Maybe if there were a dedicated place in the major city hubs to set this up. UO had the advantage of "owning" land and building structures. But I like the idea of having to shop around for things. When you know what the market bears for something, you know when you are getting a good deal and can snatch something up. If you really need something, you may just buy the first one you find, etc. AND if you know someone's vendor usually has good deals or interesting/rare items, you can become a repeat customer. Perhaps if there was some way to flag those vendors with different color text or something.
When you have a huge list of goods that you can just sort by price, you are always going to buy the cheapest of something. The problem with that is it makes it really easy to for players to play the "Auction House mini-game": Where they are just buying up things to force players to pay more. Undercutting in most games will drive items down to less-than-vendor costs too sometimes. Which is also silly.
I completely agree with your Auction House assessment. An economy like this opens all sorts of possibilities. I could see people running a string of donkeys across the world because walnut is super rare somewhere and they can make mad profit from doing so. So many possibilities by keeping an auction house out of the game.
Of course, a string of donkeys is pure speculation at this point, but I imagine we will eventually get something that can haul a supply of ore in from some remote destination for a miner.
I wasn't a big fan of the zones that became auction locations in EQ. I remember sailing to the port city to buy things, but I also remember how annoying it was to constantly be spammed by the buy-and-sell chatter when I was trying to carefully pull something back to my group in that same zone. Even with our small player base, I was noticing the OOC channel traffic being a bit much with sales. Player vendors would reduce this chatter while keeping the spirit of economy Pantheon appears to be going for.
"I wasn't a big fan of the zones that became auction locations in EQ. I remember sailing to the port city to buy things, but I also remember how annoying it was to constantly be spammed by the buy-and-sell chatter when I was trying to carefully pull something back to my group in that same zone. Even with our small player base, I was noticing the OOC channel traffic being a bit much with sales. Player vendors would reduce this chatter while keeping the spirit of economy Pantheon appears to be going for."
Ha. Wishful thinking. Even with vendors, there will people in chat advertising to... go to their vendors ;-) Mark my words. I don't see how they could allow you to just put a vendor anywhere. Seems like there needs to be a place where you would expect to find them... It is a good idea though. Probably a LOOOONG way off if they even decide to go in this directly, frankly.
"Ha. Wishful thinking. Even with vendors, there will people in chat advertising to... go to their vendors ;-) Mark my words. I don't see how they could allow you to just put a vendor anywhere. Seems like there needs to be a place where you would expect to find them... It is a good idea though. Probably a LOOOONG way off if they even decide to go in this directly, frankly."
You are probably right on both counts. Do you think we could at least convince players to use the auction channel instead of ooc?
"You are probably right on both counts. Do you think we could at least convince players to use the auction channel instead of ooc?"
I sure hope so... I think the thought of "well if I spam more channels, I am reaching more people, right? Right?!??!" is just too pervasive for some people.
Reminds me of Ragnarok Online, there was something magical about knowing the game on a deeper level. That knowledge manifested in players setting up shops outside leveling hotspots or deep in unexpected areas.... selling things that could be the difference between life and death or even a fat power leveling session. For a price ;) Or walking the streets of the capital city and window shopping. Was it suboptimal? Maybe. Was it Iconic? Def.
I also really liked the EQ method where you could buy trader's bags and have one of your characters sell stuff when you were offline. In EQ it was on the moon, but I'd allow it in any safe areas in the world (ie in towns or near NPC merchants elsewhere). That way as you run through the world, you'd see a vendor and check to see what they have. It would be very local and you could stumble on bargains, which is never the case when you have a global AH.