Increase Shop Limits

Moirean

Proposal:
- Please consider giving every city 10-20 (or even more!) extra shops.

Optional Mechanics:
- Have them be unlocked by a new ylem perk
- Have them be unlocked via questing (think Isle of Quel'danas/Isle of Thunder group content unlocks, ie the more quests each city does, the quicker they unlock more shops, encourages everyone to get involved)
- Have the max amount be unlimited, but have the cost to place another get higher the more you have

Reasons:
- A large chunk of the stuff sold in Aetolia are crafted creative items, so more shops doesn't really mean repeated wares. It gives people a broader range of clothing, RP tools, etc
- More shops also encourages more people to pick up tradeskills - owning a shop is a HUGE motivation to spend credits on tradeskills and crafting artifacts
- Keeping supplies (cures, enchants, etc) stocked can be very time-sinky and often you encounter situations where it's really hard to find basic supplies. This can be very frustrating, especially for a new/returning player trying to get equipped
- More shops lets people create specialty stores, which encourage RP encounters. We've seen awesome success with using shops as restaurants and bars and the more of these cool little themed shops we have, the more vibrant the game world seems and the easier it is to pop in for RP. If more shops were available, we'd have the freedom to make even more creative shops, since we wouldn't be pressed to cram in as many things as we could into our own, treasured shop. We could have art galleries selling paintings and sculptures or a scribe's shop selling fun books and leaflets and nerdy scholar supplies.

Potential Downsides:
- Objection: Too much competition would devalue everything, like in Imperian where everyone has a shop!
--- First, cures are already like 1 gold a piece. They can't really get any cheaper. Second, THEMED stuff sells far better here as this is the RP game. People will buy random stuff to augment their RP, and people will happily pay shop taxes to maintain a fun space even if it's not super profitable.
- Objection: If everyone has a shop, then they aren't special anymore!
--- Why should shops be some special exclusive thing? If someone wants to play a merchant or shopkeeper role, it should be something they can easily do without having to beg and plead and get lucky. Besides, it's what you do with it that makes it special!
- That's basically extra free money for each city via shop taxes!
--- Shops cost money to construct and money for guards. Taxes aren't really free money (but we should totally have more tax rate options anyways)

Erzsebet

Eh. I don't think we need 10-20+ new shops per city. A few more wouldn't be amiss, maybe, but I don't think having a ton of them is really needful.

If anything, we need to put more restrictions on what counts as a functioning shop and give warnings to the people to have them that if they're not going to run their shop they need to sell it or it'll be repossessed. Know a bunch in 'reach had like maybe 15 things total, last time I checked.


Tangentially related, I -do- wish they'd up the stockroom limit, or allow us to have multiple artifact shelves per shop.

Moirean

What harm would it do to increase the overall number? You and I might not need more, but how would it harm us if other people could participate?

Areka

I do wish that the merchant stall was a regular artifact, or that we could buy proper shops for housing - I would give up my Delos shop for that (and have housing looked at overall with the prices - I would move Iron Hill to proper wilderness in a heartbeat if it wouldn't be so outrageous, and set up the armoury there).

Aldric

As somebody that's slowly getting into acquiring more tradeskills and is starting to find a few niche items to make for fun, I wholeheartedly support this. A shop doesn't necessarily need to be a luxury thing that only people with a million gold on hand to buy one should be able to purchase.

Spinesreach is a wonderful example of shops that utilize their space for the most part for RP-centric things, and it helps a ton with adding to the atmosphere of the game. Want a nice sit-down-and-eat RP experience? Head on over to Eleanor's cafe. Thinking something rowdier and more fun? Hound and Halberd will do that! Looking specifically for weapons and the likes? Moirean's Armory has got you there.

And you know what? Those interactions in places like that can be awesome. (Spirean fight nights anybody?) I never really understood the aversion to adding more shops, and I'm quite aware that it's something in general from an administrative standpoint was mentioned as not extraordinarily popular, but why?

More shops = more niche places that can be created for RP purposes.

More niche places that can be created for RP purposes = more opportunities for player-created engagement.

More opportunities for player-created engagement = less whining about a lack of admin-driven events or means of entertainment.

It looks like a win-win to me, personally.

I'd fully support the idea of rising costs per shop being added to a city, or making the merchant stall artifact Areka mentioned something to be purchasable, but to be honest, it doesn't really matter what solution addresses the issue as long as it's a solution period. I don't think people should need insanely obscene amounts of gold, but more importantly they shouldn't be required to wait sometimes upwards of RL months for the lucky chance that somebody wants to get rid of their shop... for a game.

