happyslinky
06-04-04, 10:35
The Idea:
- remove physical NPC vendors from the game
- create a universal (or city-wide?) market
How would it work?
- The market would allow players to place an item on sale, the sale could be set to last for a certain amount of time (from a day to a week sounds reasonable). The seller could log off and the item would still be available.
- NPC vendors would be completely removed, the developers would replace them with “NPC constructors and researchers” that wouldn’t physically exists in the game. They would put decent quality weapons and bps up for sale at set prices so players could always get something. As the player economy grew these npcs could be scaled back and possibly removed completely.
- BPs would have a quality, higher quality could require fewer parts, guarantee better stats or even a higher chance of slots. (This would be to differentiate player researchers from npcs, and reward specialization).
The benefits:
- Trade skilling would become economically viable at every level, with xp tweaking it could become a serious career path.
- Recycling becomes viable as a trade skill – finally. Ingredients can be bought from the market, turned into high level chemicals, drugs and food then sold for a profit.
- Salvaging would also become a serious trade skill
- The availability of items would increase dramatically. Having recently started a new character, this is a chief complaint of mine. Especially with the low server populations it is *extremely* difficult to get the items I need.
- Researchers are finally rewarded for specialization and given a bigger role
The market would be an excellent way to monitor and adjust the droprate / availability of items. There are a lot of hard to measure factors that go into the item-supply such as where people hunt, what items they keep, why they keep them etc. With a market it’s easy to see “ok there are way too many distance cpu 2’s out there, the price is very low compared to other level 2 imps” The developers could tweak the supply by cutting back or stopping npc production, or lowering the drop rate. On the other hand, if zerk 2’s start costing more than mc5 chips it should be obvious the developers need to increase the supply and quick.
- remove physical NPC vendors from the game
- create a universal (or city-wide?) market
How would it work?
- The market would allow players to place an item on sale, the sale could be set to last for a certain amount of time (from a day to a week sounds reasonable). The seller could log off and the item would still be available.
- NPC vendors would be completely removed, the developers would replace them with “NPC constructors and researchers” that wouldn’t physically exists in the game. They would put decent quality weapons and bps up for sale at set prices so players could always get something. As the player economy grew these npcs could be scaled back and possibly removed completely.
- BPs would have a quality, higher quality could require fewer parts, guarantee better stats or even a higher chance of slots. (This would be to differentiate player researchers from npcs, and reward specialization).
The benefits:
- Trade skilling would become economically viable at every level, with xp tweaking it could become a serious career path.
- Recycling becomes viable as a trade skill – finally. Ingredients can be bought from the market, turned into high level chemicals, drugs and food then sold for a profit.
- Salvaging would also become a serious trade skill
- The availability of items would increase dramatically. Having recently started a new character, this is a chief complaint of mine. Especially with the low server populations it is *extremely* difficult to get the items I need.
- Researchers are finally rewarded for specialization and given a bigger role
The market would be an excellent way to monitor and adjust the droprate / availability of items. There are a lot of hard to measure factors that go into the item-supply such as where people hunt, what items they keep, why they keep them etc. With a market it’s easy to see “ok there are way too many distance cpu 2’s out there, the price is very low compared to other level 2 imps” The developers could tweak the supply by cutting back or stopping npc production, or lowering the drop rate. On the other hand, if zerk 2’s start costing more than mc5 chips it should be obvious the developers need to increase the supply and quick.