Merchant Archive

Hi board!

As sale and resale are a part of the Merchant profession, I would love to see a feature, that would allow merchants easier re-sale by performing one-click custom calculations. I.e. if you are selling ressources, it would be a great advantage to click a button and have all ressource containers offered sorted after CPU or have any Energy sorted after their efficiency (Credits per EU i.e.).

To manage this, a merchant should be able to add formulas at the bazaar. A walk through example:

1) The merchant uses the bazaar and browses through the ressource container offers.
2) He clicks a button at the bottom of the bazaar screen, called "Calculations". A new window pops up, where he can select an item category (i.e. Energy (radioactive)).
3) Once he picked a category, all possible values of any item offered in that category is shown. "Energy (radioactive)" would render "Overall Quality", "Potential Energy", etc.
4) In a text edit box below, the merchant can now give his calculation a name and write a formula with the possibility to use the values of the selected category. I.e. to use the "Potential Energy" value, he would use a short variable name such as "%PE" or similar.
5) In this example the merchant wants to calculate the credits, he has to spend to keep his personal harvester (or the one of an artisan - who does not have this option but asks a merchant to handle it) supplied with energy for 24 hours. He writes "600/(%PE/500)*(%PRICE/%QTY)", where %PE is replaced with the value of the potential energy of the offer in question, %PRICE is the price and %QTY the offered quantity.
6) Once done writing, he clicks OK. A new column is added to the bazaar screen under that category, now showing the result of the calculation.
7) The merchant finds out what ressource containers are the best offers for that specific purpose (cost of energy supply of a personal harvester for 24 hours).
8) The calculations are saved and can be modified later, but no more than once per hour per category.

There are many other calculations that are interesting, i.e. when finding out what weapon is a good offer, since there are so many different and important values. With having a limit on how many calculations per category are allowed (I suggest 1), the merchant is not provided with a great overall and imbalancing advantage, but instead may specialize on whatever he wishes to.

This option should be available on local region offers only, to prevent the Merchant having a too big influence on the overall market price, when reselling cheap offers at a higher price. This in return adds special RP content to the game, i.e. "Bestine is expensive on ressources, Anchorhead is cheap". Since such information has to be passed on vis-a-vis between players, it helps to raise player to player activity.

Having such possibility, the merchant can easily find the best offers and offer these items to anyone who is requesting it with an extra charge, but i.e. does not want to calculate by hand or just has no time to. Such feature would definitely bring more vis-a-vis communication between players on the run. It helps to find the best reseller prices and that way makes the merchant a little more important to crafters and miners. These professions can calculate on their own by hand, but with a calculation system, the merchant is a lot faster. I can imagine only a few crafters, who are willing to sit in front of their PC with a pocket calculator, a pencil and a piece of paper.

This should be a Master Merchant ability, so i.e. Droid Engineers that want to find good component offers need to calculate by hand or get Master Merchant or find a Master Merchant.

Feedback appreciated.

Greetings,
--Hatchery

And if that is all too complex, at least add a /calculator command, available to novice merchants