Erzsebet

I'm not saying there's a problem with opening up more shops, I'm saying 10-20 is excessive. That's 40-80 more shops total in the game. We do not need that many more shops. I'd say another 3-5 per city at most. I'm down with letting other people play shopkeeper, too, I just don't think we need to have 300 shops across the world--especially when some of the ones we have, only have 10-20 things in them and/or are being used for storage.

Also agree that the merchant stall should be made standard.

Areka

That's why I noted the merchant's stall - if people want a stockroom they can buy one and loosen up space for everyone else. Stalls are also something that can't be taken away from you by an outside power, so offer some security for your investment and time (so if you're MIA for a while you aren't completely SOL of both your shop and its contents).

Aldric

I think another thing that may help, in addition, is possibly having a flag that can be set to designate a shop as an org shop. Almost all (if not all outright) guilds have a shop (some have one in each similarly-tethered city), most cities (all again here maybe?) have a city shop, and even some orders have shops of their own.

If these organization-owned shops could be designated as such and not made to count against the shop limit, that in itself would open up a few more shops for people, and honestly at this point, even a few more is preferable to the current situation.

If the above were to be implemented, guilds could have a quartermaster position, or an appointed guild priv to allow access to the shop. Same applies to city shops, but that could fall naturally under the chancellor position.

EDIT: Saw this as I was posting and wanted to talk about it:

Erzsebet said:

I'm not saying there's a problem with opening up more shops, I'm saying 10-20 is excessive. That's 40-80 more shops total in the game. We do not need that many more shops. I'd say another 3-5 per city at most. I'm down with letting other people play shopkeeper, too, I just don't think we need to have 300 shops across the world--especially when some of the ones we have, only have 10-20 things in them and/or are being used for storage.

Also agree that the merchant stall should be made standard.

Why is more shops excessive? From a business perspective, if people decide to have a shop that stocks little to nothing of appeal, they're not going to get any business, and therefore there's an incentive to actually keep up a stock of things that are appealing to people.

More shops = more chances that somebody is going to stock something somebody else might like better than your stuff = more incentive for you to stay on your game with keeping your shop stocked. If anything, expanding the number of shops (even significantly) will diversify the things people are selling even more.

Shops are indeed used for storage though, and that keeps folks from being able to buy them. Two things to potentially combat this:

Haven Feature: Cache
Just like the shop cache, for x haven points you can purchase a cache for your haven that you can store your extra herbs/whatnot in. Only able to be used by the person that owns the haven. People want more things they can spend haven points on. People that are rich enough to own shops for storage at this point tend to get a lot of that gold (in many/most cases) through bashing, and by default would likely have haven points they want to spend.

Haven Feature: Storage room
Works exactly like a stockroom, preserves the things that don't decay in a stockroom. Get a door for in your haven, lock it up just the same, bam, can't tell the difference! Again, people want things to spend haven points on, here you go.

Erzsebet

If people stock next to nothing in their shop for too long, the cities should step in, I think. Issue warnings, give a timeframe, if it isn't fixed in the timeframe, repossess it and sell it to someone who actually wants to use it.

Frankly, I don't have enough -room- in my shop, even including both of the house shops, to stock all of my designs, even with a level 3 shelf in all of them. I don't need incentive to keep them stocked--they'll be stocked as long as they're mine. That's completely unrelated to the fact that we don't need 40-80 more shops in the game. Our player-base just isn't that big.

I'm not against other people getting to play with shops too, I don't think it needs to be some super-elite club. I think a few more shops per city could be good. I also think we should force the people who have shops to stock them, sell them, or lose them.

Do like the haven cache/storeroom idea.

Moirean

Why should cities have to micromanage that stuff, and put us in the roles of playing mommy taking away toys? That's not fun at all and I have no desire to yell at people and threaten taking something they spent gold and credits on. If more shops were available the same result would happen - more stuff for sale, etc - without making players have to play the very uncomfortable and unfun role that you are advocating we take on.

Erzsebet

Most cities already have use-it-or-lose-it policies to an extent. It's not something you have to put a lot of focus on.

And in anycase it's typically the chancellor's domain. So as cityleader, you'd get to delegate it.

Moirean

I'm not going to delegate out being a jerk. My argument isn't that I personally don't want to do that, it's that it's a crappy role to put anyone in.

I'd also be pretty upset if admin implemented something like what you want. Sometimes people get busy and can't get time to restock for a while or they are slowly building up designs. My Carni shop in Spines is currently low on stock because I haven't had time to sit and handle reshelfing and pricing after the bug that caused me to lose the stock in there. If I was forced to ensure stuff was being sold all the time, that would be stressful and unfun - and you'd just see people circumventing it anyways with junk stuff for sale.

