Using Vendors for Storage.

[lariva]

BTW. Which shard did you play?

In Ultima Online, the npc vendors charge a fee for their services. The fee is taken out of the player's bank funds each real life day, whether the player is logged on or not, and the amount taken is related to the prices of the items on the vendor.

This system does not prevent UO players from using their npc vendors for storage, but it does ensure that they must work to maintain such storage, by earning the gold they need to keep their npc vendors from quitting due to lack of wages.

I am not sure how this could be implemented in Ryzom, however. Perhaps a better solution to storage issues in this game would be to allow people to craft from their apartment inventory, increase the BULK for apartments, and perhaps allow us to buy beefier packers not meant for travel but for increased storage capacity (they would carry more bulk) and have us need to feed them to keep them from collapsing in the stables.

Perhaps npc merchants should charge a non-refundable consignment fee for any items over a certain bulk, as well.

In the mean time, calling the practice of using inflated prices to protect items stored on vendors from being sold is not an exploit. It's a clever use of the game mechanics, which were designed and implemented correctly but apparently could use some improvements.

[kirvar]

How is it wrong? Where is integrity being violated?

It's wrong because the are knowingly using a game system other then its intended purpose. The Vendors were created so that players could sell their wares to other player. These people have NO intention of actually selling thier wares and are just using the vendors as storage.

I do it and i will continue doing it until somone does something about storage wihtin the game... lets see:
a single mektub can hold 1000 mats that is 3000 mats all together

What about apartments?...that another 2000
What about Guild Halls?.... Thats another 10000

I know that some people don't want to join a guild and want to go it alone. But being a guild member does have it's advantages. Storage space just being one of them.

[lariva]

Funny how you left out the second part of the questoin -

---------------------
I wonder, how do you gain XP? And where exactly is the difference between finding an optimal way to kill a mob and gain XP vs an optimal level to manage your items?
---------------------

I know for a fact you can gain 10+ levels per hour at level 100+ in some skills and I very seriously doubt it was intended to be that way. Not to say that if something does something wrong others should follow ....

Guild Halls, item limit of 100 thats a problem on its own. And even disregarding that -

For me to get into the guild hall, I need to:

teleport to yrkanis wait 1 min
run to district 4 (1 minute)
Get the items into my bag
Craft for 30 seconds
Teleport out (1 minute)
sell items to the vendor outside
Teleport back in (1 minute)
Craft for 30 seconds...


do you notice the pattern here? If I'm in natae, and need to craft something
I will spend 9 minutes waiting for game screen to reload to spend 1 minute crafting - are you kidding me?

Dont forget I also needed to put the mats into the guild hall after i loot them near thesos - add another 4 minutes (teleporting / running) for each 400 items (if I dont carry anothing else with me but loot)

Being a memeber of a guild has virtually no advantages when it comes to storage - I have a guild, and I have a guild hall. Aside from the fact that it is not being used for anthying other then 100x100000 daper storage slots (kind of expensive if you think about it) I dont let my members put anything there other then Supreme / Excellent mats; and guess what, we are 1/2 full already.
I feel for guilds such as PF which counts somewhere in a vicinity of 130 members or others with more members then what we have.


And besides, i will gladly sell a stack of 99xQ200 big shells for 15mil to anyone any time.

It's wrong because the are knowingly using a game system other then its intended purpose. The Vendors were created so that players could sell their wares to other player. These people have NO intention of actually selling thier wares and are just using the vendors as storage.

What about apartments?...that another 2000
What about Guild Halls?.... Thats another 10000

I know that some people don't want to join a guild and want to go it alone. But being a guild member does have it's advantages. Storage space just being one of them.

[josephm]

I understand the OP's concern here, and I sympathize. That's why I do not use it. However I also believe that a small 'buy back' fee should be implemented. However posts and threads already suggest this and it seems to be something a lot of people agree on. Even the people that use this aren't fighting against a fee to buy their stuff back wholeheartedly. They see it as something that we all can use and so they do. Until it changes or word comes our from Nevrax saying 'this was not/is the purpose of the system' no one can say what is right or what is wrong.

In essence, by lack of direction, the only people who are 'wrong' here are those of us not using it. This is only because we allow ourselves to progress slower than our comrades for a rule that we, who are not the rule makers, have made up.

As far as the poll goes, I'm not voting. I'm sorry but that is hands down the worst poll I have ever seen. Most poll takers try to skew things one sided. In ways that most people will vote before they realize it. Look at that poll! Dear god who ever said what the 'right' thing to do was? You? Do you work for Nevrax? are you such a powerless development coordinator that you have to garner consumer support? Dear god man, get a lobotomy. People like you start wars in countries where they don't belong.

