Merchant Archive

so, had a merchant related idea outta left field while stuck in traffic & I thought I'd toss it out there for consideration. For disclosure's sake, I'm not actually in the merchant class in-game, so please forgive me if such an option already exsists & I wind up wasting your time.

My thought is this: there should be a merchant-related ability to query the bazaar DB to generate a report of the hottest selling items, avg. prices, etc. This would give you some practical way of determining market demand and would (could?) be a useful tool to help you decide what to build and how high to set your prices. On a technical level, the DB query shouldn't be impossible to do (esp. if the query options were somewhat limited - enough to give merchants of various fields the ability to tailor their reports, but not so much that you're rebuilding Access SWG-style), esp. if some of the things that have been hypothosised about the DB are true (particularially that there is some col. that tracks origiating item type).

Whaddya think? Useful? Useless? Allright...i'll run back to the marksman board now...

I think it's a brilliant idea for the merchant class. Certainly a lot more useful than some of the brain dead "features" the SWG team came up with.

awww, but i was having fun breaking out the old statistics textbook!

This is a great idea! First, maybe you could only do it for your "local" market (i.e., the town your vendor's closest to.) And later, you could examine other towns on your planet; later, other planets or even galaxy-wide trends....

This idea popped up recently on the artisan board, but I think the limitation for merchants only is an even better idea. The one shortfall is the lack of information on what merchants are selling their items for and what commodities are hot for them.

Sounds like an opportunity to do a price report, i.e. canvass the merchants/artisans for what is selling at what prices and sell an emailed market intelligence report for a subscription fee...hmm

This would be such a cool thing. I'd love for it to be thrown in.