Erzsebet

I'm not saying you monitor and the instant someone dips below the 'acceptable' number of things you go WHELP TWO DAYS TO FIX THIS, GOGOGO.

Your carnifex shop is still above the line of 'this shop sells absolutely/next to nothing'.

You're taking what I've said and applying it to an extreme I'm not intending. The idea is to not create a shop nazi that makes shopkeeping unfun, it's to put shops that consistently stock literally 10-20 things in circulation again for people who will actually use them.

Moirean

If they are selling 10-20 things, they are using them. Maybe not as effectively as others could, but they are still being used. You're talking about repoing shops because people don't stock enough stuff. I'm not putting it to any extreme, I'm simply citing how it would be annoying and frustrating to deal with.

Maybe I don't browse shops enough, but what shops are actually out there stocking nothing and just using it for storage? People bring up the "shops as storage" all the time, but I haven't encountered these shops myself. I am a bit skeptical that this is even done, since most unique stuff is already either non-decay or decays regardless of where it's stored. If someone wanted to just store stuff, they could set up some display cabinets for far cheaper than buying/paying taxes on a shop.

Again, to get back to the original point of this thread - how does ADDING more shops in HURT you? You are disagreeing enough to the point that this thread has been pretty derailed, so clearly there's something about the idea that is repellent. What is it? All you've said so far is that it would be "too many" and that we should go around repoing shops instead, but you've not explained why more shops would hurt the game.

Erzsebet

Put bluntly, I disagree, and I'm going to continue to disagree regardless of whatever you say. I think a use-it-or-lose-it policy alongside the addition of maybe 3 or so shops per city would help the issue you've brought up without ridiculously overdo it.

The storage shop thing -is- done, though the only one I can name off hand is the one Aoi runs in 'reach.

Aishia

See I was trying to puzzle out a mechanical thing to deal with inactive shops a while ago but every idea seems so easy to get around. IE: Only have the hsop taxes payable with funds directly earned from sales (People can just buy their own goods and/or have friends buy stuff and put it back. Have it so ONLY the active shop owner or the minister can pay off shop taxes so inactive players eventually lose theirs might work too.

Aishia

Even so far as like quotas on sales IE in gold or item numbers. I mean how many shops do you think actually sell nothing over the course of a week/month.

Aishia

Someone had an idea for something like, market stalls or something. Like temporary shops where you could place like, a limited amount of items up for sale. That's something interesting to explore too.

Moirean

Aoi's shop isn't storage. Aoi hasn't been logging in. She's 2 years behind taxes. I don't like just taking shops from people given how expensive and hard to get they are, and it's been the holiday season, so I'm giving her time to return to catch up.

You're free to disagree with my idea, but you're just saying that you do without really offering any ideas why so it's basically derailing.

Erzsebet

Not really. I offered an opinion on the point of the thread. Is the point of the thread. You're just arguing back with 'I don't want to be the fun police' non-stop and I'm done offering the same counter argument for why you're wrong over and over.

Aoi's shop has had exactly the same low number of stuff in it more or less for at -least- a real-life year. Which is why I mentioned hers specifically. Hers -always- has a very low number of things in it, whether she's playing or not.

Ishin

Erzsebet said:

I'm not saying there's a problem with opening up more shops, I'm saying 10-20 is excessive. That's 40-80 more shops total in the game. We do not need that many more shops. I'd say another 3-5 per city at most. I'm down with letting other people play shopkeeper, too, I just don't think we need to have 300 shops across the world--especially when some of the ones we have, only have 10-20 things in them and/or are being used for storage.

Also agree that the merchant stall should be made standard.

Why not?

Erzsebet

We have...what, 20 shops per city now? So 100 shops total, plus the refugee ones. Not counting NPC ones or market stalls. Plus another 40-80 shops? We don't have the playerbase on Aet to -need- that many. I'm not saying it needs to be an exclusive club that you have to wait RL years to get into--a few more shops per city is fine, but I think there is such a thing as too many. Despite what Moi said about cures and such already being at the bottom, price-wise, if you have 180 shops in the world all filled with competing merchant-types, it -will- devalue everything else that can be undercut.

In that vein, if we're going to add a ton of shops, IMO should also lower taxes, since most shops barely break even consistently as is, if that, even if they're properly stocked to the brim with assorted items.

Moirean

The cities set the shop taxes...

Erzsebet

Mhm. I am aware, yes.

Gwenith

There was an suggestion in the other thread I quite liked : Expand the refugee camp with more shops/content to make people visit - like a second Delos.

