Merchant Archive
Thread: Companies
Hi everyone
Im quite new to the forums so I dont know if this idea has been presented before or not. Would like your opinions on it anyway.
Something I lack as a merchant is the ability to cooperate with others in an easy way. If I want things to sell I either have to go around buying them from others or make them myself.
My idea is to introduce companies to the game.
You will need to be a merchant to start one, and it can only be started in a player city. The company pays taxes to the city and stuff like that. The company doesnt own anything. At this point, there are 2 way to go.
1) Only the players involved in a sale gets cash from it.
2) The company takes 10% of each sale to pay for taxes and other expenses, the rest are distributed among the share holders each week/month.
I like the second better, that makes it possible for someone that doesnt have anything to do with the company to still be a part of it in some way and perhaps make some cash if the company is very succesful. The price of the share will of course be higher depending on how much the company sold last week.
There is central management for harvesters, factories and vendors. Not that everyone can control them but everyone should be able to see what is being harvested/produced/sold at the moment.
If someone has just stocked all vendors with scatter pistols, then you dont have to do another 100 of them.
If someone has 10 harvesters on steel, perhaps you should go for fiberplast instead.
You get the idea...
The company consicts of 3 types of players, suppliers, resellers and share holders. The suppliers are all players that provides the vendors with items for sale, whatever they are. They will sell things to the resellers in the company in exchange for either a perchentage of the money when the items is sold or cash straight up. The perchentage is agreed upon between the provider and the reseller.
The resellers provide good locations for shops and handles the prices. They can choose what to "buy" to their vendor and at what price it should be sold.
The internal buying and selling for the company takes place in some sort of internal vendor, only available to the people in the company. There should also be a system for requests here, where resellers can leave requests for thing that have been in high demand.
The request system is something I would like to see implemented throughout the game. I would like to leave a request for a specific gun, a house, a pet or some clothes or whatever and have another player respond to it later, kinda like mission.
I realize that alot/most of this might never get implemented due to the complexity but it would be soooo sweet if it was.
Thats it for now, take it easy.
These types of systems have been set up, with varying success. I think the best grow organically from players who are honest, want to help each other, and are willing to work with each other to make sure everyone feels like they are getting a fair cut. Your system sounds complicated because you have put actual values to the various roles. Alot of guilds operate in a similar manner but are looser about the specifics, and just try to help each other out. Stim City, the guild SIN and DarkTower mining operate in a similar manner.Like anything, it takes a mix of personalities, you need someone to lead and call the shots (without being an a&&
, and a few people who are willing to follow that person.
I would suggest taking your idea and applying it to yourself and 1 or 2 other who you have made friends with and who are like minded. Find some core resource or craftable that you can focus on, then you can grow organically taking on trusted people, expanding,and spreading the load around. I would also suggest just finding another player at first, split the creds 50/50 then add people and still share evenlytill you have a core group. There are some efficiences to be gained. So though you may be getting 25% of something, you could be getting more creds and having more fun than you were at 33%.
Message Edited by PepeGSay on 02-23-2004 04:40 PM
Actually, im already doing this with a friend. And if are only a few people, it would probebly work just fine. But when the gathering of people grows, you will have to have some sort of central menagement and that will be an full time job for someone. The reason for the company would be to take over this central management from the players so they can concentrate on playing.
The first idea was to add a vendor and a request system for guilds, that would really satisfy my needs. Some place where people in the guild can sell large amounts of weapons, tents, whatever to low prices so the merchants in the guild can pick it up and sell it to the larger masses. That along with the request system where you can post request for items in high demand is really all that I think is necessary.
By going one step further I wanted to make the merchant part of the game worth something more. Today it feels like a profession without any real cause in the universe. The share holders part was really just cause I saw that the possibilites would be there if companies was introduced and that it would be kinda fun to be able to trade stocks.
I dont quite understand what it is you think is difficult. The system simplifies everything compared to if you do it yourself.
A short example.
Player A is a weaponsmith and has gotten alot of really nice resources to make weapons with. He checks the company vendors to see what is missing in stock and checks the requests from the merchants to see if anything is in high demand or has been requested by the buyers lately.
A request has been made by a merchant on naboo about dx2 pistols so he decides to make that. He answers the merchants request saying that the dx2 pistols will be ready tomorrow and that he wants 80% of the price since he provides everything himself.
He could also have requested cash up front at this point, but since he knows that that merchant has some really nice stores the 80% of the total gun price will be more that what he could have gotten if he had sold them for cash.
The next day the dx2 pistols are ready and he ships them off to the merchant who then sells them in his vendors all over naboo.
To me, this is really really basic stuff and I would just love to see it in the game to make for a more interesting merchant/crafter experience.
What you could expand with is a new big house(mall) strictly for companies where they could have their vendors. This would provide customers with the assurance that the vendors in such a mall will always be well stocked and items of high quality. If you go to the much smaller businesses you might make a bargin but the vendors might also be empty and the trip made in vain.
As an ending note, these arn't brand new ideas and have already been done by players, I know that. What I would like to see is tools in the game to support these players even more to make both the merchant and crafters professions work togheter on an easier way.
I think what a lot of people miss about an MMORPG is that it is a ROLE PLAYING GAME. Most of the ideas I've seen on this forum can easily be done if you just role-play. Why play an RPG if you're not gonna role-play?
Kids these days... 
Puck_Starfire wrote:
I think what a lot of people miss about an MMORPG is that it is a ROLE PLAYING GAME. Most of the ideas I've seen on this forum can easily be done if you just role-play. Why play an RPG if you're not gonna role-play?
Kids these days...
thesimple reason is that if you leave it up to roleplay you have to trust people to role play. not everyone role plays, nor do they want to leave thingsup to chance that the person role playing a 'nice guy' doesn't go into 'uber a-hole mode'.
True Pepe, but that brings up one fundamental question:
Why play a ROLE PLAYING GAME if you're not gonna ROLE PLAY? That's like going to play basketball but taking hockey equipment with you.
Is this statement serious or tongue in cheek?
Puck_Starfire wrote:
Why play a ROLE PLAYING GAME if you're not gonna ROLE PLAY?
- Get another account or dump credits on a friend and keep the business running?
- Retire with your 100000000 credits to Verni Island, pick up the Dopest Combat Professions and Weapons money could buy and have more fun & not have to worry about keeping your vendor stocked for a while ?
Not to mention the people who never even hit 100m & just quit because all the hard work went into a game where all the people do is whine about "spammers" who's afk Entertainer Buff Bot Macro businesss hurts their chances of charging someone 5-10k for a cheesy mind buff that they dont even understand the workings of?
Message Edited by OldManDog on 01-24-2005 06:18 PM