IDEAS FOR RYZOM

I have seen that 'Slots' seem to have a meaningless effect for me, so I don't care or have no opinion about them, but.. as for time for mats to expire on merchant, well, seems 6 days is a bit to quick, so i would not be opposed to something like maybe 2 weeks, or maybe 1 month at the most, but never would I agree to 6 months. Imagine wading through 12 million crafted mats/items/ etc. that have been put up on the merchant in the last 6 months? Forget it! It dictates that it simply will not sell, so let it be lost.
If you want it up longer (for storage, admit it!), then pay for it! 1 month is longer than enough to tell if the item will sell.

The biggest problem I see is that items are destroyed after their resale time went out (I lost some k mats and other items).
They should just stay on the resale tab after their resale time is run out, being invisible to others on resale, staying there for infinite time (and block resale slots).

The period of time items stay on resale and the number of slots could also be adjusted, but the current ratio should be maintained with the goal to have not much more (especially low quality) items on resale.
For example, 14 days duration/64 slots or 30 days duration/32 slots.

Further, the current max price on resale is insufficient, it does not reflect the value of most things with supreme quality. The current base price on the marked should be doubled.
The prices for npc vendor items, armor, tools, mats, whatever should go the other direction and be half or less of what it is now, it’s not a money sink, it’s mostly an annoyance for little/new players.

There are clearly 2 camps with different points of view on this idea so I tried to come up with an idea that might satisfy some of the issues both have.

So how about a new system where you can still place items on the merchants for sale as normal but what happens to them once they 'expire' changes? After a set period, e.g. the existing 7 days, rather than the merchant throwing them away, they take it off the 'shelf' and put it into their 'warehouse'.

In other words, the items don't appear on the list any more but aren't gone yet. When the player who put them up for sale next logs on, they receive a message and have to go to the merchant, open a warehouse tab to either destroy the item or put it back on sale.

After a set period, say 2 months (definitely not more than 6), the merchant has a clear out and destroys any items that the owner hasn't dealt with.

I think that this would solve the issue for players who are cursed by RL but also reduce some of the potential clutter.

I'm aware this idea would require a lot more dev work than just extending the expiry deadline; I'm assuming the existing time limit is a number in some config file/database and would be easy to change.

Yubina's and Neelas ideas are a lot more well thought-out
Hence the topic was a success, we have some really good solutions

Realistically:
change existing variables
reduce slots and increase time as suggested
128/7 days 64/14 days 32/1 month 16/ 2 months

It would be awesmoe if we could actually PICK the way we want from above but thats not just a change of a variable so i'd be more for 32 slots 30 days

Ideally:
actually change the expiring mechanics to make the items go somewhere the player can get the back (with a second expiring date, example, after 14 days your items go into storage for another 30 days then are destroyed)

Other topics for fixing npc pricing and base sell price are already in existinece and will continue to be reposted but none of this really seems to be a priority

I undertand that labour and time are being used, and they are limited... to add new things. I get that. Changing a few variables in a config file to fix this issue is not a lot to ask

If we can actually agree on days/slots changes, it should be implimentable

I have lots a lot due to RL interference and I no longer really list anything, it's very disheartening

P.S.
@bitty, my 40 slots was just a made up number at the start, i did state that it was merely to suggest a balance, reduce slots to increase time in some fair exchange to prevent some clogging, i later did add that i'd prefer to have more slots, yubi's proportional changing idea articulates the theory i was trying to put forward

What if items selling price just incrimentally decreased over time, and once it was below a certain point it is destroyed. This should work well for mats I think, but not so much for ex or sup gear- that might need another system of a NPC auctioneer/bazzar/etc, or a pay service at the merchant to keep the gear on shelves longer, or return to seller if not sold.

Because people will wait the lowest price before buying anything ?

Most of the homins are using merchant as extra storage and sometimes to sell weapons or armors.

I think the point here is more like : does the merchant could keep my mats for more time ... ? which is not their role at the beginning.

About selling weapons/armors, each time i'm selling some (even if they are with bad stats) an announcement on universe channel allow me to sell everything in less than a day.
Also, increase the retention time will limit the renew of items no ?
Increase the amount of item you can sell ? well it will not hurts anyway.

The real problem is not the merchant but the in-game economy.

Hi Sinvaders thank you for posting your reply
I agree the economy does have problems

While few are likely to believe it, fewer slots can help jumpstart an economy

If you can't store as much, you store what you want to and buy what you don't store, it does work and I attest to this with personal experience in other MMOs

But putting that aside, one reason for the extending of time is to allow people who sell things that do NOT stack, more effectively

As bitttymacod has stated, it takes a long time to sell a set of jewels because sometimes people just buy a few pieces

Also as myself and yubina have stated, we have sold GOOD things are GOOD prices and people did not buy them

Yes this is a problem with the economy but consider this possible chain of events:

Seller makes nice items and sells at reasonable prices, and works hard to get all their items in all lands.

Sellers lose their items and are made to sell very cheaply anyway
Sellers don't try to sell anymore because it's inconvenient

Buyers don't see anything selling because of this
Buyers get used to nothing being good on the vendor
Buyers don't buy anymore

I personally adore people who list good things and I am always buying, and I feel bad for them because it is a LOT of work to keep your things on the market every 7 days

I wonder how much less stuff there would be clogging the shelves if we had the option to buy additional storage, both personal and in the form of expanded guild halls.

Then again, I suppose that if we could expand our storage then we would see a dramatic decline in the number of alts and alt guilds. How much of the population of Atys is mere warehouse alts?

