tl;dr version:
This market provides another RP interest point in the city and a player exchange for various goods. Each stall carries a certain range of items to help players find useful items quickly and to provide opportunity for players to take on niche roles for RPs. Selling items in a market area can be a burden, so this market has been set up to provide a hands free exchange. In order for this to work, players have to support RP there and drop off items to be browsed.
Please provide feedback so this can be as useful as possible. To drop off or get items, open the available containers around each kiosk. In order to keep things relatively neat, please contribute a limited amount at a time. Instead of dumping an entire stash at once, contribute over time. If in the future, players want to expand the market to run their own stalls, there will be opportunities to do so.The Premise:Gug's Open Air market provides a new RP interest point in the city and creates a player exchange for various goods. We don’t have a global exchange like in other MMOs, but this is an attempt at least getting items moving around from a central place.
Each stall caters to items used in crafting and is meant to carry a certain range of items to help players find useful items quickly. Hopefully making items more readily available will encourage more players to try crafting and possibly help characters move into more specific professions instead having to rely on some of everything. They also provide opportunity for players taking on niche roles for RPs. For example, the butcher stall is for exchanging meats, hides, and animal parts. If a player wanted to RP as a butcher, they could simply jump behind the kiosk and start doing things like selling “cuts” of meat to browsers or haggle with hunters on the price of an Ulbernaut shank. However, with selling comes the need to stay with the items and collect tria.
Since it can be a hassle and sometimes even a burden to sell items in a market area, this market has been set up to run as hands free exchange initially. Tria is abundant, so it’s not critical to get tria for every last rat eye, and it’s a shame to sell to NPCs if the money isn't needed since the item is gone for good at that point. This market solves both problems by allowing items to change hands without players having to stand around all day hoping for a buyer, chase each other to find hunters for each quest or recipe, to try to learn skills to cover every part of a crafting process, or having to get lost in the wilderness to find a particular fruit or spice each time it is needed. However, this means availability depends entirely on player contribution.
I know this is getting long but please bear with me.
How it Involves You:In order for this to work, players have to support this by RPing and/or dropping off items; there will be no NPCs here. After seeing how eager people were to RP and drop off items for the charity boxes at the Stonehead Tavern, it was pretty clear that people are willing to use such a system, so this will work in the same way, but it will be open to all players. However, this is still something of an experiment. Please provide feedback as you use the market. This system hasn’t been implemented before, so the only issues addressed so far are the theoretical ones. You can comment below or PM me and I will try to resolve any issues. Also, please feel free to ask questions.
Organizational Stuff:In order to drop off or get items, use the available containers around each kiosk. Containers are great because they cut down on lag from items sitting in the world and they allow you to pull specific numbers of items from a stack. Please don’t drop items around the kiosks since that can create lag for other players and please don’t load up the container with one item per each slot.
In order to keep things relatively neat, please contribute a limited amount at a time. Please don’t fill up containers with full stacks of one kind of item. It’s fine to put partial stacks of an item with different qualities, but be mindful of container capacity and the amount of item diversity within the container. Unfortunately most of the containers seem to run in the 20 to 60 capacity range. Also keep in mind when taking things to leave some for others.
If it can be helped, try not to put too many high quality items in the container so that we don't run players selling high quality items out of business. We want to encourage player ventures not destroy them.
Contribute over time if you have a whole bunch of something stored back. You can return as often as you like. However, if there is enough popularity we can probably get more containers for a stall in the future.
Also, please be aware that anything you put into a container is automatically guarded. Right now, there is no way to change that, but guarding has a distance limit, so once you walk away people will be able to take items you leave behind. If you need to let people you are talking with grab something you just left, quickly and OOCly walk away a distance so they can grab the items and then walk back over. It is a bit inconvenient, but, until now, that feature has been more useful than not. Maybe with time, we can get a solution that keeps items from being stolen but also allows players to choose when to unguard things in containers.
Player StallsIf in the future players want to expand the market to run their own stalls, there will be opportunities to do so. If that is something you’d like to do, RP at the market with the available stalls for now and keep an eye out for events that may give players a chance to run their own stalls. Or feel free to grab a table and set up nearby. But, whatever way you use the market, please have fun.
