Merchant Archive

We've all been tossing around some various ideas for higher-end merchant advertising, especially in cities.

One just hit me:

We've all talked before about player-driven kiosk advertisements in major cities.

This would be basically a kiosk setup in range of a major starport - it would feature a unique slogan (as a name) as well as spouting an advertising message every 2-3 minutes (like with an advertising droid), and have the same advertising droid interface where people can click and recieve a merchant waypoint. It would be noticably better than those who AFK-spam, and noticably better than the merchant droids. Perhaps a unique color for the chat-bubble or something...

I know what you're thinking, its certainly been thrown around before, but here's my take on it:

There is one (and only one) player sponsored advertisement allowed at any given time per planet.

The advertising appears on only the major planets: Corellia, Naboo, Tatooine (maybe Talus).

The advertisement would run for one week. Maybe two weeks. Some sort of fixed time period.

And here's the kicker - the advertisement itself would be auctioned. No limit on the maximum. The advertising fee would "sink" the credits spent out of the economy.

Only master merchants would be eligible to bid on the advertisement. The auction would take place through the advertising kiosks on the various planets - you would travel to an advertising kiosk on the planet you wished to bid, enter your maximum bid in a hidden bid system (like the way eBay works - you'd enter the maximum you're willing to pay but the auction would go for the lowest possible price which wins).

So there would be three auctions per galaxy. Each auction winner would be allowed one week of advertising, and the advertising would cover each starport on the planet.

I think in-city advertising is a great idea, but its going to be extremly clustered if we don't allow for some sort of limitation. By rotating the advertisements each week, and having three advertisements per galaxy, there's a decent amount of rotation. By making the advertisements auctioned, it becomes a pretty decent credit sink and becomes equally fair (everyone has equal chance to secure the advertising).

I can see this becoming a pretty major credit sink - people would probably be willing to pay 1M credits or so the first few times its up, but few are going to be willing to pay millions per week to blanket the galaxy in advertising...

Seems like it would be pretty easy to implement. Its basically re-use of some existing code (the merchant droid interface, the vendor/structure naming ability, the bazaar's auction system, the cityhall's voting interface) with some minor customizations and tweaks. And some new art, but wouldn't have to be major. Perhaps instead of a "kiosk" it is more like a merchant stall, with an NPC there doing the advertising/interaction.

I'm not proposing anything as exotic as an in-town vendor, because I don't see that ever happening. But one advertisement per starport city per planet, on a limited time basis, seems reasonable.

Any thoughts?


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Message Edited by Borion_Sunrunner on 01-13-2005 01:38 PM

The biggest issue I take with this propsal is that it seems geared to only established merchant businesses already. The main purpose of advertising is to build your business and then compete with others after it is established. Making it so that only the richest merchants need apply for advertising seems off to me.

I disagree with this system because yes, it will only help established vendors and usually the alts of major money makers (whoever the resident big time weapon/armor vendor is on your server). I could bid 1m a week on it and not have it cut too deep into my profit margin, but most pure merchants couldn't do that. Then again, merchant alt to the big ticket sellers could drop 5m and never even notice it.

well, i saw it as exceedingly valuable as sinking that extra 5M / 1M / whatever per week from the top moneymakers, out of the economy...

I'll go back to the drawing board.