Merchant Archive

Merchant Idea #2: Vendors leased to crafters. The merchant will contract out vendors to crafters in exchange for fees. Merchants will create vendor deeds by running a crafting tool similar to other crafting tools, in which you set the appearance, attitude, and sales approach, and a deed is created. The vendor will be fully customizable outside of deed form by the merchant, with morecustom / re-customoptions available at higher levels of merchant skill. The vendor will be entirely re-deedable and can be transferred by trade agreement to customer. Deeds can be destroyed and new ones created, however higher level merchants would have the ability to create more deeds at any given time and have more working vendors. The terms of the contract with the crafter will be set forth by an option on the deed itself to set various daily, weekly, or % fees and an expiration date. This information would be clearly visible on the deed for all parties involved to read, and would be available at any time for the crafter to reference. Once the agreement is made, the merchant will use an option to setthe crafter's name as the lease-holder andthe crafter has to initialize the contract by option on the deed itself. High level merchants could have an option to take % of sales instead of a time based payment. The crafter can then take the deed home, spawn the vendor, have the merchant make some adjustments if necessary, and then place their items on the vendor at no cost (because the vendor cost is being paid to the merchant now).Upon the termination of the contract by the crafter only, or by the expiration of the contract, the vendor will automatically redeed itself and return to the merchant's inventory.

Potential Problems: Things I have considered as potential problems are: difficulty of coding for the game developers;bugs involving missing inventory; bugs involvingbroken vendors; players that forget about the vendor and let the vendor contract expire with items still on; bugs with sales agreements; bugs with fees not being paid correctly to the merchant; broke players that can no longer afford fees; deeds failing to spawn a vendor; deeds failing to re-deed; deeds failing to reappear in the merchant inventory; merchants with full inventories and auto re-deeds (full inventory = lost deed, make a new one). There also needs to be consideration of cost for the merchant in "training" new vendor deeds. There does need to be some amount of cost in resources, time, or money (i prefer time such as a two day crafting period) to keep it a balanced prof that cant be abused by multiple accounts. The idea here is to make merchants independent of other profs andto make them a desirable prof to play.

*** More merchant ideas will follow. In the meantime please read "Merchant Idea No.1" ***

Message Edited by MaDuece on 09-06-2004 07:57 AM