I ended up getting a GH because I can't adequately store mats for crafting simple suface excellent mat recipes

I wouldn't have to store all the mats if I could buy some reasonably and sell some reasonably, I would for example focus on amber and seed and buy my armor mats from someone else

Both of us should not have to worry, oh no only 3 days left...

When selling gear I just used to log on alt after 6 days - take everything off - log alt out and back in again and stick it back on the market - sales used to vary so difficult to judge a length of time - every 36 hours would have made me not sell anything
Do enough homins know about the sort tabs at the bottom - like which weapon (amp) and level (above 70)?

Only just yesterday a Cookie was saying "I miss Binarabi's sold stuff, she used to sell a lot"

It's like a dying thing now, the hassle is great

Perhaps not everyone knows about the sort things, I'll add it to our FAQ

Thanks for posting =]
More time will help everyone and less slots can handle clutter and support trading, this is my position

A note on the economy (totally aside from the discussion on possible changes to the vendors):
There is only a problem with the economy if you think that the in-game economy is a cash-based economy. It isn't.

The economy on Atys is an economy of abundance, not one of scarcity. (Even sup and OP mats are abundant at the current population.) Cash economies only really work in cases where there are limited supplies of raw materials (and for that matter, limited supplies of money).

Any attempt to "make the economy work," in the sense of having spending money for stuff be a prominent part of it, will fail in either a very short or medium short time. It had failed before the server merge, and the attempt to "fix" it failed within months thereafter (with the added burden on new players due to the high NPC prices). The only reasons we need dappers now are role-play items with NPCs (i.e. conversion, transport, and OP battles). Those do not reflect the true inter-player economy.

Comparing Atys to Terran human societies in a region of abundant raw materials (e.g. Northwestern Amerind societies, jungle dwellers in the tropics) you see craftsmanship as the most valued thing, and the craftsman(woman) generally gives the items away as a way of gaining prestige. If items are not given away, they are bartered.

-- I have only played one game that had a viable micro-economy. It had a programmer that worked full time at tweaking the economy to keep the money supply stable, developing sinks and in-game pleasurable sources, and he was always at least one step behind the players.--

As for Bina's stuff, I'm not sure you can blame that on the vendor system so much as the fact that she isn't playing any more.

P.S. I like the "warehousing option". I'd even be willing to pay a nominal rent for warehouse space. It would definitely put a stop to using the vendors as warehouses.

Indeed there are too many sups about... not discounting that
But it IS possible to play in a way that discounts the veteran players and play with new players instead, as new players

Newer players haev the choice not to take as many free things, choose to trade among themselves, ignore things that sell that they don't need, etc

It's atually working quite well for our group

In any case, about bina, I used that example to show that people did and do love to buy thngs and it sucks that it's less common now for someone to take the effort to sell things of that kind of quality

I am aware she no longer plays, but the craftswomanship lives on

In fact, for older players the dapper is broken because they have lots of them, but young players are mostly low on dappers.
The reason, with one lvl 200 crafting skill and a lvl 200 dig skill you can already make 200k+ per hour by running craft missions (time for digging the mats included) if you know how and about double for craft/dig masters.

But what about smaller/new players, the adjustments after server merge made their life a lot worse.
The payment for small crafting missions is to low, so they have to do an occupation, it’s the easiest way for them to make up to 180k a day (50 fame, lvl 2 occupation).
If someone does not know or want to do an occupation, there are rarely any other ways to earn that amount of dappers from npcs.
For example, a fairly new player starts digging in the lvl 200 area:
4k + 1k for tps, for each bag of mats
25k for the craft tool, 9k for the pick
112k (* 3) for the packer
selling crafted goods to the merchant nearly +0k

That makes already >150k for the first packer filled with mats, not to mention any armor or jewels to wear (and then I see older players asking such a young player for 2 m dappers for a ex jewel set ;’D)
And the biggest problem about that, is that the older players are not really aware of this situation, when they were young homins, things were different, they were able to earn money with just digging and crafting and selling things to the merchant.
They were not forced to do an occupation (or worse low level craft missions) to be able to level dig and craft.

Hope it’s not too far away from the topic :)

A bit back o the topic:
Still, biggest problem with the resale, people mostly don’t use it for precious things (only for trash) because they can loose their things easily, so the destruction of anything placed on marked after any amount of time needs to be removed.

Players that are not afraid to loose anything on game mechanics are less stressed/frustrated and more happy while playing!

And for the little ones, it makes their life a lot easier to use resale, if they just can go to the marked and grab the things they need 7/24, no asking, no feeling bad because getting things for free, no waiting for the crafter to be on…

There is no better equipment ever than those that is tailored to your specific needs.
And the need of little players is that they grow out of equipment faster than they learn to spell Psykopla. Trying to fix the marked would maybe not mean much to most older players, but a lot to new players.

I rarely sell anything that I wasn't about two seconds away from destroying. If it's going to be destroyed anyways, I may as well destroy it myself and make almost as many dappers on average without flooding my SysInfo with notifications about unsold gear being removed from the shelf.

As Bittty points out, the current Atysian economy runs largely on gifting and barter. Merchants are useful to those who have neither the connections to get gifts nor the skill to make their own gear, but realistically the usefulness of merchants drops precipitously once one hits Mainland and makes at least one friend.

I suspect that making merchants relevant again may not be possible without larger changes to the economy that I feel are beyond the scope of this discussion.