Exploiting a known problem? There are filters. People who buy stuff on accident almost always say 'oopsie' my bad for not using what's right in front of me. It's a problem? No kirvir you are the problem. You could use this but you deign not to. Then you make ridiculous suggestions like removing the materials and 10's of hours of people's time...all because you decided not to exploit this, and for that you should be rewarded through other people's agony. You are one sick jerk and the sickest thing about you is that you had to make it so obscene that I had to come in and post and EVERYONE knows when I post I piss people off. I don't mean to, it's just that inherent evil thing. It's genetic.

[josephm]

lariva I forgot brings up a point similiar to why I believe Nevrax leaves this open. Brithlem, my guild leader, takes like 10 minutes to log into the game, and many minutes to TP spawn etc. I take maybe 4-5 minutes log, 30-40 seconds spawn/TP. So for merely being better equipped for the game for reasons that have nothing to do with the objectives in the game itself, there is an uneven playing field. This option makes it even...and if a fee were introduced..given this is nevrax's concern.. it would serve to unbalance the game in my (and those with faster computers) favor.

[varelse]

BTW. Which shard did you play?

I was on Siege Perilous as Varelse for the last six months of UO. For the first three years I was a complete non-entity on Pacific, usually playing a bard or tamer. That is, no one but my friends knew I existed, and I liked it that way =)

Was in the guild ICE (Iron Claw Empire) on Siege, which I joined almost by accident. I was showing my mom around Siege (because I would not play any other shard anymore at that point) and we were approached by one of that guild's tamers. After warning my mom that his gate could lead to instant death and looting, we followed the tamer through the gate and were given a tour of ICE lands. Later we joined this guild, which at the time had a lot of really nice people in it. I don't know who's still in it now.

I am not a good or even an adequate pvp'er but defending player run events and guild champion spawns or harrower against raids and sometimes helping in faction battles was a blast. Even if I did spend a LOT of time looking at a greyscale world. =P

I quit after it became painfully clear to me that EA would not even lend token support to what little was left of the "old UO" on the Siege Perilous shard, instead undermining it by continuing to add blessed weapons and armor with nearly every new promotion or expansion, and suggesting insurance as a possible solution to the imbalances caused by the AoS promotional item, the Personal Bless Deed.

Ryzom is a world away from the last game I played, and sometimes I still catch myself wondering how I am going to get out of an open PvP spot with a pack full of supreme mats and nice, shiny HQ focus armor... then I remember it's all coming with me to the spawn point if I do get killed by another player.

*drags post back on topic*

The reason I brought up the UO system is that it adds in a "cost of doing business" that still sets some limits on what players can do, but gives them more choices. If they can afford to pay extra for storage by earning dapper to pay a rental fee, then why not let them do this? If they are crazy enough to pay a 10% consignment fee on mats stored on vendors at prices in the millions to prevent other players buying them, isn't that a good compromise?

In any case, I don't think it's fair to call this use of a perfectly functioning, non-bugged npc merchant system an exploit. An exploit is the use of a bug or design flaw for personal advantage, and there is no evidence yet that this is either a design flaw or a bug.

[lariva]

I'm not talking about what is intended by the developers, i'm talking about plain time (which tranlsates to degree to which I'm enjoying the game) that i have to spend staring at the screen.

I cant claim that i have a bad PC - I run 3 ghz system with 10k rpm drives and 2 gigs of memory; two screens with nvidia ti4600 video card. In addition i'm doing system architecture/engineering for a living, hence optimized OS.

with that said - why do i have to waste time when it could be avoided? If someone in design/development would have played other games perhaps they would see what the convinience points are... Would I would complain about is lack of QA instead of poeple abusing the system in a way it was not intended to be.

lariva I forgot brings up a point similiar to why I believe Nevrax leaves this open. Brithlem, my guild leader, takes like 10 minutes to log into the game, and many minutes to TP spawn etc. I take maybe 4-5 minutes log, 30-40 seconds spawn/TP. So for merely being better equipped for the game for reasons that have nothing to do with the objectives in the game itself, there is an uneven playing field. This option makes it even...and if a fee were introduced..given this is nevrax's concern.. it would serve to unbalance the game in my (and those with faster computers) favor.

[lariva]

I completely agree with you that there should be cost of doing business. I dont mind paying extra for additional storage - charge me 100k per ryzom year per storage box and i will be happy

As for UO - I played Chesapeake since very early days of it. I still have my keep up there along with other, smaller housing (ebay is coming up i feel)

I quit for the same reasons - blessed weapons, advanced characters (80%) for $19.99 and now ninjas(!?!?!?).

as far as PVP is concerned - it is not how well you know how to fight, but how well do you support your guildies; Riders Of Apocalypse was 15 members at most and we were #1 chessy pvp guild for quite some time.

if interested, pm me (Exquisite or Lenox) within the game - I restarted R-A in ryzom hoping to achieve the same level as in UO

I was on Siege Perilous as Varelse for the last six months of UO. For the first three years I was a complete non-entity on Pacific, usually playing a bard or tamer. That is, no one but my friends knew I existed, and I liked it that way =)

Was in the guild ICE (Iron Claw Empire) on Siege, which I joined almost by accident. I was showing my mom around Siege (because I would not play any other shard anymore at that point) and we were approached by one of that guild's tamers. After warning my mom that his gate could lead to instant death and looting, we followed the tamer through the gate and were given a tour of ICE lands. Later we joined this guild, which at the time had a lot of really nice people in it. I don't know who's still in it now.

