Right now if you need something you have to visit and explore world running into shops hoping to eventually come across one selling what you need. This is extremely time consuming and make you want to give up and eventually just try and make everything yourself, but making everything yourself is also even more time consuming and game encourages people to work together but right now i’m finding that not so possible.
For example i want to start acquiring power coils, i been gathering/mining a lot, selling to player shops and accumulating coin. I mostly then use coin to buy higher end gathering tools that i don’t feel like making myself. All well and good, but i do eventually want to get into forging my tools, etc. since i can’t find any shops that sell them reasonably or at all for the most part. But i also don’t want to spending weeks/months trying to make my own power coils, when other more established people should be able to make them more easily and sell them to players like me willing to simply gather, earn coin, and buy them straight out. But right now that doesn’t seem possible. I’ve gone through majority of shops in Aquatopia for example, not finding anyone selling anything but basics like mats, tools, etc. I’ve even shouted for anyone selling them, no responses, and this is on a weekend with a lot of people online.
Back when i used to play older MMO’s that had in depth crafting systems and had player run shops like this game has. There was usually an in-game search tool that allowed you to search for things you need, ,give you a list of store locations and pricing, then you could take down the location of one of those shops and go there. This made it possible to find best deal with 1 item your looking for and this also gives pricing more stability too, since now people have to be a little more wary of others pricing to attract shoppers. People could do marketing schemes like stores in real life, sell some popular item lower then everyone else to attract customers in hopes they buy other stuff too while visiting. etc. This would help out with generating traffic for lesser known shop locations and specialized/large shops who regularly provide good pricing and stock should still stay popular as people still would visit their fav shops rather than searching then traveling all over for a slightly better deal at expense of time traveling/searching. For example in real world most people just buy online at Amazon, amazon doesn’t always have best pricing, but you know you will find what you need there and convenient so you tend to just buy all your stuff there to save time, but someone looking for best deal could take time to exploring, buy a few items from this shop, few items from that shop and go that route. But in Boundless this is almost impossible due to lack of a search feature. And way too time consuming to physically walk around universe looking at each shop, it’s ridiculous right now and very frustrating. Most shops seem to have very limited inventory space with few items left or sold out of almost everything and most shops seem to have almost same stuff, and i think it’s all due to lack of any good way to find them. If people could locate items/shops more conveniently it would i believe help the economy in boundless way more then it does right now, allowing people to work together more easily.
I hope some kind of search/indexing of some kind can be made available in the future. or else you will simply have most players playing this like a single player game, which is basically what i’m doing. There is only a couple shops i regularly visit to sell mats and buy tools but other then that, shopping is too time consuming and unfun right now when your looking for stuff that you can’t find in your usual locations.
If anyone wants to provide input for other alternative options then an in-game searching of shop items for sell with pricing/locations listed feel free to post them. Anything is better then what we got now. Unfortunately there also is little to no activity on trade forums, so an in-game search I believe is best way to go. I know people are always fearful of an action house like system messing up the economy but i’m not proposing that, only a way to search shops and pricing but you still physically need to go there. Not much different then real life.