A Proposal for Selling to Vendors

Obviously one major feature that would be nice to see on vendors is the ability to sell to them. The owner must, of course, have complete control over the price paid for any item (if it is to be purchased at all); I believe this system provides that.

The advantages to providing a way to sell to vendors are many. The most obvious one is that players will now be able to have a fully-functional shop with both buying and selling. Supply and demand will be more accurate. This will also encourage the sale of many items that NPC shopkeepers do not purchase (bone armor), or that NPC shopkeepers do not offer a fair price for (magical weapons). This will be good for players who have large but useless stockpiles of these items, and will also help reduce the number of items in random circulation around the world as more items are placed on vendors.

In order for this to work most effectively, vendors must have their item count limit increased. Ideally, vendors should undergo significant changes to make them better and easier to use as well as to reduce abuse of the system; see my comments on this elsewhere.

Basic Features

• Vendor owners can buy a "shopping list" (looks like a Happy Holidays scroll, normal beige color) for their vendor.
• The owner places the list in the vendor or a container within the vendor.
• Dragging an item to the shopping list adds that basic item type (i.e. "a viking sword") to the list of items the vendor will purchase.
  • See the notes on magical items below, but at first magic would just be one item type and probably not very useful.
• The owner is prompted to set a buy price and (optionally) a sell price for that type of item (required), and the maximum number to buy.
• When the owner double-clicks the list, it brings up a window displaying all the item types the list will buy. In this window, the owner can:
  • change the buy and sell prices, and the demand (number to buy).
  • remove the item from the shopping list.
  • (ideally) control the price adjustment for the item's current condition and color, but this is tricky to implement (perhaps an option to pay extra if the item is in full repair, or if it matches the color of an item specified by the owner).
  • specify the minimum number of days that the shopkeeper should keep himself employed to prevent his entire pay from being used to purchase items. If buying an item from a player would drop him below the minimum days of employment, he no longer buys.
• If a customer says "vendor sell" he gets a normal NPC "shopkeeper sell" listing based on the vendor's shopping list.
  • (If the normal sell window is not possible, the customer could be given a targeting cursor to use on their own inventory to select the item to sell.)
  • Items sold to vendors appear in the container with the list, at the specified price.
  • If the vendor resells an item purchased, the count of how many he is willing to purchase goes up again.

Future Features

• Allowing multiple shopping lists per vendor (in separate bags), and having the lists have names: i.e. "vendor sell armor" uses the shopping list named "armor", and "vendor sell" uses a default list specified by the owner.
• Magic items: double-clicking provides an option for owner to "tweak" prices based on magic properties: durability, AR bonus, skill bonus, and damage bonus. Adjustment for spellcasting ability should be allowed as well, but would be very hard to implement due to the number of charges, etc.).
  • Owner's list when double-clicking the shopping list looks like this:

      Shopping List
      [x] magic viking sword
      [x] plate legs
      [x] bone helm
      [Done] [Options]

  • Clicking an "x" and clicking "Options" brings up the details:

      Options for magic viking sword
      [x] durability adjustment
      [x] armor rating adjustment
      [x] skill adjustment
      [x] damage adjustment
      [Done] [Tweak]

    (This same window could be used for color and condition price tweaking.)
  • Clicking an "x" and clicking "Tweak" brings up a series of prompts ("How much extra will you pay for the most durable item when buying?" "How much extra will you charge for the most durable item when selling?").

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