I am not a good or even an adequate pvp'er but defending player run events and guild champion spawns or harrower against raids and sometimes helping in faction battles was a blast. Even if I did spend a LOT of time looking at a greyscale world. =P

I quit after it became painfully clear to me that EA would not even lend token support to what little was left of the "old UO" on the Siege Perilous shard, instead undermining it by continuing to add blessed weapons and armor with nearly every new promotion or expansion, and suggesting insurance as a possible solution to the imbalances caused by the AoS promotional item, the Personal Bless Deed.

Ryzom is a world away from the last game I played, and sometimes I still catch myself wondering how I am going to get out of an open PvP spot with a pack full of supreme mats and nice, shiny HQ focus armor... then I remember it's all coming with me to the spawn point if I do get killed by another player.

*drags post back on topic*

The reason I brought up the UO system is that it adds in a "cost of doing business" that still sets some limits on what players can do, but gives them more choices. If they can afford to pay extra for storage by earning dapper to pay a rental fee, then why not let them do this? If they are crazy enough to pay a 10% consignment fee on mats stored on vendors at prices in the millions to prevent other players buying them, isn't that a good compromise?

In any case, I don't think it's fair to call this use of a perfectly functioning, non-bugged npc merchant system an exploit. An exploit is the use of a bug or design flaw for personal advantage, and there is no evidence yet that this is either a design flaw or a bug.

[9e32bcd]

Hmmm, We are all missing the important question. How can we teleport things and ourselves without cost like the merchants do? While trying to figure that one out we minds well figure out how to get the common npc skill of infinite anti-aggro.

. . .


The problem or advantage some of use are seeing is that the merchants like all computer characters completly ignore the cost/risk and reward system for players. In this case the merchants teleport for free and have no bulk restrictions.

If merchants where brought more into line with the way the game works for players (limited storage space, and a cost and risk of transporting items) that would be ideal. Perhaps something like the following:

1) Players could submit any number of offers to sell or requests to buy without any cost.

2) If you wanted to store goods on the merchants you could as long as you paid the storage fee.

3) When something is purchased there is a delivery cost and time according to how far the package needed to travel up to the max of a round trip teleport ride.

If the NPCs of this game get to play by different and more favorable rules then any effort players make is trivalized when a computer controlled character does the exact samething without any cost or risk.


. . .


Some possible quick fixes

1) Change the buy back price to something more than what the item was sold for. For example you sell a parok vest for 1,000 dapper. Oops, didnt want to do that and have to pay an extra 100 dapper to get the item back.

Problem: How much should this repurchase tax be (and who does it go to )?
If the goal is to prevent temporary storage then the amount should be equal to a round trip teleport ticket. In this case the repurchase tax is 24,000 dapper just to make it even assuming the best possible circumstances (can teleport to town to unload and right back to where you were).

By temporary storage I mean the 7 day allotment each item gets. I noticed recently that you can no longer take your items back in your bag to restart the seven day countdown.

A variation on this is to make the tax a percentage of list price. This is a disadvantage to anyone that sells items that sell at higher prices than others.

2) What about a take back period or increase the tax over time?

Problem: No more taking something off the market later on.

Do we really want to make user interface issues harder.

3) Limit how much a person could mark items up. Aka price ceiling.

Problem: First off the base price seems to have a weak if any relation to the cost, quantity, and difficulty of acquiring the materials used.

Second who knows what a fair market price is. If there are only a few people capable of making a nice amp then I guess 10million a piece is a fair price even if I am the poor guy that has to use the basic amp.

4) Don't buy something that you think is to high and go on your way. (price filter!)

Problem: Unlikely

5) Give us a purchase undo.

After all isnt the whole reason this is brought up is we have all dumped some dappers on something we didnt want for a price we thought was unrealistic. Or are there some that want more running, watching that cool tp screen, and dumping at your packer/apt.

Problem: Heartbroken crafters. Some one bought my wares ... returned

[xcomvic]

It's called Integrity. Maybe you've heard of it?

Integrity? Nah man, never heard of that one before, maybe you just haven't looked at my sig yet... oh wait a second... this is a GAME... ah damn people, stop the presses!