Market research - Opinions wanted

I’m building a mall-thing that will allow only request baskets in small 1x1 plots. The idea is to make it easy for people to sell their loot, be it from mobs, mining, gathering etc. Obviously this should also be the best place for shopkeepers and alike to buy materials in bulk. The place will have 6 different wings, each focusing on a specific area.

The proposed categories I came up with would be

  • Mob drops (eyes, trophies, glands, blood, meat, shards, tallow, mantle, hide and bones)
  • Miner/mountain resources (ore, gems, ancient tech, fossils, coal, flint and fragments)
  • Organic stuff (leaves, beans, orbs, earthyam, lamella, berries, seeds, sap and bark)
  • Blocks (wood, rock, peat, silty soil, ash, mud, gravel and sand)
  • Oort stones (rough and refined)
  • Misc (everything that doesn’t belong to one of the categories above)

I want your opinion on the categories, did I miss something obvious or not so obvious? Is there something else people would probably want to sell to request baskets?

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Kinda feel like having a whole area dedicated to oort stones is overkill.

Also, where does crafted goods that are used for crafting, such as glue (and its varients), butter and other food items, and centraforge ingredients go?

Otherwise, i can see it working quite well.

Should oortstone be in the misc section then? Seems like every other shop is buying oortsone, I’ll probably start with a section for it and change it to something else if there is no demand. I’m mostly looking at this from the point of the seller, a lot of people are complaining they can’t find a basket to sell things to, though oortstone is probably an exception. We’ll see :slight_smile:

I haven’t seen that many baskets buying centraforge ingredients, if I wanted some I’d just set up stalls in the sections that have the raw ingredients for them, same for glue etc. Or do you disagree? Does somebody actually farm butter (or other intermediate products) just to sell them? Seeds is something I’m missing though, they should go to the organic section.

A request basket themed mall is an awesome idea, I would have been in heaven as a noob… only problem is all those baskets (the reasonably priced ones) will be drained of coin quicker than they can be filled. I did a request basket store once, and it always drained quicker than I could fill it.

I would suggest sticking oort-related stuff together with mob drops, since it comes exclusively from hunting. The people selling those would be going to that section already, anyway.

If you need it to be six for symmetry, you could make another category for crafted ingredients/materials (buckets, nails, cogs, all the various intermediate food stuffs like flour and such, forge materials, and so on).

yes to the butter, it takes milk glands that you get from the stout critters, I think mainly the goats, can’t remember if any other critters drop them.

I use the milk glands to make reg butter, purified butter and when I can get shimmering orbs, I will be making fortified butter for recipes. I sell them in my shop, The Making of Greatness, in the G. Mall right now.

Yeah I’m doing this partly to get evidence of there actually being a problem with the economy. If after pooling the coin of most request baskets under the same roof doesn’t fix it, the problem isn’t “you just have to look more”, it’s something else.

Good points, I’m just afraid if the mob drop section will be full of plots requesting just oort .__.

But do people really sell buckets, nails cogs etc to request baskets?

No idea :stuck_out_tongue:
I’ve never seen anyone buying those things in request baskets but I don’t see why not.
People always try to buy only raw materials even when buying the finished thing might be cheaper :man_shrugging:

That’s what I was thinking, never seen anyone request them, easier to get the raw stuff. And why would somebody process a material and sell it if selling if would result in a loss compared to selling the raw materials? :sweat_smile:

I’ll still probably start with one section for oort, and if it looks like it’d be better to include it in the mob section, move it there and convert that one to something that’s more relevant, like the intermediate products. In the beginning those can go to the misc section.

I sell both buckets and nails ‘at a loss’ because I was using those to farm ‘craft X at workbench’ feats. :stuck_out_tongue:
Since I did that with 10 alts, it ended up being slightly more than I’ll ever be able to use.

Ok that I didn’t think about, got me there :smiley: But do you think it’d be fine to chuck those in the misc section at least when starting out?

Oh and @Janna55 milk glands are in the mob drop section, but would you actually sell butter to request baskets?

Sure, I only suggested another category in case you needed it to be six in order to divide symmetrically. :stuck_out_tongue:

Just slightly more than I can use for the foreseeable future. Those are all 900 smartstacks. I have a couple other overflow shelves like this…

Did you cover the shop stands with glass on purpose? You know that makes them unusable, right?

They’re only for display purposes. The place only accepts buying things with request baskets, not selling. Somebody else can make the mall with similar categories but for selling, making this one has been such a big project already I’m not going to create another one any time soon :smiley: This was the only way to make them easily visible as no other full-block-display option exists, yet. (Baskets hide the item in them on the upper shelves)

Sorry to be so long in replying. I have never thought of that. I have the butter for sale in my shop and it has sold. Not much, but not of anything is being bought. Too many shops is my opinion. When you have six or more shops selling food in one area, and it looks as if at this point we have more shops than players, nothing is being sold a lot.

We need more ways to get coins besides shops.
As for request baskets, it would depend. I would have to look at what it would cost me to buy the milk glands, make the purified milk, make the purified butter. Buckets are cheap as once you make them you get them back, so that helps to keep the cost down.
Players who want to make their own food but can’t get the items I had thought would buy the ingredients, but it seems not. Problem is that they need the higher level machines to make them. To make the purified butter from the purified milk, I needed power, advanced coils.

There is no easy solution to what will and won’t sell, who will buy what.