A method to have a Request Basket request become an Objective in the Journal. Call it Questing or Quests or something. The Objective would have two steps: Gathering and Delivery.
It would be neat if the Gathering step contents were live, in that the number of items requested as shown in the Objective would update as other people fulfilled the request. If the request gets completely fulfilled by other people, it gets marked as “completed”, or unfulfilled by that person.
Need a method to be able to manually move from the Gathering step to the Delivery step without having to gather all that was desired.
The Delivery step would give the location of the request basket (for ease of finding your way back there) or a way to make it the target location.
Another thing to count for feats: number of Quests completed.
It would also be nice if there was a quick way for Quest-goers to give feedback on the Quest; be it that they think the price for the Quest is too low or that they’re willing to do this quest again.
Edit: actually after re-reading your post I think my suggestion might not really fit what you’re trying to accomplish, though maybe it could complement it. Leaving it here anyways but I’ll probably make a separate topic for it too
I like the general idea. I think the most straightforward way to implement something like this would be to make Shop Stands and Request Baskets trackable in Places, like we already can do with Worlds, Settlements and Beacons. The details card could show live info about the stand/basket price and remaining stock, as well as the location, with the option to Set Destination like with any other Place.
Though I think the shop stand owner should have to opt in to allowing their stand to be trackable in the shop stand interface. Because competitors could use the Places tab to more easily keep tabs on your prices, so some merchants might not like that.
I’ve always wanted the ability to have personalized quests in an MMO; that a player could request some task and it could be completed by whomever comes across it with whatever reward the originating player provides. Barring an actual quest system, the request basket comes close to that.
I hadn’t considered tracking prices with my suggestion, though. It also brings up a different problem of someone starting a quest, coming back and having the price lowered and it not being immediately recognized and thus ending up with less money than hopes for. If there was a way to make it contractual (that the price is fixed at the time of accepting the quest), perhaps that is how a quest could differ from simply fulfilling a request basket.
An alternate concern would be not exactly meeting a quests requirements. Let’s say someone requests a forged item of a certain build, but the submitter can’t exactly meet that build; how might the game work around this situation?
Yeah, I think for a quest system you’d need some way to “lock in” the offer for some fixed amount of time at the basket. Otherwise it could be manipulated.