Idea: Create Your Own Shop

Here's an idea that would, I think, improve trading; help control inflation; lessen 'item for sale' message spamming; and generally make the game more fun and involved:

For a (fairly large) amount of goal you could buy a plot of land in a market-place and open your own shop. You would be able to put in the shop any of the items you have in your inventory and be able to set the price you are willing to sell for. However, instead of having to stand there and manually sell items you would 'employ' a NPC trader to do the actual selling on your behalf. From the point of view of a buyer this would work exactly the same way as it does now. The seller merely sets up the prices and goods and leaves the NPC to do all the tedious selling. Gold from sales could be automatically added to your inventory (or added nightly or something).

Anything you sell, though, would incur a sales tax (say 10% of it's retail value). This would help curb inflation and also keep prices more competitive because people would be able to more easily shop around and compare prices. Perhaps a special 'market district' could be created where all the shops/stalls would go? You could even have different types of stalls (sizes and shapes) and perhaps specialise in what you trade? (You could set up a specialist weapon shop, perhaps, or rare goods).

What do people think? (This is my first post here, btw, so 'hello'! )

I like you idea to open shops, but I think that it would either flood cities with billions of shops or be too expensive for the average player, and not help the trade situation. Perhaps you could instead have one trader NPC who you could then access electronic shops from, and sort listings. Example, i want to buy a firey dragon sword, so I go to the trader NPC in ascalon. I select sword and refine my search to dragon swords. It comes up with a list of all of the dragon swords that ppl have put up for sale as well as their prices. I choose one, hit buy, and money is moved from my char to the sellers. That way ppl could compare prices and sell without using lots of time or spamming chat channels.

There were few thing, IMHO, that SWG did right. But this was one of them. You could have a vendor in your home as a shop and they would interact with a player coming in to buy, you could advertise and put ware on a computer vendor system that would span planets or the universe. EQs answer was ok, but I think a little cart or tent in a city and say only allow a few per city or open a new area where you could do this, like in EQ.

I have a bank load of items to sell that aren't going so I would love this improvement

Agreed (despite the mystical search feature being ignored) and seconded.

Dr Slugfly fully supports this idea on behalf of gastropods everywhere!

Miridan: yes, I can see your point, and it's true that too many shops would be confusing and make it difficult to shop around. Too few, though, would make it too elitist.

So, how about another idea? A virtual auction! Think of it like eBay, but within the GW world. Players could put up items for auctions (within various categories) and set a minimum accepted bid. If you're rich enough you could even set up your own virtual 'shop', just like some retailers do within eBay. I can imagine that bidding wars for rare items would be fun whilst also making it easy to sell/buy more common, but wanted, items. Again, the system could take a percentage of the sale as tax or simply charge people a set fee to 'advertise' their goods.

This would also solve the problem of people not knowing what an item is worth. (I know as a new player that I often don't have little clue what an item I have found might be potentially worth.) This system would allow you to see what similar items sell for. The competition would help combat inflation and people getting ripped off. It would also just be fun!

Hello Diplo.

It's your first post here, so I will give this thread a chance and I won't lock it. In the future, please use the search button and browse past threads. In this case, you'll find multiple threads about auction house, player's shops and so on.

The search button is your friend.