of stuff, in unlimited supply. Why then, do they only take 5 of each thing from PCs, if they have thousands of OTHER things - that they probably got from VNPCs? How come the VNPCs don't have a 5-per-item limit? Why? Because that's the way it was coded. It doesn't have to be coded that way, and it seems pretty arbitrary to be coded that way. So my suggestion is to set it up otherwise, for a less arbitrary reason: to allow ALL characters, no matter what time of day they play, no matter who gets there first, the opportunity to earn sids from NPCs.

It's frustrating as hell to be someone who can acquire stuff - usually from foraging, and have to carry around the same few items for many RL weeks in the hopes that you care the lucky contestant to show up JUST when that NPC a) doesn't already have 5, and b) has the sids to pay for it.

Many of these items are things that PCs just plain don't want to buy. So you're expected to carry them around - and how about in 3 days, when I acquire 3 more interesting things that I know that no PCs want to buy, but an NPC would if they didn't already have 5 and had the sids to pay? Now I have 6 different things in my pack. Hopefully they're not too heavy, because if they are I"l have to just give one of them away, or junk it.  I might have just one log, one studded collar, one head-sized chunk of alabaster, one spear, one sandcloth facewrap, and one bandage. But if I can't ever find anyone who wants to buy any of these things, I could very easily be stuck at the bar, not moving, not being able to afford anything to eat or drink, and not having enough strength to go out and get more stuff, all because I can't find an NPC who doesn't already have 5 of each, or the sids to pay for more.

I've always thought this was how it should work. Added benefit: If we did this we could knock it down to 'each merchant only buys 2 things from each PC' or something restrictive. This won't devastate casual players since they won't on average have more than two of any one thing, but it does put more pressure on rich indie merchants to actually put effort into gathering their riches.

[Maso]

In the interim, though...would it kill you to not make as much money as you or your PC desires by selling crafted stuff to NPCs?  That's what it looks like this is boiling down to.  You can make money in various ways in Zalanthas and only one of those ways is to sell crafted stuff to NPCs; there are many other ways to make 'sid in Zalanthas without worrying about quotas in shops or quotas with regards to a certain script or two.  You can't buy everything you want whenever you want to; you can't sell everything you want whenever you want to.

It might be that it's less a case of simply 'making money' and it's more a case of....you roll a character that can craft, you have a history that surrounds them being a crafter (this could apply to hunting too, or whatever...but there's definitely more of a PC market for hunters...anyway)...you actually learn how to craft something decent, start figuring out where materials are and them bam...you can't sell shit. You just want to complete that cycle, the lifestyle and career that you envisioned for your character. If that is your character and that is what they do, and that is what you want them to do...then it's a real frustrating pain in the arse for it not to be viable...when really it makes no sense for it not to be viable. Build it and they will come. If you make good shit you should be able to sell it. One, two, twenty or a hundred, to someone, for some price. Really. But the real problem is that the PC's are like... "Dude, I played a merchant, I know all the sdescs to every item and all that shit is just so boring. Plus I already got 20 jugs yo." and the NPC's are like..."Nah uh...I got five of them already and I can't even shift 'em to VNPC's...yo" and the vNPC's are just like, "Uhh wut? Don't look at me like that...bitch."

It just plain sucks. It's a shitty situation to get into and it's hard to get out of and it can become real old real fast. And then when some shit does roll around or an NPC does sell some shit...you're not thinking...Hey, I should only sell one item to be nice to all the other players. You're thinking...Fuck them, fuck the system, fuck the man, I'm selling my krathdamn fucking jugs. All the of them. Bitches. Because you're pissed. Because you've been carrying them around for 2 RL weeks and your character has had to give a blow job to a Bynner to survive and that wasn't what you wanted for them and now everyone thinks they're a whore.

Then other times it's alright.

[Barsook]

On the clothing issue, I think it would be neat if the clothes never totally wore out, but over time while beign worn they eventually became 'worn' and then 'ragged'. I wouldn't mind seeing commoners wandering around in worn shirts and ragged shoes, after all.

+1, and that is more realistic.

And to the armor wearing out, I agree with the point of it wearing out so the skill is more useful.  Could the skill "tailoring" be used in the same way if we had clothes wearing out.