I was thinking that it might be interesting if different NPCs could have some kind of memory when it came to haggling.
For instance, the more you fail at haggling and upset a certain NPC the less likely they will be to haggle for a certain amount of time. And then conversely, the better rapport you build with NPCs through haggling, the easier it becomes in the future.
This is already done a little bit, when you upset a merchant and they won't haggle. But more in depth detriments/benefits could be helpful.
And it would add a new dimension to merchants - like some renowned merchant that has an in for best prices here and there.
Code-wise it could probably just be stored somewhere in the merchant's data, or via a script, not sure on the specifics.
Imagine storing both a number, and a name for -every- PC that tries to haggle with a specific merchant, though. If there was a way to purge the database of any links to dead/stored characters or something, but thats a lot of work, if it doesn't already exist.
To be honest. This kind of thing might already exist. Not too sure, but ... if you continiously haggle with someone, while your skill increases the merchants 'patience' wears out. So while before you could really squeeze those sid out, later the merchants get annoyed after 2-3 fails. So something like that might already exist. Or maybe I'm just recalling it wrong.
Well the concept I had in mind was that it would only store for a temporary amount of time, and yeah, if they died then it would clear as well.
Eventually the merchant would forget some people because of the amount of people they deal with.
But if a relationship is constantly worked on, the time period of remembering would go up, until such a point they became a favored trader and then they'd likely remember them for awhile.
Merchants are already stingy enough. ><