I really like this idea, I do agree that more shops would be nice but 40 new shops is overdoing it. With Delos/Refugee area the admin can trickle in shops 2 or 3 at a time and stop when they feel comfortable.

Aldric

Erzsebet said:

Despite what Moi said about cures and such already being at the bottom, price-wise, if you have 180 shops in the world all filled with competing merchant-types, it -will- devalue everything else that can be undercut.

In my experience in Aetolia, this isn't necessarily the case though. Curatives and the likes are already priced quite low, as was previously mentioned, but when it comes to clothing, drinks, RP tools, etc., the Aetolian public in general doesn't seem to really pay much mind to prices.

I can walk into a shop and see 100 different pieces of clothing for a character of mine each priced at 50 gold, but not a single article that I think my character would really wear/complete the image I'm going for. As a direct result, I'd be willing to go to another shop that's priced significantly higher if it means finding exactly what I'm going for.

Food and drink is another great example here. If I'm playing an alt or something that doesn't have level 80 yet and I'm just trying to beat the hunger alert spam, I'll look for the cheapest food to get rid of it. If, on the other hand, I'm looking to RP out a meal with somebody, I'm more than happy to pay a little more for a higher-quality selection that would make sense with what I'm going for.

I don't believe I'm the only person who thinks along these lines either, as many shopkeepers have proven with higher prices placed on some of these things that cater towards those scenarios.

Irruel

Gwenith said:

There was an suggestion in the other thread I quite liked : Expand the refugee camp with more shops/content to make people visit - like a second Delos.

I really like this idea, I do agree that more shops would be nice but 40 new shops is overdoing it. With Delos/Refugee area the admin can trickle in shops 2 or 3 at a time and stop when they feel comfortable.

If Areka's shop was in the refugee camp, I'd go there just for that.

Maybe the so called 'themed' shops Moirean mentioned, could be a restricted shop type, something new where you're only allowed to open a shop here if it is a bar, and over there if it is a restaurant.

Or perhaps each city gives out a certain number of licenses to sell herbs, weapons, etc, and shop taxes go up with each license added to the shop, limiting the number of shops that sell these sorts of things, without limiting the total number of shops.

Areka

I'd make a proper market in Iron Hill if I could. Furniture, tailoring, jewelcraft and enchantments, cooking and brewing and so on.

Teani

It should be noted, as has been pointed out to me before, that just because you go in to a shop and only see 15-20 items for sale, it doesn't mean they only have that in the shop. Sometimes the other wares are on shelves reserved for people in certain organizations, meaning you can't even see them.

I've made the suggestion of moving ownership of shops that are run by guilds over to the organization itself and then capping the number of shops a person can be the proprietor of to one. It might not open up -that- many shops for sale, but I know there are plenty who own more than one that is not run for the organization.

I like the suggestion of making the city work together to create more options for merchants, through questing or as an ylem perk. As I've seen more and more RP-bound locations spring up in Spinesreach (H&H rough brawling, Rooster Cafe relaxing, fine drinking at the Winery, cannibalistic choices at the Stuck Pig etc) I'd really like to get my hands on my own shop and make a proper tailoring place, with measuring, trying clothes and loads of fabric and accessories. Could be fun!

Damn near impossible to accomplish though, since there are no available shops. Last one I got, I immediately sold to Jensen, because he'd been looking for a place for so long already and I wasn't ready to be a shop owner. At least something has to be done to make it a little easier. My option right now is to rent an apartment and set that up as a "sort of shop" and run a constant ad for tailoring.

Gwenith

@Teani : Get away from my shop idea -glare-

(But really I love you think the same.)

Ishin

Erzsebet said:

We have...what, 20 shops per city now? So 100 shops total, plus the refugee ones. Not counting NPC ones or market stalls. Plus another 40-80 shops? We don't have the playerbase on Aet to -need- that many. I'm not saying it needs to be an exclusive club that you have to wait RL years to get into--a few more shops per city is fine, but I think there is such a thing as too many. Despite what Moi said about cures and such already being at the bottom, price-wise, if you have 180 shops in the world all filled with competing merchant-types, it -will- devalue everything else that can be undercut.

In that vein, if we're going to add a ton of shops, IMO should also lower taxes, since most shops barely break even consistently as is, if that, even if they're properly stocked to the brim with assorted items.

It isn't really about need. You have what, like fifty shops yourself? TBH all I really hear is 'I have soandso amount of shops. I don't want competition.'

Pls 2 give me a better reason as to why we shouldn't have more shops. What is the harm?