Best Of

This thread seems to have died down a bit.  I'm going to throw a few more musings up here.

First, shopkeeping in Lusternia is actually discouraged for any of the "design" trades because there are frankly too many designs / options.  People want something that fits them, so they either design it or consult someone with a full catalogue to have it made on-the-spot.  If you do choose to go browsing, the options you find stocked pale in comparison to the full range available.  This is, imo, a big reason you don't see a lot of forged goods in shops (yes, the limited availability of forging is another).

How would you fix this?  I'd say by adding an option kind of like one brought up earlier: Shopkeepers can sell a design instead of the finished product.  Any design available in their own catalogue can be added.  It pulls commodities from the shop's rift.  A new bin would need to be added to store non-riftable commodities (example: putting 10 crowfeathers in would add "crowfeather 10" to the shop, and it would deplete from this total for every design made that uses crowfeathers).  The shopkeeper can assign a price to each commodity, and the final total is based on the sum of all components (calculated & assigned when the design is listed).

This is slightly different than the "skin/sorcelglass" thing brought up earlier in that you're still buying the exact item you want.  Make sure to limit the number of slots that a shop can use (so an exclusive tailor shop will have more choices than one that's tailoring, forging, and jewellery), and to prevent listing of an entire catalogue (so different shops will have different options, based on personal choice of the shopkeeper).

This also has the benefit of reducing item bloat because people are no longer pre-making items that just sit around on a stockroom floor, they're only being made when someone actually wants them.  Restocking would no longer be restocking designed items, but instead restocking raw comms.

Second, if you want crafting / merchant to be an actual profession (the above change is still more of a personal branding choice than a requirement), make it a way to earn gold & experience both, as an alternate advancement system (just like influencing is).  This is something I was getting at earlier.  I don't know that there's a great way to make player-sales give exp without being egregiously abused, but you could have sets of NPCs asking for an order of different designs.  Fulfilling the order gets you some gold and a chunk of exp - the larger the quantity/variety requested, the more they give.  Luce mentioned something along these lines as a gnome-thing, but I'm not sure why it needs to be gnomes.  Maybe village comm-shop owners now take orders for the village.  For non-village factions, maybe someone (the leader, or some other assigned NPC) starts offering orders instead.  Accepting an order locks you into a contract where you're expected to complete it within a timeframe, if you fail you take a malus (same as losing an influence battle).  New orders are listed every 40 minutes (approximate shuffle time).  Etc. etc.  Depending on how you overhaul the commodity input & availability, this would be an option to effectively rethink trading and make being a trader a true calling.

Third, commodity availability.  Both of the above changes actually rely on people being able to get commodities.  I've said before that I believe divorcing commodities from villages is an important step (I think I've seen it repeated by others too).  How do you do this?  Close down village comm shops.  Reduce or remove tithing entirely (reduction is probably fine, letting orgs still build up some supply passively).  Set up caravan(s) of npc traders that roam around on a circuit between villages.  They have a maximum quantity supply - when they arrive at a village, any comms that village produces are bought up by the trader.  Eg: Arriving at Angkrag will set the metals, coal, silk, meat on the trader to the cap of 500 (or whatever is picked).  The price varies; if when they arrived at the village the trader had less than half the stock still on hand, the trader will raise the price.  If more than half, the trader lowers the price (down to a set floor for each comm).

Leave org comm shops open; it's the trade minister's job to go talking to the caravans and bring comms home, so that an org's members & newbies have easy access to needed comms.  Someone can try to get a deal by going directly to the traders, but they don't need to if they don't want to.  Individual merchants might be incentivized to do so to increase their profit margins, or to make doing the crafting quests more profitable.  Cap org reserves again so it's more transparent what an org actually has on-hand.

This way you're basically making an "artificial" commodities market where the price is based on supply and demand.  If you find that the game is regularly choked out of specific comms, you can raise the cap that the caravan has for that comm type.  Adjusting this is relatively easy, compared to the opaque tithing system we have now.

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Obviously, this is all a lot more work than "just give us more comms darnit," but it's a potential path if you really want to take on the extra challenge and make the website blurb actually accurate.

The very first sentence in that post was a direct reply on the decay issue, unfortunately, and thus it makes every subsequent suggestion look as if it is a way to "provide a net benefit to suddenly making other things decay."  Maybe that's not what you intended?  It certainly isn't very clear in the text, it all looks like it's chained directly onto that opening sentiment.

If you're actually suggesting these things as alternatives to, instead of in addition to, that's a hugely different matter.

Also, you could probably make every design trade a profit trade simply by adjusting existing aethertraders a bit.

1) Allow all design trades to refine items.

2) All aethertraders will accept any refined items, with a +10% increase in items for that specific trader type.

3) Adjust trader output as desired to accommodate this change (can allow more trades, reduce goop craft quantities a bit, whatever is desired).

Of course, that's predicated on the notion that aethergoop trading is good, and I know that there's some disagreement on that.  If it sticks around, though, opening it to more people seems better than leaving it locked as-is.

Also, I note that your suggestions are essentially a way to get other players to hand over their gold that they gathered through other activities - but I'm not sure that it necessarily needs to be that.  We have an entire world here full of tens of thousands of npcs who theoretically have their own wants & needs, and for which there could be some form of an opening to build a system around.  Why can't the npcs be part of the market, too?  They fork over gold for helping them with their quests - why not for bringing them goods and services they need?  Crafting skills could, theoretically, be a third kind of advancement system alongside hunting and influencing, if you really want to go overhauly, and make being a merchant actually a real thing.

I'm still not personally convinced that a huge overhaul is needed here, but if you're going to go big, why not really go big and rethink it from the ground up?