Shops

I won't pretend that this is the best version of the shops idea, but here's mine and I encourage everyone else to post their ideas if they have any for the possibility of these being implemented, that way if the devs do decide to consider things like this, they have a wealth of ideas in one spot to farm.


Towns
Don't have shops in major cities unless they're in 'shop districts'. Here's a sample shop town:
Dancing Chameleon (I'm having fun with names)
-10 districts
-50 shops available per district to rent out
-500 gc/day rent fee for a shop with 20 inventory room (another 500 gold per every 10 more inventory space purchased (with a downpayment for expanding)).
-Storeclerk NPC Purple Monkey Dishwasher functions like other NPCs, displaying a price for their goods.
-Storeclerks are willing to haggle.
-The owner of the store inputs a 'display price' that is shown for what the NPC will accept for the commodity, and a 'minimum price' that the NPC will accept (but not tell while haggling).
-Records kept of what items are sold for what, and either a till that the gold people bought stuff for, or the gold goes directly to the vault.

You could have 500 people selling stuff in that city. With the ease it is and the fact you can sell stuff while you're away, the prices shouldn't be so high, as buyers can simply find someone who sells for less.
Have ten or so of these towns, and you can have 5,000 shops. Elliminating half the "WTS/WTB" @#$% that goes on in cities. You should probably require something like a celestial sigil to get one of these.

Having 5,000 shops per server would be great.

Problems with this:
How do you remember where your shop is?
Will the space disappear too fast?
Can you go internationally to get prices from another server?

Strong suggestion: Have an island for these towns with a boat leading to a port on the island departing from Lion's Arch upon request (immediate teleportation). From there you have to explore to get to the different selling towns.
Second strong suggestion: Don't do this until at least the next expansion, unless you can do it for cheap and without updating in such a way that you have to end someone's run in HoH because it's imperative they restart the program




Ideas anyone?
Please do not flame, it is not constructive. If you don't have anything useful to add, don't bother hitting the 'reply' button (or 'quote' button for you smartasses out there who will just quote a post to flame it). If you disagree with an idea, it's likely the dev's will too and they will ignore it, so don't waste your precious time.

it seems like a very logical idea. I would have to say that there would have to be more then 5000 shops. I say this because if it is 1 person to a shop then that would allow for only 5000 ppl to post items leaving the millions of other ppl no where to sell their items. i dont know if you could go over 5000 because that is already a lot of shops to look through with 50 per district. What if you could set up your own shops or auctions inside a town. you could buy something from a merchant lets call it a "Shop Kit". This allows you to act as a merchant for a given amount of time maybe an hour or two. when someone mouses over you it would say your name and then maybe player merchant. someone could click on you and then walk over to you and your self made shop and look at what you have for sale. I think that would be pretty neat. And to see all kinds of ppl with shops set up would be cool. I would love to see ppl setting up shops around the fountain in lions arch. i havent fully thought this through (just kinda thought of it on the spot) so i dont know how pricing would be handled. Maybe someone has an idea of how it would work.

I like the idea, the flaw i am seeing is the NPC storeclerk. they cannot haggle and cannot make deals like "you trade me this and i'll trade you that."

Yeah nice idea...

Also, if anyone has played the free online game Knight online, you can just type/ merchant and set up a little shop tent with the prices and items...but it gets hella crowded really fast...maybe something similar.

Personaly i probly wouldnt open a shop, but id love to go look at shops, as long as its not run my big bad bots...

idea is great