Not every player has or wants a shop though, it’s problematic if they just want to sell or buy a few items here and there.
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Im not sure how to solve that…
If i dont like mining for example, would it make sense i got handed thousands of gems without participating?
Of course if you want an amount of ‘X’ thing… you might have to do something to obtain it.
Nono what I mean is that currently the players that don’t know where the stores are, find it hard to participate in the economy. That’s what all the price listing suggestions are trying to fix, make it easier for people to find your shop.
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I would be very interested to have the developers actually tell us percentage wise where coin comes from in game. How much is footfall, how much is the minting machine and how much is objectives and feats. I think that could be very eye opening one way or another.
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Yeah i see what your saying… but at the same time how do the players that know where the stores are know where the stores are?
There is literally 100s of them, which i think is the problem. Unfortunately you have to do a little searching to find the good ones.
But thats not unheard of… google “buy shoes” and tell me how many results you get.
In any other scenario does anyone really get that upset if you have to spend a little time to find a shop with what you want in your size for the right price?
If we go down the path of maps with active shops… what happens when you get there and the price isnt what you expect? Do we need maps of active shops with individual price items? Whos to say what is active enough to be active? Whos to say what is a good price?
If it really was a case of no one could use ut thats definitely different, but there is plenty of examples of people not having any issue at all.
If the arguement is “i dont want to look”, then i think the issue is obvious.
Some players see the advertisements on the forum or discord. Some have settlements with stores nearby. Most know that various hub networks have store portals through information on the forums or discord again. Its just too bad external sources are the best source of information on where stores are, what they have for sale and what they are charging.
Not everybody likes exploring, they should be excluded from participating in the economy?
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Thats true sometimes, but not always. I recently ran an experiment to see if i could make a shop in the middle of nowhere with no advertising… and on day 4 i made over 100k profit. And since then I think ive mentioned it twice outside the game and it has made a healthy and steady profit with daily customers both buying and selling, all with no external influences in any way.
I understand not everyone does that… but its also far from impossible.
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I’m lost here, where did I say players should get handed thousands of gems?
That’s interesting because without a portal and not being located near one, I would have expected it to be similar to when someone in our guild tried to open a store on Segi. They did not want it in the middle of our settlement so they opened one with a portal to our settlement. Ended up moving to a mall because no one bought anything. Now it could be what they were selling which was some foods and stuff but no forged items.
So I guess that is one that can go either way. maybe you got extremely lucky and as part of a guild at least they knew where your shop was. Or the other player got very unluckly.
Haha… no i did earlier, was quoting myself… very unsuccessfully
Oh i had portals… making it easy for your customers is important.
OK then really you are where ever your portals are and not necessarily in the middle of no where. That makes sense to me.
edit: I do agree under the current set up you have to try to make your shop accessible.
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I’m still lost 
Nope don’t get it.
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Lol. Its ok its not at all important. Just rambling cause i have an hour ride home and the cabbie wont talk to me.
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@uni3k I think you’re looking at this through a veterans eye. we know how it all operates, new players don’t. Especially true if they don’t seek out help.
The economy works for you and me and many others, but we have stats that show more prefer to trade hand to hand than engage with buying items via a request basket.
If we make things easier to find the whole economy becomes more active than it already is.
It’s part of a cyclical problem. The economy isn’t the only problem for retaining problems. There are several I think we all could put a finger on a reason for. Retaining more players will naturally make the economy larger and more vibrant. So making shop stands more accessible than they already are seems to be a good way to encourage a healthy growing cycle.
It’s not about the economy works for you or I, we’ve learned how to make it work for us with what we have.
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Accessibility and marketing is key to any business. I dont think the fundamentals change for boundless (as in cant be dictated). Perhaps Kal, what we’re talking about is better ingame marketing channels. it wouldn’t and couldn’t be perfect, but could perhaps bypass some common barriers, like accessibility and language. Like boundless trade net sort of does. I use that all the time. And I admit, the data is often pretty stale. But it still saves me hours.
I think the first questions I would ask designing a system like this would be:
(1) what metrics do players want to see
(2) what metrics can be supported (and how)
(3) what makes the system discoverable to in game players
To me: item, price, stand/basket location, update timestamp (hours or minutes since update) would be key. The database results would be searchable by item and sortable by price and timestamp.
I could imagine getting a warp token or location from the tool.
I could imagine a cost setup (extra tax…) to attach a shop stand to the database.
I could imagine a timeout or price to do a search.
I could imagine this being tied to a piece of equipment. Perhaps coils increase blinkdistance searchability?
Additional features which could make shopkeeping more interesting could be sales/time charts. That would enable the analysts out there access to market data.
Does anybody think this is a good discussion? Is there an existing one with similar ideas that could be linked here?
@Kal-El
@uni3k
@Mayumichi
@Evergreen
@… everyone else contributing here lol…
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I really like your proposal! However maybe some tweak as you have suggested with coils.
For example the shopstand network, or however you coin it, would maybe be best to be planet specific and then when fully max on coils you gain access to the entire ‘server zone’ you are connected to. This might not work though since different server banks have different world amounts. Maybe nit picking on this idea. The way you have proposed it seems ideal after I’ve typed this out and reread it.
But yes this is a great idea I think. Have it be an item you learn early like the beacon and give it a good tutorial use so the player has to interact with it a few times and get accustomed to it. I think this is a marvelous idea on its face specifically for the problem my friend encountered when I bought her the game. And if that’s the case I can only imagine how many other new players it would help (Nevermind the vets it might help).