I had been speaking with Thi and Vastar at the recent UK Achaea meet, and we were saying how the game could use a better marketing system.

• The Prosperian Bazaar is being rebuilt, so why not rebuild it with a silent auction market of sorts? Think of it as a denizen owned communal shop.
• You place your item for sale within the careful hands of the bazaar, along with the price you wish to sell it at.
• An adventurer comes along and buys it. You get the gold in your inventory, and the shop takes a percentage cut. Most importantly, this is open to everyone as a marketing forum.

Thanks to Thi for raising the issue of over priced shops. Thanks to Vastar for sort of nodding and agreeing.

My wording of this post has been deliberately open so as to be flexible. I'm tired of people disregarding ideas on a technicality. Ideas are here to be built upon, not rigidly defined.


-B

Wow Style?

I was thinking that, too. I'm not entirely opposed to this, but I would need to know that something is in place to assure shops do not lose their value.

Kind of like the guy on Meropis?

Restrictions on sales-per-year, sales-per-month per adventurer, a restriction on the amount of items one can have for sale in the shop at one time. etc could be put in place to stop the bazaar from replacing adventurer owned shops.

The trouble with shops as they exist is that there is no way of transferring a shop once someone has gone dormant. The prices are not open to widespread market comparison and it takes a great deal of searching for both customer and merchant to find each other.

While it is possible that this market could turn out like those in WoW, Runescape or other games of note, it should be remembered that we are designing it for Achaea, not Wow or Runescape. It wouldn't need to be a terribly complexed system.

Heck, think of it like the CFS (credits for sale) system, but for multiple objects, and localized to a set of rooms divided into categories in Delos.

I like this idea.

What, that's not true. Chancellors have the power to repossess shops, and generally use it after taxes have gone unpaid for X number of years. Though given the investment that shops represent, this is understandably done only as a very last resort. I think it would also (eventually) happen in Delos, though the Gods would probably be even more cautious about it.

There should probably be a listing fee, too -- you don't want people loading up the bazaar with junk that doesn't sell. So you pay the listing fee, it goes on display for a year. If the item sells, the bazaar takes its % and you get the remaining gold. If not, you get the item back.

I didn't know this. Scratch it from my previous statement. I was working with what I'd seen of the empty shops, or semi-empty shops in Delos. This may not have been a result of dormancy, but reluctance to restock.

The item should certainly be sent back after a short time period- This would keep the market tidy and prevent people making unreasonable prices. As Yen points out, a penalty would need to occur if the item is not sold (i.e must wait another year until they put anything more on the market, or a loss of deposit, which could be calculated as a percentage of the price the item was marketed for).

As with the market channel, an age/level restriction may be required.

To promote reasonable prices, the items could be stocked in order of price.

*As an afterthought, the items in this market would not be effected by the stasis which shops enjoy. Herbs or other riftable items would not be prone to decay, as if they were in a rift. This would prevent people exploiting the market as a means to preserve items.

-B

Just a quick summary of points.

The idea for the Prosperian Bazaar stands thus;

• A development in Delos where there is currently a building site.
• For the fee of a deposit, adventurers are able to submit their items to the bazaar and set their own price.
• The deposit is calculated as a percentage of the price the adventurer has set.
• The item is listed under WARES (the market itself could be split into categories, such as herbs and cures, weapons, clothes, misc and so forth. Don't hold me to this.)
• The items in each WARES list could be organized by type, and then by price. This would be to encourage fair prices (such that the market would work).
• If the item remains unsold for [a certain time period], it will be removed from the bazaar and sent back. The bazaar will keep the deposit.
• If the item is sold, the adventurer will receive a message, and the gold from the sale. The bazaar keeps the deposit.
• Items in the bazaar are not subjected to stasis as with shops.
• Items in the bazaar are not listed with the names of the people who submitted them. They are anonymous.
• Anybody is able to buy items from the market, but to place items within this bazaar you must be above a certain requirement (as with the MARKET channel).

Each and every point of this concept is flexible and open to criticism and change.

P.S. I can practically feel the IRE staff sitting with bated breath, waiting for me to add, 'Oh, and you must own a shop keeper's license to use the bazaar'. I thought I should add it as an option, but it'd be a shame for this to be cordoned off into the background of Delos. Then again, as others have mentioned, the concept may work a little too well as an open format, and put shops out of business altogether.

-B

This is, indeed, exactly like Yenien (the "guy on Meropis"). I think it would be cool to have something like this on the main continent, though.