“I’m afraid of consumers having access to information” at a cost to exploration.
Honestly if I run my numbers and I can’t see a sustainable profit trading an item at a fair market price, then i just don’t bake it That bit is my job as a shopkeeper.
My worry is that oorts will get lazy and i won’t see new faces running around the different hubs / markets staring at shopstands. This will likely only happen if every price on every shop stand is automatically pulled into a publicly accessible location, and i think that’s kind of what sulfur is advocating against.
As a side note, at the moment “travel distance” in boundless is negligible with so many interconnected hubs. If the hunting server went live however… those 30 blinksec stretches could change a thing or 2.
How do you think grocery stores compete? They put their products on sale and run deals to give customers incentives to shop at the place of business.
Also, this Oortsphere is a opt-in thing from the looks of it. Even if it had an API that captured the price of every Shop Stand and Request Basket, it still wouldn’t matter. If you don’t want to compete as a shop owner, then you can be the guy that sells to them. The economy isn’t all about buying stuff from shops.
Looking at real life examples of how businesses work, a lot of the companies that have a menu of products they sell to consumers often is pretty easy to price compare against a competing business. All this Oortsphere is doing is cutting out all the wasted time in manually price comparing stuff from different shop owners. It’s no different than being at your computer and Googling the prices of different grocery stores that sell apples and oranges or different stores that sell blue jeans. It’s literately no different.
As the game gets larger (universe expands with more worlds) the distance thing you brought up of 30 blinksecs is going to be more of a thing. Portal Networks will struggle to stay a flout without allying with other hub-style guilds or guilds in general if their guild membership doesn’t increase to keep up with trying to link all the worlds together. Theoretically there is no actual limit to how high the blinksec distance can get and if it gets into the hundreds you better expect people won’t jump through 50 to 70 portals through a massive portal network maze just to get to a shop that sells Dark Matter tools half the price of a shop that’s 5 portal jumps away.
One of the things I really hope becomes a thing when airships are introduced into the game is a way to transport the airship from world to world with you. Perhaps through a really massive Portal. That way you can have a way to run freight for people and do shipment contracts for other players for coin. That would be pretty awesome! Fingers crossed on that one!
I think the hardest part for you might be less of making all of this look appealing, and more of making it functional for the merchants themselves. Rather than having them edit each entry individually, you’ll probably want to create some sort of a dashboard where the merchant can take a broad look at all of their orders and make quick/easy changes to them.
As an option for people who want to run promotions, you might want to either leave them space to attach a note to a particular buy/sell order, or create a field for them to list a duration along with a specific offer. That way, someone could post something like “This Weekend Only!” to let people know that there may be a limit on time instead of quantity for the offer.
I agree with a lot of your points. The nice thing about one place to look for items is it saves the buyer time looking for things. If the sellers are really interested in providing a good service to their customers then they should not have a problem with this.
Just yesterday I ran into someone looking for titanium hammers. The place they were looking was under renovation so nothing was available. I had not been to any of the other stores to know if they had any titanium tools and could not offer any real help. If there was a website it could save the person time going to a lot of stores to find something.
First of all, thanks for your ideas. I’ll try to find a way to easy edit the items. Otherwise it would take some time to change every item. I might create a little dashboard just for items or an easy edit mode. I have to think about it first.
Promotions could be placed on top of every section of a shop. It could contain a short message and a list of items. And the user could be able to set a time limit. I like the idea. I might add it to my todo-before-launch-list. Stay tuned!
DarthNott, as a feature suggestion that you could maybe look into after you have the major core stuff in would be a search function that lets you look for shops within a blinksec distance away from the world you consider your home. That way when there’s like 200 worlds (thinking far into the future) it can tell you roughly how many portals you’ll need to walk through or how many blinksecs it is.
Could shops be color coded to show activity of the owner (based on how often the owner log-in and/or update stock and prices).
So, when I browse shops I can see right away which ones are most active and most likely to re-stock or change prices and create good offers.
Traditional red to green color scale - from inactive shiops (red) to ones checked daily (green).
That bit is my job as a shopkeeper.
