Merchant Archive

This is from the dev chat, and while it seemed like a cool idea to me at first, now I am not so sure:

Dariuas - *Vanye* Will there be some sort of Marketplace for crafters to put Vendor's rather than going from house to house to go shopping?
GreenMarine - So, this isn't related to player cities and might show up afterward or at the same time, but we do have a set of open tent structures for Merchants only that will be going in. You can place your vendors in the tent and people will hear the vendor bark as they walk by. You can also place a few decorations in the tent to customize it. I don't have any ETA on that. It's half implemented on my machine

First off, this will kill my shop. No one will want to wander out the edge of the city to shop now since everything will be available right in town. My shop is a lot of fun for me - we have 2 weaponsmiths, 2 armorers, 1 tailor, 1 doctor, 1 smuggler, 1 chef... most of us are masters, and a BE and DE right next door.My shop is constantly full of customers and is just fun to hang out, help answer questions and pass the time. By bringing all that together in tents in the city, my shop will not hold much value. Instead we will be foced to move into the city, and that just makes the whole vendor experience a lot less personal and a lot lessfun (at least for me).

My second concern is player cities. Originally I was planning on helping to build a city that would be an economic hub with shopping galore and really cater to the customer in a way that could not be done in a npc city... but now that basically is going to be done in every npc city with the tents. To run vendors in a player city will likely mean less people and higher taxes/fees to support the city... I simply do not see much point to a city like I had been envisioning. WIll cities simply be a play toy for large guilds? What is going to be the draw for them to the masses?

For me, this is kind of dissappointing - the fun I have in game is not simply making/selling weapons and watching my bank roll get larger, its running my shop, connecting with customers and creating an different atmosphere that they can experience when they visit my shop.

I should note also - doesn't this essentially make the global advertising skill useless? I mean, every serious vendor is going to have a shop in town anyway.

Arrya, these tents are just a different type of building for us to use to help show customers that its a shop and not a house. The style of building shouldn't have that big of an effect.

Now as for medium to small cities becomming a cash source for big guilds, I want to know whats going to be inplace to stop them. I can see a smallish town doing well but still young, on a nice tract of land, having an unscrupilous guild comming in rigging the elections, voting on pet projects draining the town to a dry husk, griefing non-guild members for kicks, then moving on.